Most companies hire backwards. They start with the CV, move to the technical interview, and if there’s any time left over, someone asks a soft question about “teamwork” so the process feels complete. Culture fit becomes a box ticked somewhere around minute forty of interview two, usually by whoever remembers to ask.
Then they wonder why a technically brilliant hire lasted four months and left the team worse than they found it.
We do it the other way around. Not because we’re precious about culture as a buzzword, but because we’ve watched what happens when you get the order wrong, and we’d rather not watch it again.
Team People goes first, and they are not impressed by your certifications yet
Our HR department has a name, and it isn’t HR. We call it Team People, and it runs the first screening for every candidate who wants to join our managed services organisation. Not a courtesy chat. A real screening, focused entirely on cultural fit.
This happens before anyone looks closely at the technical CV. Before a single scenario question about DNS or Active Directory. Team People wants to know how you handle pressure, how you communicate when something is not your fault but is still your problem, and whether you actually want to work in a service environment or just want a job that happens to involve computers.
This step is not a formality we run through to look thorough. It is the step. Get it wrong here and no amount of technical talent fixes it later. Get it right, and everything downstream gets easier: onboarding, teamwork, customer relationships, the lot.
Managed services is a team sport, and we mean that literally
Here’s something the industry underplays: running managed services well is not an individual achievement. It’s a relay race where everyone is running at the same time.
A brilliant engineer who cannot function inside a team is, for us, not a brilliant engineer. They’re a liability wearing a good CV. Tickets get handed off, knowledge gets shared mid-shift, someone covers for a colleague who’s stuck in a client call, and the whole operation only works if people actually fit together, not just individually excel.
So after Team People confirms the cultural fit, the next question is whether this specific person fits this specific team. Not a generic “team player” checkbox, but a real look at how they’ll mesh with the people they’ll actually sit next to. Recruitment for us is never just “can this person do the job.” It’s “can this person do the job here, with these people, in this rhythm.”
Yes, we test technical skills. Eventually.
None of this means technical competence is optional. It very much is not. At some point every candidate goes through a proper technical screening to check whether they’re the right fit for the specific opening — the right depth in the right domain, doing the right kind of work.
But that screening comes after culture and team fit have already been confirmed, not before. We’ve found that starting with the technical test and hoping the personality works out later gets the sequence exactly backwards. Skills can be trained. A person’s ability to work well with others under pressure is much harder to install after the fact.
Our agents are heroes. We are not being poetic about this.
We ask a lot of the people who sit on our service desk, and we think they deserve the word. Our agents are heroes: technically strong enough to actually solve the problem in front of them, and empathetic enough to read the emotional temperature of a customer who is stressed, frustrated, or quietly panicking about a deadline.
That combination is rarer than it sounds. Plenty of technically gifted people struggle to read a room. Plenty of naturally warm communicators struggle with the technical depth the job demands. We look for both in the same person: IQ and EQ, in balance, not one propping up the other.
Because a technically correct answer delivered with zero regard for how the customer is feeling isn’t actually a good answer. And a warm, reassuring conversation that doesn’t fix anything isn’t one either. Our agents are expected to do both, in the same interaction, often within the same five minutes.
Solving tickets is the job. It is not the whole job.
Working in a service organisation is not, despite appearances, a numbers game about closing tickets as fast as possible. That’s part of it. It’s not the point of it.
The point is working together, as a team, towards a higher standard of service than the one you started with yesterday. That requires people who are willing to stand up and speak up: to flag a recurring issue instead of quietly closing the ticket and moving on, to challenge a process that no longer makes sense, to say “we can do this better” out loud instead of thinking it privately during the coffee break.
We don’t hire people to be quiet and efficient. We hire people to be quiet and efficient and occasionally inconvenient, in the specific way that makes the whole team better.
One person, several roles
We don’t believe in narrowly defined lanes for our service desk agents, and our recruitment reflects that. The people we hire are expected to move comfortably across several roles, often in the same week:
- Working tickets, obviously. That’s the foundation.
- Assisting the project team when extra hands or specific expertise are needed.
- Contributing to tooling improvement, because the person doing the work every day usually has the best idea of what’s broken about the way it’s done.
- Pitching ideas and insights, because good observations shouldn’t die in a private Teams message to a colleague.
- Linking up directly with Service Delivery Management to communicate and capture customer needs, because the person closest to the ticket often understands the customer’s actual concern better than anyone in a status meeting.
That’s a wide brief. We recruit for people who are energised by that variety, not overwhelmed by it.
When a complaint lands, it hurts. That’s the point.
We won’t pretend customer complaints don’t happen. They do. When one lands, it hurts, and we think that’s exactly as it should be.
Accountability is a feeling before it’s a process. If a complaint arrives and nobody in the room feels anything about it, something has gone quietly wrong with the culture, regardless of how well the escalation procedure is documented. We look for people who take ownership personally, not defensively, and who see a complaint as unfinished business rather than someone else’s paperwork.
The chain of command is short. On purpose.
Our service desk is run by Bart Van Havere, our Service Desk Manager, and I follow it closely as Operations Director. That’s it. That’s the chain.
We keep the lines short deliberately. Short communication lines mean issues get surfaced quickly, decisions get made without a queue of approvals, and everyone on the team carries a genuine sense of responsibility instead of assuming someone further up the chain will catch what they miss. In our experience, that structure produces better performance than a longer, more “proper-looking” hierarchy ever does.
And all of it, from Team People’s first screening conversation to the shortest possible line to management, exists for one reason. Think of the best butler you’ve ever seen in a film: anticipates the need before it’s spoken, handles the awkward moment without making it more awkward, and is quietly, completely reliable. That’s the standard. Not servile, not scripted but genuinely, capably in service of the people relying on them.
That’s who we recruit for. That’s who we build a service organisation around.
Curious how this approach plays out for our clients? Michael wrote earlier about why mid-market deserves better IT.
Want to be part of our managed services organisation? Explore the open roles at Xylos.
About the author
Michael De Bruyn is Operations Director Managed Services at Xylos. He has been with Xylos for over twenty years, starting as a systems engineer after beginning his career at HP, and growing into competence centre lead for infrastructure before taking charge of the company’s central service desk. Today he is responsible for the way Xylos designs and delivers managed services, with deep expertise in infrastructure, virtualisation and service desk operations. He writes about what growing companies should expect from an IT partner, and is not shy about the opinions that come with it.
