Having a trainer on your Customer Success team can drastically improve customer enablement and help drive rapid product adoption, while decreasing the risk of customers churning. But finding and hiring the ideal customer trainer can be difficult in today’s recruiting landscape. Given that this role can be critical to a company’s success, we’ve outlined a few thoughts below to help with the process.
Continue reading to learn more:
1. Consider the ideal attributes for a successful customer trainer.
Many of these qualities will be brought up during your discovery on what makes the ideal candidate for your organization. But for your reference, here are a few key traits a customer trainer should possess:
- Develops strong relationships and open communication with other company leaders to ensure alignment of training programs with business goals.
- Has outstanding interpersonal skills and can work with a variety of customers, internal stakeholders, and executive team members effectively.
- Able to create high-quality training materials for a wide variety of students.
A more detailed overview of the various roles on a training team can be found in our eBook, “How to Build a Customer Training Team.”
2. Make sure your hiring team is aligned on what is needed to succeed in this role.
This step is crucial to making the best hire for your team. You may need to look for a candidate with a technical background because your company sells a highly technical product; or you may need someone with an outgoing personality who can relate to any of your varied customers. Education can also play a large factor in the hiring process. For instance, does this candidate need to have a degree in Instructional Design?
Taking the time to first clearly define and establish the responsibilities and success metrics for this role can help narrow down what characteristics are required in your ideal candidate.
3. Streamline the interview process to get all-star candidates through quickly.
The interview process will most likely build off the success traits defined with the hiring team. An easy way to disseminate this information and make sure everyone is on the same page is to host a quick meeting in which you brief the interviewers on their respective topics before hosting any candidates onsite.
In addition, at some point during the interview process, I would highly suggest requesting a recent writing or work sample that demonstrates the candidate’s skills.
4. Go with your instincts.
At the end of the day hiring anyone is hard, but a rule of thumb we generally follow here at Skilljar is when in doubt, don’t hire. Take time to find and hire the best candidate you possibly can!
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