In my last post, I talked about how to cast a net for managed services engineer candidates.  What happens once you have some good potential fish?

Sell the prospect on the opportunity, the company, and your culture.

Sell the prospects? Aren’t they looking for a job from me?  I am the managed service provider after all.

Two good questions and a huge reason companies often fail to attract top talent. The interview is just as much about you selling your company, culture, and team as it is about vetting candidates.

I am not talking about a long sales pitch.  What I am suggesting is that you have a process by which to introduce the opportunity you are hiring for.

You should be able to go through the following with prospects:

• Company history
• Why it is an exciting rewarding place to work
• What the prospect will be part of in the bigger picture
• What your company’s values are
• What your hiring criteria is

Doing this serves two purposes. One it gets the prospects excited to win the chance to work for a company that can articulate things at this level. Two it gives them insight into what you are looking for and you will quickly be able to tell who doesn’t get it as the process continues.

We use a group interview process to make this pitch to candidates and I highly recommend it.

I am able to put 8 prospects in a room and within two hours send half to two thirds home. Getting the process down takes some getting used to but once you have a process for the group interview it is an invaluable time saver. Think about how many times you have had a candidate get through a phone screen and within 10 minutes of meeting them in person you know they will never work at your company? The problem is that you feel obligated to go through the motions of interviewing them and even if you speed through everything it is still a waste of an hour of your time. Get comfortable with group interviews and use them to your advantage.

The group interview process has many other benefits as well:

• See how candidates interact in a team setting – your team works as a team after all
• See how candidates work to get their thought heard by the group
• Give group activates for them to work on – who leads, who doesn’t contribute
• Ask the group who the best candidate in the room is based on their understanding of the job – you will be surprised how much wisdom there can be in group mentality.

D0 a deeper dive into the candidates’ fit.

Once you have sent the unlikely prospects home it is time to conduct an abbreviated individual interview to really assess the candidate’s potential.

In this process you should have a shared language by which to rate people with the members of your team. An example of this is as follows:

Rate each candidate A, B, or C in each of the following categories:

• Cultural Fit
• People Skills
• Critical Thinking
• Tech Skills

In order for this to work your team has to have a shared understanding of each of these categories (they should look familiar at this point) and what they mean to the company.

By doing this you can assure that each member of the team is evaluating the candidates on the criteria that will make them successful in their roll.

Get started.

If you start to use this process in your hiring you will bring a new level of clarity to what you are looking for and it will cut time and money out of the process of hiring.

This is going to take some getting used to and you will have to create and document some new hiring processes but they will be worth their weight in gold once you start to use them.

Josh

Finding managed services engineers that are great at providing remarkable customer service can be a challenge but if you build your processes around this objective your will have much greater success.

Hiring is a process.

I think the most important thing to understand is that it is a process, not an event. You need to know that hiring takes time and plan ahead. If you wait until there is a burning need to hire before you start the process you will surely fall back into the old ways of just taking the best of what you can find.  Engineers are usually looking to get a job right away so it can be hard to keep a pipeline full of candidates.

On the flip side of this is when you lose an engineer because you are not quite ready and they get another offer, they will often come back to you when the time is right if you sell the opportunity well.

The most important part of the managed services hiring process to realize is that if you will need an engineer to start working for you the first of a particular month, you must start this process with enough lead time for success.

Cast a net for candidates

There is an unlimited number of places to post your employment ads. The key to success is testing a few of them out and measuring your success. We have some of our greatest success in these areas:

• Craig’s list – sounds too easy but we have great success here
• Internal referrals – A players like to work with other A players, they tend to stick together
• Career Changers – colleges, certification programs, people looking to get their foot in the door and bring a wealth of other experience to the table (possibly service related)
• Competition – there are a lot of big companies putting reps through extensive service and technology training that you can take advantage by luring them away

Go through what you have caught and determine what to keep.
If you have cast your net properly you will have a lot of resumes to go through, even if you have written your job post to try and weed out the people that do not fit.

You should have someone (HR if you have them) review each resume for characteristics you are looking for. Have the list of what you are looking for in a candidate and check off as many of them that can be identified from the resume and cover letter.

Do not screen resumes for tech skills only and I would even argue on the first screen you should not rule out anyone due to a lack of tech skills as long as they have some tech background or training.

Once the resume screens are done a phone screen should be completed.

The HR person can do this phone screen for you again as long as you have clearly outlined what to look for:

• Phone Personality – we work on the phones in this business so you cannot be a dud
• People Skills – were they able to keep the conversation going, did they have good questions, were they articulate
• Salary Range – why do you want to talk to someone that wants twice what you can afford to pay for the position? I worked with a hiring manager that would talk to everyone and tried to create positions for good people that didn’t fit the particular role he was hiring for. Sure he hired some great people but his budget was way out of whack and the roles that needed to be filled suffered.

Once you have these screens completed you are ready to move on to the next phase.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the interview process and how to “sell” your company to strong candidates.

Josh

This is the third post about the key characteristics of good managed services engineers.  Seek out people with these characteristics, and you’ll be on your way to building a strong service team.

5.  They love to learn

In the managed services business, it is impossible for anyone to know everything about everything, even though there are people you will run into that think they know everything. Great service reps do not need to know everything about technology or about how to provide great customer service.

