Your business grows and changes, sometimes faster than you can keep up with it. One of the most frustrating things about a growing business is the increased amount of resources that you must dedicate to IT personnel issues. Software platforms like internal customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, manufacturing resource planning (MRP) systems, content management systems (CMS), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems help your business manage operations and reach customers. But implementing and maintaining this network of diverse, integrated systems can require significant, highly specialized IT resources.

As you grow, you focus more and more on

• Recruiting quality talent to maintain and troubleshoot your IT systems
• Ensuring your IT compensation packages remain competitive
• Retaining your IT employees to minimize turnover and loss of institutional knowledge.

An experienced software consulting and placement firm can help you determine what resources you need and find quality candidates to help your team thrive. Rather than spending significant time on these human resources issues, you can efficiently and effectively give your IT team the resources it needs to keep your business running (and growing).

Understanding Your IT Resource Needs

As your business grows, many of the platforms it incorporates into its business require specialized technical knowledge. Sometimes, this is only necessary during the initial implementation, integration, and customization process. In those situations, it makes sense to augment your IT staff with temporary software consultants with that specialized knowledge. If those temporary needs grow into long-term projects, you may want to retain that temporary IT staff on a permanent basis.

Other times, you know immediately that a new software or enterprise platform will require permanent, ongoing maintenance and support. You may not know, however, what kind of special skills or qualifications are appropriate for your ongoing and future needs. But if your business isn’t in the IT business, how do you know where to start when looking for someone to fill that new position? How can you evaluate whether a candidate is knowledgeable, capable, and qualified?

For example, your multi-national organization has decided to integrate an enterprise video management system into its worldwide business enterprise systems. You’ve selected the Qumu video management platform. For the initial installation and integration, you have a small army of temporary IT consultants who specialize in Qumu implementation and customization. But you know that your company will need ongoing internal support for the Qumu applications. This position will need to be extremely skilled in troubleshooting both technical difficulties and user concerns. No one in your company has the technical knowledge to evaluate whether a candidate would be qualified for this position. What do you do?

Making a hiring mistake can be seriously detrimental to your organization. In addition to failing to meet your actual IT needs, an employee who is underqualified or just a bad fit with your organization can have a significant ripple effect. As more and more employees value “quality of life” and “workplace environment” as key factors in remaining with an employer, an employee who makes his environment less appealing for his coworkers can cause your other IT staff members to begin exploring other opportunities. The cost of retraining IT workers and transferring their acquired institutional knowledge can be incredibly high. A bad IT hire risks upsetting the entire technological foundation of your business. Terminations put your business at increased risk of litigation in addition to putting you right back where you started: with IT needs that you don’t know how to fill.

Call in the Experts

Ideally, you would find someone to consult with you about your systems, problems, and goals, advise you about the kind of specialized resources you may need, and help you find them. Recruiting and hiring IT employees typically involves a lot of overhead (both time and money). In addition to whatever personnel considerations and regulations are a customary part of your company’s hiring process, adding additional permanent resources to your IT staff can be a major headache.

Offering a persuasive salary and competitive benefits package can be difficult in the current tight market. It’s important to understand what a candidate’s specialized knowledge is worth (and how much competition there is for it on the market). Businesses must compete with both other organizations and with the freedom and economic benefits freelance consulting offers skilled IT professionals. This can make recruiting in-house IT talent difficult and expensive, as you struggle to find candidates and evaluate whether their abilities align with your needs.

A skilled IT staff augmentation company can evaluate your IT needs and help you find, recruit, and evaluate candidates that meet your technical needs and job criteria. It can use its experience in the industry and its understanding of the value of your position to help you structure a competitive offer to a desirable candidate. This can significantly reduce recruitment and hiring costs, saving the time and inconvenience of sorting through resumes, interviewing potential candidates, and potentially losing excellent candidates because of inadequate offers.

PulaTech can help you find the software consulting and IT staffing resources you need to implement, integrate, and support all of your enterprise software solutions, for short term, temp-to-hire, and permanent staffing assignments. Contact us for a free consultation and find out how our IT outsourcing, placement, and staffing resources can benefit your business.