Resellers seek soft skill expertise
Resellers are still recruiting staff, but most are seeking a handful of strategic additions with elusive ‘soft' skills, research has claimed.
Networking giant Cisco’s UK Partner Talent Survey finds that 85 per cent of respondents are currently hiring, with 78 per cent planning to increase headcount next year. Recruitment agencies are the most popular way of finding staff and are used by 71.4 per cent.
However, this represents a drop of about 10 points on last year’s figure. The number of VARs recruiting through online advertising has experienced an even bigger slump, falling from 70 per cent to 42.9 per cent.
Beth Rowland, Cisco global lead for partner talent, claimed more resellers were using social networking, personal contacts and referrals.
“Partners are still investing in talent around software and applications skills,” she said.
About 93 per cent of UK VARs claimed to be investing heavily in employee career development, considerably higher than the 84 per cent global average.
Staff attrition levels are better than last year, but VARs reported increased nervousness about hanging on to sales and engineering talent.
Mike Mihalop, head of HR for integrator nscglobal, said his firm had budgeted for recruiting four mid-level consultants this year.
“We are looking for a cultural and technical fit,” he said.
He claimed retaining good staff was an expensive exercise requiring continual development and training opportunities.
Brad Hale, European services leader at Touchbase Communications, said it was “harder than ever” to find staff with the right attributes. He added that his firm was looking to make a small number of “strategic hires”.
“Softer skills are difficult to find,” he added. “Skilled individuals are holding on to their jobs quite comfortably, so poaching is harder.”
Yves Mertens, Cisco’s European director of systems engineering and sales, claimed the vendor wanted to help VARs work together.
“This is a great opportunity to improve partner collaboration,” he said.