What I learnt … about retaining people in IT

Adrian Bryant, 64, is the co-founder and managing director of ADM Computing, which he set up in 1984 in Canterbury, initially selling printer ribbons and floppy disks, before opening a shop trading in early home computers such as BBC Micros and Amstrads, and later shifting to selling IT services to businesses. Joined by his son, Kailas, 28, communications manager, they have built a £12 million-turnover business, employing 75 people and providing desktop and IT services for 300 customers, including the likes of Hornby. Its average employee turnover is 9.8 years in an industry where it is more typically 1.8 years. Bryant’s secret is to hire apprentices and make sure that the fit is good for both sides from day one.
It has always been difficult keeping skilled engineers in our industry
[Adrian] They take quite a lot of time to train up, courses, shadowing, and inevitably they get a phone call from a recruitment agency headhunter offering them a much better job in London, with loads of prospects and fantastic opportunities. For a while we were struggling. We can’t charge London rates, down here in Kent, so it was challenging to keep staff.
About ten years ago I joined this organisation called Trust X [a peer-to-peer networking group run by the US group Ingram Micro]. One of the things we discuss there is staff retention. Quite a lot of the members are looking at what we have done because we have the highest staff retention by a long way.
We acted because I got a bit fed up with recruitment companies ringing me up and offering people who were fantastic for their 10 per cent fee. But I found they were often not a good fit culturally; not the right person.
The issue with hiring people going to university was they were learning things that were already out of date. So we went down the path of apprentices. We took on our first apprentices about 11 years ago, just one person. That went well and since then we have taken on three apprentices each year. Over the past ten years we have 31 of our people who work for us now who started as an apprentice.
How have we done it?
We are selective and say we are after A grades at A-level or distinction for a Btech qualification. But the reality is what we are really looking for is someone who will fit us culturally well. Somebody who wants to learn. We don’t always go for the A* person. I am looking for the person who will be here in ten years’ time. I look for family commitments locally, their ties to Canterbury, a little bit of work experience. But it comes down to the person who wants to learn.
It is worth investing time in getting it right
We do a short telephone interview, a chat, then we invite them in for an interview. When they come in we warn people that it will be a long interview. These people are often quite young, 18 to 19, so we try to make them relax. We are fairly informal as sometimes they are literally shaking.
We give them all a skills test. Depending on what level [of ability] they have we give them different tests because we don’t want them to fail miserably.
Then we have a chat. I like to ask, “Who do you admire?” You get a sense of what their values are from that. If they say my dad or brother, I like that, as it is an indication of family values. And in that first hour I am making a decision whether that person is the right person or not.
If they get past that hour we say we would like you to go downstairs in the workshop and meet one of last year’s apprentices, as well as a member of staff who has been with us for five years.
The signal there is if the person asks questions. You get the sense that they want to learn. If my engineers think the person is not going to learn then I will respect that opinion.
Once we have made a decision we invite the candidates back for a whole day, for which we pay them. A trial day. They sit with two people and have a whole day to experience a day of work. Sometimes that flushes out people who say it is not what they expected. There is no point taking on someone who is not sure, as you’ll be wasting a lot of time and energy.
I really think it is best to invest that time in the second interview stage to make the right decision. What I hear at other companies is they take people on, find they are not a good cultural fit, and have to go through the rigmaroles of trying to get rid of them.
Our biggest asset is the level of support and care that one engineer has for another
[Kailas] Because we have these senior guys who have been around for 20 years, it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle with the apprentices as they can see the longstanding staff and feel confident that they are in the right place.
We also have engineer of the week, which in the past was driven by customer votes, but that has evolved to all staff vote for their colleagues, who stood out this week, who is tackling a really different problem, who is supporting them?
Admittedly, a low turnover of staff does create some problems
[Adrian] I have senior engineers who have been here 20-years plus. We are having a discussion about the fact that we have so many people who have been here so long that we need to have more, and bigger, clients coming on with more projects so we can create more work at the higher level for them.
We don’t want to lose people: so we look for things that give us a return on investment as the business and meet their desires as to what they want to do. If they get bored or aren’t enjoying their current workflow, that is when they start to look elsewhere.
The bottom line is that if you look after people, they help you.
Adrian and Kailas Bryant were talking to Richard Tyler, editor of the Times Enterprise Network