Hiring remote staff can be a great way to meet the staffing needs of your Managed Service Provider (MSP) while keeping labor costs down. By utilizing an MSP staffing agency, you can access talent from around the world without having to invest in expensive local hires. Moreover, hiring remotely allows you to provide support on a 24/7 basis because employees in different time zones can cover shifts throughout the day and night.
When considering hiring remotely for your MSP, there are several factors to take into account. First, make sure that remote workers have the same level of qualifications as their in-house counterparts; experienced IT professionals often live outside of major cities or may not even live in the same country as you do. Additionally, consider the cost of living in the country or region from which you are hiring: if wages are lower in a certain area, then you can pay employees competitively while keeping labor costs down.
The positions that can be outsourced through remote MSP staffing include IT technicians, help desk support staff, service managers and coordinators, project managers and system administrators. In addition to having access to a larger pool of talent than local hires, using a remote staffing agency can also save on costs and administrative effort associated with recruiting and onboarding new employees.
Overall, utilizing a remote staffing agency to meet your MSP’s needs is an increasingly popular strategy for reducing labor costs while still providing top-quality service to clients. With careful consideration of skillsets, qualifications, and hiring in areas of low cost of living expenses, your MSP can benefit greatly from the cost savings associated with hiring remote workers while keeping the quality level of your service intact.
Benefits of Staffing Your MSP with Remote Workers
One of the greatest benefits of staffing your MSP with remote workers is the flexibility and cost savings associated with hiring from a diverse range of locations. As mentioned above, remote staffing can help reduce labor costs while allowing you to access a larger talent pool than local hires. In addition, outsourcing certain positions through a remote staffing agency can save on administrative costs and effort for recruiting and onboarding new employees. Hiring remotely also allows you to provide round-the-clock IT support, as different time zones can cover shifts throughout the day and night. Taking into account both cost and skill level when selecting remote workers for your MSP is essential for a successful transition to remote staffing. When done correctly, the ability to hire remotely can prove to be a powerful asset in boosting productivity, reducing costs, and providing clients with excellent customer service.
With Support Adventure‘s model, you have access to our database of pre-vetted contractors of various skill levels who have passed our Training and Testing program to confirm and solidify their skills and are ready to start being onboarded within weeks after becoming our client.
Cost Benefit of Hiring Remotely from Low-Cost Countries
Remote staffing can be highly beneficial for MSPs, especially when hiring from low-cost countries. By working with a remote staffing agency, MSPs can access a global pool of qualified IT professionals and recruit them from countries where living expenses are lower. This means that businesses can save considerably on labor costs without sacrificing quality or customer service.
In Support Adventure’s example, we mainly hire expats coming from English-speaking countries and staff from countries with a strong level of English proficiency like South Africa and some European countries. Our candidates are required to pass a battery of tests that assess their communication, documentation and technical skills among other attributes that MSPs would look for in a candidate. With our team sharing decades of experience working in and running MSPs along with working with more than 100 clients at Support Adventure, we know what an ideal candidate for a helpdesk position looks like.
Benefits of using an MSP staffing agency compared to a recruitment agency
Using an MSP staffing agency is a great way to hire remote IT workers, with the added benefit of having access to a team of pre-vetted candidates who are ready to be deployed within weeks. This saves MSPs time and makes the hiring process much more efficient.
An MSP staffing agency also offers many benefits that recruitment agencies don’t provide. They specialize in identifying the right candidate for your remote team, which ensures you have the required skill sets and technical knowledge for your needs. Plus, they understand the specific requirements of an MSP helpdesk – when hiring from a recruitment agency you may end up with people who lack the experience and skills needed for these roles.
The team at Support Adventure understands the culture of both working remotely and being part of an MSP team, meaning that all candidates have been pre-screened to ensure they will fit into your existing environment and work ethic. This helps to create a cohesive team atmosphere and maintain high levels of productivity.
In addition, working with an MSP staffing agency rather than recruiting individuals yourself can save you money in terms of advertising costs, headhunting fees and admin overheads associated with traditional recruitment processes.
Check out our MSP staffing vs. recruitment article to learn more about why we think a staffing model is beneficial.
Things you can finally forget about when staffing your helpdesk with an MSP staffing agency like Support Adventure
Writing Job Adverts
Writing job adverts can be a daunting task. You need to ensure you have the right words to attract the right candidates, all while making sure that you stay within your budget. Not only does this require a lot of effort and time, but it also requires creativity and an understanding of how to present yourself in a way that will both draw attention and portray you as a reliable MSP.
