Last week, I spoke with Jazmin Lewis, who leads Customer Success at hackajob, a fast-growing tech hiring platform. With her extensive experience in both B2B and marketplace dynamics, Jazmin shared valuable insights into how data drives customer success and product development. Here's what we discussed:
Last week, I spoke with Jazmin Lewis, who leads Customer Success at hackajob, a fast-growing tech hiring platform. With her extensive experience in both B2B and marketplace dynamics, Jazmin shared valuable insights into how data drives customer success and product development. Here's what we discussed:
Jazmin's team is responsible for everything post-sale, focusing on driving usage and adoption. She explained their approach:
"We get introduced to a customer at the point of a subscription kickoff, and we're there to align the customer's goals with what they want to achieve on the platform initially and then drive usage and adoption. That's the core function of my team."
Jazmin emphasized the high-touch nature of their CS team:
"We're quite a high-touch CS team, and there are definitely customers who see us as an extension of their own teams at times. Often customers will say to us, 'Can you join our team meeting and inform the team about what they need to do on the platform?'"
hackajob operates as a two-sided marketplace, balancing the needs of job seekers and employers. Jazmin highlighted the importance of this balance:
"We're a two-sided marketplace, things change so quickly. Supply and demand have to marry up to be able to create that magic moment of a candidate and a company actually speaking. If we don't have enough of a sense check on the demand or supply side at any point, those things misalign."
Jazmin's team uses data extensively to understand customer behavior and drive success. She outlined several key areas:
1. Usage and Engagement: "We go really deep into usage data. How often are people logging in? How many candidates are they reviewing? Of those candidates they're reviewing, how many are they progressing?"
2. Algorithm Effectiveness: "If it means that they are looking at 100 candidates and only progressing five candidates, something's not working in the algorithm. We need to go fix it."
3. Diversity and Inclusion: "As part of hackajob intelligence we have product features that will tell you at the rate at which you review female, male, ethnically diverse candidates, and are you progressing? Is there any unconscious bias in who you're progressing with?"
Jazmin emphasized the value of their first-party data:
"All of our data is first-party. We don't scrape from anywhere. So candidates have to sign up to hackajob and become part of the community to be able to use the product. When we are asking candidates for their DE&I data, they're giving it to us upfront and we've got about an 80% completion rate."
Jazmin's team leverages data to drive customer conversations and identify upsell opportunities:
"You go into a QBR and say to a decision maker, 'Here's what we're seeing in the data. Here's some recommendations of what we can do. Oh, we can also offer you this suite of products to help solve the problems from last week’s call that you mentioned you had.'"
They also use comparative data to demonstrate value:
"We could also then compare people to competitors of theirs. So we might say, 'Okay, well, in the area that you're recruiting in, here's are your peers, and here's how they perform on the platform and this is what they're doing, which is why they're outperforming you.'"
Jazmin described their process for incorporating customer feedback into product development:
"We have sessions with the team and we have a system where you can post in any ideas that customers have. Customers also have a feedback session in the tool. As a group we use products like Miro and have board sessions where we just sit with the product team for an hour and discuss current ideas."
She emphasized the importance of solving customer pain points:
"Fundamentally, how we're making decisions at the moment is: ‘what pain are we trying to solve for a customer?’ If we're building something and it's not solving a customer's pain point, it won't be built, at least in the short term. It has to be solving for something very specific or something that's going to benefit the marketplace as a whole."
1. High-touch customer success is crucial in complex B2B SaaS environments, especially for two-sided marketplaces.
2. Leveraging first-party data can provide unique insights, particularly for sensitive areas like diversity and inclusion.
3. Using data to compare customers against their peers can be a powerful tool for demonstrating value and driving renewals.
4. Product development should be driven by solving specific customer pain points or benefiting the entire marketplace.
5. Balancing the needs of both sides in a marketplace is essential for creating "magic moments" of value for customers.
As Jazmin succinctly put it, "If we don't have enough of a sense check on the demand or supply side at any point, we’re fundamentally misaligned." By leveraging data effectively and maintaining a deep understanding of customer needs, hackajob is able to drive success for both job seekers and employers in the competitive tech recruitment space.