Customer Support Leaders
Customer Support Leaders
From The Archives: 47: Hiring in Support with Kristina King
Kristina King returns to the spotlight, sharing her remarkable pivot from finance and teaching to becoming a technical support engineer, all without a formal CS degree. Kristina's narrative underscores the power of varied backgrounds in tech, illustrating her philosophy of hiring for culture "add" rather than culture "fit." She emphasizes the need to extend opportunities to those who might not traditionally find their way into tech, particularly through her role on hiring committees. Kristina's hiring philosophy is about finding those "weirdos" who bring a distinct passion and personality to the team, making the workplace not only diverse but vibrant.
This episode also highlights Kristina's innovative approach with a business support specialist internship aimed at non-traditional candidates, facilitated through a collaboration with WorkSource Oregon. Notable successes include interns like Dana, an Army vet and former bricklayer, who transitioned into valuable technical roles. This initiative highlights how skills like customer experience from the service sector can be effectively channeled into tech support positions. Join us as Kristina unpacks these transformative hiring strategies that are broadening the talent pool and reshaping tech support teams for the future.
Hello, welcome to the Customer Support Leaders podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. Today we're listening to one of my favorite episodes from the archives. Today I'd like to welcome back Kristina King. Kristina, the topic for this week is hiring for customer support.
Kristina King:Yes, I love this topic so I'm 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 a CS degree, I didn't have a lot of technical experience, and so when I started it was a pretty new world for me and luckily I was starting at a company still JAMA that was much smaller then 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.
Charlotte Ward:That's a good place to be.
Kristina King:Yeah, exactly, I love it. So it's, you know, it's fulfilling in a way, 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 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, and I say so are we more officially calling this culture ad.
Kristina King: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. 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 add.
Kristina King: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 you're, if you don't have any interest in us, we really aren't interested in you. 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 really paid off for us to start at the very beginning with 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.
Kristina King:And so we went to this place called WorkSource Oregon and they work a lot with, like veterans and parents who are out of the workforce for 20 years or people who were looking to change careers because maybe they were, you know, working in a paper mill and it shut down.
Kristina King:And so our first internship we offered to 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 physical, you know, in the army in Afghanistan, 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 since starting that program a few years ago, our community manager started in that we had one of our tech support engineers who recently left for the job that's a better fit for her and then 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.
Charlotte Ward:Right, it's often the case, right yeah exactly.
Kristina King:So it's like starting with the lower tiers and those people who just have that experience that isn't, you know, computers, computers, but they're like, I want to get there because that's the future.
Charlotte Ward:And how long is that internship that you run?
Kristina King: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:Well, that works really well for both parties, right One way or the other, whether they end up with you or not, it's good all around and really gives them a lot of exposure, a lot of relevant experience. I think of those kinds of opportunities that the you know extended trial periods or the internships often is just a kind of really long interview process somehow, but it works.
Kristina King:And it's good too, because then the rest of the company can get to know them 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 is like I don't need your help, I'm a professional, I got this. They're like they come in wide-eyed and like what can I learn about? This is 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 and they get truly invested.
Charlotte Ward:If you hire them after that, they're really truly invested.
Kristina King: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:That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaderscom. Forward. Slash 47 for the show notes and I'll see you next time.