Solid Personnel Makes Flexibility in Staffing Electric

By Jay Hipps, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

When an administrative office needs help with a project, they can call a personnel agency to bring in someone on a temporary basis to help make it happen. Now, thanks to Hacienda's Solid Personnel, a number of specialized businesses can do the same thing when they need to increase staffing for a specific task.

"Solid Personnel is a niche-specific staffing and recruiting firm," says Cameron McNabb, the company's president and CEO. "The niches that we are focused on right now are electrical, renewable energy, and telecommunications. We're looking to get into IT and scientific recruiting, but my background primarily in the last ten years has been in the electrical staffing realm."

The company's business model fills a need that is unique to contractors. "Anybody who's been in the construction industry knows that there's no such thing as a full-time job. You're only employed for as long as that contractor that you're working for has a backlog of business," McNabb says. "There are a lot of layoffs, a lot of people sitting at home for a week or two for their contractor to put them back to work, and that's where we make a lot of sense.

"If contractors can have their permanent staff and then supplement a few guys here and there for projects, they don't have to make that commitment to a person where they say, 'We want to hire you for full-time work,' and then a couple projects fall off and they have to lay them off. That's a lot of stress on a business owner, to worry about these things. I think that's part of why this business works so well - it just makes sense."

Solid Personnel has further refined its offerings to focus on project-based recruiting and long-term, permanent placements. "The reason is because if we always focus on these better, longer-term, higher-paying jobs for the employees that we place, we're going to attract a higher quality of people. The best candidates are going to want to work for us because we offer better jobs with higher wages and we provide benefits," says McNabb. "To them, there's really no difference between working for a company like us and working directly for a contractor."

The quality is reflected by the projects involved. Contractors employing Solid Personnel staff have worked on projects for Tesla, including the auto company's Fremont plant, Palo Alto headquarters, and Lathrop facility; refinery work for Chevron and Shell; industrial work at Clorox and at Ball Metals in Fairfield; and tenant improvements at a number of Orchard Supply Hardware stores.

McNabb started the company in October, 2013, operating out of his kitchen before leasing space in Dublin. Solid Personnel purchased an office condo in Hacienda earlier this year and recently relocated after investing $200,000 in tenant improvements. The company also has an office in Alhambra, enabling it to staff projects throughout California.

As for the future, McNabb has hopes to keep the company moving forward on a number of levels. "We'd like to grow and expand in different niches," he says. "The Bay Area has a lot of interest in technology and scientific and clinical research, and that's what we're excited about. Now that we've had the success in the core business, we're looking forward in the next couple years to growing these other sectors, and eventually growing this company and possibly taking it out of state."

For more information on Solid Personnel, call (510) 370-3550 or visit www.solidpersonnel.com.

Photo: Cameron McNabb and Solid Personnel staff at work in their new Hacienda office.

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