The Industry Has a Talent Problem Nobody Talks About
There’s an uncomfortable truth in the managed IT industry: most of the people working on your systems were never tested on whether they could explain what they’re doing or why it matters to your business.
The standard hiring process at most MSPs looks something like this. Post a job listing for an “L3 technician.” Screen for certifications. Ask some technical trivia. If they can talk about Active Directory and know what a VLAN is, they’re in.
That person might be perfectly competent at closing tickets. They can reset passwords, restart services, and follow runbooks. But put them in a room with your CEO during a network outage, and they freeze. Ask them to explain why a cloud migration decision affects your compliance posture, and you get jargon. Ask them to prioritize between three simultaneous emergencies across different clients, and they default to whoever called last.
This is not a criticism of those individuals. It’s a criticism of the hiring model. The MSP industry has normalized the idea that technical skill alone is enough. It isn’t. Not when the person working on your firewall needs to understand your business, not just your network topology.
What the Industry Calls “L3” and What We Call a Senior Consultant
The MSP world uses a tiered system. Level 1 handles basic tickets. Level 2 takes escalations. Level 3 handles the complex stuff. The assumption is that each level just requires more technical depth.
At BALANCED+, we rejected that assumption.
We don’t hire “L3 technicians.” We hire Senior Consultants. The distinction isn’t semantic. It reflects a fundamentally different expectation for what a technical professional should be capable of.
A technician follows a script. A consultant understands the situation, communicates clearly, makes judgment calls, and takes ownership of outcomes. A technician fixes the problem in front of them. A consultant asks whether the problem should have existed in the first place and what needs to change so it doesn’t come back.
When we built our hiring process, we started with a simple question: what does our client actually experience when one of our people shows up? They don’t experience certifications or resume bullet points. They experience a human being who either makes them feel confident or makes them feel nervous. Who either explains things clearly or hides behind jargon. Who either understands the business impact of a technical decision or treats every issue like an isolated ticket.
That experience is what we hire for.
We Test for Business Thinking, Not Just Technical Knowledge
Our interview process has a section we call “The Balanced Consultant.” It comes before any technical questions. That’s intentional.
We put candidates into real scenarios drawn from our actual client base. A financial services client in downtown Toronto is skeptical about moving sensitive data to the cloud. How do you explain the security benefits without using technical jargon? Your client’s internet is down, the CEO is losing money, and the problem is an ISP outage you cannot fix. How do you handle that conversation? You’re juggling three critical issues at once across different clients. How do you prioritize, and who do you communicate with first?
These aren’t trick questions. They’re Tuesday afternoon at BALANCED+.
We’re listening for something specific: can this person bridge the gap between what’s happening technically and what it means for the business? Can they stay calm under pressure? Can they take a frustrated executive from panic to confidence, even when the news isn’t good?
A candidate who gives a technically perfect answer but can’t communicate it to a non-technical decision maker doesn’t pass. A candidate who handles the people side beautifully but doesn’t have the technical foundation to back it up doesn’t pass either. We need both, because our clients need both.
Technical Depth Across the Full Stack
The consulting mindset matters, but it has to sit on top of genuine technical mastery. We don’t hire generalists who know a little about everything.
Our technical evaluation covers the specific technologies our clients depend on. Azure cloud architecture, not just “do you know what Azure is” but “a client’s bill spiked 40% last month, walk me through how you investigate and what quick wins you look for.” Microsoft 365 security and migration, not just “have you used Exchange” but “you’re migrating a 200-user law firm with massive mailboxes and zero tolerance for downtime, what’s your strategy and why?”
We test Fortinet firewall architecture, VLAN design for real-world scenarios like isolating manufacturing floor IoT devices from a finance network, backup and disaster recovery strategy when ransomware has already encrypted the local backups, and hybrid identity troubleshooting when password sync failures are locking users out of Teams.
Every question is scenario-based. We don’t ask candidates to recite definitions. We put them in situations our clients actually face and evaluate whether they can think architecturally, not just procedurally.
We also watch for what we call “red flags,” the difference between someone who understands systems at a deep level and someone who has memorized surface-level answers. When a candidate says “just restore from backup” after a ransomware attack without considering whether replication will overwrite the restore, that tells us everything we need to know. When someone can explain IOPS and latency to a non-technical client using a simple analogy instead of rattling off specs, that tells us something too.
The Whiteboard Test
The final stage of our technical interview is a whiteboard scenario. No scripts. No Googling. Just a real-world problem, a marker, and a blank board.
Here’s a version of what that looks like: a manufacturing client has two physical sites connected by a site-to-site VPN. When the internet at head office goes down, users at the factory can’t log in to their computers or access files. Why is this happening? Draw the architecture. Propose a fix so the factory can operate independently when the head office connection drops.
This is where we separate consultants from technicians.
A technician might identify that authentication is failing. A consultant diagnoses that the factory lacks a local domain controller, maps out the full dependency chain, proposes both an on-prem fix and a cloud-based alternative, and then, this is the part that matters most, asks clarifying questions before drawing anything. They want to understand the client’s priorities, constraints, and budget before proposing a solution.
That instinct to ask before answering is what makes someone a consultant. It’s also what makes them trustworthy in front of your leadership team.
Why This Should Matter to You
You probably don’t think much about how your IT provider hires. Most business owners don’t. You evaluate the service, not the process behind it.
But consider what’s actually at stake. The person who manages your firewall determines whether your network is secure or just appears to be. The person who migrates your email determines whether your data is protected during the transition or exposed. The person who answers your 2 AM emergency call determines whether a minor incident stays minor or spirals into a business continuity crisis.
These aren’t abstract risks. They’re the scenarios that keep business owners up at night. And in every single one, the outcome depends less on the technology and more on the person operating it.
When that person was hired because they checked certification boxes and answered trivia questions correctly, you get a certain level of service. When that person was hired because they demonstrated the ability to think architecturally, communicate clearly, stay calm under pressure, and connect technical decisions to business outcomes, you get a fundamentally different experience.
Every senior consultant at BALANCED+ went through this process. Every one of them was tested on their ability to sit across from a client, understand the real problem, and deliver a solution that makes sense technically and strategically. That’s not an accident. It’s a deliberate investment in the people who stand behind every ticket, every project, and every recommendation we make.
The People Behind the Technology
It’s easy to evaluate an MSP based on the tools they use, the certifications they hold, or the price on the proposal. Those things matter. But they’re not what determines whether your technology actually serves your business.
What determines that is the person who picks up the phone. The person who walks into your office. The person who makes the judgment call at 2 AM when something breaks and nobody is watching.
We built our hiring process around a belief that’s simple but rarely practiced in this industry: the people behind the technology matter as much as the technology itself. That’s why we don’t hire IT guys. We hire consultants who happen to be deeply technical.
If you’re curious about the team behind BALANCED+, or want to understand how our consultants work with businesses like yours, we’d welcome the conversation.
