By Evan Rich
I recently wrapped up an intense hiring cycle that saw us add eight new hires, increasing our department headcount by more than 50%. Attempting to grow at this rate meant dedicating a significant amount of time over the last few months to interviewing candidates. This required a monumental investment not just from the hiring managers, but also from individuals across our organization. A colleague remarked to me last week, somewhat in jest, that I should write a book about the experience. It’s enough of a struggle for me to find time to read a book, much less write one, so I thought why not share what our team learned from this experience with other members of the Customer Success community who might be gearing up for a similar undertaking.
Identify your stakeholders and include them in the process
Who is going to be most impacted by this hire and who will be critical to the new employee’s success? The answers to these questions should be a good indication of who to include in your interview panel. Customer Success, Support, and Services teams sit at the center of most organizations. It is almost impossible to make it through a day communicating only with individuals inside the department. One mistake we made in the past was failing to recreate that dynamic in the interview process and keeping our panels too closed-off to others. We’ve since learned how valuable it is, both for the candidate and the key internal stakeholders, to start building those relationships during the interview process.
When hiring CSMs, for example, we’ve found that it really helps to get the perspective and buy-in of a well-respected salesperson in the same region. This individual will be very important to your new hire’s success, both directly as a peer collaborating on shared accounts and indirectly as an advocate in conversation with fellow salespeople. Giving this duo the opportunity to develop some level of rapport in the interview process can help make it easier for the candidate to envision themselves in the role and, if selected, should accelerate the ramp-up process. This is not limited to individual contributors. We applied the same principle to leadership positions and found the insights from pre-sales peers invaluable to forming a complete picture of each candidate.
This is just one example of how you can pull in resources from other teams to build a well-rounded interview panel. We observed similar benefits when including peers from the product and engineering organization on panels for more technical roles. Despite the challenges of interviewing entirely over video conference, we generally exited our debriefs (more on this soon) with a good feel collectively for what each of the final round candidates would bring to the role.
Be transparent and intentional with your interviews
It is equally important that the candidates exit the process with a good feel for the company and its culture. Now that you’ve identified the key stakeholders across your organization, you need to be intentional about who you select from these departments and what you will be asking of them throughout this process. One of our top goals at the outset was to improve diversity within our department. We feel strongly that augmenting our team with individuals from diverse backgrounds who can draw on different experiences will strengthen our culture and enhance the group’s overall productivity. Given our priorities, it was important to us that the interview panels reflected the diversity that exists within the company. This provided candidates the opportunity to hear different perspectives on what it means to be a member of our team and, based on subsequent feedback from interviewees, helped them form their own assessment of company culture and how they might fit into it.
The second piece of being intentional relates to what your interviewers are asking candidates about. In the past, we struggled with coordinating content across the interview panel. Interviewers would inevitably ask many of the same questions and our debriefs were largely uneventful because everyone was arriving with the same information. In preparation for taking on this massive initiative, our recruiting team did a tremendous job working with the hiring managers to identify an angle for each of the interviewers that played to their areas of expertise. For example, we identified placing a high value on customer satisfaction and retention as a necessary trait for our Professional Services leader and then tasked our Customer Success leader with evaluating each of the candidates on this basis. For CSMs, we valued having the ability to build rapport cross-functionally within the organization and brought in members of our Support team to assess the candidates in this area.
Maximize information sharing in your debriefs
Implementing the above recommendations certainly set us up for more impactful debriefs, but we also made some small modifications to how we ran the debrief session itself that greatly improved the flow of information. Previously we would start the meeting by going around the room and giving each interviewer a chance to share what they liked or didn’t like about a candidate and whether they were for or against the hire. There is a big difference between sharing what you liked and what you learned about a candidate. The former provides judgement without context of the inputs that informed the decision. By asking each interviewer to share only what they learned about the candidate and reserve judgement until after all members of the panel had spoken, we helped everyone arrive at a decision based on the most complete set of data available.
As much as we’ve talked about the importance of building your panel, the final decision ultimately rests with the hiring manager. Though it can be tedious, I’m an advocate for hiring managers taking the initial call and even doing some sourcing work. In retrospect, meeting with so many candidates both helped me refine what we were looking for and enhanced my ability to articulate the role expectations in future interviews. After enough conversations, it becomes clear pretty quickly which candidates best meet your requirements, which makes it much easier to confidently hand the process off to your panel to dig in on their areas of expertise. The hiring manager can then arrive at the debrief seeking out new information that may not have surfaced in prior conversations with the candidate, and be prepared with specific questions for the panel. This approach helped bring some contradictory data points to the surface, which opened a dialogue that would not have occurred otherwise. In totality, these initiatives greatly enhanced the decision-making process and enabled us to extend offers to such a large group with full confidence that they can collectively strengthen our team and our culture.
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Evan Rich - Evan formed the Customer Success team at NS1, an infrastructure technology company that is changing how internet applications are delivered. As Sr. Director of Global Services, he is responsible for account management, support and professional services. Evan holds a BS from Cornell University and resides in New York City.