#4 | Hiring

ABH: Always Be Hiring

“You hire the best people you can possibly find. Then it's up to you to create an environment where great people decide to stay and invest their time.” – Rich Lesser

As a leader, the most important thing you can do is hire, train, and coach your team to reach new potential. I believe potential evolves as career and people evolve so we always reach new and different levels of it. When we were redesigning the CS organization, we had to figure out how to hire 1,000 CSMs into the org. Some of the team would be from the existing org, some would shift in, and the vast majority were new hires into the role and / or into IBM.

I really didn’t know where to begin, but I wrote down principles operate against:

• Build a consistent hiring framework for every manager to use.

• Create a small, scrappy team to help screen, recruit, and hire.

• Design an onboarding process where employees said, “Best. Decision. Ever!”

• Hiring couldn’t be outsourced. I needed to be part of the hiring team.

I watched a video from Mark Roberge on growing revenue which quickly took me to his book, The Sales Acceleration Formula. There were a few gems in this book, particularly on hiring. When Mark was at Hubspot, he built a super simple “hiring formula” for hiring sellers. He laid out the evaluation criteria with ways to evaluate, weigh, and score candidates. He would later match performance against skills the candidates had in their interview. I uplifted Mark’s framework for the “IBM CSM Hiring Formula”.

Here's a high-level picture adapted to help you think about it.

I rolled this out to all our CSM managers and our recruiting team so we could use this consistently. What’s magical is that once you get performance metrics from your CSMs, you can correlate performance to scores from the hiring formula to find patterns. For example, did your top performers score best in Communication or Technical Skills? You can tweak your formula based on patterns of high performance or double down on candidates with characteristics and behaviors that perform well. We’ve evolved our CSM hiring formula since its initial launch and embedded it into our hiring platform for all managers to use. It’s consistent, scalable, and measurable.

We had to hire hundreds of CSMs in a very short time all over the world. While I needed to be part of the team, I don’t scale if I do all the screening, hiring, and interviewing myself. I needed an expert hiring squad in the geos and in global to lead recruiting, screening, hiring, and onboarding. We put global squads in place consisting of the CSM WW leader or geo leader, the HR partner, the Talent Acquisition partner, and a dedicated CS hiring leader from within the unit that understood CS and could drive the day to day. We were small and scrappy enough to try new experiments to find talent. After all, we were (and still are) in the Great Resignation so the talent war was felt.

Once I had a CSM hired, what would I do with her/him? I wanted onboarding to be more than training. I wanted that CSM to feel loved! I wanted our new CSMs to tell their friends, spouse, partner, or dog that they just had the best first week ever at IBM! So again... we re-wrote the onboarding process. Consider a multi-week onboarding process, face to face where you can do it. Balance technical training, functional training, and assign coaching and executive cohorts to be with that group of hires throughout the course of the onboarding. Onboarding is more than just teaching people about your company or products. It’s about the connection and making them part of your culture.

You, as the CS leader, must be part of hiring. Do not simply delegate this to HR. I realize your calendar is already full, but you will have a higher reply rate from candidates because of who you are. Candidates want to talk to you.

My 3 “teaching moments” 16 months in:

• Do not make the job description unattainable. Female candidates will not apply unless they believe they can do 80% of what you wrote down. I made this mistake and did not get a good pipeline of diversity my first quarter of hiring.

• If you use external recruiters and external agencies, you must spend time with them so they deeply understand what you need in a candidate. You may have to write queries for them to get going. Have them talk to exemplar CSMs so they understand what you are looking for.

• Don’t compromise. Hiring mistakes are the worst. They cost that candidate and you time, effort, and money. If you rush a hire through the process to hit a hiring target, you are right back to where you started.

Hiring is never easy, and it’s also never done. Some best CSM hires were never looking for a new role. As a CS leader, you are accountable and responsible for getting the best people into your organization. Lay out a framework, surround yourself with a team to help you hire, establish world class onboarding, and be part of the hiring process.

I’d love to hear how you’ve hired CSMs.

Janine