Interview tips from an ex-Meta recruiter | Zack Zweber | Ep. 89

[Zack] (0:00 - 0:10)

You can't go through a 30 minute or a 60 minute first interview and then draw it back to economic value and then hope you can drive the conversation. You need to get those out there up front.

[Dillon] (0:17 - 0:28)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I've got my man Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:29 - 0:30)

What's up people?

[Dillon] (0:31 - 0:35)

And we've got Zack here. Zack, do you want to say hi?

[Zack] (0:36 - 0:41)

Hello, good morning in my time zone. Oh boy, we try to keep this evergreen, Zack.

[Dillon] (0:42 - 1:00)

All right, so that's strike one on you, Zack. Okay, my bad. And I am your host.

I am the umpire of customer success podcast hosts. My name is Dillon Young. Zack, thank you so much for being here.

I'm sorry to have scared you already. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Zack] (1:00 - 1:31)

Absolutely. I will give you a sense of where I've been and what I'm doing now, but I've been recruiting for about 10 years in a lot of different facets. So I started in IT and software recruiting for a staffing company for about five years and then went into corporate recruiting, worked for a few different companies, including a little company called Meta or Facebook you might've heard of and then got laid off and then recently started my own business in the last year.

So I've seen it all and excited to speak with you both today.

[Dillon] (1:32 - 1:36)

And where did you come across the misfortune of knowing Rob personally?

[Zack] (1:37 - 1:44)

I may or may not have tried to recruit Rob for a position for a client in the past. And I tried to pull it through.

[Rob] (1:45 - 1:58)

I was like, I'll say an interest in this role in hopes that it'll turn into a consulting gig. I was just getting rolling on my full-time consulting gig. So it was like some bad sitcom where in the end we fall in love.

[Dillon] (2:00 - 2:17)

Maybe it's not where I thought that was going to, I didn't think that's where that was landing. All right, Zack, you know what we're doing here? We're talking about customer success or feel free to expand it out.

I'd love to hear just about recruiting in general, but our question is what is on your mind? So why don't you tell us what that is?

[Zack] (2:17 - 3:20)

Yeah, for sure. So I'll set it up a little bit here and then I'll ask my question, but no surprise to everybody that's talent market continues to be super tight. And I think you have to be able to demonstrate value and be different, right?

When you're interviewing, when you're trying to get a company's attention and going through a process, I was reflecting on customer success and the different responsibilities that customer success reps have, whether you're a entry level or you're a director level type of candidate. And I got my little cheat sheet here. So I was thinking about onboarding.

I was thinking about customer advocacy, value realization, growth, renewals, expansion, all those different areas. So my question is how can you best showcase your CS skill set and your toolkit and interview process? So how do you take what you do best every single day and use that to impress the right people in the right companies?

Rob, I know that you help with some interview processes and coaching for companies. So maybe I'll kick that to you to start.

[Rob] (3:21 - 3:32)

Yeah, you're catching me at a really good time. Also, thanks for taking the bull by the horns instead of letting Dillon run the show. Yeah.

Tired of Dillon doing this.

[Dillon] (3:32 - 3:38)

This booming superior voice has pushed me to the top in all ways. Please.

[Rob] (3:39 - 5:42)

But yeah, you're catching me at just the right time for this because I'm actually in the process of putting together a new version of a recruiting playbook, which I've iterated on this thing many times in the past, depending on the role, depending on the company. So I sort of am working on my core template recruiting playbook, which is if you're hiring for customer success, what should you look for? And there's a combination of factors.

I think from the interviewee side, what I'm realizing now is that the advice that I give on the interviewee side actually doesn't match the questions that I ask on the interviewer side. So I'm realizing a mismatch that I've even created for myself. I often recommend on the interviewee side to think about your role in terms of the economic value that it brings to the table.

So if you manage renewals and upsells, it's fairly easy to make that case, to basically say, I would be a cash efficient hire. Every dollar you pay me, you're going to at least make that dollar back in more. That's at least for most startups, that's a criteria that they have to see in place.

If your role is something like implementation, it's a lot more nuanced. Right? Because you have to show that I can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes for a customer to onboard compared to what you have today, which obviously requires some research and assumptions around what that looks like today.

Or I can have massively more throughput. Right? I will be the most efficient piece of this assembly line that you've ever seen, hopefully.

And I can show that in how quickly I can activate customers. That matters a lot, especially with some models that I'm working with right now. The company doesn't get paid until the customer goes live.

So that's where you can make a really compelling economic case for your role. So it's a good question. I'm thinking about it a lot, applying it in different situations, still a work in progress for me.

But Dillon, I don't know what you think.

