Losing an employee, either planned or not, is hard for a business. It disrupts so much and, if not managed well, may lead to more. But we aren’t going to cover how to treat employees when they leave, as there are lots of articles on that.
What is going to be covered is what happens when someone leaves and, in an ever-competitive hiring market, your plan of action is to flip and replace. A quick search of Dice.com and there are over 1,600 open positions posted — how are you going compete with those who might be super sexy like Google or Facebook or the latest startup in your town? According to Salesforce Ben, the average salary is $141,000 so can you pay that plus all the perks? If the answer is yes, then you have a fighting chance to hire someone but the average tech position goes unfilled for over 50 days. There are alternatives to hiring.
Let’s start with the replacement salary ($141k)+ benefits (40% overhead): $197,000 total employee cost.
At Zinovo, we have a standard model where companies either have quarterly or annual contracts. If you were to replace just the base salary with a contract for support and presume you are replacing this person with a blend of our resources (architect to admin, because that is what you get) and you would get a blended 900 hours of work. You may be saying, “Dang, I get over 2,000 hours with a FTE!” — but you don’t. According to a recent survey, it suggests employees only work 2 hours and 53 minutes each day! So if you do that math and include PTO/sick days, you actually only get 870 hours of productive work with a FTE. Surprised? Since we work and bill at the task level vs the role level (Mary, the architect bills you $89 for admin work and $185 for architect work — but at the task level), which we estimate gives you a 20% efficiency quotient on your capital dollars, your $141,000 actually has the power of $170,000.
While we never encourage our clients to never hire internally, there are great reasons to hire a blended team of internal + Zinovo. Here are a few we share with clients:
- At some point, a firm should be able to support their org — yeah it’s crazy to think a responsible company would ever want to work themselves out of a job, but we have by training or supporting a hiring plan to minimize the need for Zinovo
- We offer to run internal teams through our proprietary training program (with our employees) for free
- As we recently wrote, a recent Forrester article shows that companies look most to support companies to provide expert advisory — we hire the best who are beyond passionate in our business model, with most coming from larger consulting companies realizing the tide is shifting
Oh, and Salesforce salaries are rising at a 20% annual clip so that $197,000 rockstar is now expecting $235,000 — all in. It’s not the easiest thing to wrap your head around but when you look at the quality of Zinovo (only ALL 5 star partner rating in the ecosystem) and the economics, it’s not hard to think twice about pausing and considering “the way we’ve always done it” because we all know what comes after that.
