MSPs hire for technical skill first, then wonder why client relationships fall apart. An MSP interview writing test catches that gap before it costs you a contract. A technician who can fix a server but can’t explain the fix in plain English will frustrate clients every single time.
Most interviews focus on troubleshooting scenarios and certification checklists. Candidates rehearse for those. Few prepare for a five-minute writing exercise that asks them to draft a client-facing email about a delayed ticket or a billing question. That exercise reveals more about day-to-day fit than a whiteboard session ever will.
This article walks through how to build a writing test into your MSP hiring process, what scenarios expose real weaknesses, and how to score the results without turning the interview into an English exam. It includes a rubric you can copy, a worked example of a strong and a weak response, and how to keep the test fair for candidates who struggle with timed writing.
Why Certifications Don’t Predict Client Communication
Most interview rubrics reward a candidate who names the right protocol, patches the right port, or spots the failing service in under two minutes. That kind of scoring makes sense for a certification exam, but it says nothing about whether that candidate can sit down and write a calm, clear message to a client watching their email server go down.
Plenty of candidates spend weeks prepping for troubleshooting scenarios, memorizing command lines and diagnostic steps before they ever walk into the room. Almost none of them practice writing an email to an anxious client. That gap explains why so many hiring managers only start asking how to test written communication skills in interviews after a bad hire has already cost them a client.
A candidate who nails every technical question can still send emails that read like error logs. Clients rarely complain about jargon during the interview process, which is why weak communication skills slip through unnoticed until a confusing update leaves someone wondering if their ticket got read at all.
Fixing the server only covers half the job. Someone still has to explain, in plain language, what broke and what happens next. Hiring research supports testing that directly instead of asking about it. When Sackett and colleagues recalculated decades of selection data, structured interviews predicted job performance more than twice as well as unstructured ones (.42 against .19), with work sample tests close behind at .33. A scored writing exercise is both things at once: a structured question every candidate answers, and a sample of the actual work.
Building the Writing Exercise Into Your Interview Flow
A typical MSP interview runs 45 to 60 minutes, so the interview writing test has to fit without crowding out technical questions. Across the remote helpdesk placements SupportAdventure has run for MSPs, the version that sticks is a ten-minute writing block dropped in after the troubleshooting round. It gives candidates a break from technical pressure and gives you a fresh read on how they communicate once the adrenaline settles. If you want the surrounding structure before you slot the writing block in, you can find out more about how Support Adventure builds and runs its MSP staffing interviews.
Live writing under a timer shows how someone performs under pressure, which matters for a job built on tickets and deadlines. A take-home prompt shows their best possible work with time to edit instead. Running the exercise live tends to match the job more closely than a polished take-home draft.
Five to seven minutes of drafting time is the window that works in practice. Real client emails rarely get thirty minutes of drafting between tickets, so a tight window forces the same quick, clear thinking they will need on the job. Watch what they choose to say first once the clock starts running.
Tell candidates they are writing a sample email, not taking a grammar quiz. Skip details about tone scoring or empathy cues, since candidates who know exactly what you are measuring will write for the rubric instead of writing naturally.
Keeping the Test Fair for Every Candidate
A timed writing exercise measures two things: how clearly someone communicates, and how well they handle being watched with a clock running. Those are not the same skill. Candidates with dyslexia or ADHD, and candidates writing in their second or third language, can be excellent at client email and still come apart in seven minutes with an interviewer watching the cursor blink.
Offer an alternative before the exercise starts, to everyone, without asking why. Two options cover almost every case: send the prompt fifteen minutes ahead so the candidate can think before they type, or let them take the prompt away and return it within the day. Score the returned draft against the same rubric. A candidate who needed twenty minutes instead of seven has still shown you their tone, their structure, and whether they can explain a firewall bug to an office manager.
Let them use spell-check and a normal email window. Technicians write client emails with autocorrect on and a browser open, so stripping those away tests something the job never asks for.
Our own guidance on hiring neurodivergent technicians argues against time-pressured performative testing, and that tension is worth naming. The timer earns its place here only because it mirrors a real constraint: emails between tickets genuinely do get written fast. It does not earn the right to be the only format on offer.
Scenario Prompts That Expose Real Communication Skills
Ask candidates to write an update email for a ticket that is three days overdue while the client is already annoyed. This single prompt reveals whether they apologize without groveling, explain the delay without excuses, and give a real next step.
