You've hired on gut feel before. So has every owner who tells you they have a system now. The interview felt right, the person nodded at the right moments, and six months later you're still the escalation point for half their tickets. That's not a hiring problem. It's a planning problem.
The fix is three moves you make before you post anything: write a role scorecard that lists the outcomes the hire must deliver, publish a pay line you're actually willing to pay, and score every candidate against that same scorecard. None of this takes a recruiter. It takes an afternoon and the discipline to follow your own sheet.
Say you're hiring a desk tech. You draft a scorecard where "respond to tickets within 15 minutes" carries the most weight. A candidate interviews beautifully, has the right certs, and when you ask how they'd handle a day where five tickets land at once, they say they'd finish the first ticket before looking at the other four. The scorecard tells you that's a fail on the top outcome. You pass on them, and you only know to because you wrote the outcome down before you met them.
What Does the Role Actually Need to Achieve?
Before you write a job description, write the outcomes. Not tasks, not responsibilities. What has to be true one year from now for this hire to be worth what you're paying?
List five to seven outcomes and weight them by importance. For a service desk role, outcomes look like "resolve 40% of tickets without escalation" or "maintain a client satisfaction score of 4.5 or higher." Adjust those numbers to your actual ticket volume and service scope. They are not fixed targets to copy; they are placeholders until you know what your desk really handles.
The weights matter more than the list. If your team is green or you're the only escalation point, self-sufficiency should carry most of the score. If the work is mostly password resets, customer service outranks raw technical depth. My view: I'd start with self-sufficiency over pure technical skill for service desk hires. Some MSP owners who have hired green candidates with customer service or food service backgrounds report those hires fitting their day-to-day operations well.
Set the Pay Line Before You Post
"Competitive" is not a number, and it tells applicants nothing except that you don't want to say what you're willing to pay. Publish a range you'll actually honor.
Do the local market research first. For illustration, a desk tech in a mid-size market might earn $55k to $65k. That is an example, not a recommendation. Your range depends on your area, your budget and the complexity of the work. Set it before you write the advert, and set it at what you'd genuinely offer, not what you hope to pay.
An honest pay line will likely shrink your applicant pool. That's the point. You want fewer people who will actually take the job, not a hundred resumes from people who'll reject your offer at the first phone call. If your budget sits below market, the pay line will scare off the strong candidates, which is better than interviewing them and watching them walk. If you can't pay market, say so in the advert and lean on training and growth instead.
Score Every Candidate Against the Same Rubric
With the scorecard written and the pay line published, the interview process becomes mechanical. That's a feature. You score each candidate against the weighted outcomes before you compare impressions, and you rank them by that score.
Picture two candidates. One has five years of enterprise IT experience and interviews well, but scores low on "handles a high-workload day" because they can't describe a time they triaged competing priorities. The other is green, worked in food service, and nails that outcome plus the customer service one. The scorecard says the green candidate gets the offer. That's a hard call to make on feel, and an easy one on paper.
A pre-screen questionnaire or a behavioral aptitude test can be part of the score, but only part. One input, never the sole decision factor. A filter that screens out candidates who can't write a coherent sentence saves you time; a test that decides the hire by itself ignores everything the scorecard exists to measure.
Where This Falls Apart
The scorecard is a decision aid, not a substitute for judgment. It fails when the outcomes were never defined, when the pay line sits below market and you won't adjust it, or when you have one applicant and the whole process feels like overkill. It also fails when you don't use it consistently across interviews, because the first candidate you meet becomes your anchor and everyone after gets compared to them. That's a risk worth guarding against, in my view.
The most common failure is time pressure. You need someone now, so you skip the scorecard and hire the person who interviews best. Owners who have been through it describe ending up as the escalation point for many support requests even when the hire turns out good. The scorecard costs you two to three hours on the front end, and my view is that it saves you months of being the escalation point on the back end. That's my estimate of the trade, and I'd make it every time.
If the role is new and you genuinely don't know the outcomes yet, start with a temporary scorecard and revise it after 90 days. If the pool is small, relax the criteria or widen your sourcing. And if you keep hiring the same way and getting the same result, the problem isn't the candidates. It's the process.
Write the scorecard before the advert. Publish the real range. Score everyone the same way. Do that, and the next hire is a decision you made, not a gamble you took.
mspoutpost.com/articles/write-the-scorecard-before-the-job-advert-goes-out
Written by Megan Friesen
MSP Outpost publishes information, not legal, financial, insurance, tax or compliance advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship. For decisions about your business, talk to a qualified professional.
