Hiring the Right People for Your IT Service Desk

By Arvind Parthiban, Sr. Marketing Manager-ITSM, ManageEngine

Hiring people for a service desk is a major challenge but an important one. Without good people, even the best processes and tools will fail to deliver high quality services and support. So where do you start? Planning a recruitment process is critical to helping you find the right person quickly. IT recruitment is complex and requires good project management, yet it rarely gets the attention it needs. You will need to set out clear stages and tasks, create supporting documentation and involve people from across the organization, including IT, HR and perhaps even the marketing department.

Work Out Who You Need

Recruiting for any part of an organization tends to fail when the business doesn’t have a clear understanding of what it needs. Most often the failures are due to assumptions made. It might look like an easy option to recycle an existing service desk analyst job specification, but your requirements might have changed since it was used. In the end, you’ll get what you ask for, so if you’re asking for the wrong person, you’ll get the wrong person. It will pay dividends later in the process to start with a clear picture of what you need. The service desk is the friendly face of IT, so an effective service desk analyst requires a mix of interpersonal, technical and problem-solving skills to succeed. In general, an analyst should be polite, considerate, patient, calm and respectful. The technical skills they require will depend on your own organization. What applications do your business people use? How do they communicate with the service desk? What tools does the service desk use? The technical problem-solving skills required will depend on where you draw the line between the service desk and second-line support, e.g., which issues do you expect to handle on the front line, and which will be escalated to the technical support teams?

Work Out What You Need to Pay

People cost money, so you’ll need to work out how much money is available to hire someone new for the service desk. You might already have a “default” salary range for analysts, but salaries change over time and you get what you pay for, so you might need to revise your budget. If you are going to have to pay more to get somebody who is up to the job, you will probably need to justify this, so you might need to articulate the business case. What value do you need a new analyst to bring? The trigger for recruiting a new service desk analyst is usually one of two things: to replace somebody who is moving on, or to scale up support capacity to handle increased demand from the business. By presenting the case in terms the business can understand — such as an increase in the number of incidents or service requests logged per month or an increase in the number of SLA breaches — it should be clear exactly why a new analyst is required and what difference he or she will make.

Work Out What They Need and Expect

Try as you might, if you’re paying under market value, you won’t get the right people for your service desk, and support quality will suffer. But salary is just one component of the package. A prospective employee will also want to know about the incentives, benefits package, training and career path. They might also check the reputation of the company using social sites like Glassdoor, so it pays to keep an eye on who is saying what about you and to respond to any negative comments. Talk to your HR department for guidance on expectations you need to meet as an employer, as well as any reputation issues you might need to counter.

Where Do You Find Good Service Desk Candidates?

Chances are the best service desk analysts are currently working on a service desk elsewhere. Most service desks have a high turnover of staff — much higher than the rest of the organization. But this is more reflective of the absence of a staff retention strategy than the general caliber of people on the service desk. With analysts changing jobs frequently, they will eventually settle into an organization that both recognizes and rewards their talents, so this is where you will find the star employees. Companies need to compete for the best staff, but the payoff is outstanding IT support and happy end users. You’re going to have to pay to get them — and work hard to keep them. Remember, it’s not just about you finding the right employee. It’s also about the employee finding the right company. In order to reach these star candidates, you’ll need to use a mix of channels. Consider how you can use your website, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, specialist forums, industry events and word of mouth — as well as outsourcing to recruitment agencies — to let people know you’re hiring. Wherever service desk people are hanging out, that’s where you need to get your message. Your marketing department may be able to help you spread the word across this array of digital and social channels.

Candidate Shortlisting

If you are offering a competitive package and you’re putting the word out in the right places, you can expect a flood of responses. With such a high turnover of staff happening across the service desk industry, there are always plenty of people looking to move to an organization that provides better career prospects. Some people are just not good at writing a CV that really sells their potential value, particularly in IT where the focus is still very much on technical skill sets; so a short phone interview will help you get a clearer picture. Depending on your corporate vetting policy, this phone interview might be done by HR, so make sure they have a clear list of criteria to work with and a set of poignant questions to ask. After all of this, if you’re still not getting CVs of the caliber you require, it might be time to ask the HR department to headhunt candidates who are not actively or openly looking for a new role.

The Interview Process

Make sure you have a plan for a structured interview. Too often, organizations waste time talking through the candidate’s CV instead of focusing on meeting their specific requirements. If you have spent the time documenting your requirements, interviews should be a simple process of “checking off” the skills of the candidate against those requirements. Going beyond the set of technical, interpersonal and problem-solving skills you have specified, you should also look at their qualifications and fit within your corporate culture.

Qualifications

What qualifications do the candidates have that support their application, e.g. ITIL Foundation, the SDI Service Desk Qualification or one of the many more general customer service qualifications? Qualifications aren’t everything, but they will give you a quick indication of capability. Make sure you balance qualifications against real-world experience to ensure you will gain value within a reasonable timescale without putting an overwhelming burden on the rest of the service desk.

Culture

You will need to assess whether the candidates will be able to operate effectively within your organization’s own unique culture. Are they from a similar size organization in the same industry? You may favor hiring from similar organizations. A proven track record in the same area of business will be of value, but analysts who have spent time in a number of different types of organizations will have experienced a higher variety of support and are likely to be more adaptable. They may also bring more ideas for improvements with them, so if this is something you’re looking for, gaining some insight into their backgrounds will be important. By nature, large organizations tend to emphasize rigid processes and escalation paths to handle the challenges of scalability, whereas small to medium enterprises (SMEs) and startups favor greater flexibility and problem solving. How much will a new analyst need to work within the constraints of your existing framework? And how much room is there for more creative approaches to problem solving? Many large businesses are seeing the value in recruiting people with problem-solving skills and entrepreneurial attitudes that are bred by necessity within startups and SMEs.

The Right Hire Wrap-Up

Clearly, upfront planning and analysis are critical to successful recruitment. Bring members of your service desk team in at an early stage to help you work out exactly what you’re looking for.

– Finding the right person takes time, money and effort, but the legwork is essential to net somebody who will fulfil the requirements in the long term. You don’t want to have to go through the process all over again in six months.

– IT recruitment doesn’t work well if it only involves IT people, nor if it only involves HR people.

– Once you have your team of service desk superstars, you’ll need to work hard to keep them. Work with the HR department to put together a staff retention strategy that sets out an ongoing process of evaluation, engagement and reward.

Arvind Parthiban is senior marketing manager-ITSM at ManageEngine, the real-time IT management company. For more information on ManageEngine, a division of Zoho Corporation, please visit www.manageengine.com; follow the company blog at http://blogs.manageengine.com; on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ManageEngine and on Twitter at @ManageEngine.