How We Took a DIY Approach to Hiring Our CSM—with a 28% Response Rate

Think Wiza is just for salespeople? 

Think again. 

It’s also a powerful recruitment tool that helps you reach the best job candidates so you can grow your team. We use it ourselves by pairing it with LinkedIn Sales Navigator for the best results. Here’s the step by step process we used to hire a Customer Success Manager—no recruiter required. 

Because job boards weren’t cutting it

At first, we posted our open role on job boards like Angellist and Indeed. We received plenty of applications, but they just weren’t what we were looking for. 

The people who we really needed to join our team, the people who already had the skills we needed, weren’t visiting job boards. 

These individuals already had jobs and weren’t on the market for a new one. To win them over, you must pursue these candidates and try to poach them away from their current company. Show them that your organization offers better growth potential, more money, and a better work environment. 

We turned to LinkedIn, the largest professional online network in the world, and used the advanced search features included in Sales Navigator to find the right people for our company. 

Finding the perfect candidates using Sales Navigator  

When you click into the search section of Sales Navigator, you have tons of filter options. To get started, we typed “customer success” into the “title” field. Since we’re a Toronto based company, we filtered for Canadians as well as remote workers from the United States.  

Our search turned up 46,000 results. 

Since Wiza is a tech company, we narrowed our search further to people who work in industries like computer software, information technology, and internet companies. 

We had 28,000 results. 

Wiza is a startup and we wanted to hire a customer success manager that’s familiar with working in a startup environment. We chose to keep their current company employee headcount between 11-500 employees. 

13,000 results. 

Still too wide of a net. 

So we took advantage of LinkedIn’s ability to pick up on keywords. For example, we use a service called Intercom, an in-app customer support messaging tool that is embedded into our website. Our customer success team uses Intercom to help our customers in real-time.  

Once we entered “Intercom” into the keyword field, LinkedIn Sales Navigator searched through every profile to see if they included this word. The results were hyper specific: we had 64 targeted results. (For example, one candidate wrote that she was familiar with using Intercom and similar tools in her About Me section.

Aside from keywords, try restricting the number of years they’ve been working at their current company. We narrowed down our search to include 1 to 5 years at their current company. If they’re less than a year into their job, they probably aren’t looking to make any changes. 

Search your competitors

Here’s where LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you even better search results. Remember how we talked about poaching from other companies? You can search for customer success managers currently working for your competitors using Sales Navigator. 

Let’s say I work at the company Ahrefs. One of my main competitors would be Semrush. In LinkedIn, I’ll keep the search filters for Canada and the United States as well as the job title “customer success.” Next, I’ll add Semrush into the “company name” filter. 

We now have a list of 8 people that definitely qualify for our open customer success manager role based on this competitor search. 

After compiling the results from all of these searches, we came up with 735 candidates. 

Use Wiza to export your LinkedIn leads

Start by clicking on the  “export with Wiza” button and fill in the name of your new list, something like “Canadian CS Manger – poaching.” You’ll be prompted to choose between three types of export options: 

1. Scrape only – doesn’t include email addresses
2. Prospect – includes work and personal email addresses
3. Enrich – includes email addresses plus phone numbers, social media, and more

Next, you’ll see a pop up window that says “customize output.” You can choose to export work emails and/or personal emails. Interestingly, we found very good results contacting people on their work emails. Keep both email options turned on as personal emails can work as a backup if someone doesn’t have their work email connected to LinkedIn. 

Finally, click the “launch scan” button and you’ll have your results in 10 minutes. Your contacts will be split between valid email, risky email, or no email. Since we’re already working with such a large list of candidates, we chose to download just the valid email results.  

Your new lead list will show information like: 

• Email addresses
• First and last name
• Current job title
• Current company
• LinkedIn URL
• Industry and sub-industry
• Company size
• Age of company
• Company annual revenue
• Company funding

The last step is to use a mail merge tool to upload your CSV file and map the columns into Wiza’s email platform. Once you’ve imported your list, you can build your email sequence and start recruiting. 

Use our successful recruiting template  

We usually recommend 6 to 7 follow-up emails over a few months for sales sequences, but for recruiting, we kept it to one main email and one follow-up email. Since we have a high number of quality candidates we’re working with, if someone isn’t interested in replying after two emails, we move on. 

Here’s the template we used:

Hi NAME,

I recently stumbled upon your LinkedIn profile while researching potential candidates for a JOB TITLE.

I’ve been over it a few times, comparing it with our current open position, and have forwarded your info to our hiring manager. We’re impressed with your expertise and think you’d make an excellent addition at Wiza.

We are an early-stage start up with a lean, focused team that was recently recognized as an ACCOLADE.

If that sounds interesting to you, feel free to schedule a 30-minute intro call with someone on our TA team CALENDLY LINK. 

Job Description LINK

Thanks for your time.

I highly recommend using this template, we saw great results from this template. Check out our stats: 

• Email open rate = 58%
• Response rate = 27%
• Interviews held rate = 12%

Don’t just take our word for it, here are some of the responses we received from customer success managers: 

Our 6 top takeaways for recruitment 

This recruitment campaign taught us a few best practices along the way. Here are our top 6 recommended tips for using LinkedIn Sales Navigator advanced search filters to find your next new hire.   

1. Use candidates’ work emails for a better response rate
2. Aim for a small, targeted campaign rather than a larger, catch-all approach
3. Use variations of the job title like: CSM, customer success specialist, etc
4. Search for employees at companies that you admire or are similar to yours. Always search for candidates who work at your competitors 
5. Filter based on current and past company experience 
6. Use the keyword search to find candidates with the right experience (hint: look at your job description for keywords)

Next time you need to hire a new member for your team, use the power of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Wiza to watch the interviews roll in. 
If you’re interested in learning how to use templates for sales outreach, get started with these 11 free templates.