Customer Support Leaders
Customer Support Leaders
From The Archives: 49: Hiring in Support with Alyssa Percell
Unlock the secrets to building a standout customer support team by tuning into our captivating conversation with Alyssa Purcell, a seasoned manager from New York City. Alyssa brings her expertise to the table, offering strategies for crafting precise job descriptions that attract the right candidates. She shares the nuanced art of balancing skills assessment with cultural fit, and the importance of having a diverse interview panel featuring both leadership and peers for a comprehensive evaluation process. You'll leave understanding how to identify the strengths and qualities necessary for each role, paving the way for effective hiring.
Alyssa also unveils her unique approach to interviews, providing real-time feedback to candidates as a means of gauging their potential for growth. Her insights on coaching peers for interviews, maintaining consistency, and reducing unconscious bias with quality feedback are invaluable for anyone in a hiring position. Whether you're bringing in newcomers for entry-level roles or seeking seasoned professionals, Alyssa's proven strategies will equip you with the knowledge to enhance your hiring process and improve candidate outcomes. Listen and transform your approach to hiring in customer support.
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 to the podcast Alyssa Purcell. Alyssa, would you like to introduce yourself?
Alyssa Purcell:Hi, absolutely, I'm so happy to be here. My name is Alyssa Purcell. I am a current manager on a customer support team based in New York City. I've been in support for about five years and my focus is really around people management, training, development, quality assurance, process, all of that. So quite a bit of experience, but still definitely keeping an open mind on different strategies and support. So love the podcast Very excited.
Charlotte Ward:Thank you so much. Very excited to have you so, Alyssa. The topic for this week is hiring in support Absolutely.
Alyssa Purcell:So my first advice to everybody is make sure you have a very clear and accurate job description. 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 and to get that extra bit of insight. It's great to not only elevate those who are current team members but build a bond early on with potential candidates.
Charlotte Ward:Culture fit is one aspect. Skills assessment is another. Do you think that peers in an interview should spend too much time on skills assessment or do you think that should more come from you know assignments and things like that as part of their hiring process?
Alyssa Purcell:If you have an assignment as part of your hiring process, I don't think it's necessary for the peers to focus on the skill set because you're going to have a fair way to assess it. I think it's great to elevate the peers who are going in there and coach them prior to the interview. You should never send an agent in without any kind of coaching or interview prep. You know, and you want to make sure that you're giving them the confidence needed and some focus needed to really maximize that time in the interview. But I love to set up one agent to kind of focus on the skillset and another to focus on the culture. You could call it kind of a good cop bad cop, but really what it does is it allows a more fair balance and some direction to kick off the interview.
Charlotte Ward:Yeah, and also as part of that framework, you are setting some levels of consistency across all potential candidates as well. So those don't just become conversations where you can't draw any meaningful conclusions right, other than he was nice, she was nice.
Alyssa Purcell:Yeah, I think you need that quality feedback from that time. You only get so much time with a candidate, but it also helps to reduce any unconscious bias.
Charlotte Ward:What's your biggest challenge with hiring?
Alyssa Purcell:Well, it depends on the role right For an agent position, the biggest challenge is weighing experience versus potential. Especially for an entry-level support role, you're often getting candidates who don't have a lot of experience right.
Charlotte Ward:Yeah yeah, you don't have the skillset necessarily. You know story around loyalty and around even kind of softer stuff. Just you know the ability to stick at something and learn.
Alyssa Purcell:Yeah, yeah. Can I tell you my one secret tip I love to do in an interview? Please do, please do. Regardless of the level of role.
Alyssa Purcell:I love to pause a candidate during an interview and offer them some feedback. Let's talk about as easy examples. So sometimes you get candidates who speak a lot and sometimes you get candidates who have very short answers. So about halfway into the interview I like to say, yeah, I just want to stop things for a minute and provide you some feedback. Are you open to some feedback? And I provide them just a little bit of feedback, like we have X amount of time left.
Alyssa Purcell:I really want to get through the next questions for somebody who maybe speaks a lot. And then for somebody who's not giving a lot of examples and is shorter with their answers. I give them feedback like hey, I would love to hear some more examples from you. And not only does that help shift the kind of interview that you're conducting, it also allows you to gauge how they receive feedback and apply it. It's not to overly criticize them, it's really more of an exercise to see can they learn in that moment you know and apply that Right, and then you get a little bit more out of the candidate in the interview.
Charlotte Ward:I think that's. That's a really excellent tip. I was scared where you were going to go with that, as you, as you were building up that story towards you, like to pause the interview and I was thinking this is just going to be really mean, and I don't, I promise.
Charlotte Ward:I'm not scary you're not scary, but actually that's a really interesting thing to do. And also, what you're doing there isn't that personal, it's not like here's some feedback that's really specific to you. Yeah, yeah, you know which is just criticism, right? Yeah, yeah, um, that, that's a, that's a nice gentle, but but actually I would imagine fairly fruitful exercise in the middle of an interview.
Alyssa Purcell:Yeah, um, I think I've made some of my best hiring decisions because of what that resulted in, which is great.
Charlotte Ward:I'm going to try it next time. That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaderscom. Forward slash 49 for the show notes and I'll see you next time.