Interview Prep

Questions to help practice for interviews

Tell me about a time you managed a complex customer relationship with multiple stakeholders at different levels of an organization. How did you keep everyone aligned?

Circumstance

• One of my customers was about 7 months away from their renewal. There was a lot of internal restructuring within their org. They brought in multiple new members to their talent, HR, and operations team, Everyone had different levels of knowledge with Lever. General consensus was there had been challenges with Lever and they were unsure if Lever was the right ATS platform for them moving forward.

Action

• Get an understanding of what the challenges are that are contributing to their reluctance to remain on Lever. I planned a business review meeting that included all stakeholders to align on talent outcomes. Used meeting to get to know each stakeholder and understand each of their priorities and goals.

• Following the business review, we scheduled working sessions with each stakeholder to have more in depth conversations on their focus area. Worked cross-functionally to include my management team, product, and solutions consultant team

• Following the individual sessions, we conducted a follow up with all stakeholders to get alignment on a path forward.

Result -

• We were able to retain the customer and renew them with a slight expanion

• We were able to recalibrate their setup to ensure efficiency and success.

• Instill confidence that Lever will remain their as their ATS platform.

Learning -

• With customers, it’s alwasy important to try to build multi-threaded relationships in order to drive the value of Lever.

Give me an example of an expansion opportunity you found that wasn't obvious from the account's stated goals — how did you surface it?

Circumstance

• In prepping for a business review with one of my customers, I performed an audit of their usage. I noticed that they had archived a large number of candidates with an archive reason of “Bot” and “Fraud”. This led me to dig in further to understand what was going on and bring it up to them during our business review.

• My goal was to take this small observation and better understand if this was a big pain point for them.

Action

• During the business review, I brought up my observation and asked some discovery questions to validate whether this was a pain point for them.

• It turns out that this was impacting their team efficiency, as they were spending hours going through each candidate to qualify and determine if the candidate was a legitimate candidate that they wanted to reach out to.

• I shared with them that we have a solution that could help alleviate this, and make the candidate identity process a lot more efficient.

• I demo’d the solution for them on a follow up call, which made them impressed with what our solution could do. (combine bullets 3+4)

Result

• The customer ended up purchasing the product add-on, which provided them with a higher quality candidate pool.

• They were able to efficiently identify fraudulent candidates earlier in the funnel which allowed them to focus on legitimate candidates.

Learnings

• You never know when presenting a small data observation that they had not realized could end up helping you close an expansion opportunity.

Describe a situation where you had to build trust with a skeptical or resistant executive. What was your approach and what was the outcome?

Circumstance-

• A customer of mine was interested in using some of our AI products, but they were apprehensive about implementing AI as part of their talent operations, due to recent litigation involving other companies in the HR tech space.

Action -

• To understand their concerns and resistance, I had a call to understand their concerns.

• I reviewed their talent acquisition outcomes and tied in how some of the AI features can only help and not hinder their recruiting workflow.

• Used metric proof points from case studies to show the results they could expect to see.

• In partnership with product team, I walked them through how we built and designed our AI products and how it is that we adhere to strict AI governance

Result

• As a result of the engagements, we got the customer to feel more confident in adopting our AI capabilities.

• In an effort to deepen our partnership, we added them to our AI cohort program, which is an early access program for them to try out our AI features in exchange for direct access and feedback from them.

• They are currently finding the AI features being very impactful to their TA ops.

Learning

• Making a case or convincing someone that is skeptical can be a long process. It involves in depth discovery and using metrics and proof points to support your case.

Describe a situation where you used data or metrics to make a recommendation to a customer that changed their behavior or drove a measurable outcome.

Circumstance

• In prepping for a quarterly sync with a customer I noticed that one of the outcomes they had initially set out was reducing their time to hire metric to align with baseline metrics. In looking at their data, I noticed their TTH was not improving.

Action

• Dove into their data and tried to understand what data points were contributing to their high time to hire number

• I noticed their avg candidate time in stages was relatively high, their avg time to feedback number was high, which meant it was taking longer for recruiters to leave candidate feedback after an interview, and in some cases some interviews were missing feedback completely.

• Shared this with the customer, and made some process recommendations which would help drive their TTH number down.

Result

• Worked with the customer to implement process improvements to encourage their recruiters and interviewers to leave candidate feedback a lot quicker. Enabled their slack integration to notify interviewers to leave feedback.

• Since we are able to track recruiter performance metrics, they created sort of a competition among their team to see who left their feedback the quickest.

Learning

• Being proactive in bringing up observations and insights can showcase the value that you can bring as a strategic advisor to your customer without them having to ask you.

Tell me about a time you had a single champion in an account and had to multithread to other stakeholders. What worked, and what didn't?

