How to find great people with your vCIO role.
Every MSP I speak to is struggling with recruiting right now. This is probably true for almost every business in most industries. Yet, with our MSP, we’ve done quite well at hiring recently and the vCIO position has helped tremendously.
Over the years, we’ve noticed that many sysadmins we interview are unsure about where they see themselves a couple years down the road. Many love technology and don’t want to get too far from it. However, they also know that they want to stop “just” executing one day. A lot are getting tired of being on call and working off-hours during maintenance windows. We see it a lot when they get a little more serious in their relationships and either have young kids or are planning for kids. Others who work in internal IT tell us that they’d like to be an IT director one day, but not sure when.
We recently have hired some great sysadmins and project ressources because when we first interviewed them, we planted a seed with the vCIO role. We went into detail about the position and how they can work their way towards it. Many love that it’s a role that allows them to stay very much focused and up-to-date on technology—without executing the tasks themselves. They are also excited about working with clients to come up with a vision for their IT infrastructure.
For the ones who would like to be an IT director, we explain that, in our opinion, the vCIO role is a great steppingstone as they will learn to have a vision for IT infrastructure, build a plan to implement it, and present their plans to high-level executives.
This allowed us to not only hire great sysadmins but also build our vCIO pipeline! We can then start nurturing and training them so that the day that we need a vCIO, they are ready to go!
Simon is the President of S3 Technologies, a leading Canadian MSP he co-founded in 2003. He built and scaled the vCIO team which eventually lead to him co-founding Propel Your MSP in 2018 to help MSPs with their vCIO services.
