Adding a new member to your Customer Success team is never an easy task. How do you choose the right candidate? What skills should be prioritized? Here are all the answers to these essential questions to improve your recruitment process.
Recruitment is often entrusted to managers. But are they really trained to carry out this task?
Startups with fewer than 20 employees don't usually have a dedicated recruiter.
Smaller companies often take care of recruitment in-house, to avoid additional costs. Basic techniques are learned on the job, thanks to blogs or webinars that may offer a few tips.
They can also call on the services of a professional recruiter, but the fees are high, at around 20% of the candidate's gross salary.
In my last two startups, we considered that we knew how to do it ourselves. After all, recruiting is easy!
And yet, reality is often more complicated...
During a DISC analysis carried out in our department, we became aware of a somewhat disconcerting fact. The three Customer Success Managers had virtually the same profile! The team was not sufficiently complementary, the different personalities all being too analytical and not sufficiently influential on the company's environment.
Implementing more professional techniques and strategies to recruit your CSM team is therefore no mean feat.
You also have to think about the candidate, as it's never pleasant to let someone go during their trial period.
Organizing your recruitment process
Here are the three pieces of advice I'd like to give to anyone wishing to succeed in Customer Success recruitment.
Take your time!
All too often, managers find themselves in the unpleasant situation of having to recruit a new member of staff in a hurry. With a job to fill tomorrow, almost literally... If you rush, you don't think about what you really need. If you take into account the three months' notice that most senior candidates will have to give; ideally, you need to prepare your recruitment four to six months in advance.
For the manager in charge of recruitment, you'll need to allow for the time required to complete the process. On average, a professional consultant will devote 10 hours a week, for a minimum of one month, to a recruitment project. In other words, the time commitment is not to be underestimated.
Why so many? It depends, for example, on the number of people you want to interview to get an idea. For example, for four different profiles, you'll need to spend five hours interviewing each person involved in the recruitment process.
In other words, 20 hours tied up in the agendas of the various parties involved. If you underestimate the amount of time you'll have to devote to the various interviews, you run the risk of your team making the wrong decisions.
On the other hand, appointments are often scheduled between two free periods, resulting in somewhat split days.
Identify your needs
During this preparation time, one of your objectives will be to draw up a complete job description. If you're lucky enough to have a good team around you, think as a team about the profile you want to recruit.
To avoid emotional or sympathy bias, you can draw up an objective scorecard. It will list all the skills you expect from your future candidate:
- Profile type: more of a hunter? More focused on renewals?
- his skills
- his personality
- the job's technical requirements
- remuneration
- level of education
- soft skills to ensure a good fit with the team, including
In other words, a true 360-degree tour of what is expected of the candidate.
Dynamic recruitment
Be as demanding with yourself as you will be with your candidates. You need to think about an interesting, fast recruitment process. There's nothing like a lengthy process to scare off or lose an excellent candidate. At the most, I'd recommend four successive stages, spread over 10 working days at the most. Yes, recruitment shouldn't take two months! Don't hesitate to schedule each new stage within two days of the previous one.
Here's a tip: everyone involved in the recruitment process should share their diaries with each other. In this way, each link in the process can immediately offer the candidate the next appointment if the interview has been successful.
This reactivity offers another advantage: it promotes the employer brand, the beautiful image of the company in which the candidate must project himself. The dynamism of the recruitment phase is supposed to reflect the atmosphere within the company. If the recruitment process lasts longer than 20 days, there's a good chance that the desire and motivation will be lost...
By the way, forget recommendations. They don't really speak for themselves, because almost everyone will send you to their friends.
And beware of business cases. It's a good tool, but bear in mind that your candidate may have other requests at the same time. Your test should take no more than a few hours to complete, maximum.
Aiming for success in recruitment
Do you know how much a recruitment failure costs?
Between 50,000 and 70,000 euros!
A staggering figure, but justified by all the time invested by your teams in finding a nugget, and then the loss of earnings if the selected profile doesn't work out in the end.
Fortunately, certain qualities and skills are universally required and identifiable when recruiting a Customer Success Manager.
The first quality is obviously intelligent empathy.
We're not looking for someone who's just friendly, but rather someone who's friendly and strategic. She'll need to be loyal to her organization, always thinking of next steps, analyzing customer behavior, and not just being her good friend and listening ear.
We're always talking about proactivity, and not for nothing. It's a state of mind in which the Customer Success Manager must always be.
The ability to multitask is also very important. The CSM, who uses an average of seven different tools, often has to manage more than a dozen customers... which is to say that his organization needs to be particularly rigorous.
I'd also like to draw your attention to a skill that's all too often overlooked: numerical fluency. This is increasingly expected of candidates.
If the situation calls for writing macros on Intercom, the CEO expects the CSM to know how to do it. Even if he's only worked on Front or Zendesk in the past, he'll need to be able to quickly learn how to perform this action on Intercom.
To assess this ability to adapt to new tools and situations, the candidate can be tested in different ways:
- Ask them what Chrome extensions they have, to see if they have digital willpower and intelligence, and are willing to think outside the box.
- When presenting the technical case live: is it easy for the candidate to share the screen? Was the document ready before the presentation began?
This skill may seem a little hard to spot at an interview, but the signals are there. That's why you need to pay close attention. Remember to take notes on this subject so that you can compare candidates at the end of your process.
A successful interview
It's a question you ask yourself at least once in your life as a recruiter:
What are the right questions to ask in an interview?
Normand's answer: It depends on the job description and the mission.
But above all, make sure you ask open-ended questions. Name three qualities and three faults " should be deleted from your repertoire!
We don't expect the candidate to express his or her own qualities; we're not dealing with declarative statements. Instead, it's up to the recruiter to draw his or her own conclusions from the candidate's speech and mannerisms.
If you ask the question " Are you organized? ", you don't need a crystal ball to predict that 99.9% of you will answer yes, of course.
At a job interview, we prefer people to tell stories (in the good sense of the word) and highlight their professional experiences. A good recruiter will draw information from these open-ended questions.
An excellent test is to organize a technical presentation in front of the entire CSM team.
Two fictitious situations lend themselves well to this exercise:
- Faced with an unhappy customer: how does the candidate deal with the customer's negative emotions?
- Contract renewal: what arguments does the candidate put forward to convince and reassure the customer?
The candidate's experience, organizational skills, empathy, eloquence, digital fluency... all come through in the response.
During the interview :
An example of an appropriate question:
" Tell me what it was like when your customer was unhappy? "
The candidate's answer will give you some valuable clues:
- Does he show empathy towards the customer, even in a difficult situation where his work may be called into question?
- Is he shock-resistant? Can he keep his calm and smile despite the tension?
- Are the solutions proposed to the customer to solve the problem relevant?
Another interesting question:
" Explain to me an experience during which you encountered a problem with the customer who valued you most. "
It will show you if the person is overstepping the boundaries of professionalism. For example, by criticizing the company, promising too much, such as features that can't be delivered. Or, without going that far, not being proactive, just listening to the customer, but not proposing solutions.
After the interview :
Did the candidate send you a thank-you e-mail after the interview, as all good CSMs do after an exchange with their customer?
Article written in partnership with Alexandre Amrhein Jaidi
