From military veterans to boot camp grads, new paths to finding quality hires.
With the COVID-19 pandemic hiring crunch still sending ripples throughout the business world and unemployment numbers falling to unexpected lows, recruiting remains a significant challenge for many office technology dealers. Gone are the days when a simple want ad would summon enough qualified applicants to do the job. Savvy dealers are getting creative in recruiting, looking in unexpected places and using more active strategies to reach the kinds of workers they want to hire.
Make Direct Connections
At Copier Careers, a recruiting firm for copier dealers, they prefer the direct method, just getting recruits on the phone and talking to them.
“The challenge is, the second that you say that this is a position from the copier and office solutions channel, eight times out of ten we get told ‘well, that’s old or dead technology,’” said Paul Schwarz, president of Copier Careers. “We’ve become very good at explaining to people very quickly how every business they walk into has solutions that the channel and our clients have placed there, that it’s an amazing opportunity for them, and they’re not siloed into selling one item.”
Jenna Miner, channel development manager at ConnectWise, uses job posting sites like LinkedIn, but she takes a proactive stance to connect with recruits as well. “I’ve trained my team to rely on their own sourcing more than just applications,” she said. “We want top-tier talent who may not be actively looking for an opportunity. My team’s been trained well on those outreach messages, adding value and giving them information to make them interested. If not right now, then later when they’re ready to make a move.”
One of the most productive ways to evolve recruiting is by changing the company’s model of where good recruits come from. Many a job applicant has lamented postings that rattle off an endless list of requirements that are really just a wish list—an elite degree, a résumé packed with blue-chip companies, and years of experience doing precisely every single task the hiring team envisions the role they’re filling will ever encounter. It’s not realistic, and it’s outdated.
These days, internal and external recruiters counsel hiring managers to be more open-minded. There are workers with non-traditional résuméa and experience in other industries who could thrive in the business solutions channel.
“Typically, if we are going after someone from outside the industry, it’s not completely outside, it’s from a parallel industry,” said Jessica Crowley, SVP at Copier Careers. “They understand what managed print is.”
Many dealers find successful candidates with experience in payroll processing, advertising, and enterprise-level telecom, businesses with a strong B2B background and a similar pattern of partnering with clients and building consultative sales relationships. For sales roles, it can be useful to widen the net even further and think primarily about what type of expectations the candidate strived to meet in their previous jobs.
“What’s more important is finding a salesperson who is used to having goals, being measured against those goals, and who’s been monetized to hit those goals,” said Miner. “If they can’t tell you what their quota was in their past position, the sales accomplishment they’re most proud of, they’re likely not a great fit for our industry and the type of sales that we do.”
Experienced sales reps from other industries can even find the potential of the copier channel exciting, with the wide variety of products and services they can sell. “In their current role, they’ve maybe only been able to sell one solution, whereas we’re able to offer them more,” said Crowley. “You can sell hardware, managed print, security, everything.”
Boot Camps and Veterans
Another effective approach is intervening earlier in the pipeline, building a recruitment relationship on the backbone of talent development programs like boot camps or specialized job placement programs. ConnectWise has partnered with third-party programs that help targeted cohorts of workers ready for a career change.
“We’re involved in the Hiring our Heroes program, which is in cooperation with the Department of Labor to bring on veterans who are in their last six months of their tour of duty and will be transitioning to the business world,” said Miner.
The program offers a fellowship, similar to an internship, where veterans are placed into jobs at ConnectWise and given training toward their long-term career goals. “We brought on two fellows to our project management team,” she said. “It was an awesome opportunity to bring on people from outside our industry who didn’t have any civilian experience, and to push ourselves to create a training program for them.”
The training isn’t just about job skills but also about business culture. Many veterans sign on at 18 and have never held a civilian job before. The corporate environment can be alien to people used to the rigid routines and high pressure of military life. “I’m happy to say they’re both still with us,” said Miner. “They’re doing great.”
Boot camps can be an excellent resource for more technical roles such as IT or coding, often with very little risk for the dealer. Some boot camp students are early in their careers and choose this alternative to traditional college. Still, others already have a well-established career in an entirely different field and want to make a big change. They sign up for the boot camp knowing they have a lot to learn, and the potential to get placed at a job once they complete their training is a big motivator for them.
From the dealer side, the benefit is consistent results from hiring people with the same training. Many boot camps work with companies and accept input on the skills they’re looking for; they use that feedback to fine-tune the training students receive.
“It’s an agency in a sense, but we’re not paying for it,” said Miner, who oversees ConnectWise’s participation in one such program, “We’re agreeing to take them on based on skills they’ve acquired rather than the experience that they’ve had working elsewhere.”
Many boot camp recruits are happy to start out as interns or apprentices to ensure that the new role—and the field—are actually a good fit.
“They may have been accountants all their life and they’re fascinated by IT and want to try their hand at it, so they invest their time and money to go to a tech school,” said Miner. “Our agreement with them is that we’re not going to hold it against them that they don’t have any other experience. We’re saying that this is enough, we’re taking you as you are.”
Beyond Experience
Experience is valuable, but so is drive, ambition, curiosity, and dedication. A company that recruits in the same way year in and year out will only get the same results. Growth requires trying new things, and finding new talent may necessitate looking in new places. Recruiting is about finding people, so to do that, talk to people.
“Start working all of the pipelines as you can, connect with as many people as you can connect with, people you believe have the core skill sets,” said Schwarz. “Explain to them what this is all about and go after them with a vengeance.”
