How to Find and Hire Talented Customer Support Agents For Your Startup
Talented customer success employees are hard to find, here are a few ways to make it easier.
The time has come.
Your company is growing like crazy and you can’t afford to waste time resolving support emails yourself.
It’s the first time you’ve had this dilemma and you start to feel the pressure.
Unless you want your company to combust into flames, it’s time start hiring customer service agents.
But where to start looking? You need to find some quality customer support agents, not just the average Joe call center robot.
In today’s post, I’m sharing some of our favorite methods we’ve used at SupportYourApp to hire some of the best customer support talent possible.
Beware: This will not be easy, attracting the best in any field is never easy. But with our tips, the odds will be in your favor.
1 ) Use targeted job boards
There are a couple issues with traditional job boards
- It’s like finding a needle in a haystack, there’s lots of filtering and sorting for both candidates and employers.
- There are a lot of fish in the sea and you’re casting a wide net for people looking to work in customer support.
These two reasons are why we only use (and recommend) the most targeted job boards and platforms to find the most professional customer success employees. In an ocean full of anchovies and sardines, I want to help you find some sharks.
One site I recommend to find support employees is the SupportDriven job board. It is pretty expensive when it comes to online job boards, but is used by some popular startups to hire customer support agents.
If you need a strictly remote team member, there are a few good sites to find professional tech freelancers. A couple of our favorites that we’ve used to fill remote positions at SupportYourApp are Upwork because of it’s strict QC and review system and WeWorkRemotely (It’s in the name).
As for in-house work, I suggest to use Y Combinator’s, Angel List’s, or Mashable’s job boards to find employees that are passionate about working in the tech startup area.
Finally, we’ve had great success with local job boards. In our case Rabota.UA (Work.UA) for the Eastern European area, but I’ve seen many call centers in the states successfully use Craiglist (especially in metro areas) to find talented customer support members. Craiglist is a haystack, but one of the best options for HR on a budget.
2) Referrals and word of mouth
Job boards are awesome, but one of the main drivers to find and recruit new employees is through existing employee referrals. Getting the word out to your current employees about any job openings is the best way to find qualified candidates.
In our experience, employee referrals that come from valued employees that we know and trust, usually end up being a great fit for our team. Why?
- Candidates will have a better idea of what to expect, thus will close and start faster.
- Your trusted employee has validated and vouched for the candidate.
So how do you go about getting referrals?
The best way is to send out an email to your team with all of the details they need to share the news about your customer support vacancies. Include this in the email:
- Qualities or traits the candidate should possess (Ex. amazing communication skills, outstanding personality, super empathetic)
- Their responsibilities if they end up working with you (Ex. Managing incoming phone calls for software tech support)
- A friendly ask like “If you know anybody like this, please make an introduction :)”
- Link to job posting (If you have one)
Including these details makes it super simple for anybody to share the news about your job openings.
Send this email out to all current employees and you’ll be sure to land some personal referrals.
3) Career fairs
In our search for excellent customer support agents, a few of us from SupportYourApp recently attended our first career fair ever. Here’s what we learned and some pros/cons of career fairs.
At the beginning of the career fair, we brought 200 unique brochures with all of our information and 200 business cards.
The fair was packed full of college students from Kyiv’s National Economic University and we managed to speak to around 100 job-seeking students and sign up 50 of them who met our strict standards. We shared our brochure and business cards with each of them and encouraged them to share the news about our company.
PROS
- If you choose the right venue, it can be a large group of qualified and interested candidates. In our case around 100.
- It’s a great way to get your company into the local community’s eye (brand awareness)
- You can meet and network other corporations in your field.
- Expenses to host your company are typically pretty low. ($100–200)
CONS
- We choose to attend a university career fair and many students were looking for internships/apprenticeships and not a career.
- Time, effort, and expense to attend. It took around 2 hours for us to set up our flashy booth.
- There is usually lots of competition. We shared the same room with some of the largest corporations in Ukraine.
In the space of a few hours, we greeted everybody and conducted short interviews to weed out qualified from unqualified. We encouraged many students to sign up for a formal, secondary interviews. And we increased our brand awareness in the local community.
So should you attend career fairs? Yes
Time To Hire
These are our three go-to methods, but there are literally hundreds of ways to get a hold of awesome employees. If you have any creative methods please share them with us!
About the Author
Jack Plantin leads marketing and customer acquisition at SupportYourApp. He’s a Minnesota native and currently a resident of Kyiv, Ukraine. Be sure to say hi to him on Twitter!
SupportYourApp provides scalable customer support solutions for young startups. Reach out to us at hi@supportyourapp.com to learn more!
