WWT On Target To Hire 700 Employees In 2023: Here’s How
Here is World Wide Technology’s successful strategy that will enable the company to hire 700 net-new employees in 2023 as the channel partner superstar’s sales grow upward of 40 percent.
WWT CEO Jim Kavanaugh
While many tech companies are laying off employees this year, World Wide Technology is on pace to hire 700 net-new employees as sales are spiking upward of 40 percent in 2023.
“We’ve hired just under 500 employees so far this year. We’re still on target for [700 in total],” said Jim Kavanaugh, co-founder and CEO of World Wide Technology (WWT) in an interview with CRN.
“Starting World Wide back in 1990 compared to where we are today, I feel like we’re in an entrepreneurial position. And we need to be entrepreneurial as much or more today than ever,” Kavanaugh said.
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The $17 billion St. Louis-based solution provider has been driving up to 40 percent revenue increases across the board in 2023 and sees no slowdown in the second half of this year. This growth is due to WWT’s IT and entrepreneurial strategy of being critical to customers’ operational success and growth.
How WWT Is Hiring And Growing
WWT’s portfolio of offerings is massive, spanning from networking and data centers to cloud computing and artificial intelligence to cybersecurity.
The company’s services’ business is growing faster than its traditional systems integration and VAR business by providing a slew of high-demand services around customer success, strategic resourcing, supply chain, application, professional, consulting and infrastructure services, as well as WWT’s own Advanced Technology Center where customers can test out solutions.
Kavanaugh said sales growth and hiring more tech employees can also be attributed to its strong momentum in software development, mobile applications, digital and building the best IT infrastructure for each customer. With all these skill sets, WWT provides top-notch help to organizations around the complexity of IT, which has “become even more complex because of the distributed nature of the environments” that customers need to manage.
“With all the macroeconomic turmoil around things like interest rates, employment softening, etc., we’ve seen customers being very thoughtful and prudent about what they’re doing. But they know they need to continue to invest to put themselves in a strong position,” said WWT’s CEO.
WWT now has nearly 9,000 employees globally in over 55 locations. The company won the North American Partner of the Year award in 2023 from NetApp and Dell Technologies, as well as the Global Partner of the Year award from Rubrik and Pure Storage.
“We just continue to see solid activity this year. I truly believe that’s because of what we do. We provide significant value to these customers,” said Kavanaugh. “And that’s going to continue.”
WWT’s Data Science And AI Push
Another reason why WWT is hiring more employees is to keep up with the new demands around artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI.
Years ago, WWT heavily invested in building out a top team for its data science group that was focused on machine learning capabilities, which set the company up perfectly for the surge in generative AI in 2023.
“With the genesis and the evolution of generative AI and these Large Language Models, now you’re getting into more predictive scenarios and sentiment-type scenarios. So you’re blending [AI, ML, software development and data science] together,” he said.
“So having our data scientists and software developers come together is a very powerful thing. Because all of this software development—call it, ‘The things that we do,’ around creating customer experiences or patient experiences in different environments—it’s not just software, but it’s also the data,” said Kavanaugh. “You’ve got to have individuals that know how to collect the data, understand the data and monetize that data for the customer. So that’s a big one that I see as we continue to move forward: These worlds are coming together.”
WWT’s CEO is bullish about the future as a global channel partner and solution provider.
“In our collective space around IT in the channel, there’s so much opportunity here,” he said. “IT used to be a back-office discussion where you kept the lights on for customers—not anymore. IT, digital, AI—these are mainstream board-level topics that are going to continue to really drive what companies do and what society does as we move forward.”