Your staff are demanding immediate local IT (or ICT) support. The complaints are mounting as they are unable to work efficiently without rapid help with IT queries and problems. What should you do? How will you recruit or find this resource? IT recruitment is a real challenge, but is this the right path for your business?
It is a complex mix; you need to be seen to be providing the best tools and the most reliable working environment, but what do you do when the pressure mounts?
The knee-jerk reaction is to consider an in-house IT resource, but below a certain size this is almost without exception a mistake.
Why companies of up to 200 staff should not be tempted into hiring full-time staff for their IT/ICT needs…
IT Recruitment – How?
IT recruitment is a mine-field. Hiring decent IT/ICT staff is extremely difficult. There is so much jargon and ‘experience’ of this or that in a CV. How are you to know what they say they know is a passing click of a mouse, or in-depth, hands-on, real-world experience?
Salary Costs vs. Experience
Any IT person with suitable professional exposure and experience will demand a salary of at least £30k and the good ones will want more than £45k and of course the usual additional costs re: employee benefits, National Insurance, desk space etc.
Under that and you will get someone of limited experience and capabilities and if you do this you will then need to outsource your more complex project work at least once every 3-5 years and likely more often than that.
Workload
There will not be enough work for this person. What will you get this expensive resource to do for the significant moments of down-time where he/she is not needed?
Hidden Extras
How much do you think this will really cost your business? Don’t forget that whatever salary figure you come up with needs another 13% National Insurance, plus office space, telephone, desk etc. and benefits on top – what is this figure? At least £5k and probably closer to £10k per year. This means £35-55k in real terms on a £30-45k. Can you really afford that? Will you save this amount of money elsewhere through increased staff productivity – really?
You could also end up spending on both the salary of a new employee, with downtime that you find difficult to fill, as well as outsourcing to a service provider for the more complex projects.
Mistakes
If you go for the lower end of the salary scale (or even below it if you dare), how many mistakes will your limited resource make that will cost you dearly?
Training
People in IT/ICT learn from their peers first and exposure and training second. If you employ one person, where will they pick up their knowledge from? Google is full of advice and how-tos but is a dangerous resource.
How much extra will you need to set aside to keep your employee up to speed with rapidly changing technology as well as their own career aspirations? How many days of the year will you lose them to training courses.
Professional Isolation
Even with decent experience and ongoing training, how will you stop your IT/ICT resource from suffering from ‘Professional Isolation’ i.e. making decisions in an enclosed environment with no one else to make a judgement call on whether what they are doing is a good idea or not? How will you manage this without involving third parties and incurring further expense?
Help! – They Take Holidays and Sick Days!
How will you manage the 20-30 days a year of holidays and sick days – 4 to 6 weeks – approximately 8-12% of the working year (not including another 8 Bank Holidays)? Who will you turn to when your member of staff is unobtainable? How much will this cost?
BUT we need IMMEDIATE HELP!
What about immediate help? You’re sick of 8 hour SLAs? Standard SLAs that detail 8 hour response and 2 day fixes mean that things do not have to be responded to for 8 working hours i.e. the same time the next working day and then allow a further 2 days to fix.
The Solution
The answer here is simple: move your IT needs to us!
Our service will cost you far less than the recruitment, salary, taxes and office space needed for an employee and you can take advantage of our combined decades of Business, IT and technology related experience.
Get every call answered and all issues dealt with immediately. There are very seldom issues that cannot be resolved remotely. For the rare occasions this happens we can be anywhere in central London inside an hour.
Still in Doubt?
Give us a call. Obviously we are in business to sell our services but we are happy to give you up to two hours of advice for FREE on this subject or any other technology related queries.
We won’t give you a hard sell, just sound advice pertinent to your specific needs.
Contact us, call us on 020 3745 6630 or use the chat widget now – anonymously if you prefer.
