Thank you to Josh Wood, Recruitment Consultant at beaumont IT, for joining me to talk about how MSPs can find staff with ‘the right fit’ for their business by thinking of their recruitment process more like a marketing campaign.

Josh is an MSP specialist technical recruiter at Beaumont with 8 years’ experience in recruitment. He’s spent the last two years’ working with growing MSPs to help them to find and retain technical talent.

Having worked in the only market with more acronyms than tech (Medical) the transition to tech was a jump into more familiar territory.

Josh works with MSPs in the North of England and consults with business owners not only to find them new staff but around general hiring strategy as well as all things brand and talent attraction.

Connect with Josh on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshlmw/

NB this transcription has been generated by an AI tool and provided as-is.

The fourth one, and have you figured out what connects all of these yet? The fourth one is healthcare. Now, here in the UK, healthcare, there’s.

What if you went out of your way and I mean, like dramatically out of your way, to make it easy for someone to buy from you, to make it easy for someone to deal with you, to make it easy for them to get support, to make it easy for them to stay with you.

What about your existing clients? Is it easy for them to put in a support request? Have you gone out of your way to make it easier for them, perhaps at the expense of your own technicians? If they prefer instant chat, is that an easy thing to do? If they just want to pick up the phone, is that an easy thing for them to do? If they can just press a button on their computer?

Well, what’s that thing? Help desk buttons.

Left university without much of a plan and in fact, my first job out of university was working in a warehouse, packing metal tiles into a box, which is a great use of my degree.

And through a friend, introduced me to what recruitment was. Says you like to talk, you like the sound of your own voice, so you might find recruitment a viable career for you. So spent best part of six years recruiting doctors, nurses in the kind of the medical field before transitioning into private medical, sort of occupational health, that side of stuff, just after COVID arrived. And then two years ago, I’d fallen out of love with what I thought was recruitment at the time. It turns out I just did medical recruitment and joined Beaumont, where I kind of found that actually it wasn’t recruitment that I wasn’t a big fan of it, but actually the people, the types of people I was recruiting.

That’s quite nice.

There was a certain level of arrogance that dentists have, which I think they have to have, because they call it the God in the room syndrome, which is if they’re that one person in the room and they get stuck, they have to get themselves out of trouble, whereas veterinary is a lot more collaborative. Anyway, by the by, I much prefer working with MSPs now, so you’ve been able to sit and watch the market change. And I think most MSPs who have tried to recruit any point this year, really, right down to the back end of last year, have known that things have changed and recruitment is difficult. And you’ve got a lot of people out there who are not really job.

It seems to be very much a job seeker’s market right now, rather than a recruiter’s or an employer’s market. Talk to us what you’ve seen this year and how that is different to what you’ve seen from previous years.

What that kind of created last year was a lot of people willing to move, a lot of people jumping before they thought and yeah, just a lot of sort of instability. People were in three, four, five different interview processes. And oftentimes it wasn’t a case of finding the right fit for the person, it was about who’s going to offer me the most first, as compared to this year, where it’s still equally as tough to find the right people, especially because there are less of them looking to move just for salary jumps. The kind of the market has relaxed in the inflation of salaries and it’s sort of settled into a rough estimation of kind of where people should be again, and therefore it means that a lot of people are moving for the right reasons, whether that be moving or change of circumstances sort of progression. There’s a whole host of different reasons, but someone might choose to move. But it means that you, as a recruiter, we have to be a little bit more cautious about where people are interviewing. Is the fit right for them? Are they moving for the right reasons as well?

Because people are not just looking for a pay bump oftentimes they’re looking for another place that’s going to offer them more opportunities and more I’m really struggling.

Money is one thing, but actually they’re looking for all of the other factors development, moving on, growing as a person and as a tech. And we’ll come back onto that later on because I think that’s I suspect that’s one of the things you’re going to tell us of how MSPs hold themselves back, that they’re not forward enough about how they’re going to grow their teams or they don’t have a plan in place. But let’s come back to that. Before we do, I want you to get your shiny crystal ball out and look at 2024. And I know this is finger in the air and you could just make this up, but you’re a professional recruiter, you’ve been doing this for some time. What do you think it’s going to change next year? What’s the 2024 market going to be like?

But more importantly, robotic process automation is kind of starting to bubble up in a lot of MSP circles as being a particular area of interest that’s gone untapped. So like a lot of technical recruiting is almost six months behind, a year behind a lot of innovations within tech. Hiring certainly changed massively when Azure started to become a lot more widespread, when it wasn’t just the enterprise level businesses with big wallets and deep pockets looking to sort of make that change, but actually it’s your smaller businesses that were willing to look at cloud. You all of a sudden found that the kind of the skills that employers, specifically MSPs, were looking for really changed. And I suspect we might see something like that happen. We might see some sort of disruption or the next trend which again will change the skills that employees be looking out for or looking to add to sort of their product portfolio, as it were. Economic instability always makes things a little bit interesting, to put it lightly.

MSPs often tend to fare better than internal It people in an economic slowdown.