Circumstance

• Back when I was at Front, one of my goals with a particular customer was to expand our product offering to other teams within their organization. Their support team was already a Front champion, and my goal was to identify other teams that could benefit from the product.

Action

• Once I was confident that I had built a strong relationship with my champion, I started to have conversations about other potential use cases within their company. I identified that their Customer Success team would be a potential great fit.

• I learned that for their digital customers, they employed a pooled model where customer inquiries were routed round robin style to different members of their team. They had piece mealed a solution together that was inefficient and clunky.

• This presented an opportunity to pitch Front. I relied on my champion to casually bring up Front to the Head of CS, and got permission to email their Head of CS directly.

Result

• After a number of discovery calls and demos, I was able to land an expansion and get their digital CSM team to use Front

Learning

• In previous expansion attempts with other customers, I would send a cold email to a prospect I was trying to expand to. More often than not, I would never receive a reply.

• I learned that it was important to build a strong relationship with your champion, and leverage your champion to make introductions.

• I also learned that your outreach emails need to contain some sort of value prop (e.g. our customer xyz was able to reduce their response time) to hook them in.

Tell me about yourself

I’m currently a Senior Customer Success Manager at Lever, where I manage a portfolio of mid-market and enterprise customers and help talent acquisition teams improve adoption, optimize recruiting workflows, and drive talent acquisition outcomes.

Over the past several years, I’ve managed a book of business worth approximately $5 million and have been responsible for everything from executive business reviews and success planning to renewals, expansions, and technical conversations around integrations and reporting. Some accomplishments I’m especially proud of include achieving 107% net revenue retention, 90% gross retention, and finishing at 110% of goal for President’s Club. I’ve had experience working at fortune 100 companies to mid stage startups.

What I’ve learned is that I’m particularly energized by consultative problem-solving—understanding a customer’s challenges, translating them into a solution, and demonstrating how technology can improve their business. I’m now looking for an opportunity where I can apply that combination of customer-facing, commercial, and technical experience while continuing to grow in a more strategic role.

Tell me about a customer you were close to losing. What signals did you see? What did you do? And how did it end?

A rep closes a deal and promises a customer something that the product doesn't do yet. The customer is now expecting it. Walk me through what you do

Tell me about a time you challenged or influenced a customer or stakeholder when you believed a different approach would lead to a better outcome.

Context:

One of the outcomes that was most important for my customer is maximizing recruiter efficiency in how they work and in their setup. Upon conducting a health audit of their instance, I noticed they had a huge library of offer letter templates, which consisted of letters to accommodate different types of offer conditions, languages,etc. I could see this being a huge challenge for them and made their offer process inefficient, as it requires them to search their entire library for the right offer letter.

Action:

• I brought this up to them on a call to better understand why they have so many offer letters. They felt this was the only way to accommodate for all of their different hiring scenarios.

• I told them there is a better way to do this by adding dynamic sections to the offer letters, which will only surface up relevant offer information based on inputs from the offer form. Doing this could drastically reduce their offer letter templates and provide more efficiency

• Conducted working sessions with customer to help audit their offer letters to clean up which ones they needed to keep

• Educated customers on adding dynamic to their offer forms .

Result:

• This resulted in being able to reduce almost half of their offer letters.

• It helped streamlined their offer process by making the offer process a lot quicker and more efficient.

Tell me an example of managing complex customer situations that required coordination across multiple internal teams and how you drove alignment through resolution.

Context:

I used to manage Allegiant Air. One time, customer notified me of a 2 urgent issues. 1) 155k + candidates were bulk anonymized. Customer was adamant that this was not done by them. 2) There was a report they had to run to meet a compliance deadline that was missing data. Customer had escalated both issues as urgent major issues and were not satisfied with the response and attention.

Action:

• First issue, I got brought in to escalate this through support and engineering leadership. We had to determine who in engineering could reverse the action. I had support go through the logs to determine what caused the bulk anonymization.

• Second issue, customer already had a support case open, but it was taking a while to resolve. I escalated this through support leadership and brought in a TAC member to troubleshoot issue.

• I briefed our CTO at the time, who was also Allegiant Air’s exec sponsor to hop on a call with Allegiant’s leadership to help provide context on the issues and actions we took to resolve.

Result:

• We were able find the right engineer to reverse the bulk anonymization action. We shared with customer that it actually an action that was attributed to a user

• Through escalations, we were able to assign a TAC consultant to troubleshoot the reporting issue and provide an updated report that included all the candidate data they needed. They were able to meet their deadline.

Learnings:

• Know your escalation paths and stress urgency, especially when it’s one of your highest paying customers.

• Provide frequent clear communication to customer on actions that are being taken.