I have a Support Admin that does some of the hiring. Some with resumes some without. What are your requirements of hiring a support staff, do you make them send a resume, or have them trained by you or some other person?
Your thoughts please :)
-Max

I believe a resume is vital and one should make contact with those listed on the resume to ensure accuracy. Training should be done by the one best equipped to train and after the initial training is complete it becomes a group effort for the rest of their tenure.

I personally believe it's important to be involved. We do our best to keep the entire team in constant communication and available to each other for training at all times. It's nice for everyone to have access "to the boss" and I think helpful to have those most familiar with the particular tasks at hand to be the ones doing the training.

Thanks for the insite. :-)

Yea nice info there :D

resumes dont mean ****, common sense is #1

Yes however somebody without a resume isn't worth "* * * *" .. It's called common business.. if you want to get a job, you should have a resume.. Does not mean it has to be killer, it just shows your put in the effort to prepare for things.

its like applying for a job in most occasions you have to send a cv right? well a resume is basically the same :)

Damn, I was thinking to myself...

"Self, I don't remember posting on this thread!"

resumes dont mean ****, common sense is #1 I can learn a lot from a resume. Beyond what's written within, I look at how it is written.

We receive a lot of resumes, especially when we are hiring, and it is astounding to me how many have misspelled words, sloppy formatting, and/or are just plain incomplete.

If the person seeking a job, who had all of the time in the world to concentrate on getting their resume correct, is unable to deliver a resume with the most basic things covered, I have to assume they would not be appropriate to work in a business where they may have to communicate via email to their team members and our clients.

I am extremely sympathetic to typos and grammar errors... especially on forums and in emails written in a hurry... I can even turn a blind eye to web page errors since those are updated so often and can change quickly, but I am not sympathetic when those errors are made on a piece of work where it is obvious "neatness counts" and you have the time to ensure it is correct.

The assumption is - If you are comfortable letting these types of errors fly on your resume (the thing that's going to get you a job and a paycheck) then you would also be comfortable delivering 'sloppy work' to the clients and that is not acceptable.

I can appreciate the person who will take the time to develop a professional looking resume even if their professional history only includes flipping burgers. We even had a resume like that once. The work history was dismal at best but the resume was fantastic and it was obvious the guy wanted the chance to prove he was capable. We hired him… he was more than capable.

The key is effort. If they are not able to make the effort to get the job, then the chances of them making the effort after they have the job are greatly decreased.

Resumes are extremely important, especially in this tight job market. It is hard enough to get in front of a hiring person, but if your resume is a turn-off you have lowered your chances even further.

So should I send you my resume for a job at RackMyNineShackSpace? :D

Originally posted by comphosting
So should I send you my resume for a job at RackMyNineShackSpace? :D

Absolutely, send me 30 or 40 resumes, the more the merrier!! We plan on hiring 30,125 people this year at RackMyNineShackSpace. Not to help with hosting but to fend off the lawyers trying to sue us for trademark violation.

In fact, to add to our lawsuits we are officially changing our name to @RackMyPriorityNineShackSpaceRocket :D. We have decided to base our business model on Napster's, our primary product will be lawsuits!!!

I have two questions and would appreciate a response from those with experience hiring techs:

1. Where do you find and hire support techs? Do you advertise job offers in local newspapers, online, or both?

2. When you pay techs on a per ticket basis, how do you track how many tickets a staff member completed?

1. Where do you find and hire support techs? Do you advertise job offers in local newspaperss, online, or both? At one time we placed an ad in the Orlando paper. It was a tiny want ad. We received no responses. We also placed an ad on an online job search site and received many resumes from it. However, to-date our best techs have come straight out of our own community forums. When in need, we have been able to place a note on our forums explaining as such and have received a tremendously positive response. 80% of our staff has been acquired from people we host. We've been quite lucky in that area. 2. When you pay techs on a per ticket basis, how do you track how many tickets a staff member completed? Our email management software does this for us however I would never consider paying our reps on a per ticket basis. I do not want them rushing through, or worse yet ignoring, a long drawn out email in favor of taking the shorter easier emails for a higher pay rate. I think Salary or Hourly is best to ensure it doesn't matter how many clients they are working with during their time at work as long as they are working well with each of them. I fear pay-per-ticket would cause too much of a rush and inappropriate support.

Originally posted by optout

1. Where do you find and hire support techs? Do you advertise job offers in local newspapers, online, or both?


I know longer have a hosting company, but when I did we advertised in the local papers. We received a tremendous response from our ads (we were offering $25k as a base salary) and we got 6 qualified applicants, 12 who were semi-qualifed and 30 we wouldn't touch with all the servers in the RackShack data center.

I didn't bother advertising online because the salary we were offering was not worth the $300+ it would have taken to place the job offer online and manage the resumes. The local paper was only $35.

Your business is doing very well if you have the ability financially to pay salary and hourly wages to employees. Congratulations. ;)

I would assume your techs do not work remotely if you offery salary/hourly wages? I believe a per ticket plan can be a viable solution if you offer incentives to produce quality responses.

Originally posted by optout
Your business is doing very well if you have the ability financially to pay salary and hourly wages to employees. Congratulations. ;)

I would assume your techs do not work remotely if you offery salary/hourly wages? I believe a per ticket plan can be a viable solution if you offer incentives to produce quality responses.

Remote techs with salary works out just fine.. As long as they are dedicated to the job...

If you have alot of tickets like, I lost my password, or how do I use ftp, then yeah, a per ticket basis is fine.. But when it comes to harder problems, that you don't want to give to admin yet but most techs can't handle, you almost need the tech to be on salary..

Small example... A tech gets a problem, it could be as simple as a permission problem, or it could be a bug in apache, and it needs to be recompiled, he might spend 15-30min tracking down whats up.. Now if he's paid on a per-ticket basis.. Why should he go through all that work for what? 20 cents? He'll just pass it up to admin, when maybe its not an admin issue...

And yes, you might see it as being unethical to just pass it up because its extra work, but its also unethical to just pay him 20 cents to be working on something that can get him quite a bit more...

> I believe a per ticket plan can be a viable solution if you offer incentives to produce quality responses.

...what kind of incentives?

I have a CTO or Server Admin.

He wants to hire our support staff out. Like Bob Cares, or some place like that.

Saves money.

Originally posted by Deb
At one time we placed an ad in the Orlando paper. It was a tiny want ad. We received no responses. We also placed an ad on an online job search site and received many resumes from it. However, to-date our best techs have come straight out of our own community forums. When in need, we have been able to place a note on our forums explaining as such and have received a tremendously positive response. 80% of our staff has been acquired from people we host. We've been quite lucky in that area. Our email management software does this for us however I would never consider paying our reps on a per ticket basis. I do not want them rushing through, or worse yet ignoring, a long drawn out email in favor of taking the shorter easier emails for a higher pay rate. I think Salary or Hourly is best to ensure it doesn't matter how many clients they are working with during their time at work as long as they are working well with each of them. I fear pay-per-ticket would cause too much of a rush and inappropriate support.


Thats odd about not getting any thing from the Orlando paper, we ran one and got about 30 appz, but then we did moster.com and got like 200 of them.

But you are right, we have hired a few of our own users, users already know the end users side of the CP and most have common sense.. :)

Originally posted by aht
I have a CTO or Server Admin.

He wants to hire our support staff out. Like Bob Cares, or some place like that.

Saves money.

You really shouldn't cut corners just like that to save money. An employee on a monthly salary will produce a much better quality of answers in the tickets that they answer.

We pay per hour / monthly salary and have done so for quite a while - we find it works best this way.