Billing questions trip up a lot of technical hires because the instinct is to explain the charge using internal terms the client has never heard. A strong response breaks down what happened in plain language, states the fix, and closes with a clear next step instead of a wall of technical justification.
Some of the best prompts ask candidates to say no. Draft an email declining a request that falls outside the contract’s scope, and you will see whether they can hold a boundary without sounding cold or defensive. That balance matters even more for hiring remote IT support staff, since there is no in-person tone to soften a poorly worded message.
A missed SLA is one of the highest-stakes emails a technician will ever write, so it belongs in the test. The response should acknowledge the miss, explain what is being done, and avoid burying the apology under technical detail. Pairing this scenario with a document hierarchy for tracking SLA breaches gives new hires a clear reference for the next one.
What to Look for When You Read the Response
Read the email out loud and notice whether it sounds like something a stressed but professional person would actually send to a real client. Tone control under pressure separates candidates who can hold a client’s trust from those who either panic into over-apologizing or come across flat, distant, and dismissive instead.
Look closely at how the candidate explains the root cause behind the issue. A strong response translates the technical problem into something a non-technical client can follow in one read, without dumbing it down so far that the explanation sounds vague, evasive, or like it is hiding something.
Structure matters just as much as the content itself. The strongest emails lead with the answer or the next step in the first sentence, then explain the details after. Candidates who bury the point three paragraphs deep are showing you exactly how their real client emails will read on the job.
Watch for empathy that sounds specific to the situation rather than a copied line pulled from a template somewhere. This is where client communication skills really show themselves, and it is often the clearest signal of the gap between a polished resume and actual client-facing readiness. TestGorilla’s State of Skills-Based Hiring 2025 report found that 89% of bad hires fail due to missing soft skills rather than technical gaps, and that’s the pattern a writing test surfaces before the hire is made.
A rubric you can copy
Four dimensions, five points each, twenty points total. One page, same sheet for every interviewer.
| Dimension | 1 point | 3 points | 5 points |
| Answer first | The client reads three paragraphs before finding out what is happening | The answer is there, but it arrives after the explanation | The first sentence answers the question the client actually asked |
| Plain language | Vendor names, version numbers and internal process terms, untranslated | Mostly clear, with one or two technical terms left unexplained | A non-technical reader gets the cause in one pass, and the explanation stays specific rather than going vague |
| Tone | Cold and procedural, or apologizing in every sentence | Polite and professional, but generic enough to send to anyone | Steady under the complaint, and specific to this client’s situation |
| Ownership and next step | No commitment, or “we will advise” | A next step with no time attached to it | A named action, a specific time, and a person who owns it |
Mechanics is deliberately not a dimension. If typos matter to you, note them in the margin and keep them out of the total, or you will end up scoring typing speed. Have two people score independently and only discuss the ones where you land three points apart, which is where the disagreement is about the candidate rather than about the scale.
Common Scoring Mistakes That Skew the Results
A misplaced comma or a typo written under time pressure does not predict how someone will actually perform on the job once hired. Docking points for minor grammar slips, instead of judging whether the message stayed clear and useful, punishes nervous writers and quietly rewards confident ones who simply type fast under pressure.
Non-native English speakers often write more carefully than native speakers do, choosing simpler words and shorter, cleaner sentences on purpose because they know exactly what they want to say. Scoring them against a native-speaker baseline unfairly filters out candidates who might end up communicating more clearly with clients than someone who writes casually but sloppily. That filter is expensive, and it is the main reason MSPs write off a pool of technicians who would hold client trust perfectly well. You can discover more about what client-facing support looks like when the technician is remote and writing in from another time zone.
One rushed or oddly worded email should not erase three strong rounds of technical interviewing that came before it. Weigh the writing sample as one data point among several, not a single strike that knocks a candidate out of contention regardless of how well they performed everywhere else in the process.
Score the email writing assessment for IT support hires against a written rubric, not a gut reaction formed in the moment during a busy day. A simple checklist covering tone, clarity, and structure keeps scoring consistent across interviewers and stops one panelist’s personal pet peeve from quietly deciding who gets hired.
Wrap Up
An MSP interview writing test takes ten minutes and saves months of client frustration down the line. Technical skill gets someone through the door, but the emails they send afterward decide whether clients stick around.
Build one scenario into your next interview round, score it against a simple rubric, and watch how much clearer the picture becomes. You’ll spot the candidates who explain, reassure, and follow through in writing, not just the ones who patch a server fast.
That single addition to your hiring process pays for itself the first time it prevents a bad hire.
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