Service Desk: Tips for Hiring and Onboarding New Techs

Is there anything better, or worse, growing a business? Growth is awesome, we all know that, but it definitely comes with challenges, like finding great tech talent and getting that talent to the point where it is legitimately functional. That’s a process that can take weeks, if not months, at a lot of companies. In the meantime, growth can be constrained.

If you’re taking too long to find, hire and onboard the talent you need, you’re probably leaving money on the table on the growth side. But there are things you can do, not only to shorten the hiring cycle, but also get better results as well.

In the first two parts of our service desk series, we looked at the ways the service desk contributes to profit and how to handle after-hours support. In this post, we will examine the process of hiring and onboarding top talent for your service desk.

Focus on fit

Finding great people is the most difficult issue, and every labor market is different. But there are some universal things to keep in mind. Fit with the culture is commonly cited as being one of the most important hiring criteria, and with good reason. You need everybody on the entire team pulling in one direction.

It is more important to get the right person with the wrong skills than to get the wrong person with the right skills. By why is that? The fact is, training people and getting them to pro level is a lot easier than it used to be.

Make internal knowledge transfer powerful

The reason that onboarding is easier than it used to be is that the mechanisms for internal knowledge transfer are much more robust than before. Where even just a few years ago, a new tech would have to learn from other techs, now that knowledge can be stored in a platform where it is readily accessible. The easier it is to transfer internal knowledge, the easier it is to bring new techs on board. And when you’ve really got your onboarding dialled in, your Tier 1 techs can be as productive as Tier 3s.

Here’s how much the onboarding process for new techs has been transformed in the past couple of years. Doing things the old way meant that a tech would have to learn information, basically by rote. A lot of information. And that took time, memorizing key information about each client, and where all of that information is stored.

Learn process, not information

Now, a new tech doesn’t need to learn information to the same degree — they learn processes, in particular the process of how to find the information that they need. But once they know how to find information, they can do it themselves, which is much more efficient than running around the office tapping shoulders and guessing where the key information is.

That’s the secret sauce to onboarding — teach your techs how to teach themselves. If you’ve got all your clients’ information documented, you’re well on your way to that goal. If you have your training manuals documented so that new techs can learn on their own how to find key information, then you’ll save even more time.

New techs working at 80% just a couple of weeks in? That’s what a great service desk looks like today.

To find out more about how IT Glue’s documentation platform helps shorten your onboarding process for new techs, sign up to watch a demo below.

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IT Glue™ is a documentation platform that helps you to streamline your processes, record and organize information, and reduce the amount of time your techs waste looking for information. IT Glue’s partners report efficiency gains almost immediately after launching the platform. Watch the demo to find out more.