How to Hire Your First Software Support Engineer

April 7, 2016

As your company continues to scale and grow, it will undoubtedly run into a few growing pains.

One of those pains in particular is the moment when you need to build out a software support function and alleviate your current developers from handling support issues on top of creating the product. This is a critical step for the engineering org because it allows the developers to continue creating an awesome product instead of being interrupted by support issues or putting out fires elsewhere in relation to the product/service.

This task is challenging for every young company, so you want to make sure that you are making the right investment when looking at potential candidates. Building out a rock star recruiting function at your company will certainly help you hit the ground running on the right foot. But, regardless of the recruiting resource you use, you will still want to hone in on a few key competence areas to ensure that you are bringing on the right person in relation to the responsibilities.

The most important characteristics for hiring a successful support engineer would revolve around the technical skills necessary to understand the product and how to troubleshoot within the system. This should be pretty straight forward and if you are struggling with the core competencies, just grab your engineering team and ask them about the most frequent issues they are seeing and what “hard” skills would be necessary for someone to perform well in the role. This part is easy and shouldn’t be an issue for the team to lay out a desired candidate profile and experience level.

Now that you have identified that your team needs a support engineer and identified the “hard” skills necessary for understanding and executing in the position, it is time to highlight the key “soft skills” or “traits for success” that you should specifically target and grade candidates around.

4 Traits for Success

1. Strong Communication

This could quite possibly be one of those skills that you completely overlook or toss into the pile with “self-starter” and “a real go-getter” for most overused resume fillers out there. The real value here is taking a step back and identifying what good communication actually has to do with a software support position.

To further complicate the age-old “strong communication” piece, let’s boil it down to some specific aspects you will want to dive into to analyze strengths.

Key factors to identify and grade:

  • Phone Presence – Ability to run a call efficiently and get to more direct topics/solutions.
  • Strong control on language – Ability to simplify complex ideas into easily digestible pieces.
  • Proactive listener – Ability to really connect with the customer and understand all of their issues before diving into solutions.
  • Empathy – Ability to relate to the customer on a personal level in order to put him or herself in their position.

Communication can take many forms, so whether it is non-verbal keys of confidence that keeps the team from panicking or the ability to be an active listener with the client, you will want someone who can swiftly deliver solutions and feedback concisely and respectfully.

2. Determination

“Back at it Again!” with the vague traits, but I think you can see where this one is going. The key competencies around determination that you want to dive into would be resiliency and curiosity.

  • Resiliency – Is this person someone who will go above and beyond to settle an issue for the customer? How will this person handle a situation that doesn’t have a clear solution/answer? These will be very important conversations to have with the candidate and try to obtain specifics around the resourcefulness of the individual when it comes to problem solving. You want someone who will not stop until a solution is found.
  • Curiosity – This point is around understanding the “why” beyond certain issues to prevent them from happening or get ahead of impediments that could be foreseeable. Another component of curiosity for this role would be to dive into how the support engineer handles tickets that are moved above their level. Do they close the door and move on or does this person stay connected to the ticket to see what the solution was?

3. Customer Focus

This seems simple, but really will make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful support group. The real aspect here that you want to dive into is around the candidate not only understanding the issue in a technical sense, but also being able to understand what the issue means for that client. This will allow the candidate to be able to appropriately prioritize issues coming in so that any fires are put out swiftly rather than allowing it to grow into a larger issue.

This also extends to any process creation or changes. It is important to lay out a foundation on ticket procedures to follow in particular use cases so that the company can ensure that similar issues are handled correctly and in a timely manner moving forward.

4. Personal Ownership

For this position, you will want someone that is able to truly take ownership of the function and its principles. Most likely, they are going to be a one-person team until the team grows, so the first hire really needs to be a one-person-shop. Some key characteristics to identify are:

  • Always learning
  • Sharpening Skills
  • Attacking issues head on

I feel that this is a core group of ideologies that you will want your first Software Support Engineer to embody. This will ensure that the team is solidified in an agile environment that places a high importance on continuous improvements and being resourceful in your company’s problem solving.

How Can You Test Those Skills?

A great resource that you have at your disposal in this search is the selling factor of building out a team and function within a growing organization. This also highlights that you really need to find the right person for the role, company and culture overall.

A great tool at your disposal would be to have the candidate complete a mock ticket walk-through with the team during the interview. This will allow the team to see the candidate in action, highlighting a lot of what was covered above. I think that this is the greatest determining factor in the interviewing process. You will want to create a challenging exercise for the candidate to test his or her skills and creative problem solving abilities.

It is wonderful to need to build out a support function with your company so get excited to go after the best talent and be able to dive into the core soft skills that really position the candidate and your company for successful software support.

Recruiter

<strong>Brandon DeWitt</strong> is a Talent Acquisition Manager at Criteo <a href="http://www.criteo.com/">Criteo</a>. Prior to that, Brandon was a Talent Specialist at OpenView, focused on recruiting engineering candidates, and also previously served as a contract recruiter for CVS Caremark where he sourced candidates in a variety of functional areas nationwide.