Mar 07 2005
Hiring Technical Support Consultant’s in the USA?
I’m posting an open question about this as we are having a lot of difficulty locating the kind of expertise we require for Technical Support Consultant positions we have been trying to fill here in Houston for quite some time now. We have tried various postings on monster.com & careerbuilder.com and have also tried using agencies but we just can’t seem to attract the right kind of person.
Background: We are a medium sized IT company providing software solutions for Health Environment and Safety plus more recently Risk Management based in Perth, Australia that is expanding into North America and other markets with a recently established office in Houston. Currently our work load isn’t that bad but in the coming months we are predicting more clients to come on board and expect the office here along with our support team to rapidly expand.
What we are after is someone to head up our helpdesk operations here in Houston providing support both internally and to clients for a mixture of environments including J2EE based web applications, VB (currently 6 migrating to .NET) based client/server applications running on the different flavours of Windows using Oracle or SQL Server as the database backend. We’re not even after specific experience in those environments just similar would be fine as those kind of skills easily adapted.
We also want someone that is able to:
- Perform configuration work by using our own design tools
- Write Javascript & VB script
- Report/graph writing
- Write some SQL for analysis and fixing of problems in the backend
- Install software such as a JDK/JRE, Apache Tomcat, our web application and our client/server tools
- Perform some database administration - mainly backing up & restoring databases.
- Work both independently and as part of a team
- Troubleshoot problems using the materials & resources available
What we don’t want is a high level technical consultant that doesn’t get involved in areas such as the above nor do we want someone to act just as a manager, we need someone that is able to hit the ground running with a minimum of instruction, but of course we aren’t just going to throw someone into the deep end without any support. A degree is not a necessity and in fact we will place relevant experience above a degree.
We are willing to pay at or above the current market rate and provide full training in our product so if you have any ideas on how to advertise for such a position, know someone who is suitable or think you are suitable for the position then please contact me.
Well lo and behold, we actually found and hired someone through Dice.com, actually the candidates we got from Dice were heads and shoulders above any we had gotten from Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com so I highly recommend them.