The second act of any heist movie always focuses on assembling the team. The charismatic ringleader finds his crack group of accomplices one by one in a series of little scenes—the experienced old lockpicking expert, the overly-excited demolitions guy, the reluctant computer whiz—before the job can be started. And you can usually count on the leader saying some version of this line: “If we’re going to do this job, I’m going to need my team.”
Your IT field services are only as good as the technicians that handle the work. It’s not as exciting as a casino heist, but the importance of having the right team in place for deployments—one that is well-equipped to handle the specific IT work you’re undertaking—is of the same importance. Having a reliable group of technicians that you send to job sites is where you get confidence in your ability to deliver a good outcome.
Your platform will have several talent pools — such as a cabling tech talent pool, or an AirMagnet wireless engineer talent pool — that create specific communities of resources available to deliver.
This creates an understandable fear of tapping into the labor pool of freelance field services workers. The primary concern of many organizations is uncertainty in the quality of work that will be produced, which stems from unfamiliarity with using contingent IT technicians on global projects.
But with today’s more mature global contingent workforce and the advancement of field service management (FSM) platform capabilities, building a top team of worldwide technicians is more attainable than ever. Just keep in mind these four elements for assembling talented contingent workers across the globe:
1. Understand the initial vetting process
Any organization handling global IT deployments cannot risk using underqualified or unreliable techs on the job site. Because contingent labor pools are open to just about anyone, sifting through the virtually unending list of names to find qualified techs can feel like a monumental task.
The basics of contingent worker screening do a lot to make that search easier. You know the type of IT deployments your organization handles and where in the world you will need it done, so use those elements to find technicians that check these boxes:
- Geographic proximity to your recurring and future job sites
- Consistent, flexible availability for planned work and repair requests
- Qualifications and certifications relevant to your IT deployments
- Past experience with jobs of similar scope and scale to your own
- Referrals from organizations that have utilized them in the past
Other benchmarks concerning costs can be used as parameters as well. Establish a cost basis for each technician you’re considering to screen candidates that are both appropriate for the job and willing to do the work for a specified amount of money. Gauge standardized local wage rates (especially in global markets) to ensure you’re paying the right amount for independent workers. Fortunately, most of this information can be found through one channel: Your field services management platform.
2. Leverage your field services management platform
The contingent worker vetting process is inherent to a good FSM platform, which serves as a robust database of all available talent. Through it, you can filter out technicians that aren’t relevant to your IT work, not available where you’d need them, and or lacking in necessary skills or experience. That leaves only the most relevant available workers from which to choose.
But the platform goes deeper than simply searching for qualified contingent workers. It helps in ensuring the following:
- Regulatory compliance through background checks, drug testing, and worksite safety certifications.
- Cost (particularly helpful with international technicians paid in a different currency).
- Detailed work history by gathering references, past employer reviews, or proficiency ratings.
All this, in turn, is enhanced by utilizing direct communication with potential additions to your team to conduct interviews to fill in any information gaps. Integrate your field services management platform with your existing processes and technology in order to make this a cohesive, holistic means to guide global IT deployments. That way, project parameters are set, disseminated to everyone involved, and maintained through knowledge sharing and communication.
3. Lean on your partner
The partner helping you with setting up and maintaining your FSM platform will have valuable experience in choosing and utilizing the best in the field for your IT jobs. Your partner will read into a technician’s past experience, utilize their own partners for candid assessments of workers when available, and use their global understanding to determine what constitutes a reliable, qualified tech in different regions of the world. Then your partner can append their know-how to your requirements in order to identify the top talent for your needs.
Furthermore, your FSM platform partner can work with you to improve your overall screening process. With them, you can implement proficiency testing for more specifically-detailed vetting of technicians and develop standards for continual assessment of their performance. And their expertise can bolster your knowledge about what tech acquisition should cost from region to region.
With your platform partner’s involvement in project coordination and talent pool management, they will be able to monitor the work being done, the arrangement of and adherence to schedules and workflows, and how well the techs are meeting your expectations.
4. Curate quality, reliable talent pools
The idea is to mature your platform so that you build a team you can continue to utilize—a stable talent pool that is pre-qualified to handle your global IT deployments and a deep bench to draw from for filling in availability gaps or scaling up to handle larger projects. This is a continual process, especially as your organization and its ambitions grow, but one that becomes easier to do over time.
When it’s done right, this combines the flexibility and scalability of tapping into the contingent IT workforce available worldwide with the confidence you should have in a hand-picked team of the most reliable and qualified workers. As projects expand or skillset requirements change, your platform will have several talent pools — such as a cabling tech talent pool, or an AirMagnet wireless engineer talent pool — that create specific communities of resources available to deliver.
Between your knowledge of what you need to get done in your IT deployments, the capabilities of an FSM platform, and the added expertise of your platform partner, a repeatable process emerges for not just assembling a scattered group of contingent workers, but your dedicated field services team that is specifically equipped to handle IT projects whenever you need them.
