By Lauren Costella
The market for acquiring talent has completely changed. Interestingly enough, there are 2x as many remote jobs available since post Covid, but not twice as many people. At the same time, Candidates are interviewing at 4X as many companies as pre-covid. On top of this, the “candidate experience” has shifted dramatically. They want flexibility and speed in the process. For example, 96% of candidates want self-scheduling. They also want to connect with companies. They want to understand the company culture; they want companies to take a stand on culture issues; they want to see that companies have sustainability as part of their fabric; and they want to see companies take on in meaningful ways equality and diversity issues.
Needless to say, with the ongoing “Great Resignation and Great Reshuffle,” coupled with changes in candidate expectations, the competition for Talent has only become more FIERCE!
As part of a company who works with Talent Leaders, I can say these issues are top of mind for them, but are they top of mind for you as a CS Leader and your hiring managers? If not, think again. Attracting and keeping talent remains the bedrock for your team’s success. And if you’re not building the partnership between your team and the People team, you could suffer from the inability to get the right folks in the door, onto your team, and helping customers.
Here are the top 3 things you need to be working cross-functionally with your People team on developing to attract top talent into your organization.
The Scorecard
The scorecard is what you evaluate your current and future team against. It includes the purpose of the role, the metrics to which you’re holding the person accountable, the functional accountabilities, the core competencies, and finally, the company core values.
It’s critical to have a scorecard for every single role because you’ll have no idea how to evaluate your candidates otherwise. A job description is just that, a description. A scorecard communicates success in the role. It also allows a candidate to evaluate if the role is a good fit for them.
For example, if the scorecard for a role in support says: you will answer 400 tickets per month with 90% CSAT (customer satisfaction), a candidate can immediately assess whether they would even want to do that type of work before interviewing.
The scorecards I create for the CSM role are all of the things one would need to have to master the role itself. When I hire CSMs, I don’t expect them to have every competency and functional accountability area mastered upon coming in; however, I do expect them to be “coachable” to those areas.
You can think about this similarly to sport stats of a player. In baseball, teammates know their batting average, runs batted in, steals, and more. Some players are great at some areas and not so great at others, and they spend time to improve these stats over the season. That’s what we are doing with each and every role on the team.
What’s more, with this Scorecard, you can build career paths into specialization (i.e. more advanced or specialized CSM) or into team lead and managerial roles.
Interviewing Process
The process you take a candidate through matters tremendously.
How many times have you been in an interview where the questions are largely the same with the difference being in the people asking the question? It makes you wonder, what are they evaluating?
And as the hiring manager, are you really getting what you need evaluated to decide whether this candidate is the best fit? The process and construction of what you’re assessing for each candidate should be as thoughtful as the role itself.
Over the past 5 years, I’ve used the WHO Method of Hiring as the foundation of my interview process with some slight tweaks.
With our scorecards as the foundation, we construct interview paths for unique roles, but the foundation remains.
Here’s the process for our CSM Role:
Part 1: Screening (assess the basic fit)
Part 2: Account Prioritization & Presentation** (assess prioritization skills and customer facing skills)
Part 3: Deeper Dive (assessing deeper experience in all areas of our scorecard; can the person clearly articulate what they have accomplished and done in their career? Do they know their metrics? Can they articulate lessons learned? Why have they moved around in their career? Are they a great fit for our unique culture?)
The WHO
Focus Interview #1
Focus Interview #2
Culture Fit**
Part 4: References
**The Unique parts to GoodTime. The rest can be found in the book: The Who Method of Hiring.
With a process in place, candidates know what to expect and have a clear understanding of the steps before they would get to the offer stage. Interestingly enough, I’ve had candidates actually drop out of the process. This is a good thing! From a hiring perspective, I need to evaluate the right skill sets, so the person won’t be unhappy in this role. For the candidate, if they don’t feel like they want to prepare for these interviews or have the time, I can honestly say the work here wouldn’t be a good fit for them. So it’s better to part ways before the job starts.
Training Interviewers
This is an often overlooked aspect of the interview process, and yet it’s critical now more than ever. It’s very common to use people who have been at the company a long time or simply allow your hiring managers to choose. This does not mean an interviewer is trained! And nothing is worse to a candidate if the interviewer doesn’t know what they are doing. Not to mention, by going to the same people over and over again, you introduce the 3 Bs: Burnout, Bias, and Bottlenecks.
Burnout: Interviewing can be hard with an already overwhelmed workforce. Ironically, the help you need (another person) requires taking more time that you don’t have (interviewing). If you keep relying on the same person, it can burn them out from wanting to help and that burnout could translate into your customer meetings.
Bias: No one wants to create a biased interviewing process. However, using the same people to interview introduces exactly that. Everyone suffers from unconscious bias, so introducing more people into the interviewing process and educating them about that bias can help ensure you get the diversity of people and skills needed to support your customers.
Bottlenecks: You can also introduce bottlenecks. Without enough trained interviewers, you can slow down the interviewing process. And you can’t afford to rest on your laurels. Candidates often have multiple offers on the table, and if your process takes too long, you will likely lose them. So make sure you’re not creating unnecessary bottlenecks with a lack of interviewers.
Customer Success is all about cross functional collaboration. We talk about cross functional collaboration with Product, Engineering, Sales, and Marketing, but let us not forget the People Team! This is especially important when attracting talent in such a competitive market. Working with them to create Scorecards, an Interviewing Process, and Training interviewers will allow you to be the first to offer and get the cream of the crop across your department’s open roles.
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.