Hiring an in-house team or outsourcing your IT support is something that has troubled many business owners. If you are undecided which is the best option for you we can understand that completely. Not one solution is best and your circumstances will dictate the best solution for your business.
At Firewall Technical we like to provide you with enough information so that you can make an educated decision when it comes to hiring an IT team for your business.
At the bottom of the post, we will share some useful article that will help with your decision. Today however we will be looking at some of the risks involved with hiring an in-house IT department.
What are the risks of hiring an in-house IT department?
Before we go over the risks of hiring an in-house IT department it’s important to know that all forms of IT support will have risks so this isn’t a biased article trying to sway your thought process it’s simply an article laying down the facts so you can decide what is best for your business.
Recruiting an IT Team is difficult
If you have decided to build an in-house IT Department you should know that recruitment for IT professionals is very difficult. IT professionals are rarely out of work and according to a study done by Dice.com in 2016, only 2% of IT professionals were out of work. Of course, this is pre-pandemic by a long way so these numbers may be a lot higher today but generally speaking, talented IT workers don’t stay out of work for long.
This presents you with a few problems. The first being the talent pool is small. Secondly with so many companies out there needing good workers, attracting professional staff who are experienced, qualified and hardworking is going to take a long time to find the candidate your business needs.
Recruiting an IT Team is expensive.
One of the major problems that come with building your own IT support team is the cost of setting up a team and the salaries involved. According to Talent.com the average salary of an IT consultant comes in around $76,000 a year. This can increase depending on location too. With salaries in British Columbia hovering around $75,000 while Alberta comes in at $85,000.
These numbers are just salary too, this doesn’t take into consideration sick pay, vacation time, bonuses and insurance. As you can see building a team of people like this is going to cost your business $200,000 to $500,000 for a small team of 2-5 people.
The numbers above may work for larger businesses but for smaller businesses, the costs can’t be justified.
Keeping your IT talent is difficult
Finding someone who can help with your IT support is going to be difficult but keeping them is just as hard. With the IT industry being so competitive it’s very common for companies to look at other companies top talent and try to steal them away with better offers.
This either means you have to match what a new company is offering in terms of salary and bonuses or you will end up losing an employee that may have taken you months to find.
You should know that employee turnover is very high in the tech industry and this is caused by the competitiveness of companies taking each other’s best workers, the stress the job can put people under and the sheer number of opportunities out there. IT services and support can also be seen as a “boring” job to work in so good staff will often leave to try something new.
High costs when replacing IT support staff.
Losing staff members is hard enough but you may have invested in training that member of staff and now you have to do it all again. Training your staff is a great way of keeping up to date with the newest changes in the industry but it’s also costly, especially when you have to do it multiple times to replace employees who have left the business.
You also have to spend time making sure that your data and all of your client’s data is safe. Disgruntled employees could cause a data breach so you will need to change all your access data which can be time consuming and expensive.
Replacing an IT support employee is a long, drawn-out process that can be expensive and time-consuming.
Limited skillset when building an in-house tech team
Small businesses usually don’t have the budget to hire experts in every area of tech, so they tend to hire more well-rounded people. Now there is nothing wrong with this but this does limit the problems that can be addressed by your team.
It’s also impossible for one person to know everything when it comes to IT support. Someone good at setting up and maintaining networks may have no experience in removing malware from a users computer.
Having to hire multiple job roles is going to cost and for most businesses, they won’t be able to hire for every position so that leaves them with a gap in skillsets. Outsourcing your IT support, however, will help with this problem as outsourced teams will have numerous employees that have a wide skillset.
Outsourced companies keep their costs down in this instance by employing many employees and sharing the costs between all of their clients.
By creating a small in-house team you are taking a big risk.
Only having a small IT team of 1-2 people means that you are taking a big risk if any of your staff are off work. The cost of IT downtime could be anywhere between $5000 to $500,000 per hour, If your team is off work and your system goes down, that could be an expensive problem that didn’t need to happen.
Conclusion
It’s important to know that all forms of IT support whether it be in-house or outsourcing can have risks attached to them. If you would like to learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of both please check out the following articles:
Advantages of building an IT support department
Disadvantages of building an IT support department