Congratulations on deciding to hire a new IT professional for your business! Arriving at this decision means your business has grown and needs a dedicated employee to focus solely on your IT tasks. During the hiring process, you will need to think about quite a few things. You might be wondering where to begin finding a skilled IT employee if you’re proficient in your respective field but have room to grow as a tech-savvy individual. Before and during the process of hiring the right IT professional for your business, you must consider several questions and factors.
What's your budget?
The most obvious starting point is deciding how much you’re willing to pay a new IT employee. Still, this factor is the last thing a business considers until they have found the IT person they want to hire. Once a business owner realizes how much a qualified IT employee should be compensated, they often get ‘sticker shock.’
The good news is that there are many helpful online resources for determining salaries, and a great place to look for guidance is Salary.com. Assuming you need a starting IT position, you can base your salary on an Information Technology Generalist position. According to Salary.com, the median salary for this position is $81,916. Now that you have the salary information, it’s time to crunch the numbers and determine if the finance piece will work for your intended budget for the position.
Where do you start looking for a new hire?
Deciding how to seek potential hires is more complicated because there are many different ways and places to post a job online when hiring for any position. You want to ensure that suitable candidates are looking at your job posting. While one job site doesn’t necessarily prevail over others, business owners should diversify their efforts to post job openings. You should also contact local educational institutions like technical colleges, community colleges, or universities to help you recruit those who have educational backgrounds and are looking for workforce experience.
Depending on where you are located in the country, salary ranges and cost of living expenses vary widely. If you find someone local who grew up in your business area, their decision-making process for selecting a new job may include staying close to their family and friends. Because they will be more accustomed to the local cost of living and may be potentially invested in staying close to home, hiring locally-based personnel can be a more manageable process.
How do you write a job description?
You will likely need assistance writing a job description for an IT specialist if you're not an IT guru. You can’t just put out a job listing that says, "I need an IT professional," or you will end up with hundreds of bad applicants. You could always search the internet for a job description and adjust it to fit your business needs. You could also take a stab at writing the job listing yourself. The most efficient option is to find a job description online and modify it to reflect your company's needs. Ensure you make sufficient changes to avoid plagiarism in creating a job listing identical to one from another company.
Some essential items that you may want to include in your job description may include:
- 4 years of experience and a B.S. degree in IT or 10 years of experience with A+ Certification
- Experience with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud
- Network security experience
- Workstation hardware troubleshooting skills
- Server management capabilities
Once you publish your job listing, it's only a matter of time until you can assess your list of candidates and select potential interviewees.
How do you manage offers and salary negotiations?
Once you've conducted interviews, you will ideally identify the candidate you’ve decided to hire with ease. Your favorite candidate has all the qualifications you seek, and you’re likely excited to get the offer letter out and begin onboarding your company's newest IT employee. Unfortunately, many businesses often get excited and may forget about the possibility of a candidate attempting to negotiate their salary. Even if you offer a candidate more than the median salary for your area, it is always possible that they will counter with an amount well above your budget.
If your top candidate counters with a final offer within a range your business can cover but outside of your budget for the position, your next decision is whether you are willing to adjust your budget to hire your top candidate. If your top candidate sets a final offer more than your business can accommodate, you will likely need to progress through your other leading candidates to find your new hire. This entire process depends on your willingness to hire a specific candidate, your company's ability to compensate them, and your comfort in facilitating negotiations with the goal of a successful hire.
How can Bit-Wizards help?
Business owners frequently wish it was easier to find and hire IT professionals with the experience and skills to handle an entire company's needs. When going through the recruiting process, you are inherently less able to focus on your company, employees, and customers. If you want to bypass spending the time and resources required to find and hire a dedicated IT employee for your business, partnering with Bit-Wizards and our managed IT services (MITS) is an excellent solution.
When you partner with us as your MITS provider, you connect your business to a full arsenal of IT employees with extensive experience in providing comprehensive support to businesses of all specialties and sizes. Whether your focus is to receive cost-effective IT support, connect to Microsoft 365 products, harness the power of the cloud, or anything in between, Bit-Wizards is here to help your business achieve these goals while enjoying enhanced productivity and security.
Ready to partner with Bit-Wizards? Contact us today.