It's Not Bad Candidates, it's Bad Scoping.

A leader I work with just wasted hours interviewing CSMs.

The problem wasn't the candidates. The problem was that nobody had defined what "good" actually looked like for their org before a single interview got booked.

I know this trap well, because I've fallen into it myself.

My Own Hiring Mistake

Years ago, I was scaling a team fast. I needed to staff up quickly, so I partnered with my internal recruiter, they ran the initial screens, and before I knew it my calendar was packed wall to wall with interviews.

A few meetings in, I knew something was off.

The candidates were good. Experienced, articulate, clearly capable people. But something wasn't clicking. Wrong fit, every time.

I kept giving the same vague feedback after every round. "Not quite right." "Something's missing." "Let's keep looking." My recruiter kept sourcing. I kept passing. Weeks went by.

Then it hit me: this wasn't on the candidates. It wasn't on the recruiter either. It was on me.

I had never actually scoped the role. I'd handed my recruiter a job title and a list of responsibilities and called that a hiring plan. I never got specific about what I actually needed this person to be able to do, on day one, in our specific motion, with our specific customers.

The Title Is Not the Job

Here's the truth nobody says out loud in Customer Success hiring: just because someone held the title CSM at their last company doesn't mean they're a fit for your CSM role.

"CSM" is one of the least standardized titles in the industry. At one company it means relationship management and renewal ownership. At another it means technical onboarding and product adoption. At another it means quota-carrying expansion sales with a support title. Same three letters on a resume, three completely different jobs.

If you're hiring against the title instead of the actual muscle your org needs, you're not filtering for fit. You're filtering for whoever wrote the best resume bullet points. That's how you end up with a stack of "good candidates, wrong fit" and no idea why.

What Changed When I Fixed It

Once my recruiter and I sat down and actually defined the role, everything changed.

We got specific about the skills this hire needed on day one versus the ones we could develop over time. We talked through the actual muscle the role required: was this person going to need to run technical implementations, or navigate C-suite renewal conversations, or both? Was this a book of 200 SMB accounts or 12 enterprise relationships? Those are different skill sets wearing the same job title.

Once we had that clarity, the pipeline got sharper almost immediately. My recruiter could screen against something real instead of guessing at what I meant by "strong CSM." My interviews got shorter, because I wasn't spending 45 minutes trying to figure out if someone was a fit. I already knew what I was looking for, so I could tell in the first fifteen minutes. And our hiring velocity took off, because we stopped wasting rounds on people who were never going to be right.

None of that came from a better job posting or a smarter recruiter. It came from doing the scoping work before the process started, instead of trying to figure it out interview by interview.

The Fix: Do This Before a Single Interview Gets Booked

If you're hiring for your CS org right now, here's the exercise, and it takes less time than one bad interview loop.

Write down the five skills that actually matter for your motion. Not a generic job description pulled from a template. The five things this specific person needs to be able to do, given your product, your customer base, and your business model.

Decide which of those are trainable and which need to already be there. Some things you can teach in the first 90 days. Some things you can't teach at all, and you need to hire for them directly. Know the difference before you start screening, or you'll end up rejecting people for gaps you could have closed yourself, or hiring people for gaps you can't.

Give your recruiter specifics, not just a title. "CSM" tells your recruiter almost nothing. "Someone who has run executive-level renewal conversations for a book of six-figure enterprise accounts" tells them exactly who to go find. Your recruiter is only as good as the brief you hand them.

Score resumes against that list, not years of experience or logo recognition. A candidate with eight years of CSM experience at a recognizable brand can still be the wrong fit if those eight years never required the specific skill your role actually needs. A candidate with three years at a company you've never heard of can be exactly right if they've been doing precisely the thing you need. Years and logos are lazy proxies. Your list is the real filter.

Skip This and You Pay for It Twice

If you skip this step, you're going to waste a ton of time. Not just yours. Your recruiter's, spent sourcing against the wrong criteria. Your candidates', spent interviewing for a role nobody could clearly describe to them. And eventually, if you hire the wrong fit anyway just to stop the bleeding, you'll pay for it a second time in ramp time, in performance issues, and in doing this whole search over again in six months.

Defining "good" is not a nice-to-have step in your hiring process. It is the hiring process. Everything else, the sourcing, the screens, the interviews, is just execution against a definition you either have or don't.

So before you book your next interview, stop and ask yourself the question that actually matters: what's the one skill your CSMs need to be successful in your org? If you can't answer that in one sentence, you're not ready to interview yet. You're ready to go define the role.