Hillarys looks to recruit and train graduates as IT skills squeeze tightens

£125m UK manufacturer of blinds and shutters looks for creative ways to overcome the IT skills shortage

Hillarys, the high-profile, Nottingham-based manufacturer of shutters and blinds, has started recruiting and training raw graduates - among other measures - as it looks to beat the IT skills shortage.

"As we have needed to grow our IT capabilities to match the business growth, the last 18 months - particularly last year - has been very difficult because the whole market for talent has heated up significantly. Even in the East Midlands, it's heated up," says Hillarys' head of ICT Julian Bond.

"We brought back in-house our online development, just at the same time that a lot of other companies brought their development back in house, too. Having had years of everything being outsourced, the last 12 months has seen a lot of insourcing. In terms of local competition, Boots would be a big local 'rival', with a 150-person 'centre of excellence' in Nottingham - There's only so much local talent to go round," says Bond.

As a manufacturer with production in Nottingham and Washington, Tyne & Wear, Hillarys has managed to keep hold of its staff, and has started to recruit and train raw graduates for the first time. "That's what our mobile project got us into. When we realised that we needed to quickly get up to speed with mobile development, the board asked, 'so where are you going to get those skills'. I said we'd use a partner to on-board some skills and get two or three graduates. They laughed because this is a big project for us," says Bond.

However, Bond argued that with the internet driving so much of Hillarys sales, and the mobile app key to the company's in-home sales, skilling-up in-house was vital as neither of these two channels were not going to go away.

"We particularly wanted people in mobile development. One of the recruits came from Loughborough University with a computer science degree and one of the other guys came from Lincoln University with a degree in games computing. I have to confess that I was a little 'sniffy' about games development, but the truth was that he had gone out and built himself some iOS apps and his skills were very hands on," says Bond.

One of the challenges of taking graduates fresh out of university is that they often lack the structure of more mature programmers, although they bring other skills, such as user interface design. "They are not used to working in a structured world. So a blend of old and new has been useful because when I want someone to build an interface I want something that's sustainable and maintainable, and that uses the right componentry.

"Modern, young web developers seem to want to code everything from scratch. They don't care about coding standards or maintainability. They just want to knock something out," says Bond.

That is also part of the reason for Hillarys shift towards more Agile development - rather than paying it lip service - as well as Scrum, which are both more readily understandable for raw recruits than more traditional methodologies, particularly ones that grew up out of mega-IT projects, such as SAP implementations.

Hillarys was "highly commended" for its mobile developments at the UK IT Awards in November. Its Android-based mobile app is distributed to its sales force, who use it to demonstrate, estimate and order products for customers in the home. While version one ran only on a range of Windows Mobile devices, version two represented a complete re-write in order to run on Android.

Computing will be running the full interview with Hillarys head of ICT Julian Bond next week. To make sure you don't miss it, subscribe to our email newsletter.