Furthermore, crafting an effective job advert means researching the industry trends and keeping up-to-date with what your competitors are offering – something that is often easier said than done! When working with Support Adventure, however, writing job adverts becomes one less thing on your plate – freeing up precious time to focus on other areas of your business.
Choosing the right advertising channel
Posting job adverts can be an incredibly time-consuming process for any MSP. Finding the correct advertising channel is a key factor when searching for qualified remote workers. With an abundance of job boards and platforms like LinkedIn, it can be hard to decide which one can provide you with the right type of candidates you need.
Additionally, each platform offers a range of options and approaches to pricing and targeting, usually requiring significant experience with each platform to post effectively and reach the most qualified candidates within reasonable time constraints.
Sifting through a mountain of CVs
Once you’ve crafted the right advertisement, placed it on all the right platforms and probably spent a couple of hundred dollars (or any other currency) on the job ads, the applications start rolling in. And by applications, we mean a couple of hundred applications. For any position, whether remote or onsite, you’ll probably feel like at least half of the applicants didn’t even read the advert and another half of the rest didn’t mind applying while being grossly unqualified. If you wrote a very specific ad, the rest of the applicants could make some sense, but in our experience, about 1% of the applicants have the skill, experience and communication ability to fit a client-facing IT support role.
Scheduling interviews
Scheduling internal meetings with staff can be a chore due to conflicts in schedules, scheduling external meetings with people on different schedules and in different timezones even more so.
With Support Adventure, you just give us your or your team’s availability details and our team will take care of the rest of the scheduling and communication with the selected candidates, so all that’s left on your side is to show up to the booked interviews.
Creating technical assessments
While an in-person interview is a fantastic tool to get to know the candidates’ personality and their communication skills, it’s usually no place for a detailed technical assessment or any other in-depth review of the candidate. See our thoughts on interrogation-style interviews to learn more about how we feel interviews should be conducted.
You do however need to know that the candidate you’re hiring has the technical background and the problem-solving skills required for excelling in the selected position. That’s why we’re requiring all of our candidates to pass our Training and Testing program which is designed to teach and test the skills required for a successful helpdesk employee. The test consists of multiple technical assessments that include working on real-life ticket examples, both in video and written format allowing us to carefully and consistently assess the candidates’ abilities before they get presented to our clients. We keep these tests updated to the most recent widely used enterprise-level technologies and assess the candidates’ skill levels in desktop and network troubleshooting, server administration and maintenance, MSFT cloud-based technologies, and virtualization.
Background and reference checks
Doing proper background and reference checks is another thing that can take up a considerable amount of time as you have to deal with 3rd parties to get the required information. At Support Adventure we’ll provide a police clearance from a local police department for each candidate showing that they’re not involved in any criminal proceedings and contact 2 references for each candidate providing a detailed look into their employment history.
Dealing with individual contracts and the legal aspect of hiring internationally
When dealing with staffing remote workers internally, many aspects of the process will differ, depending on the country you’re sourcing your remote workers from, sometimes even requiring opening a local subsidiary to hire the staff.
With Support Adventure, all of the legal stuff is covered as part of the service, allowing your company to deal with Support Adventure only, independently of what country the candidate you’re hiring resides in.
Dealing with accounting and international payments
Similarly to the previous point, dealing with different banks and sometimes even banking systems when working with a worldwide pool of candidates, can become quite an effort for internal accounting.
With Support Adventure you only get one invoice and we take care of the rest.
Attendance and HR issues
Remote staffing can bring some challenges when it comes to attendance and HR issues. It is important to make sure that remote staff have a clear understanding of their working hours, have adequate breaks between shifts, and are able to effectively communicate any issues regarding their attendance.
We provide a tried and tested model covering the time and attendance tracking requirements while taking care of all the communication with the contractors for any planned or unplanned time off. Any required billing adjustments are taken care of by our in-house accounting team.
Contract terminations and offboarding procedures
Dealing with contract terminations and offboarding staff is a sensitive procedure for any MSP. While we expect our clients to manage the technical offboarding themselves, we take care of any and all other termination tasks including communication and HR offboarding as required.
Become a client of our MSP Staffing Agency today
If you’re looking for a reliable and cost-effective way to staff your MSP with remote workers, look no further than Support Adventure. Our team of experts can provide you with the best talent from around the world while taking care of all the legal, accounting, and HR issues associated with hiring remotely. Join us today and start building an efficient workforce without worrying about any of these tedious tasks. With our help, you can be sure that you will have access to quality IT support staff whenever it is needed – day or night! If you need more information, please check out our MSP staffing services page here.
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