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'll 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 it finds the IT person it wants to hire. Once a business owner realizes how much a qualified 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 the role's pay on an Information Technology Generalist position.
According to the site's salary calculator, the median income for this position is around $70,000. 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 see your job posting and have enough interest in applying.
While one 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 technical backgrounds and are looking for workforce experience.
Depending on where you are, salary ranges and cost of living expenses vary widely. Locals who grew up in your area may consider staying close to their family and friends in their decision-making process. Because they're more accustomed to the local cost of living and may want to stay close to home, hiring locally based personnel can be a more manageable process.
How do you write a job description?
If you're not particularly tech-savvy, you'll likely need assistance writing the job description for your future IT specialist. Putting out a job listing that says, "I need an IT professional," may lead to hundreds of bad applicants that distract from any genuinely qualified candidates.
You can always search the internet for a job description and adjust it to fit your company's needs or write the job listing from scratch. 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 when creating a job based on another company's listing.
Some essential items that you may want to include in your job description can include:
- A B.S. degree in IT with 4 years of experience or 10 years of experience with A+ Certification
- Experience with Office 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, you can assess your list of candidates and select which ones to interview for the position.
How do you manage offers and salary negotiations?
Once you've conducted interviews, you'll 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 send out the offer letter and begin onboarding your company's newest 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 number 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 they counter with an amount that's more than what your business can accommodate, you'll need to meet with other 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. If you go through interviews with an open mind and solidified expectations, you give your business the best chance of finding and retaining 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. Going through the recruiting process often means you're 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, working with a managed service provider (MSP) can help. If you want a partnership with the best of the best, equipping your company with Managed IT Services (MITS) from Bit-Wizards is an excellent solution.
When you partner with us as a MITS client, you connect your business to a team of IT Wizards with extensive experience in providing comprehensive support to businesses of all specialties and sizes.
Whether you want to receive cost-effective support, connect to the full value of Office 365, harness the power of the cloud, or anything in between, Bit-Wizards is here to help you achieve your goals while enhancing your overall productivity and security.
Ready to skip ahead to the easiest part of hiring an IT professional by partnering with Bit-Wizards? Contact us today.