Posts by jdavenjay

Hiring strong but slightly underqualified staff and training them can help avoid turnover. A successful hire doesn’t always mean hiring the most talented person. Sometimes, a successful hire is just not making a mistake. That’s because a hiring mistake can pull your managed service provider’s staff (especially management) away from revenue-generating responsibilities. Training new employees…

Look for candidates who can communicate and are a good cultural fit; then, offer needed training. While some MSPs place emphasis on hiring a different caliber of candidate for a client-facing position versus a specific technical skills-level position, does it make sense to continually adjust top-end hiring criteria when looking for the right candidate for…

Oops… We did it Again, Bowman Williams ranks #116 on Forbes‘ 2019 Best Professional Recruiting Firms in America survey! Bowman Williams is the leading staffing company for the Managed IT & Cloud Services industry. Forbes and Statista surveyed 25,000 recruiters and 5,000 job candidates and human resources managers who had worked with recruitment agencies over…

By Kelly Hurley   With the unemployment rate so low (currently at 4 percent), it’s up to MSPs to figure out the best ways to attract top talent to the industry. Of course, compensation is no longer enough, neither are health benefits and retirement plans. While companies in other industries are offering flexible work environments…

For new MSP sales hires to succeed, it’s important to have a defined sales and marketing process in place. I used to run an MSP before I started a staffing firm that exclusively handles staff for MSPs. We’ve been staffing MSPs since 2010, have 450 MSP clients and have successfully staffed more than 5,000 MSP…

By Jason Ellis   Nobody likes to wait around for results. Nowadays, every line feels like the line at the DMV. This is why it’s so important for MSPs to implement a timely interview process. Without one, MSPs could be missing out on top talent, so to avoid this misstep there are a few suggestions…

While it’s true, compared to enterprise IT departments, MSP business owners more often than not are unable to pay their IT professionals six figures, there are still opportunities for junior IT professionals to move up in pay if they avoid key career mistakes early on. Don’t take the shortcut When you’re a junior IT professional,…

In the world of MSP, one is often called in for simple, non-issues. Things like “How to open Google” and “how to win my wife back”. This can be so incessant that for periods of time I start to want to work on a real issue. It had been one of these times when I…

Successful candidates share similar traits, from common sense to adaptability. Since 2012, we at Bowman Williams have interviewed 10,000 MSP professionals via Skype. We’ve found many similarities among the top 10 percent of the highly qualified MSP candidates with whom we Skype. In fact, when we come across that highly qualified MSP candidate, there will…

More often than not, MSPs turn to staffing companies after failing to fill available positions using internal resources. The fact of the matter is this: Many MSPs aren’t large enough to dedicate their teams to hiring. The process takes time, money and manpower. While recruitment firms can be intimidating at first, they don’t have to…

It’s been a long year for many of us, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been informative. Over the course of the year, I sat down with many of our clients to determine some of 2018’s key takeaways. While you’re developing your business plan for the new year, some of the things we at Bowman…

If you’re unsure of the going rate for a Level 2 field technician, you’re not the only one. Over the years, we’ve come across plenty of MSPs with little to no knowledge of how to compensate technicians fairly — and that’s okay: As a business owner, you’re typically more focused on other pressing business matters,…

Nobody likes interviewing for a job, especially when there’s a lot on the line. The pressure of nailing the job interview puts us on edge in a variety of ways, but more often than not, anxiety kicks in, and we become paralyzed. Overcoming your nerves is no easy feat, but preparing ahead of time is…

Besides it being painful, the hiring process for MSPs is time-consuming — but for the right reasons. To avoid burnout on your end, it’s imperative your hiring manager finds the perfect fit the first time around. If your hiring manager can’t, you could end up in a never-ending hiring cycle — which will almost always…

In the world of computers, there is almost always an easy solution: user error. I’d like to clarify right now that this is not a manifesto about how “computers are more helpful than people,” where I start quoting lines from I, Robot and AI while completely missing the point of those films. User error is…