Hiring support engineers: the skills
... to pay the ... well, you get it
So you’ve got a support team established! Maybe there’s one of you (good luck!), maybe there’s a few, but things are getting busier and it’s time to hire. Congratulations, and again good luck. Here’s how I hire support engineers, starting with the skillsets that I look for when reviewing résumés or putting together a recruitment profile.
First, think about your customer profile. Who is writing or calling in for assistance? Maybe they’re DevOps engineers, maybe they’re product designers, maybe they’re customer service folks themselves. Whoever they are, take careful note. That’s the kind of person and skillset you’re looking for. Why? Well, the first and hardest thing to do in support is to build rapport, and the best shortcut to that level of comfort is to meet your customers where they are. So you’ll want to find people with expertise that is similar to that of your customers. When they realize they’re talking to someone who speaks their language, figuratively, you’re already starting on the right foot. So there’s one skillset you want to be looking for.
Another of equal importance is difficult to put into words, but I’ll try. You need someone who actually enjoys solving problems. This is the kind of person who won’t quit until they’ve finished diagnosing a problem, and won’t let hurdles like ‘the customer hasn’t responded to my email’ or ‘the engineers tell me this is working as intended’ stop them from digging to get to the bottom of the issue. Adjectives like ‘curious’ and ‘tenacious’ apply here. A boss of mine once called this the troubleshooting mindset, which is a pretty good description of it. Some people don’t care how a problem is solved, just as long as it’s solved—but a troubleshooter not only wants to resolve customer issues, but understand them. They’ll have opinions about how to prevent those problems in future too, which is worth its weight in gold to attentive engineering and product teams.
The final skillset, and perhaps the most important in day-to-day support life, is the simple willingness to interact with customers. A support engineer will be called upon to address tricky situations at a moment’s notice, do live troubleshooting with a potentially grumpy or agitated customer, and deliver bad news with sensitivity. They’ll have to be professional and personable in video chat and clear and empathetic in written communications. While these skills aren’t that hard to find, the real trick is finding them in conjunction with the other two. This is the greatest paradox of hiring a good support engineer: there are plenty of talented technical professionals out there, but not that many who are both highly skilled and willing to enthusiastically interact with a wide variety of customers, day in and day out. Because, let’s be honest: highly technical folks aren’t, for the most part, also social butterflies. The ones who are, though—they’ve got bright prospects and probably have plenty of options for their next career move. I don’t mean to say that you need to find a complete extrovert here: plenty of more introverted folks still enjoy working closely with others, particularly when the interaction is constrained within the boundaries of a support issue.
So, supposing you’re lucky enough to find someone with all these skillsets, you’re golden. You’ve just got to convince them to sign on. But if you’re living here in the real world with the rest of us, you’re probably going to be finding candidates who are stronger in some categories than others. So how do you choose? Well, technical skills can be taught; it just depends how much time you have and how long you’re willing to set aside for a learning period. Social skills are trickier. Almost anyone can learn to fake it well enough—I’m living proof of that—but you’ll need to make sure it’s something that your candidate is willing to put in the work for. But the third skillset, that so-called troubleshooting mindset, is the most critical. How can you teach that to someone who doesn’t instinctively get it? I’m not sure, and I wouldn’t even know where to start. So that’s really the sine qua non. You can find someone who’s great at ‘customer skillset X’, someone who can gab for hours and charm the pants off anyone, but if they don’t care to dig their teeth into a problem and worry it until it’s completely deconstructed, they’ll never be more than a mediocre support engineer.
Next time: you’ve got some candidates so how do you decide who’s right for you? We dig into the interview process.
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