By Lauren Costella
When was the last time you thought about your Customer Success Talent Engine? More specifically, when was the last time you thought about your interviewing process for various roles on your team? Are your processes tailored to the role? Or are they general? What about your interviewers? Are they calibrated to interview? Do you have diversity across your interview panels to align with your candidates to close diverse talent?
If you hadn’t thought about these aspects to hiring, don’t worry, you’re not alone. However, as a Strategy Leader, you really should think about how your hiring processes, or lack thereof, could be impacting the diverse talent you’re bringing onto your team and subsequently retaining.
Having the right talent in place at the right time can make or break your bottom line in Customer Success. Hiring too slowly or hiring the wrong person, can be devastating to your team and the ability to properly support customers, which means, you must spend time understanding how well your team is doing with hiring and retaining the right people. As a VP who happens to work for GoodTime, which supports teams in hiring the right talent fast, I’m excited to share how we approach our CS team hiring. We’ve gone from 100% turnover of CSMs, to less than 10% in the past 18 months. The average tenure of a CSM was 6-9 months, and now it’s 18-24 months.
I won’t be able to cover the details for keeping team retention high in today’s blog, but I will share what we did to revamp our hiring process and bring in the right fit candidates, who kick butt day in and day out for our customers.
Here’s the 4 things you need to do now to optimize your CS Interviewing Engine:
Work with your Hiring Team
Create Scorecards
Define your Interviewing Process
Diversify and Train Interviewers
Work with your Hiring Team
If you have a hiring team internally, spend some time with the recruiting team! As the Strategy Leader, you need to know how the process for hiring for your team works today, what the interview process for each role looks like, and you should understand the average time to hire.
You should ask the hiring team where they see bottlenecks. Often, you’ll find bottlenecks in not having a well-defined process, not having enough people to interview or generally things taking too long and your candidate dropping out of the process.
Your hiring teams should have data driven metrics to share with you. They should be able to show you what the hiring funnel looks like (sourcing for candidates, time through the funnel, and on average, hiring time for various roles). And they should be able to tell you where candidates may be falling out of the process and why. You may also want to ask about interviewing load balance - how much time is your team spending interviewing? Are they trained to run those interviews? Are some of the CSMs being overused in the process?
If you don’t have a hiring team that supports you, don’t worry. You can still take the following steps. It may be hard to get to the metrics on your own, but it’s definitely possible to make a few best practice tweaks.
Create Scorecards
For every single unique role on your team, you need a scorecard. A scorecard is not a job description. Instead, it’s a way to communicate with candidates exactly what you expect of them in their job. A scorecard is made up of the following:
Mission: the purpose of the role. One sentence.
Functional accountabilities: what is the person doing each and every day (no more than 7)
Metrics: what are the key outcomes the person will be expected to hit? (no more than 3-5)
Competencies: how do you expect this person to act and behave to do this job well? What areas do they need to be proficient in to succeed? (no more than 5)
Company Core Values: these are your company’s values to which every employee is held
Scorecards are critical to the interview process, since it will be used as the foundation for evaluating candidates. Scorecards are also great because they give full transparency to the candidate on how you will evaluate their performance. For example, if you have a Customer Support Representative Scorecard, and let’s say one of the metrics is answering at least 400 tickets per month plus maintaining a 90% CSAT for tickets answered, a candidate could self-select in or out based on knowing that’s what he/she will be doing day in and day out.
Define your Interview Process for Every Role
Different roles, even if they are similar, need their own process for interviewing. This part of the CS Interviewing Engine is essential because you need to weed out poor-fit candidates as early as possible in the process; you don’t want to waste time. You also need to make sure you’re evaluating for the right skills needed for the role. You certainly can use similar elements in the interview process, but definitely make sure that you include parts within your process that allow for evaluation against the parts that are unique to the job.
For example, this is the process I have for my AM and CSM roles:
CSM Interview Process
Screening (30 min)
Technical Account Prioritization (45 min)
Presentation: Teach Us Something (60 min)
Culture Fit (60 min)
Who Interview & Functional Accountability evaluation (from the book the WHO Interview) (4-5 hours)
Reference Calls (60 mins - 3x20 min calls)
AM interview Process
Screening (30 min)
Technical: Account Prioritization** (45 min)
Presentation: Renewal and Upsell presentation and Price Negotiation** (60 min)
Culture Fit (60 min)
Who Interview & Functional Accountability** evaluation (from the book the WHO Interview) (4-5 hours)
Reference Calls (60 mins - 3x20 min calls)
**Similar but defined uniquely to the role.
These two processes seem similar, but in fact, they have been customized to the scorecard and the functional accountabilities required for the role. For example, both CSMs and AMs do a prioritization of accounts exercise, but AMs are being evaluated against growth and prioritization around renewals, while CSMs are being evaluated on driving adoption and retention.
I also have these processes organized in a way such that I eliminate candidates before they go through the longest part of the process. In other words, I’m being sensitive to the team’s time and mine by making sure that only seriously qualified candidates would be allowed to use the 4-5 hour portion of the interview.
Train and Diversify Your Interviewers
You cannot run your hiring process on your own. You must have trained interviewers.
Without trained interviewers: 1) you could be moving poor-fit candidates forward (maybe to the point of hiring) and using precious time poorly 2) you could create a very poor candidate experience, and with Glassdoor and LinkedIn allowing for interviewing feedback, you could be opening your company up for a poor brand review 3) you could be inadvertently discouraging diverse candidates from continuing with the process or accepting offers because they didn’t experience diverse interviewers in your process. 4) You could be slowing down your ability to hire fast (after all, fewer interviewers means less time options for interviewing, which slows down the entire hiring funnel).
Make sure your entire team is trained to run as many parts of the interview process as possible. To help you get there, consider the following: have 1-2 team members shadow, then reverse shadow, and then graduate them. Once teammates are graduated, they will have others shadow them. Very quickly you’ll have a viral effect of training and graduating interviewers to help with the process. As new teammates onboard, make sure they are immediately put in as shadows to interviewing. Also consider having other teams trained cross-functionally to help. The more people you have involved, the faster you can hire and you can avoid the mistakes mentioned above.
Who is hired to your team matters. Poor hires and not hiring fast enough can severely and negatively impact your team and customers. As a Strategy Leader in CS, you must evaluate how your talent engine is working and ensure it’s optimized to get the right talent at the right time to maximize your customer’s success and business success.
Want to build a top performing team? The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a CS Leadership program which features classes including Hiring Top Performers and Planning a Team Structure. Visit TheSuccessLeague.io for these and our other classes and business coaching offerings.
Lauren Costella - Lauren is a change agent, communicator, leader and passionate champion for Customer Success. When she’s not working as the VP of Customer Success for GoodTime.io, you can find her serving as an advisor for The Success League, a board member for the Customer Success Network, and blogging on the CS Playlist. Lauren has her MA and BA from Stanford University. She was a former USA National swim team member and enjoys staying active in the Bay Area.