The Benefits of Hiring Tech-Savvy Employees

Guest Blogger: Becky Wilcox

One of the best things a manager can do is to surround himself or herself with people who make the business better. The employees you hire can make you or break you.

Nobody is good at everything, so in the case of a manager, a good criterion to consider in hiring people is to bring in personnel who compensate for your shortcomings. They can complement your best features in a way that makes both of you more effective.

Technology is often one of the areas where senior staff find themselves lacking. After 15 or 20 years in management, it can be easy to find yourself behind the times on information technology. Yet the business goes right on demanding it, providing profit and growth when the right tech tools are implemented.

Consequently it’s to everyone’s advantage to bring in new faces that know their way around technology. This means more than just being obsessed with a smartphone or having a 3D television at home. It means knowing software and systems that can benefit the business, and being able to communicate that to management in a way that encourages implementation.
As you bring new personnel on board, you will quickly find that those who are tech-savvy can help in several areas.

Updating Things You’ve Missed

The very nature of information technology is that it advances very quickly. But it’s about more than technology simply doing a good job. It’s also about having technology do more jobs. Customer relationship management is a perfect example. Your current system may be effectively managing the data it collects, but if it could collect and analyze more dimensions, you’d be better off. If you’ve asked yourself how you can improve your CRM, maybe the better question would be what do businesses use instead of Salesforce. And a resourceful, tech-savvy new hire just might know the answer.

Easier Training

This one is pretty obvious. When you hire someone who can teach you about technology, you are lightyears ahead compared to hiring someone who needs instruction from you.

But this goes beyond orientation. A new hire who is already tech-savvy with the technology that your company uses right now will probably continue to exhibit precocious tendencies when it comes to apps, software, and the equipment that uses them. So not only do workers like this hit the ground running, they also have an easier time continuing to run as new things keep coming into use. As an added bonus, these workers can help train other workers as well.

Expanding Your Capabilities

The worst thing about maintaining the status quo is that your strongest competitors have abandoned that strategy. They are pushing ahead with their business, catching (or passing) you thanks to an aggressive search for ways to do new things in new ways.

Tech-savvy employees will do that for you. They have been ingrained with the desire to look for new things all the time, and they can be counted on to take the initiative to find better, faster, newer ways of doing things.

Hiring personnel is tough. There are a lot of angles you must consider. But whatever you see in education, work experience, and recommendation, don’t neglect to consider their technological skills. They’ll be better workers who will make you a better company.