Most companies hire in the wrong order. They start with the CV, then the technical interview, and if there's time left, someone quickly asks a soft question about 'teamwork,' so the process feels complete. Culture fit becomes a box someone ticks around minute forty of the second interview, usually whoever remembers to ask the question.

Then they wonder why that technically brilliant hire is gone again after four months, and the team is worse off than before.

We flip it around. For us, culture is more than a buzzword. We've seen what happens when you reverse the order, and we'd rather not see it a second time.

Our HR department has a name, and it's not HR. We call it Team People. They do the first screening of every candidate who wants to join our managed services organization. No casual chat. A real screening, entirely about culture fit.

That happens before anyone looks closely at the technical CV. Even before the first scenario question about DNS or Active Directory. Team People wants to know how you handle pressure. How you communicate when something isn't your fault, but is your problem. And whether you genuinely want to work in a service environment, or are just looking for a job that happens to involve computers.

This is the core of the process, not a formality to look thorough. If this goes wrong, no amount of technical talent will fix it later. If it goes well, everything else gets easier: onboarding, collaboration, the customer relationship.

Something the industry likes to keep quiet: running managed services well isn't an individual achievement. It's a relay where everyone runs at the same time.

A brilliant engineer who can't function in a team stays, for us, a risk with a nice CV. Tickets go back and forth, knowledge gets shared during the shift, someone takes over for a colleague stuck in a client call. That only works if people genuinely fit together. Standing out individually isn't enough.

Once Team People confirms the culture fit, the next question comes: does this person fit this specific team? We genuinely assess how someone will click with the colleagues they'll be sitting next to. Ticking a 'team player' box isn't enough. For us, hiring is never just 'can this person do the job.' It's 'can this person do the job here, with these people, at this pace.'

That doesn't make technical competence optional. Far from it. Every candidate goes through a thorough technical screening at some point: the right depth in the right domain, for the right kind of work.

But that screening comes after the culture and team fit, not before. Start with the technical test and hope the character turns out fine later, and you've reversed the order exactly. Skills can be taught. Whether someone collaborates well with others under pressure — well, that's a lot harder to instill afterward.

We ask a lot of the people on our service desk, and they deserve that word. Our agents are heroes: technically strong enough to actually solve the problem in front of them, and empathetic enough to sense how a customer is feeling — stressed, frustrated, or quietly panicking about a deadline.

That combination is rarer than it sounds. Many technically gifted people struggle to read a situation. Many people who communicate fluently and warmly struggle with the technical depth the job demands. We look for both in the same person: IQ and EQ in balance, without one propping up the other.

A technically correct answer that ignores how the customer feels isn't, in fact, a good answer. A warm, reassuring conversation that solves nothing isn't either. From our agents, we expect both, in the same interaction, often within the same five minutes.

Working in a service organization, despite appearances, isn't a numbers game about closing tickets as fast as possible. That's part of it. It's not the point.

The point is working together toward a higher level of service than yesterday. That requires people who dare to speak up: who flag a recurring problem instead of quietly working the ticket away, who question a process that no longer makes sense, who say out loud 'this could be better' instead of just thinking it quietly during the coffee break.

We don't hire people who are only quiet and efficient. We want people who are quiet and efficient and who occasionally dare to push back, exactly in the way that makes the whole team better.

We work with broad roles for our service desk agents, and our hiring follows that. Whoever starts with us switches smoothly between different roles, often within the same week:

• Handling tickets, obviously. That's the foundation.

• Jumping in to help the project team when extra hands or specific expertise are needed.

• Contributing to better tooling, because whoever does the work every day usually knows best what's not working.

• Bringing in ideas and insights, because a good observation shouldn't disappear into a private Teams message to a colleague.

• Connecting directly with Service Delivery Management to capture customer needs, because whoever sits closest to the ticket often understands the customer's real concern better than whoever sits in a status meeting.

That's a broad assignment. We look for people who genuinely enjoy that, not people who get overwhelmed by it.

Of course complaints come in. When one does, it hurts, and we think that's exactly as it should be.

Accountability is a feeling before it's a process. If a complaint comes in and nobody feels anything about it, something has quietly gone wrong with the culture, no matter how good the escalation procedure looks on paper. We look for people who take personal ownership without becoming defensive, and who see a complaint as unfinished work, not somebody else's paperwork.

Our service desk is led by Bart Van Havere, our Service Desk Manager, and I follow it closely as Operations Director. That's it. That's the line.

We deliberately keep the lines short. Short communication lines get problems on the table quickly, let decisions happen without a queue of approvals, and give everyone on the team a genuine sense of responsibility, instead of relying on someone higher up to catch what they miss. In our experience, that structure performs better than a longer hierarchy that might look tidier on paper.

And all of it, from the first screening conversation at Team People to the shortest possible line to management, exists for one reason. Think of the best butler you've ever seen in a movie: someone who senses the need before it's spoken, resolves the awkward moment without making it more awkward, and is quiet and completely reliable. That's the standard. Genuine and capable in service of the people who rely on them, without being servile or rehearsed.

That's who we hire for. That's what we build a service organization around.

Want to know what that approach looks like for our customers? Michael previously wrote about why SMEs deserve better IT management.

Feel like being part of our managed services organization? Discover the open vacancies at Xylos.

About the author

Michael De Bruyn is Operations Director Managed Services at Xylos. He has worked there for more than twenty years, started as a systems engineer after a stint at HP, grew into competence center lead for infrastructure, and later took charge of the central service desk. Today he's responsible for how Xylos designs and delivers managed services, with deep expertise in infrastructure, virtualization and service desk operations. He writes about what growing companies should expect from an IT partner, and doesn't shy away from the strong opinions that come with it.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.