Great service people are able to instill confidence in people that their problems are in good hands and will be resolved even if they have no clue how to fix the problem at that very moment. Even my most senior techs see problems each week that they have never dealt with before.

Using their critical thinking ability and their people skills they are able to provide a great experience to the customer while learning what it takes to address the situation.

I am not saying that they can spend all day tinkering with technology or reading articles to formulate a plan. They are adept at using the team and the resources available to them in order to learn in the most efficient way possible how to resolve the issue.

They must also be able to lean the technology need to do their job while being great service people.

Great service engineers love to learn!

6. They are enjoyable for you and your team to work with

I am not suggesting you ever hire someone because you like them. In fact, if you hire someone based on the fact that you like them they will almost always disappoint you because you have not factored in the other critical components of making the decision.

I am saying that after you know someone has all the characteristics and values you are looking for you should stop and think about how they will mesh with the team. In fact when hiring service engineers weather you like them or not is less important to how the team will enjoy working with them.

One of the biggest determinants of an employee’s longevity at your company is the perception that they have friends amongst their coworkers. If they are not enjoyable for you and your team to work with, they don’t belong on the team no matter how good they are at what they do.

Make sure you find people with all six of these characteristics

Hiring can be time consuming and it is often tempting to settle for the best of what we have seen. Just get someone into the role because we are buried is the mentality I often seen take over when decisions are being made.

You do not have to pick the candidate who is the lesser of the evils. You can run your process again and again until you find the right fit. Even though it will take more time and possible feel like more pain it will save you aggravation and money in the long run.

Josh

In my previous post, I talked about two vital characteristics of managed services engineers.  Here are two more.

3. They love to help people

A critical characteristic of a great service person is that they love to help people.

Nothing makes a true service person feel more rewarded than going above and beyond to help someone. Not because their job requirements demand it or because their boss told them to do so but because they are intrinsically motivated to help. If a person does not intuitively, almost as if they cannot help it, have the desire to help others then they are not the type of service person you are looking for.

These are the candidates that show up early for an interview, offer to help you clean up after the interview is over, ask if you need them to do anything for you, and never forget to send a thank you note to wrap things up.

Great service people are always looking for ways to help people even if it is not on a conscious level.

Because of this you can look for the signs of even setup situations where they have a chance to offer their assistance to you during the interview process to see how they react.

4. They love to solve problems (critical thinking)

Let’s face it, the majority of what we spend our day doing in this industry is dealing with and solving people’s problems for them.
* A computer problem
* A business problem that technology can address
* Network problems

And any people problems your clients may present during interactions with your team.

Great service people pride themselves critical thinking ability and being creative in the way they solve problems. They are not just looking to solve tech problems either even though they do love doing so they are just as challenged by the people problems presented to them each day.

People problems can be anything ranging from an irrationally angry, stressed out, over worked, nervous, scared, or flustered end user to a business owner who’s financial well being is on the line as their largest customer requests and audit of their information security with the threat of ending the account if not up to par.

In these situations it is easy for a tech to focus in on the technical problem without addressing the people aspect of the issue. I would argue that an engineer that takes a call, fixes a technology issue, and leaves the client with a bad people experience (doesn’t address the anger, anxiety, or root people issue) will cost your MSP business both money and time as you scramble to replace them.

The opposite side of this argument is that a great customer service engineer could take the same call, address the people problem they are hearing, take twice as long to resolve the technical issue but provide such great service that you will have a customer for life!

Now, don’t get me wrong. You can find engineers that have great people skills but it is rare and often those people have such a high perceived value in the marketplace that it is tough to bring them on-board.

It is easier to teach technology skills than to teach people skills, knowing this will save you countless hours in getting your service right.

In my next post, I’ll talk about two more important things to look for when hiring managed services techs. Being able to spot these characteristics early can help you secure the right people for your service team.

Josh

If you want to hire great service people at your managed services business, it is important to know what you are looking for. We have found over time that all great service people share some common characteristics. In our hiring process we look for these characteristics in our candidates and will not hire someone if they are missing or we are unsure they poses even one of these characteristics:

1. They are a cultural fit for your organization

What do we mean by cultural fit?

It means that the people you hire have values that are in alignment with those of your company.

This is the single most important piece of advice I can give you when it comes to hiring at your MSP. If someone looks like a great performer, has all the experience you are looking for, seems like they will bring a ton of value to the table, but they are not in alignment with what you and your organizations value, they will not work out in the long run.

In order to do this you have to stop and define what values your company holds most dear. This should be a list of three to four values max and should be easy to remember even if they have a longer definition to give them some bite. If you have not done this it is almost impossible to hire people that embody these values.

2. They posses people skills first and technology skills second

They are service people with a love of technology

Every person that joins your service team should be a service person that just happens to have a love of technology. If you hire technology people and expect them to learn to deliver great service you are in for an uphill battle.

You need to accept that service people are different from techs.

I can’t tell you how many times I have spoken with the owner or the hiring manager of an organization that tells me they have hired an engineer with the perfect skill set for X. X is any technical trait you can think of. Invariably these hires end up being great with technology but struggle to be part of a team that’s success is based on customer service.

You need to be the first to acknowledge and accept that these skills are different so that this difference becomes a clear distinction for your hiring managers.

I’ll cover more important characteristics to look for in my next posts.

Josh