MSPs Can't Hire Their Way Out of Technician Burnout

One thing we hear from MSPs all the time is how hard it is to find good technicians. And it's getting harder. Kaseya's 2026 State of the MSP report found that the share of MSPs struggling to hire skilled technicians rose from 9% to 16% in a year.^{Source 1}

But getting someone in the door doesn't help much if you can't keep them.

Nerdio's 2026 State of the MSP Business Report, released October 20, found that 29% of MSPs had lost technicians to workload-related burnout in the previous 12 months.^{Source 2} Concern about burnout also climbed as workloads grew, from 34% at MSPs with fewer than 200 users per engineer to 54% at those above that mark.^{Source 2}

Those departures cost more than a recruiting fee. Someone has to cover the empty seat. A senior tech has to make time to train the replacement while keeping up with their own tickets. Clients start asking why things are taking longer.

Estimates put the cost of replacing an employee at anywhere from half to twice their annual salary.^{Source 3} Whatever the exact number is for your business, you feel it long before you add it up.

And when the replacement finally gets settled, they're often handed the same workload that drove the last person out.

It's easy to see why owners focus on hiring. An open role is a clear problem with a clear next step: find someone to fill it. Changing the day-to-day work takes more thought.

But think about what that work looks like for an experienced technician. Password resets. MFA lockouts. Mailbox permissions. Printer issues. Another late-night page for something that probably could have waited until morning.

All of it needs to get done. The problem is when it leaves little time for anything else.

CompTIA's IT Career Insights study found that 76% of IT professionals are satisfied with their jobs, but only 47% are satisfied with their opportunities to advance.^{Source 4} Someone can like their team and enjoy helping clients while still wondering whether they have a future at your company.

If your best L2 tech spends half the week handling repeatable L1 tickets, it's a fair question. They want to build skills, take on more responsibility and work on harder problems. When there's never time for that, another job starts to look appealing.

A higher salary might convince them to stay for a while. It won't clear their queue.

This is where Squash can help. Squash is an AI technician built for MSPs that resolves over 70% of L1 and L2 tickets end to end in the tools your team already uses. It handles the work through resolution, with guardrails and a full audit trail, around the clock.

For your technicians, that means fewer routine tickets competing for their attention and fewer issues pulling them away after hours. It gives them time for security work, projects and conversations with clients that go beyond fixing the next thing that broke.

You may still need to hire. But before you open another role, look at the job you're asking someone to take.

Giving good people a reason to stay starts with giving them work they want to keep doing.