The last eighteen months have been challenging for connectivity companies when it comes to their talent attraction. Finding and hiring qualified talent has become more difficult than ever due to many specialists moving into bigger tech companies in different sectors. On Episode 27 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast, we spoke with Ryan Carlson, the Head of Digital Marketing at Soracom, about his philosophy of talent attraction. He shared his perspectives, as well as advice for other companies who want to bring people back to the industry. Read on for his thoughts on the subject. 

“Well, my philosophy on talent attraction starts with understanding what the role is and what kind of personality you want. For example, I’ve always found that the best engineers want to solve interesting problems. It starts with the job spec and helping them understand what they will work on. I like to pitch the concept of the problem that they get to help solve. 

Beyond that, there are two different categories of jobs out there. There are jobs where you want a generalist who can take a problem and figure it out. Those are hard. And then there are the ring binder jobs. These are jobs where, if you’ve got a question, you just turn to page 13 to find our process on that. Turn to page 27 for a list of all the people you could talk to about it. They’re well-thought-out jobs where people come into them because they’re not sure of their own skills. They look like an entry-level job sometimes, but they’re often not. They also give people a false sense of job security because they think if they do the things on the checklist on page 1, everything will be fine. The reality is that anybody could do it. 

Individuals need to look at their skills and how they can constantly improve. The days of pensions are over, it’s unlikely that you’ll work the same job for 20 years and then get to be done. That’s not how that’s not how the job market works anymore. For all the time I’ve been in management, my job has been to put myself out of a job. That’s how you create your next role as well, not just job security. Trying to chase job security is a pipe dream, and it’s a false positive. When consolidation happens, people feel like they are invaluable, but a spreadsheet says that they fall into the 13.25% of staff that are being let go. You have to ask yourself how each job that you have reads as a chapter in the story that you want to tell. 

As a hiring manager, my philosophy has always been to choose the candidate who brings something to the table that we still need but don’t yet have. From a diversity perspective, I want people on the team who have different backgrounds, perspectives and economic situations. Especially if you’re in product development, you need people who can advocate from their own perspective. Don’t hire people that are the same as you. Determine what it is that they have that you don’t, and get diverse perspectives onto your team. 

The big telcos are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Where I see success is in those larger companies that have invested in incubators within their own four walls. They’re essentially creating small startup groups within their own company. They’re incubating smaller startups, which attract talented younger people who have unique skill sets, so the larger organisation gets to benefit from having them in their ranks without directly bringing them in. If their goal is to fill cubicle 37b with someone sharp and talented, I’d say good luck with that. That’s just not what the up-and-coming workforce is looking for. 

The stereotype has always been people just work very hard, and they still work very hard, but this generation of workers isn’t going out for happy hours with their boss and coworkers. They’re going home to be with family, so bosses are like, ‘Well, how do I pass the torch?’ That’s where mentorship comes in. We’re in an interesting place with the large telcos, where the way they approach a business is to talk about the fact that they’re working with interesting technologies. That’s really hard, given the current socioeconomic and macroeconomic conditions that we are in. There’s an opportunity to appeal to 18-year-olds who just graduated high school, where lots of them are going into apprenticeship programs for electricians or plumbers because those skills are recession-proof. You always need a plumber. 

Young people are being put off other industries because you need four years of a liberal arts college just to get through screening. We have to find alternative ways to train people in these areas. In the energy sector, they’ve been very successful with programs that get kids into two-year technical programs right out of high school. They’re taking on these roles of senior-level individuals who are about to retire, and they’re saving skills that are about to disappear. We have so much field experience from people in that middle layer who aren’t executives or upper management, but they do the actual work and have that lived experience. In the telco space, AI is going to be addressing some of those issues through training. It’s not stealing someone’s job – it’s just helping the next generation work up to the certification. It’s training people on anomalous things that only a handful of people know. 

It’s surprising how many people whose goal is just a living wage, and there are far too many jobs that don’t provide that. Then others dangle the carrot of making so much money, but you’ll have to work so hard that you don’t get to have a life outside of that role. What if I like biking and having a family? That’s what people want to do. We’re in changing times. The gig economy has radically changed the trajectory of the job market since COVID, and tools like Zoom make it possible to do business from anywhere. In fact, the expectation of getting on a plane or getting in a car and travelling everywhere and doing face-to-face meet-and-greets is now the exception, not the rule. Personally, I think the next generation has their priorities far more in order than my generation ever did, and companies need to adapt to that.”

To hear more about attracting great talent in the connectivity sector, tune into Episode 27 of The Connectivity Matters Podcast here. 

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