Finding, hiring, and retaining employees is our industry’s No. 1 concern.
We hear it from industry publications, from our partners, and straight from the mouths of our members.
In their own words, integrators told us in a recent report that they struggle to:
- Fill staffing needs for experienced technicians and designers
- Find and keep talented and qualified staff
- Hire people who fit the company culture
- Make sure new employees are on board to support company growth
- Fill their pipeline with skilled workers while facing an aging skilled workforce
- Retain qualified employees
- Replace retiring workers
- Increase staff size to keep up with project backlog
This is a long list of challenges – one so overwhelming that many integrators don’t know where or how to start when it comes to addressing the problem. Offer better benefits or more time off? Bring in interns? Invest in training for existing workers?
To help you locate capable workers – and retain existing talent – NSCA created a set of resources you won’t find anywhere else (and most of these resources are included in your NSCA membership). Here’s a quick overview of the talent acquisition and management tools we provide for the industry to use – and what they can do for you.
Ignite: To Help You Find New Staff
NSCA first announced the Ignite program in 2016 at the 18th annual Business & Leadership Conference. The program’s goal is to attract, engage, and encourage students and young professionals to join the fast-growing commercial electronics systems industry. Today, more than 90 Ignite Ambassadors are spread throughout the country, talking up the benefits of working in our industry to young students and professionals, as well as community members.
The program offers free resources to integrators and manufacturers to assist with recruiting and hiring, guidelines and framework for subsidized internship programs (to help interns and the organizations that bring these interns on board), and connections to scholarships for interested students and professionals who want to learn more about our industry.
The Ignite Internship Program provides subsidized grants to qualifying integrator and manufacturer companies, with a goal of transitioning interns to full-time employment. Each company can apply for reimbursement of up to $2,000 to offset wages associated with hiring an intern.
Technical Assessment Tool: To Help You Analyze Employee Proficiency
This online tool allows you to scrutinize technician and installer proficiency before you hire – saving time, money, and frustration. It walks the test-taker through basic, intermediate, and advanced questions about the industry and specific technologies. Because it is 100% customizable, you get to select which categories to test for each candidate.
If you’re hiring a cabling installer, for example, you can select only the sections that apply to that position (you probably won’t need to test them on their pro sound or surveillance system expertise).
Although the tool is perfect for screening new candidates, it can also give you a better read on internal candidates. Does your project manager have the skills to move into a technical role? Is one of your existing technicians better suited to work with unified communications and videoconferencing systems instead of fire alarms? This tool can tell you.
C-SIP (Certificate as a Systems Integration Professional): To Help with Onboarding & Training
Great onboarding is now a necessity – not an option – to cultivate talent. The best employees will want to stay with you and grow, but only as long as you engage them properly in that crucial first-90-days period.
A poorly executed onboarding process leaves new hires with the sense that your company is disorganized or simply doesn’t care about the employee experience.
NSCA’s C-SIP (certificate as a systems integration professional) program is an effective and deliberate onboarding program that helps you develop the best people in the industry. Bringing new employees on board is an exciting process – but providing training to get them up to speed can be time-consuming and overwhelming, with no one able to take full responsibility for the task.
The C-SIP program helps you get new employees started on the right foot – without a lot of hands-on time required from existing staff. It provides industry and job-specific training in an online, at-your-own-pace environment without placing the training or information-transfer burden onto other staff members.
Users pick a track (more than one, if they’d like) – marketing, sales, project management, or operations – and complete the course according to their own schedule. It’s also a great tool for those who want to explore other aspects or opportunities within their organization.
Insperity: To Help with HR and Onboarding
Finding the right people is only half the battle. If you don’t know how to motivate employees or prepare for an ever-changing workforce, then your top performers may make a move.
Insperity – one of NSCA’s Business Accelerators – offers HR, onboarding, and workforce resources and solutions to help you shape company culture, offer benefits that attract new employees, and create processes and procedures to keep your talent pipeline full.
Program benefits include:
- Updates about HR trends, compliance issues, and best practices
- Administrative relief
- Better benefits
- Reduced liabilities
- A systematic way to improve productivity
Job Board: To Promote Your Open Positions
Our free, industry-specific job board is where electronic systems manufacturers, distributors, and integrators across the country advertise available positions. List yours here, too, so that NSCA members, Ignite Ambassadors, and other industry professionals can find them.
Have questions about any of these resources? Want to get started with one? Let us know!