47: Hiring in Support with Kristina King

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 47 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is hiring, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. Today I'd like to welcome back Christina King. Christina, the topic for this week is hiring for customer support.

Kristina King: 0:41

Yes, I love this topic, so I'm happy to happy to go over it. So I'll start by saying first off that my career in tech began as a technical support engineer, tier one. And I had been in finance before, I'd been teaching before. So I didn't have I didn't have a CS degree. I didn't have a lot of technical experience. And so when I started, it was it was a pretty new world for me. And luckily I was starting at a company, still JAMA, that was much smaller than and had a really small support team. So the world was almost my oyster in that I got to define my own role. And then I stayed with the company as it grew and I got to grow along with it. And with that experience, it made me really want to try to provide experiences like that for other people, which has really influenced how I hire and even how I try to use my influence sitting on hiring committees for other teams. It's a good place to love it. It's so it's you know, it's fulfilling in a way, um, but also gratifying to be like, wow, only you know, seven years ago I was working at some miserable financial services job, and now I get to, you know, sit on for a director of product or whatever, you know. My big thing is really providing opportunity for people who may not have that opportunity. And I was talking with my boss. One of the things that we really solidified in the past month is that what really has been paying off for us is hiring weirdos.

Charlotte Ward: 2:11

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

Kristina King: 2:24

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. So it's it's really paid off for us to start at the very beginning with um this business support specialist internship that we started, which we had some creative headcount, and so we're like, let's do this for six months, let's see how it goes. And so we went to um this place called Work Source Oregon, and they work a lot with like veterans and parents who were out of the workforce for 20 years, or people who are looking to change careers because maybe they were, you know, working in a paper mill and it shut down. And so our first internship um we offered to uh an army vet named Dana, who had been a bricklayer for a long time and hurt himself and couldn't do manual labor anymore. And so his only experiences were like, you know, physical or you know, in the army in Afghanistan. Um, so nothing directly applicable to tech. He went to like a short code school program, you know, he applied for this internship, and you know, it's been almost three years, and Dana's still here. So we were able to keep him on the team, promote him to a technical support engineer. And um, since starting that program a few years ago, um our community manager started in that, um, with one of our tech support engineers who recently left for a job that's a better fit for her, and then um our current permanent business support specialist, they all started in that internship role, and none of them had had a tech job before. It was like one of them just in service industry, but had a lot of good customer experience. Right.

Charlotte Ward: 4:50

So that it's often the case, right?

Kristina King: 4:52

Yeah, exactly. So it's like starting with with the the lower tiers and those people who just have that experience that isn't you know computers, computers, but they're like, Well, I wanna I want to get there because that's the future.

Charlotte Ward: 5:05

And how long is that internship that you run?

Kristina King: 5:08

Six months. It's a revolving, like, okay, five months in, you're going to start, you're going to start ramping up the next person.

Charlotte Ward: 5:15

Well, that works really well for both parties, right? In one way or the other, whether they end up with you or not, it's uh it's good all around and and really gives them a lot of exposure and a lot of relevant experience. Um I I think of those kind of opportunities, the the the you know, extended trial periods or the internships often as were it just a kind of really long interview process somehow, but it works.

Kristina King: 5:41

And it's good too, because then the the rest of the company can get to know them um and and know that they're learning, and then they're excited to share with them. They don't see them as this person who comes in as like, I don't need your help, I'm a professional, I got this. They're like, they come in wide-eyed and they're like, What can I learn about this? Is it so new and interesting and cool? Uh, and then so usually people um, you know, are happy to you know talk about what they do in case it's something that that intern is interested in person.

Charlotte Ward: 6:11

And and they get truly invested if you hire them after that, they're really truly invested.

Kristina King: 6:16

Yes, definitely. So, yeah, I guess it's you know, a third of our team came through from that program. So it's definitely worked out well.

Charlotte Ward: 6:25

That's it for today. Go to customer supportleaders.com forward slash forty-seven for the show notes, and I'll see you next time.