Hiring guides
Hiring your first support rep: a ten-day playbook for UK founders
When the first customer ticket arrives at 2am, who picks it up? A field guide to making your first support hire the one that scales.
The Adarna Team
Editors
Most founders hire their first support rep three months too late. By the time the Notion doc of triaged customer emails has crossed two hundred rows, the head of product is answering refund requests at midnight and the company has lost the thread of what its customers are actually asking for. The hire, when it comes, is rushed, and the wrong person sits in the most important seat in the business.
Customer support is not a cost centre. It is the seam between what you sold and what you actually deliver. Done well, it surfaces product bugs before they show up in churn data, it converts angry first-time buyers into testimonial-givers, and it teaches the company what its customers actually care about. Done badly, it teaches your customers to charge back.
What you are actually hiring for
The first support rep is not a ticket-handler. They are a translator. They translate customer confusion into actionable engineering tickets, translate engineering jargon into customer-readable answers, and translate emotional escalation back into problem-solving energy. If you hire on typing speed alone, you will get exactly that: someone who types fast.
Read a candidate's written reply to an angry customer. Does it sound like a human you would want to hear from at the worst moment of your day? If not, keep looking.
The four traits that consistently predict first-year performance, the ones the Adarna assessment process is built to measure, are these:
- Written empathy that lands without performing. Acknowledges the customer's actual situation, not the textbook one.
- Judgement under partial information. Knows when to escalate, when to commit, and when to say 'let me check'.
- Process discipline. Documents what they did. Hands over cleanly at end of shift.
- Curiosity about the product. Reads release notes. Knows the difference between a bug and a misunderstanding.
The ten-day shape
A startup that has never hired support before tends to do one of two extremes: spend three months on it, or hire the first person who can hold a conversation in English. Both are wrong.
The right shape is structured and fast: ten working days from brief to placement, with the bulk of the work happening upfront. Define the role, define what "good" looks like in writing, then run candidates against that bar, not against each other.
What to test for, what to ignore
Test for written response to a real customer scenario. Test for judgement on ambiguous cases. Test for how they think about an angry message at 11pm. Don't test for "culture fit". That is almost always shorthand for hiring people who look like you. Don't test on whether they have used your specific tooling. Tools are learned in two days; judgement is not.
The seat after the hire
The job of the first support rep is to design the role for the second one. Within three months they should have written your support handbook, set your response-time targets, documented your top fifteen recurring issues, and identified two product bugs that need fixing. If they have not done these things, the hire was wrong, and the lesson is to brief better next time, not to hire faster.