When considering truly entry-level openings for your MSP, it’s often difficult to anticipate how they’ll react to the environment. Without a solid amount of verifiable experience dealing with multiple environments concurrently, it tends to feel like a crapshoot when bringing these people on. They often have limited experience (if any) with your tech stack, your tools, your procedures, etc. Without having been in the environment, the entry level price point is low enough to justify the training period – but how do you give yourself the best chance on getting a solid ROI?
Make sure the candidates “IT philosophy” aligns with the company.
Sure, you’re hoping for experience with the tools you use and the customers you serve. But at its core, good MSP employees tend to have similar reasons for entering the industry in the first place. Some IT workers simply see this industry as a safe bet to remain in-demand, and a good chance of hitting six figures early on in their career. Job security and high salaries – what’s not to love?
Sure, some prefer to play Silicon Valley and shoot for a siloed mastery of 1-3 technologies. Those individuals have their place and their value and will talk to you about their “amazing app idea” until they’re blue in the face. They seek to stoke the ego, and dream of early morning whiteboarding sessions, Ted Talk presentations, organic kale smoothies and a knockoff Starbucks in the office lobby. There’s another side to that coin – the Wozniak to the Jobs.
Those of us that are a little more grounded usually got into IT for a different reason. Simply put, we love technology – it makes our lives easier, more enjoyable, it’s fascinating and it solves our problems. When we see something that does so much for us, and then we see others struggle to utilize it correctly, we want to share that joy with them! Change, fix, build, optimize – those are the true “Tech Evangelists”. Not someone giving a choreographed PowerPoint with lights and sound, talking about how the problem won’t exist in 20 years. We’re the ones that help you right now. We make what you have work the way you wanted it to when you decided to buy it – and we love the feeling that comes from sharing what today’s tech industry has to offer right now with those not naturally inclined to get it all synced up and humming.
Where do I find these guys/gals?
It ain’t easy! We’re the best in the business at finding those profiles here at Bowman Williams. Hiring boils down to hit rate – and we’ve noticed a solid success rate putting young “Geek Squad-ers” to work at MSPs.
“Our environments are extremely hectic – can they handle it?”
Ever been to a Best Buy on Black Friday? I wish that on nobody!
Android phones, week-old laptops with some nasty malware, cracked iPads, a desktop rigged to mine cryptocurrency and the one person that refuses to move on from Blackberry, all in the same day. They’ll be just fine!
“Yeah, but can they handle our client base during a bad outage?”
If you last a significant amount of time in retail, you learn to smile through an onslaught of abuse. I’d wager a ticked off CEO that can’t receive any emails isn’t much worse than a stressed mother of four who wants to know why the iPad she bought for her oldest didn’t power up on Christmas morning.
What’s the catch?
Mainly no experience with RMM’s/PSA’s limited on the server/networking side. But they’ve usually never had a salaried position with benefits before, so the price point is low enough for a good training period.
Hire people who want to solve your problems and have the ability to do so. Geek Squad puts you in front of customers, has your head swimming with a thousand different products at once, brings periods of high volume/stress. People that work retail/restaurant jobs always bring a good work ethic, because they don’t want to go back.
Teaching them how to use ConnectWise and how to virtualize a physical server is the easy part – finding someone with the mental aptitude/stamina to thrive in your environment is hard. Do yourself a favor, hire a customer service-oriented problem solver over the certified tool user. It’ll pay off in the long run.
