Building Technicians Rather than Finding Technicians

Building Technicians Rather than Finding Technicians

  - Lessons Learned, episode 60

 

Here’s an age-old question: Is it better to “build or buy” a technician? The reality is that almost all business owners do some of both. In talking with several dozen people in the Small Biz Thoughts Technology Community, I find the most common answers to “How did you find your best technicians?” to be:

• 
  
  Technical recruiters
• Job boards (e.g., Monster)
• College internships and placement offices
• Friends/family/acquaintances

Less common but also mentioned are:

• Referred by a current employee
• Someone who worked at one of our clients
• Someone who just walked in the door looking for a job

I put that list in order from Most to Least likely to have the most professional experience and certifications. I shouldn’t have to say it, but we all probably know that the correlation between experience/certification and quality employee is present but weak. The relationship between cost and experience/certification is stronger.

We started out with the friends and family option because it just sort of happened. When it came time to hire an administrative assistant, I put ads out and had very good luck collecting resumes. So, after that, we primarily hired by placing ads on job boards (and primarily Craigslist). On a couple of occasions we used a job recruiter. We got some good candidates but a lot of people who just weren’t a good fit. I suspect the recruiters needed to send those folks out on interviews in order to justify their existence.

I would say, overall, I had the most luck with paid internships promoted through local tech schools and community colleges, followed by Craigslist. And that brings us to the build vs. buy question.

Note: A large part of the following discussion is true for me because we were rigorous about having “our” processes and procedures. We had our way of doing things, so we were committed to training new employees on our processes no matter where they came from or how qualified they were.

As we settled into recruiting from tech schools and Craigslist, we also settled into training technicians to create great techs out of good techs. This meant that our hiring process focused primarily on finding people who had a good attitude, a good culture fit, and a focus on good service. You’ve probably heard it a thousand times, but you can train people on the technology, but it’s harder to train them to have a customer-focused attitude toward service.

Lessons Learned: First, if I were to start over again today, I would only rely on internships and Craigslist to find people who are motivated and have technical aptitude. We would “build our own” from the start. Only if there was an urgent need for a specific talent or high-level guru would I spend money on recruiters.

Second, I would develop a more formalized training process for our team. We really figured out and documented our hiring process. It is detailed and works great with our service-focused approach. Where we could improve is evaluating which skills are needed for which technicians and providing them with the training to learn what they need to learn.

 

How do you feel about buy vs. build?

Feedback always welcome.

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Episode 60

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. 

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