Do You Hire Techs Without Industry Experience?

We have hired both with/without experience with mixed results.  I think it comes down to personality and if they are dedicated enough to learn the industry. 

We have done both and will probably continue to do both in the future. We have had a lot more success with green techs that we train than we have had with experienced techs in terms of how long they stick around.

The problem with experienced techs, as others have correctly noted, is that the job market is usually pretty tight for real techs that are any good. The ones that are looking for a job often are on the market because of personality issues that makes it hard for them to do a good job consistently and get along with all kinds of people. There is also the issue of bad work habits and practices that they bring with them.

On the other hand, training takes a long time and costs a lot of time and money. It's pretty easy to get people to wire-puller stage and I guess that's why it works pretty well because this trade requires so much wire work. But to get much beyond that takes so much longer that you can't even think in terms of training someone to be a service and repair tech from scratch.

So, there's just no great solution and it seems we have to just muddle through it all in order to have a tech staff that's up to the work out there.

Not usually since we have a strict company-wide quota for non-industry hires, and upper management always takes the spots ;)

I've hired plenty of techs with no industry experience, mainly out of desperation. The trick is to keep giving the good ones raises and let your competition steal the crappy ones. 

During my days as an integrator (30+ years ago) and as a consultant, I have tried both paths: hiring those with industry experience, and hiring someone with no experience and training them from scratch.

For me, I found that you get a much better installer/technician/engineer/consultant if you train an employee from scratch. However it requires a significant investment to do it right. You need a structured training program, and need to continually monitor and coach the trainee throughout the training process. Simply hiring a new person, placing him or her with a senior employee and expecting learning to occur by osmosis will probably not get you the desired result.

The very best installer/technician that I ever had was originally forced upon me by my boss. The guy was an out-of-work warehouse worker that happened to be married to the secretary of very good customer. The customer asked my boss (the owner of our company) if he had a job for a hardworking young man. Wanting to please the customer, my boss said "sure we do", and told the customer to have the young man come in and ask for me. Against my strong protests, we hired the guy, and I personally trained him from scratch. He ended up being one of the best and most productive techs in the company. He later formed his own company and is still very successful 30 years later. 

While it can be a road bump (especially when there are time sensitive jobs) having to train someone new, the most important criteria for hiring remains attitude and aptitude. The biggest pro is that you don't have to pay inexperienced people much to do menial work, the biggest con is that they can't do much on their own for the first couple of months until they develop some skills. I can personally say that I was hired with zero experience and am glad my boss and management took a chance on me. I would venture to say I became a very proficient technician, and I'm now in management myself.

I think it depends on the scale you're doing as well.  If one is hanging cameras then it's a good idea to have experience, if you're more of an enterprise environment (servers, networking) then it is a much easier transition.

On my team we have hired mostly non-industry experienced personnel and it has worked quite well.  It takes them a couple months to ramp up to speed, but when you're dealing with a few hundred servers and thousands of cameras it is much easier to teach them cameras than to teach a camera tech enterprise server architecture.

That being said we have 2 team members that were industry experienced on an enterprise level and those were no-brainer hires.

We get students from local Vocational schools who are interested in the electrical field to start an apprenticeship through us. We've had dozens of students work for us and currently have 5 former students who graduated and continued to work with us.