High growth demands right skills, flexible mindset

After re-creating itself in three different markets in as many years, software startup Swipely finally found its feet and began to thrive in 2012, and founder and CEO Angus Davis shifted into high gear to find the people who could make his “lightning in a bottle” product even better.
“I grew up in Bristol and consider myself a born-and-raised Rhode Islander, but I spent over 10 years in Silicon Valley, at a little company called Netscape,” said Davis. “When we started the company here in Providence, that was the only context I had for how a company should operate, so we think of ourselves as trying to have a slice of Silicon Valley here in Providence.”
One aspect of the Silicon Valley mindset that Davis and company have embraced is fast growth. According to an Inc. magazine report, for the 18-month period from December 2011 to June 2013, Swipely grew from 27 employees to 72, and Davis told Providence Business News he expects to close out the year with about 80. The company’s pivot away from a social media approach to product reviews to customer-loyalty programs to its current – and successful – iteration as a merchant payment system and customer profile information provider has garnered the company significant funding, including a $12 million series B funding round in May.
The strong growth earned the company a spot at No. 3 on Inc. magazine’s 2013 “Hire Power” ranking of the top seven job creators in Rhode Island. Including Swipely, three of those seven are technology companies, mirroring a national trend that placed both software and IT services among the five top-hiring industries in the United States.
“To find and recruit really talented people to join our team … that’s a big challenge,” said Davis. “We have to adapt the business without losing sight of the things that make Swipely a great place to come into work every day.”
So far, the company seems able to stay on that track. Daily free lunches, a relaxed dress code and open-environment office space helped win the company a place among PBN’s “2013 Best Places To Work,” but staying on the list requires constant vigilance. Ranked right behind Swipely on the Hire Power list for Rhode Island is electronic health record developer Amazing Charts LLC, which has hired 27 new employees in the last year for a total of 88, but Senior Vice President Kathleen Repoli said the company has struggled to grow as quickly as it would like and increasingly competes with other companies in the medical software niche for skilled workers.
“When we first started in 2001 and 2002, the number of EHR companies alone was much less, so the number of people competing for the same talent was much lower,” said Repoli.
Most of the new jobs created at Amazing Charts fall under the company’s tech-heavy software development segment, Repoli said, and that means hiring mid- to high-level professionals with specialized technical skills, including proficiency with the .net programming framework Amazing Charts uses to build its EHR software.
To find the right people for the job, Swipely has partnered with organizations like the Startup Institute in Boston, which runs an intensive eight-week training program for startup hopefuls in Web development, product design and other skills, and Venture for America, which connects recent college graduates with two-year positions at emerging companies in underserved markets like Providence, Detroit and New Orleans.
Local universities such as the Rhode Island School of Design and Northeastern University also provide a pipeline of new talent, although Davis stressed attitude over aptitude.
“It’s not about having five, 10, 15 years of experience; it’s about being able to thrive and succeed in fast-paced, high-growth environment,” Davis said.
The prevailing trend at Amazing Charts and Swipely to target experienced professionals with niche technical skills and unquantifiable “soft skills” are representative of recruiting at Rhode Island tech companies across the board, according to Tech Collective Executive Director Kathie Shields. The organization is preparing for the early December release of its analysis of the technology skills gap in Rhode Island. The most sought-after tech professionals in the state are software developers and network engineers with experience in cloud computing, security and virtualization, Shields said, but often harder than finding an experienced professional is finding a qualified candidate who also displays skill in communication, problem-solving, teamwork and is business savvy.
“These companies, because they’re all small, really need somebody that can come in as a full package. … They really want them to have the soft skills,” said Shields.
Danny Warshay, executive chairman of G-Form LLC, said the focus on soft skills rings true at his company, which sells protective gear for athletes and electronic devices using a reactive and flexible technology to guard against impact damage.
G-Form ranked at No. 7 on the Inc. magazine list and more than doubled its workforce over the 18 months from 17 to 37. As the company has grown, its needs have changed, Warshay said. Most new hires at G-Form are specialists rather than generalists, but mindset remains the critical X-factor for recruiters.
“I think it’s less [an issue of finding applicants with a certain] skill level, because we have not found it impossible to fill those needs,” said Warshay. “The challenge, we find, is getting someone with the right cultural set.”
G-Form hires a steady stream of recent graduates from Brown University, where Warshay teaches a course in entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor, as well as from RISD, the University of Rhode Island and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Colleges and universities are conscious of the skills gap their students face after graduation, and many are doing more to partner with employers, update their curriculums and encourage internships, said Shields.
In addition, she said, “high schools have really started to appreciate the fact that they need to have more experiential learning infused in their training … and companies are starting to become more receptive to hosting experiential learning internships.” Atrion Networking Corp. – which placed fifth on the Inc. magazine list last year but did not submit its hiring figures for the 2013 ranking – is one company that has taken on-the-job training into its own hands. Approximately 50 percent of Atrion’s new hires are veterans of the company’s yearlong “bootcamp-like” training program, the first registered IT apprenticeship in Rhode Island.
“We weren’t seeing the right talent coming through the door,” said Jamie Boughman, manager of the apprentice program.
Similar to Swipely, Amazing Charts and G-Form, Atrion needed highly skilled workers with experience in niche skills like routing and switching, audio/video and IT security. As apprentices, recent graduates or professionals looking to transition into IT from another industry undergo three months of intensive instruction and 20,000 hours of on-the-job training with mentor engineers across all of Atrion’s specialty fields.
While not every participant completes the rigorous program (the dropout rate is somewhere between 5 and 15 percent, Boughman said), those who do emerge as associate engineers and are guaranteed a job either with Atrion or with one of Atrion’s vendor or customer companies.
Davis, Repoli and Warshay all said they expect their companies to continue hiring aggressively into 2014 and all spoke of plans to reach further outside the box to recruit quality talent, including reaching out to staffing firms, developing closer relationships with universities, engaging the large talent market in nearby Boston and hiring some employees to work remotely.
“The most important thing is knowing that when people come in every day, the people they encounter are people they will learn from,” said Davis. “We’re here to try to win, and we have to help each other do that.” •

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