By Shari Srebnick
As CS leaders, one of our core responsibilities is to hire, build, and grow successful teams – sometimes from scratch. However, many of us were never really taught a proper way to do this and if you’re like me, you have struggled to develop an approach to hiring and interviewing that is effective.
Currently, there are many companies hiring, and even more available candidates. Therefore, it is critical that in this increasingly competitive talent market we need to do better because the impact of hiring the wrong profile is not just financial, but even more importantly it will impact your team’s productivity. Their workload and stress levels will increase, their morale will decrease, and ultimately it will have a negative effect on the team’s culture.
All of this has an even larger effect on the bottom line: it puts revenue growth and retention at risk and can affect our ability to successfully scale the business.
So, how do you go about this? As a leader currently facing this exact challenge, I knew I wanted to make this time different - and more efficient - than in the past. The following are some key components I’ve been using to help find and hire that “A” player.
Identify the Context
When I embarked upon this process, I knew I needed to have a solid understanding of what “contextual” competencies and experience this person was required to have in order to succeed in this role. And I needed to be able to share these skills in a way that would help my talent acquisition team, colleagues, and others understand what I required in order to help me hire and build a team both effectively and efficiently.
After crowdsourcing information from other leaders on how they crafted their requirements, I decided on the following 4 variables:
How do we sell? How you sell and who your customers are has a direct correlation to the contextual skills of the type of “A” player you need to hire. Are you a full service high touch model? Are you mostly a freemium model with self-service sales and education? These are two very different models that would require different skill sets.
How do we “go live” or deploy? Does your product have complex implementation requirements? Do you have an established implementation team? Or is it straightforward and only requires provisioning of an account? If the latter, then getting your customer trained as soon as possible and using key workflows is critical. In this case, your candidate would have strong consultative and discovery skills.
Subject Matter Expertise: How much domain expertise is needed to drive towards a quick time to value? Is this a necessary requirement or can it be easily learned on the job?
How do we expand? How your company expands its revenue from its existing customers is another important aspect to consider. Some companies expand by identifying the need for additional resources, or consumption, of the product. This can be from additional seats, ability to pull more data, etc., whereas for others it comes from uncovering where additional features, products, or even professional services might add more value.
Develop a Scorecard
Scorecards are your “blueprint” for success. A great architect doesn’t just tell an engineer to build a house based on a vision in his head, he crafts a blueprint loaded with specifics about the house so that the engineer can bring it to life. Your scorecard is essentially the same thing; it is where you take that theoretical definition of your “A” player and put it in practical terms for the role you need to fill, and allows your talent team (your “engineers”) to help bring the vision to life.
To help carve this out, I used the formula as outlined in the book, “Who - The A Method for Hiring” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. For those who don’t know, this book has fast become my hiring go-to and offers so much great advice for finding the right people to do the jobs you need done.
Here are the 3 key components of your Scorecard:
Mission: This is the essence of the job; an executive summary of the job’s core purpose. It boils it down so everyone understands why you need to hire for this role. It needs to be clear, concise, and free of fluff so that it is short, to the point, and understandable.
Outcomes: These describe what a person will need to accomplish in this role. I think everyone in CS understands the importance of outcomes, and this is no different. The book recommends a range of 3-8, ranked by order of importance. While a job description focuses on activities or things a person *will* be doing, this focuses on outcomes, or what a person *must* get done.
Competencies: These directly correlate to the first two, because competencies define *how* you expect a person to operate in execution of the role and the achievement of the outcomes. There are a number of criteria you can use for this list, and the book highlights many of them. Additionally, you want to consider cultural competencies, to ensure the person can meet the demands of your organizational culture. I personally like to view this as a “culture add” vs. a “culture fit”, and look for someone who has similar qualities of our top performers, and also can add value to our current culture.
Once you have your scorecard completed, it becomes time to turn that into strategy. Scorecards don’t just help you hire, they become that blueprint that links the theory with reality. They help translate your plans into role-by-role outcomes and foster alignment among your team, and ensure people understand your expectations. It clears away any ambiguity and allows for clarity between all parties.
Hiring the right people to get the job done is hard but hopefully this provides food for thought on how to improve your process and allows you to implement some immediate changes. Will this change how you look at your team and your thoughts on how to scale for success?
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that helps leaders build and develop top performing customer success teams. We offer short-term consulting engagements that can kick-start your planning efforts, as well as coaching for leaders who need some weekly advice. Check out TheSuccessLeague.io for details.
Shari Srebnick - Shari is a passionate, highly motivated, Customer Success evangelist who finds fulfillment in educating and empowering others to reach their goals. She is currently the Head of Customer Success-US at Searchmetrics, a global SEO and Content Marketing software platform. Additionally, she was named one of the Top 100 Customer Success Strategists of 2020. Shari is a lifelong New Yorker and enjoys global travel.