WWT To Hire 1,000 New Employees In 2022

‘When we look at some things that we may want to accelerate in some of these core areas, an acquisition may be the right thing and the most prudent thing to do,’ WWT’s CEO Jim Kavanaugh tells CRN.

The $13.4 billion digital transformation superstar World Wide Technology plans to hire “at least” 1,000 new employees in 2022, on top of the roughly 1,000 net new employees the solution provider superstar onboarded this year.

Unlike some other large channel partners, World Wide Technology prefers to grow organically versus via acquisitions as the company continues its successful strategy of doubling both top line and bottom line revenue every five years.

“I absolutely see us hiring at least 1,000 people next year when I look across the organization. It could be more based on the trends and the things that that we’re seeing today,” said Jim Kavanaugh, WWT’s longtime CEO and channel industry legend in an interview with CRN. “Probably 99.9 percent of World Wide over the last 31 years has been all organic growth.”

However, Kavanaugh said his St. Louis-based company may slightly shift its growth strategy by potentially acquiring some “boutique” companies in 2022 in a move to rapidly accelerate business in red-hot markets such as cybersecurity.

[Related: Presidio CEO: 8 Big Bets On AWS, Cisco, Apple And M&A In 2022]

“We just think onboarding people is a more effective way to continue growing to make sure you’re hiring people in a very thoughtful way that makes sure those people map to the culture and the behaviors that you have. It can be a bit more difficult to do that through acquisitions,” said Kavanaugh. “I’m not saying acquisitions are a bad thing. It’s something that I believe we need to be thinking about more seriously and looking at.”

WWT’s corporate culture is one of the biggest reasons why the more than 7,000-strong company continues to double its top and bottom-line revenue every several years. The company has rigorous onboarding and management leadership curriculums that cascade throughout WWT in order to property train, vet and coach-up new employees. In fact, WWT was recently named in Fortune’s 2021 Best Workplaces in Technology across the U.S.

“But when we look at some things that we may want to accelerate in some of these core areas, an acquisition may be the right thing and the most prudent thing to do,” said Kavanaugh.

Specially, WWT’s CEO said he’ll be looking at “some boutique acquisitions potentially in areas that could enhance security, digital [transformation], or cloud.”

“Acquisitions are a little challenging at times because of the price points of some of the boutiques. So that is not something that anybody I would say enjoys paying--some of those multiples,” Kavanaugh said. “I’m not committing that we’re going to go out and do that, but it’s going to be something that is more focused on. There will be individuals that will be looking at those things specifically. We feel very good at where the business is today. The activity that we have coming out of the year is very solid. … We’re going to continue to do the things that we’re doing and continue to keep our eyes and ears open.”

World Wide Technology is witnessing strong growth in several different market segments this year including digital transformation consulting and management projects , cybersecurity services, and building out private and hybrid cloud platforms for customers.

“Activity is this very strong in just about every sector that we’re going after: whether it’s commercial enterprise, service providers or even hyperscalers. Also in the public sector, we’ve seen good activity and movement from both federal and state and local government, both domestically and globally. Even with all the craziness that’s been going on, is been a very strong year overall,” said Kavanaugh, whose company ranks No. 9 on CRN’s 2021 Solution Provider 500 list. “We’re looking forward to more growth next year.”