159: Year in Review: Careers and Hiring

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode one hundred and fifty-nine of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week I continue to look back at 2020. Now I've been in technical support for nearly 25 years. For me, from those early teenage years when I started a little computer club at school back in the late 80s, to my undergraduate degree placement on a help desk at Exxon in the post-Exxon Val these days, to those early days at Oracle. I've taken immense joy in fixing and helping and coaching. I feel completely at home solving and solving and solving all day long. Every day in tech support is different, and sometimes every hour is different, every case is different, every customer is different. And you learn all the time. You help and interact with people and get potentially hundreds of little successes every day. It can be a role filled with frustrations, but it's also immensely fulfilling. I've been in support and leading support teams for more than 20 years. The day I walked into my first role, I knew it was the place for me. I knew it was the place I would build my career. Back in March of this year, I spent two weeks talking to other leaders, both about building careers in support and hiring in support too. Let's revisit those conversations.

Matt Dale: 1:59

It's a topic that comes up regularly on our team. People are always asking, what is what does uh you know support trajectory look like? And basically we kind of have a couple different paths. The first is to progress in in support, um, moving up as an individual contributor to kind of an expert level. Um one of our products is a special ed product, um, mostly used in the state of Michigan. And and the the support person we have on that team, um, she's amazing. Uh she handles all of the all the support issues, and she's actually she wrote a lot of the stuff that ended up being used in our system then. So she's an expert in that area. She's a team of one and she's completely self-sufficient. And so for some people, they could say, hey, I want to be, I want to be like she is, and I want to I want to grow um and become an expert. I don't want to lead people and I don't want to leave support like I want to be on support, but I just want to be like an expert in my field. And so that's that's one one path. The second path would be to move into to leadership. And then the final path is kind of actually off support. So uh in our company, support is is kind of one of the farm teams. Um, that is we bring people in, we train them, and then after a year or two, there's they they know our products, they know our customers, and they're a great uh transition into a role in QA or to help our customer satisfaction team uh you know in doing some backend stuff or even out in front of the customers. And so we've had a lot of people that have grown and moved into some of those other fields.

Natalie Ruhl: 3:15

No, support wasn't my first choice, but very quickly as an agent, like figured out the things that I was good at and then like the ways that success played to my strength. I love solving problems, um, particularly not my own. And I think it's you know, like it it just started to become a thing that I really, really liked. I left my first role in customer support because I was told, yeah, sorry, no raise, um, and this is as much as we can offer you. And I moved on to something completely different, um, which is online marketing. There I really understood like how transferable skills are really a thing that are massively important in in the workplace these days. Because I am very, very firmly of the belief that uh if you hire for the right attitude, a lot of skills can be taught, or most of the skills can be taught.

Vanessa Subramaniam: 4:12

I've always aimed at being solutions-oriented. And I think whatever role I've had, um you can identify problems, and that's a large part of uh showing your ability to innovate and ability to do more than what um your core role is. But when you're identifying those problems, coming up with a solution and a plan for other folks in the organization to work on has been helpful for me in terms of my own growth. And I find that when people are looking to grow on my teams, I suggest that they do something along those lines and come up with business cases that have solutions as part of the business case or recommendations. Um because it's easy to point out the flaws, but it makes it seem like you're very narrow-sighted.

Mike Redbord: 5:02

So to me, like support and customer work in general is kind of like the liberal arts education of industry, right? And I think that you you see everything. And if you if you work in support, you know what I mean, right? You see the good, you see the bad, you understand the customer, you understand the product, you see how you know that one decision some executive made maybe a few months ago has finally flowed through to the customer experience. And you start, you can kind of pin together all these disparate points of view. And support is like an awesome basis for moving your career anywhere you want. It could be, you know, to double down and spend you know a decade or a career in support, it could be to use it as a bit of a stepping stone, or it could be to you know move into a leadership position because you really love the you know the team around you in addition to the customers in front of you. So I view it as just like this awesome foundation support is. And I think that if more support people even thought like that, I think it would do some real, real good uh for all of us because I think there's a ton of um optimism to be had around the support role.

Kristina King: 6:02

I worked on a very small team at that time and the goal at that point seemed to be get out of support. Uh, you know, I quickly had a coworker move into DevOps, uh, the next coworker moved into solutions architecture, and then the last one moved into professional services, all in the same company, mind you. And so then I'm like, wow, okay, I'm the only one here now that was on this team three months ago. It became clear as as I progressed, it made sense to have stability and support. And I think a lot of us do consider it as a jumping off point. And so, for instance, the people team or the HR team, whatever you call it, might not have a plan for support. And we definitely found that to be the case. And so it's like, well, if we want something to happen in terms of making this a valid career choice, then we need to do that ourselves.

