Spinoff enhances ADT as job creator

BOCA RATON, Fla.—The ADT Corp. already has about 16,000 employees, but since spinning off from Tyco International in the fall, the home security giant has become even more of a job creator, adding hundreds of new hires around the country.

Job recruitment also will be a major focus for the company in 2013, according to Anita Graham, chief human resources officer for ADT, which is based here.

“For [this] year … talent acquisition is a really critical area for us because as a stand-alone company now we need to develop our own employer value proposition,” she told Security Systems News. “What do we stand for at ADT as an employer? How do we track the right talent? How do we source that talent?”

She said that ADT plans to do such things as develop a way to recruit candidates through their mobile phones. Also, she said, the company will be focusing on its early career program—which fosters college interns so they can become potential long-term employees—and on recruiting military personnel to join the company in roles such as sales representatives and technicians.

“There are some great, great folks [in the military] we could tap and have them join our ranks, so we're going to be looking at that,” Graham said.

ADT has added more than 1,200 employees in the past year, Graham said. About 4 percent were in Canada and the remainder in the United States. She added: “We have accelerated that pace since the spinoff.”

ADT, which has more than 6 million customers, officially became independent from Tyco on Sept. 28. Since that time, ADT has said it plans to add 150 jobs at its monitoring facility in Texas and 120 jobs at its headquarters here.

ADT also recently signed a lease for 121,954 square feet of office space in Aurora, Colo., with plans to bring 850 jobs to that city, according to a Dec. 17 report in the Colorado Real Estate Journal. It's not clear how many of those are new jobs. ADT said it would be premature to comment on the lease plans at this point.

Graham said there are two factors driving the increase in new hires.

One factor is that ADT is now an independent publicly traded company, so it needs new employees for corporate functions that Tyco previously covered, she said.

“We've hired across the board in HR, finance, legal, IT and areas like that that are really corporate-enabling functions,” Graham said.

Also, she said, some positions being filled are new ones ADT now needs. For example, Graham said, ADT previously “needed people in finance but we didn't necessarily need to have a public finance group that had investor relations.”

She said the company also has created some new corporate positions to ensure its future growth, such as the job of chief innovation officer, for which it hired cable industry veteran Arthur Orduña.

The other driver behind the hiring “is the growth in customer base that we've had and gearing up capabilities for the future,” Graham said.

She explained “as we've had more offerings over the last 24 months with the inception of Pulse two years ago and the increased penetration of home automation and expanded solutions, we have increased the size of our sales force.”

She said sales representatives constituted about 50 percent of the 1,200 new hires in 2012.

In the split from Switzerland-based Tyco International, ADT shed its commercial side and it now purely residential and small business. That also created some hiring needs, Graham said.

“Our commercial and residential businesses had a shared function that now needed to break up. Each company needs its own support group,” Graham explained. “It's particularly evident in our IT organization. We have hired close to 100 IT folks here in less than a year in the Florida area alone to really support our operation.”