Today I want to talk about hiring (people and vendors), and more specifically about how you tell the difference between someone who can do the work and someone who’s learned to describe it well. Most of my examples come from my own world, managed IT, because that’s where I’ve spent eighteen years watching the claims and then watching the delivery. But almost none of this is really about IT. If you’re hiring an employee, choosing a contractor, or letting any vendor into your business, the same rules apply. So I hope there’s something here for you even if you’re not shopping for an IT provider.
Walk any trade show floor and you’ll hear it: “Our team brings over a hundred years of combined experience.” It sounds impressive until you do the arithmetic. A thousand employees, a hundred years, that’s about five weeks apiece. Nobody aggregates when the individual numbers are good. If you’ve got three engineers with twenty-five years each, you say that. Combined experience is what you reach for when the real number embarrasses you.
But here’s the honest part, and it cuts against my own interests. Experience gets overrated too. Deep familiarity with one obscure firewall or one vertical application is often just a matter of having read the manual first. Someone who genuinely understands networking, identity, and how systems fail can learn an unfamiliar platform in a week. When a bid demands five years on one specific product, what’s being measured is exposure, not ability.
The experience that matters is a different animal. Call it operational maturity. It’s the engineer who, before touching production, takes the backup, schedules the work for when a failure would hurt least, and confirms who to call if it goes sideways. The junior instinct is that competence means knowing how. The mature instinct assumes you might be wrong and builds the exit before starting.
Which brings us to certifications. A certification proves you can pass a test, and that’s not nothing. But certifications teach the vendor’s ideal world, the clean lab with no legacy and no fifteen-year-old line-of-business app held together with hope. Confidence without scars is precisely how production gets broken.
Then there’s who actually shows up. The bid promised expertise. The technician at the door may follow instructions perfectly and still be impossible to work with: no shared vocabulary, no social ease, occasionally no deodorant. Clients can’t judge whether the fix was correct, but they can judge that. And it compounds, because staff stop reporting problems when reporting means dealing with that guy. Your visibility into the environment quietly dies.
So how do you vet this? Honestly, it’s hard, because the people best at embellishing are best at interviewing. But one technique never fails: keep asking “and then what did you do,” one layer at a time, until the answer runs out. I once interviewed a candidate who listed VMware infrastructure support. So I asked what that involved. Racking servers. And then what? Well, if new servers came in, he’d rack those too. Three questions in, the VMware expertise turned out to be a screwdriver. Embellishment has a floor. You find it by descending.
Then ask about the people, not the logos. Tell me about your senior engineer. How do you hold your help desk accountable? What are your metrics? Most firms will say “we have great people,” and that’s your answer right there. At ArcLight we run on Traction, Gino Wickman’s Entrepreneurial Operating System, which means scorecards, cadence, and accountability that exists on paper rather than in someone’s memory. We use a platform called Crewvu that financially incentivizes my team on client satisfaction. Every positive review on a closed ticket puts real dollars in a technician’s pocket. That’s a system, not a personality.
And finally, ask for last month’s report. We send clients a monthly performance summary: total tickets worked, average time to first touch, average time to resolution, tickets per employee, tickets per endpoint. Some months it flatters us and some months it doesn’t, and we send it either way. If a prospective provider can’t produce theirs, that tells you everything you need.
Because embellishment isn’t just dishonest, it’s predictive. The company that inflated its background is the same company that won’t have taken the backup. And when that goes wrong, it doesn’t go a little wrong. A technician who didn’t prepare properly, who didn’t verify the restore, who made the change at two in the afternoon because he didn’t think it through, can cost you your data, your week, and in some cases your business. Nobody ever lost a company because a vendor was too careful. Plenty have lost one because a vendor sounded confident.
Brian Largent
Father to five, husband to one, founder, CEO, and all around swell fella (or so I'm told)