Partly it’s because internal businesses get rid of their It people and are hiring MSPs on.

So if things slow down, it’s going to become incredibly difficult to find good people, but very easy to find.

Average is probably a little bit cruel, but to find people who don’t quite fit the bill, which usually means as a hiring manager, you’re trawling through hundreds more CVS finding that actually, when you’re putting a job advert out, the percentages that come back that are strong are so much smaller because you just see a volume of applicants at the same time. If things go better, it tends to mean that more businesses have money to invest in projects, which means that kind of the internal workforce as a large gets more skilled up, which means that actually they become more viable. In terms of people who are candidates to kind of work in MSP, there is a bit of a divide. There’s always almost that sort of MSP thought of, oh, we’re better than the internal people. And to some extent there is. You’re busier, you work with more varied tech and what is a one in 100 problem is a Tuesday for an MSP.

There is certainly a different type of person that likes the MSP and thrives in the MSP, but actually a lot of that does come to hiring managers being a little bit inflexible about skill sets and hiring for technical skill rather than attitude or competency.

There are a lot of good MSPs who are hiring for capability and will look for someone to train and kind of bring on. But at the same time, especially if you’re a smaller business, oftentimes you just don’t have the time to do that. You’ve got all the customers screaming at you, you’ve got everything else that kind of forms part of that job. And then to have to sit and hold somebody’s hand is difficult, especially early on, because whenever you bring someone who needs training in early on, you really are just causing days and days of can I bother you about this? Can I ask you a question about that, please? Can you verify what I already know, but I’m just a bit scared.

But there are a lot of hiring managers who will look at a CV and go, well, they haven’t got every single one of the technologies we support. It doesn’t matter that actually let’s pick one out the air. You only have one client who has Nutanix on there, and you have two engineers who know it well enough.

Oftentimes that we’re so focused on those kind of lists of certifications or technologies on a CV, we forget that actually you’re cutting out sometimes a better fit for you and your business, because you’re not being open minded in the kind of people that you want to see.

Loads of hiring managers that I talk to say, oh, I’ve tried, indeed, I’ve done this, I’ve done that, and the response is always relatively poor. But actually you’ve done nothing to persuade or convince anybody that your job or working with you is any different to any of the other ones and where you then become lowest common denominator. Who’s going to pay me the most? Who’s got the largest list of benefits? Which actually lets most people, when it comes to sort of making a decision between two jobs, is not, oh, they’ve got a ping pong table and nice coffee. It tends to be, I’m working with a team that’s going to put time into me, it’s going to develop me. The environment is really good, people are really happy to sort of in work, but also they’re supported. I can see that there’s a plan for me kind of moving forward within the business and so I’m going to join here, but there is room for me to grow.

You have to sort of adapt some of your content to what you do and what it’s like to work there. As opposed to a lot of MSP facing content tends to be client facing. This is what we solve, these are the issues that we do. But actually occasionally, once a week or once every if you don’t post that often, once every month or so, a post that you drop in there where you are celebrating wins of the people that work for you or talking about some of the sort of incentives do we go out and do company days? There are companies that I work with that would go out and do go to Silverstone for example.

Some of those kind of intangible cultural things that everybody you work for knows about the business. But actually if you were to stand outside the office, you’d have no idea. So having that kind of conversation online, it will feel really braggy, as I think any marketing exercise does, where you have to talk about you or your business, but the ability to illustrate to people what it’s like to work from you above and beyond. Just the kind of the normal conversation that you would have with someone in an interview is invaluable, I think the third one in terms of what can you do to secure the best people. So you’ve got the best CVS or you’ve got a couple of CVS of people that you really like is actually to be really quite lean with your interview process especially. I know it’s very much a bigger thing in the States, but it does happen in the UK. Through two, three, four rounds of interviews you have to meet every stakeholder and person who has any sort of investment within the business. All you’re doing is annoying the candidate oftentimes. But also the longer that process takes on, the more opportunity that other recruiters like myself or other businesses have to contact that person and tap them up to come and work with them.

I normally say two interviews, two weeks should be the maximum time that you have someone in that process. Any longer and you’re risking them going elsewhere or losing hope.

Or we hire too fast and we just take the first person who comes along because all we’re thinking about is the immediate problem. I think recruitment, like marketing, is going to be one of those nightmare subjects for all business owners for all time.

Tell us what you do.

I like to say, and I believe it’s true that I tend to consult more than I do recruit. So there are quite a few businesses that I work with that we still maintain that relationship even when they’re not recruiting. And I’m advising on the next hires. A big one is salespeople. When do I need to bring on a salesperson? It’s those conversations that are helpful to a lot of businesses. But some of this advice, it’s telling them when the processes are taking too long. Having honest conversations with candidates throughout the process to make sure that they aren’t just sort of seeing the process through, just to see what happens, is actually making sure that the people that they’re speaking to are committed and interested in working with the business so that when it comes to the okay, it was time to hire. They’re much more likely to get someone who is invested and interested and kind of has plans to be with them for more than the standard one and a half to two years that we normally see throughout the MSP side of things.