[Dillon] (5:43 - 7:50)

We're popcorning now. I think what's interesting is you painted with a broad brush, but in the best way, Rob, whereas my question was going to be, I was having a conversation with somebody earlier today. And it was someone who just recently got into CS, like in the past two years.

And they are jaded already about, I have 115 customers, but I'm also responsible for adoption and implementations, as well as renewals and expansion for 115 customers. Really hard to do. And so the conversation I had with them was around like, it really sounds like your organization doesn't know what they want CS to be yet, or they're in a really cash-strapped position.

And this is one of those classic catch-all positions that CS often ends up in. And so I was going to say, you've really got to understand what exactly this position is doing. It should not be everything you listed, Zack.

It should not be responsible for all those things. It's really hard. First of all, they're all disparate skill sets.

They are disparate personas often, like a person who's really good at driving adoption is not always very good at sales, is not always very good at project management that onboarding requires. And so I would encourage folks to really get deep in understanding what is the one metric the position is responsible for, one or two metrics this position is responsible for, and then take everything Rob said around. You've got to really understand the...

I always talk about the number. What is that one number you are expected to increase or decrease? And then talk about how you do that.

And it's typically not dollars. It's a few degrees removed from dollars. You've got to be able to explain your understanding of that through line and what it is you do to drive that up or down.

[Rob] (7:51 - 8:35)

If I can add to that, Dillon, the question that I was just recently recommending to a friend who's interviewing is to ask, imagine you make this hire, whether me or somebody else, and in six months, this was a massive success. And you look back and you feel great about it. How does that show up in the metrics?

What are you looking at that makes you feel great? Yeah, exactly. How does this show up in a dashboard?

What that does as a candidate is it shows that you're a metrics-oriented candidate, which most companies like, and it shows that you're thinking far into the future. And it also shows a degree of humility because you're like, whether me or somebody else. I do this whenever I'm selling things too.

I'm like, whether me or somebody else, what does this look like as a solved problem for you?

[Zack] (8:36 - 8:37)

Great sales tactic. I love that.

[Dillon] (8:38 - 8:45)

Zack, I want to know, you asked the question, did you have an answer in mind? Or is this something you're trying to untangle?

[Zack] (8:46 - 10:11)

Yeah, I would say I'm trying to untangle it. And you both made really good points in that you have to draw it back to economic value and what you're going to bring to the company. And Dillon, I think you're right.

You need to ask those two questions. You need to ask them early too. You can't go through a 30-minute or a 60-minute first interview and then hope to ask those at the end and then hope you can drive the conversation.

You need to get those out there upfront. So in whatever way that you do that, asking those early to then help frame that conversation and help understand where you're going to drive it, just like you would in a new customer conversation or a client conversation is really important. But to answer your question, I think where I'm going with this is, as I think about just the preparation that you all put into a client call, renewal call, whatever it may be, the research you do, how you're setting those up, is there an opportunity without hijacking an interview process to essentially take that same framework in what you do every day to show them what it might be like to work with you? And it's tough, right? Because I think in interviewing, oftentimes, we want to follow the process, get to the next step, get the next interview, get the offer.

But how do you, with nuance, help drive that conversation and show the value in what you can do?

[Dillon] (10:13 - 11:51)

So what's interesting is you brought it almost full circle for me because you said, you got to get that out early. And I think that is so uncomfortable for people to not sit back and say, okay, what do you want to know? And instead say, I'm going to ram down your throat or whatever less weird analogy we want to use of tell me what's important to you.

And let's talk for 60 minutes about how I can do that. And a lot of times we're doing this dance because we want to be subservient in a lot of ways to what they need. I think there's the secret dozack, and it's less so for a recruiting consultant, but a lot of times interviewers don't know what they're doing either.

And we've got to get comfortable with helping them a lot. You brought it back to the thing with customers. And I think that's a really prescient point of oftentimes we're helping the customer understand what their success metrics should be.

Hey, based on what I understand about your business, this is what you should be worried about. And here's why. There's a shade of that to it.

And when I said you brought it almost full circle is because you mentioned that nuance thing. We want to be able to do all of that without feeling super type A, without feeling pushy and aggressive. And that's a crazy balance to strike that we don't have enough time to talk about because we're out of time, Zack, but awesome topic.

I love this. And we'd love to have you back to talk about that second thing that I just mentioned is like, how do you finesse that? So thank you so much for being here again.

We'd love to have you back, but for now we've got to say goodbye, Zack.

[Zack] (11:52 - 11:54)

Sounds good. Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it.

I'll be back.

[Voiceover] (11:58 - 12:29)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

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