At a recent conference, I was casually visiting with a few CIO’s and IT Executives. We were discussing the availability of technical resources and the conversation quickly moved to the shortage of skilled workers in the United States, especially in new technologies like Cloud Computing and Mobility.
In sharing experiences and ideas, an IT executive of a Fortune 500 company from the East Coast spoke of how he built a Center of Excellence (COE) in the Bay Area, because of the available pool of local talent.
Almost every other IT executive in the discussion voiced how he or she wished they had this option. For their companies though, this just wasn’t a feasible way to solve their skills shortage problem. Primarily, because most of them were representing medium-sized manufacturing companies, and other industries. Most of the companies were based in the Midwest, and other central parts of the country. In those locations, it’s just not easy to find a cloud or mobile developer.
It’s those tech corridors, like the Bay Area, or Boston, that are home most of the skilled mobile developers. There’s no way for a mid-sized firm to hire most of their talent from a software hub, like the Bay Area, and move them to the central parts of the country. It’s just not feasible.
Getting Around Talent Shortages
I can personally relate to this problem. appsFreedom falls into the SMB category, and we’re not located near any software hub. We’re located out of Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. We have been building cutting edge technologies, for our mobile development platform, for years. And we’ve been facing this challenge the entire time.
Not only are we in the same boat as many of these companies, but also our need is magnified. We’re not like a manufacturing firm where cloud or mobile technology is not at the core of their business.
We’re a software company. Our entire business model depends on these technologies. Without the best technical, skilled talent, we don’t have a business.
We may not have the perfect answer to this problem, but we have been trying some things over the last few years that might be useful for your company to overcome this challenge.
Some Things We’ve Implemented:
Identify Talent Types
We had to identify the kind of people we should hire, especially in our engineering department. It was pretty obvious that most people with the cutting-edge skill sets are the millennials, the younger crowd of engineers in their 20’s. We didn’t want kids fresh out of college, but we wanted them to be young enough to still be hungry for knowledge.
These younger employees are more demanding in terms of flexibility, as well as empowerment and engagement. Younger workers gravitate to companies that provide both, and more. These three things were the primary driver for the things we implemented below:
Telecommuting
This was a no-brainer. Being able to work remotely provides the highest level of flexibility and almost all companies support telecommuting for their employees.
Working from home is only a convenience factor. Employees still need to use a company laptop, do a VPN access to internal systems, and may need to have access to an office for those face-to-face interactions.
While this was a good starting point, and almost a must-have expectation, it’s not good enough on it’s own to lure the best technical talent.
A No-Server Policy
When we started our company, one of the first things we put in place was a formal, no-server policy. We will not buy servers for any reason. This enabled us to move to the cloud from the beginning, from operations to customer engagement. Even product development is done in the cloud.
Apart from the obvious cash flow benefits, our employees having access to everything from anywhere has been one of most significant benefits of adopting cloud technology over on-site servers.
There is no proximity to systems required, or even possible, if anyone chooses to come to the office. The need to be in the office is automatically diminished, and anyone can access all systems from anywhere, once they have proper authentications and authorizations in place.
The result has been great flexibility for our employees.
Measurement By results
We implemented a policy to manage by milestones, and to measure by results. Time is not an important measurement at our company. But results certainly are.
What and how much is of greater value to us than when and where.
Unlimited Vacations
At appsFreedom, our vacation policy is simple: we don’t have one. Anyone can take as many vacations as they want, at any time they want. The only caveat is that results cannot be compromised at any cost.
This policy gives our employees amazing freedom and flexibility to manage their own downtime. It also gives a sense of responsibility to the employee to manage their own time and deliverables.
Provide Mobility Tools
Various tools for collaboration, mobile-enablement, work from any device, and much more, are all part of the package we provide employees to enhance their flexibility. There are so many tools available today, for almost any type of collaboration. We’ve discovered that, by using these tools, almost all work can be done remotely.
Do More With Less
Being an SMB, we obviously can’t spend vast resources on mobile-enabling applications. We had to leverage our existing resources. To that effect, we built a platform to do just what we needed: a platform to mobile-enable applications without requiring a large amount of technical skilled workers. This has enabled us to be productive no matter where we are.
Breaking Old-School Paradigms
Today’s workforce transcends geographies. At appsFreedom, we consistently work across a minimum of 5 time zones in any given day. Even though we are a relatively small workforce, we follow the sun in a global workflow model.
We have been able to overcome the skills shortage problem and hire the best talent regardless of where they are. They don’t have to move to Chandler Arizona to work, and be successful, in our organization.
Now, it has become our core competency to provide a platform for other organizations to mobile-enable their systems, without adding any additional resources. And to do so, very quickly.
These ideas may not be directly applicable to each and every SMB. They may have requirements that force them to overcome talent shortages in other ways. But hopefully, this gives some ideas for other organizations on how they can leverage cutting-edge technology to hire cutting-edge talent.