A Managed Services Firm's Guide to Its Next Ops Hire

It's tempting to hire the most technically impressive candidate available, but an MSP's COO or VP of Service Delivery role is mostly about process discipline: ticket routing, escalation paths, and SLA tracking that doesn't slip when the team is under-staffed on a given week. A candidate who can architect a network but has never run a service desk against an SLA is a weaker fit than one with less technical polish and a track record of operational consistency.

When screening candidates on either platform, ask for specific SLA performance numbers from a previous role and how they were achieved, not just a description of the systems the candidate built.

MSP clients often have a direct relationship with whoever is currently running service delivery, and swapping that person out is riskier than it looks on an org chart. Before finalizing either a Hunt Club or Bolster hire, plan a transition period where the outgoing leader, if there is one, introduces the new hire to your largest clients directly rather than letting the change happen silently.

This matters more for a permanent hire through Hunt Club, where the person is expected to hold those relationships for years, than for a fractional engagement through Bolster aimed at a narrower, time-boxed problem.

Hunt Club runs a recruiter-managed search through a referral network built for permanent hires; Bolster is a self-serve marketplace of vetted executives available fractionally, interim, or on a project basis. Using Bolster to try to fill a permanent COO role you actually want someone to hold for years, just because it's faster, often means re-running the search in twelve months once the engagement's natural limits show up.

SHRM's 2025 data put the median time-to-fill for a nonexecutive role at 44 days from requisition to offer accepted, and executive searches routinely run longer¹. If your timeline can't absorb that, a fractional engagement through Bolster is the more honest choice, not a shortcut to the same outcome.

SHRM's 2025 benchmarking survey found the average cost of an executive hire at $35,879, against $5,475 for a nonexecutive role, once agency fees and internal recruiting time are included². A retained Hunt Club search for a permanent operations leader will land in that higher range; a fractional engagement through Bolster is usually billed as an ongoing rate instead, with no placement fee.

Budget for both the direct cost and the client-facing cost of getting the hire wrong. An MSP that churns a client over a bad leadership transition loses recurring revenue that's often worth more than the hire's entire first-year compensation.

A resume tells you almost nothing about how a candidate behaves when a client's production system goes down at 2 a.m. Build a scenario into the interview, on either platform, where the candidate has to walk through prioritizing multiple simultaneous incidents across different client SLAs, and listen for whether they can explain their reasoning clearly under pressure.

Candidates who default to vague reassurance instead of a concrete triage process are a risk sign, regardless of how polished the rest of the interview goes. This single scenario tends to reveal more about operational fit than the rest of the conversation combined.

MSPs sit between clients and a stack of vendor relationships, from ticketing software to the carriers and hardware suppliers behind managed services. A new leader needs to inherit those vendor contacts and contract terms cleanly, not rediscover them during an outage, so build a documented handoff into the first thirty days regardless of which platform sourced the hire.

For a fractional Bolster engagement focused on a narrower fix, this matters less, since the scope is usually limited to one process or one client relationship. For a permanent Hunt Club hire taking over service delivery broadly, treat the vendor handoff with the same seriousness as the client introductions.

Before you open a search on either platform, run through this quick check:

• Screen for operational discipline first: ask for specific SLA performance numbers from a previous role and how they were achieved, not only the systems the candidate built.
• Plan a direct introduction between the new leader and your largest clients so a change in service delivery leadership never reaches them silently.
• Match the platform to the role: Hunt Club suits a permanent seat, while Bolster suits fractional, interim or project work.
• Build an incident-response scenario into the interview and listen for clear reasoning when several client SLAs are at risk at once.
• Document the handoff of vendor contacts and contract terms in the first thirty days so nothing has to be rediscovered during an outage.