We just added two more folks to our support team (Welcome, Casey and Rachel!) and I wanted to talk about the choices we made along the way. We could hire support folks to do one of two things: 

• Do their job and go home.
• Do their job exceptionally well, make customers love PBwiki even more and then go home.

PBwiki’s support team chose the latter - here’s what I look for:

• Do we get excited thinking about bringing this person on board?

If there’s any doubt - move on. We need superstars to rub off positively on the rest of our superstars.

• Are they capable of doing exceptionally well at their job?

How passionate are they about what they do? How good do you think they can become? If both of these questions look good, you’ve got a great hire on your hands.

• How much hand holding will they need?

We need people with initiative - otherwise, constantly making sure they’ve done the right thing is going to eat up all of my time.

• Do they share PBwiki’s core values?

If they don’t, we risk losing PBwiki’s identity and becoming Boring Company, Inc. Test this by letting them support a handful of customers and watching the customer response - you’ll have your answer in short order. 

Will this get you the right candidates 100% of the time? Perhaps not - but it will significantly boost your chances of finding the right people along the away.