Beaverton-based Biamp Systems is bullish on 2023. The company ended 2022 with business growing 30%.
The company makes audio-visual conferencing technology, microphones, public address systems, communications software and support services that are scalable from conference rooms all the way up to football stadiums. Customers are in business, education, entertainment and government. It’s majority owned by Highlander Partners.
Biamp has 825 employees globally with 60% in office roles and 40% in manufacturing. We caught up with Jami Senger, senior director of human resources, to talk about the company's workforce needs, its current workplace strategy and more.
Are you currently hiring or are you planning to hire this year? We are always looking for amazing people to join the Biamp team. Our open roles typically range from engineering, technical support, and sales to material handlers, production workers and everything in between. Our focus for 2023 is primarily on filling engineering roles – and these are some of our most challenging to fill! We’re especially looking for software, firmware, and DSP engineers.
What is your opinion on the current workforce availability of the Portland metro? Has that opinion changed over the last three years? Like most employers, we’ve seen big swings in availability of talent in the past year. In 2022, it was very difficult to find enough talent to fill our roles, but in 2023 we’ve had more success. Covid, the great resignation, and economic issues have brought turnover as well as opportunity to our door.
What is the office strategy for corporate employees? Biamp is passionate about our in-office strategy. We believe that working in office provides numerous benefits that remote work cannot. Working in office allows for better collaboration and teamwork, with the ability to easily bounce ideas off coworkers and solve problems together. Our in-office strategy also provides a structured routine, which leads to a better work-life balance, creates opportunities for social interaction, and reduces feelings of isolation for our employees.
Are remote employees in the Portland metro or Oregon? Or do you have people nationally or internationally? Did you offer this kind of remote hiring before the pandemic? We have a limited number of remote employees around the world, all located in areas where we do not have brick-and-mortar office buildings. These employees typically provide sales, field sales engineering, or technical services to our customers all over the world. This has been our business model for years and did not change with the start or end of the pandemic.
What was your biggest take-away from the big work-from-home experiment all companies went through in 2020? Biamp executed a work-from-home strategy for about 15 months during the pandemic and asked all employees to come back into the office starting in July of 2021. The biggest takeaway from that time was the productivity and mental health of employees suffered greatly. So, even though it was concerning for some employees to come back into the office, ultimately, we saw big improvements in these two areas right away once they returned.
For Portland based hiring, both in manufacturing and corporate, have you seen any changes in difficulty in recruiting people to the Portland area? In 2022, the war for talent was certainly challenging. We saw increased expectations in compensation and many people electing to move out of and into Portland due to changing life priorities. We rode the wave by increasing base comp and referral bonuses for our manufacturing positions and structured creative relocation packages for people electing to move to Portland to work for us. In 2023, hiring has smoothed out for us. We recognize that this is partially due to large companies downsizing, which is impactful on the individuals, however it has created better access to highly talented people that otherwise might not have been job seekers.
Biamp invested during the pandemic and has been growing. Is that expected to change through the rest of this year as we keep seeing other tech companies shrinking? Biamp is very bullish about 2023. Our business is primarily project based and our partners have many exciting projects in the mix scheduled for this year. We’re optimistic and excited to see how this year shapes up for us.
Have you implemented any new retention programs? In 2023 we’ve seen a decrease in turnover so far, and our workforce is stable, which we’re grateful for. Because we’ve prioritized regular development conversations with employees and their managers, have a strong culture of asking for feedback on the employee experience, and structure reviews in a consistent way, we feel confident we can work to retain employees on both a large scale and individually with our current strategies. With the stabilization of our talent pool, we’ve mostly discontinued our financial-based retention initiatives in 2023. It was imperative for us in 2022 to put in a special retention bonus program but we don’t need to rely on that anymore. We do still have a referral bonus in place for our employees who guide candidates to us as a way to show our gratitude for supporting the company.
Have you invested in new benefits for employees? To support our employee’s mental health, we launched Headspace in 2022 to all our employees worldwide. We’re seeing excellent usage of the platform and have received many thanks from employees for supporting their mindfulness and mental wellbeing journeys.
How has your job as a human resources professional changed since the pandemic? It’s changed a lot since 2020. Seemingly overnight, our focus shifted from administrative and employer relations tasks to triaging a global pandemic, providing mental health support to hundreds of employees, and coming up with new policies and training to help everyone acclimate to our brand-new world. Now that we’re through the worst of the pandemic, we’re much more future focused. We’re exploring the uncharted territory of how AI can help us be more efficient HR practitioners, new and exciting vendor partnerships, and refining our recruiting strategy to attract top talent to Biamp. It’s an exciting time for Biamp and we’re ready for it.