Ulrike Pitzschke: 6:58

I found it really hard to find the right people for support. Um, that's why I did it like for 10 months uh on my own, because we weren't just able to find proper people. I don't know what happened. It's really hard at the moment. Um the first Rumble we hired actually for our support team was a student rumble. Um, I think the most important thing is to test out what you really need very early. So we had one candy then that um that was doing okay on the trial work we gave him, but we had a trial day, and a trial day we found out that his technical like knowledge is not good at all. So we could now we figured out that it would be better to have like some trial work that is related to technical knowledge, which basically in our case means working with an app, knowing about features on iOS, on Android, mobile stuff like that. So it's not like really technical, but being like okay with dealing with an iPhone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that's one thing we really learned from it to like put the things we really need and really want to know upfront in the process and not like going through the whole process and then realizing okay, actually it doesn't work out.

Kristina King: 8:25

What really has been paying off for us is hiring weirdos.

Charlotte Ward: 8:29

And I say uh so are we are we more officially calling this culture ad?

Kristina King: 8:42

Yes, I am I am a huge proponent of the culture ad verbiage instead of culture fit. You know, we want to get along with the people we hire, uh, we want to work with people we like because your work relationships, especially if you're not remote, you're spending most of your time with your team rather than you know at home with your partners or kids or whatever you might have, your pets. And so for us, it's definitely a culture ad, definitely looking for those weirdos. When we screen, you know, it starts when we screen resumes. Like, is there any sort of personality coming through? Is there any sort of passion coming through? If if you're if you don't have any interest in us, um we really aren't interested in you. Uh we want to hire people who, you know, maybe are interested in tech support as a career, or maybe they are looking to do tech support for a year or two and then move into an engineering role.

Craig Stoss: 9:36

I focus a lot on um what I call cultural addition. Uh, you know, we quite the kind of a theme you heard over the past couple years was cultural fit. And I I I'm someone that disagrees with the idea of cultural fit.

Charlotte Ward: 9:49

Yeah, and me too. I'm I'm with you on that.

Craig Stoss: 9:51

Yeah, and I think that fit is just this idea of everyone has to be this cookie cutter, and usually it's defined by a small subset of executives or leaders within the company that that may not even understand the business part, that the organization that you're trying to build. And so cultural addition to me inherently helps foster career progression. If I hire someone that is super technical, and then I hire someone that's maybe less technical but super customer experience focused, they can learn inherently from each other because they're sitting next to each other doing similar work.

Alyssa Percell: 10:23

So, my first advice to everybody is make sure you have a very clear and accurate job description. Um, if you don't know what you're looking for, you're never going to find the perfect candidate. So being able to be clear about the scope of the job, the responsibilities, and maybe the vision for what it can expand to in the future is really important before you start your search. Think about the strengths and qualities you're looking for in an agent. I think before entering into the interview phase, it's really great to understand the panel that is interviewing for this responsibility. I love a mixture of leadership and peers in an interview panel because it allows different perspectives from leaders, but peers are very important to just understand the culture fit. Um, and to get that extra bit of insight, um, it's it's great to not only elevate those who are current team members, but build a bond early on with potential candidates.

Josh Magsam: 11:25

Hiring, yeah, everyone wants to know what's the what's the secret ingredient to really hiring the right people. I mean, everyone knows turnover is costly, retention's costly, it's all costly, but you you want to figure out the most efficient path. And and it it gets even more complicated when you're hiring managers. And it's it's funny, sometimes you you get lucky, and and um I can think of one search we were doing with just last year where we were sort of mid-process, and we had one of those out-of-the-blue applications from someone that sort of made us halt the whole process, a complete unknown to us. There's obviously uh often a lot more angst that goes on around around that. Um you tend to find that you're leveraging your network a lot, and that's sort of old tried and true advice. But when you're gonna hire someone who's gonna be in charge of other people, uh maybe even other leaders, um, you don't really have the time or the resources or the legality to go around knocking at doors and saying, Hey, is this person a great leader? Did you work for them? Well, you're just not gonna get that. I'm a big proponent of finding ways to let people show you how they would do the job rather than just have some of those feel-good conversations where everyone walks away going, gosh, we love the same sports teams, and we you know had had the same favorite band in high school, and that one's a straight shooter with upper management written all over them, right?

Charlotte Ward: 12:57

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one five nine for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.