Hiring is a chore.
When vetting a potential hire, you must read them in a concise amount of time, understanding their work ethics, their ambitions, their skillsets, and their ability to communicate, among other qualities that lead to success. And you must do so within only one or two brief interview sessions.
The hiring process is a critical component of every business, MSPs included.
But when your MSP is already stretched thin (and let’s face it, most are!), reallocating additional resources toward hiring talent can put a significant strain on day-to-day operations.
How many precious hours can your team afford to lose?
To offset the strain that the recruiting process can create, many of our MSP partners have benefited from collaborating with staffing companies.
Outsourcing your hiring process can save your company time, money, and lots of headaches!
Print Partner is the trusted print vendor for hundreds of MSPs throughout the country. We want our partners to be equipped with all of the industry knowledge they need to succeed.
In this article, we’ll review what outsourcing the hiring process looks like, its benefits, and its downsides.
To create this article, we’ve collaborated with PSM Partners, a Chicago-based technology consulting firm and MSP. Just like Print Partner, PSM Partners is dedicated to supporting fellow MSPs by simplifying processes and offloading tasks to make their partners have a lighter workload.
What Does Outsourcing Your Hiring Process Look Like?
In a traditional hiring process, your MSP’s staff performs all of the legwork.
Someone from your team (maybe that person is you!) collects resumes, schedules interviews, vets, and ultimately decides whether or not to hire new recruits.
The entire process falls under your MSP’s umbrella.
But when you partner with a staffing agency, they do all of these tasks for you.
Staffing agencies have a wide range of candidates in their databases - by the time they start hiring for your position, they already have a large selection of potential candidates.
When you outsource your process, your partner will do all activities related to hiring for you - you just have to make the final decision when they bring you a viable candidate.
Benefits of Outsourcing Your Hiring Process
After working with as many MSPs as we have, we’ve found that many struggle with handling the hiring process in-house.
Most MSP staff members have a limited amount of time they can dedicate to supporting the company’s hiring processes. The owner, manager, or IT technician must set aside hours of the workday to focus on outreach, recruiting, interviewing, vetting, and hiring new members of the team.
Most of the time, these staff members already have a full plate of work and barely have time to take on these additional tasks without disrupting the rest of the company’s workflow.
If you want tips on handling the hiring process in-house, read: How to Hire Quality MSP Staff
Now, consider the alternative: you have an outside staffing company do the headhunting for you. Ideally, you should work with a staffing company that focuses on the kinds of employees that MSPs typically hire.
When you work with an MSP-focused staffing agency, you’ll have access to their base of qualified candidates looking for work.
Vetting candidates on their skillsets and work ethic is often a time-consuming, taxing endeavor for your team. But when you partner with an MSP-focused staffing agency like PSM Partners, they’ve already done the hard part for you.
“Sourcing IT talent requires specialized technical skills and a keen ability to weed out candidates who are not a true fit for the role at hand,” writes Scott Schultz, sales director of PSM Partners. “Many staffing firms lack the industry knowledge to recruit beyond simple Boolean searches or keyword matching in resumes.”
Staffing companies do the initial legwork; you just get to swoop in at the end of the process and make the final call.
That means no more shifting through a gigantic pile of resumes on your desk.
Not only does this save you time, but it also means that you’ll probably get a better candidate than you would have if you hired in-house.
Even if you spend loads of money and time on recruiting - sending out messages on Indeed, plugging ads, etc. - chances are, you’re never going to come close to the number of candidates a staffing agency has access to and has already vetted.
With a larger pool of talent to recruit from, you’re more likely to find a top-notch fit for your team.
How to Ensure a Successful Relationship with Your Staffing Partner
Outsourcing your hiring process requires you to build a relationship of mutual trust between your company and your staffing partner.
We encourage MSPs to overcommunicate their hiring needs to their partner. Leave no room for confusion on what types of employees you are looking to hire, what qualities you are after, and anything else that could be critical to getting the right resource in place.
Make sure you and your partner are always on the same page.
We also recommend you speak with and perform a vetting process for all new candidates before onboarding. Even if your staffing agency partner handles the rest of the hiring process, you should always have the final say!
The more trust you build with your partner, the less effort you’ll have to put into the hiring process. Let them take the wheel!
Print Partner, PSM Partners, and Staffing
We hope that this article helped you make an informed decision on your staffing processes.
At Print Partner, we want to help ease every step of our MSP partners’ hiring process so you can focus on providing our shared clients with only the best service.
If you’re looking for a quality staffing company that can offload the burdens of hiring, consider working with our partner, PSM Partners. Click here to review their MSP staffing service offering.
PSM Partners works with MSPs throughout the country to help them find the right talent for their company. If you want to find the right talent for your positions in a fast and streamlined way, consider discussing your needs with PSM Partners.
And if you want to build an additional revenue stream while offloading your printer-related tasks, consider partnering with us, a Print Partner you can trust.
