Hiring guides
A customer support job description template that filters, not just describes
Most support job ads attract volume and select for nothing. Here is a template you can lift, plus the reasoning behind each line and the three phrases to delete on sight.
The Adarna Team
Editors
A support job ad has one job, and it is not describing the role. It is filtering. A good ad makes the wrong people close the tab and the right people feel recognised. Most ads do the reverse: they are so generic that everyone applies, which means you pay for the filtering later, by hand, across two hundred CVs. The template below is the one we use. Lift it, change the specifics, keep the structure.
The template
Customer Support Specialist, [Company]
[Remote, working [09:00 to 17:30 UK time]] · [Full-time] · [Rate or range]
The job. You will be the first person our customers talk to. That means [email and live chat], roughly [40 to 60] conversations a day, about [describe the product in one plain sentence]. Most are straightforward. Some are not, and those are the ones we care about how you handle.
What the first month looks like. Week one you read, shadow and ask questions. Week two you answer the easy half with someone checking your replies. By week four you own the queue during your hours and escalate what needs escalating. We will know if this is working by [specific signal, e.g. "your replies stop needing edits"], and so will you.
You will do well here if. You write clearly under mild pressure. You would rather say "I do not know, let me find out" than guess. You notice when five people ask the same thing in a week and you tell someone. You are comfortable being the only support person on shift.
You will not enjoy this if. You want a script for every situation. You want to move into [sales / engineering] within six months. You need someone checking in hourly.
Practicalities. [Rate, paid monthly in GBP/USD]. [13th month pay or equivalent]. [Health allowance]. [Equipment stipend]. [Holiday]. [Public holidays: whose?]. We are [contractor / employed] and happy to explain exactly what that means.
How to apply. Send [what]. Then reply to this one question in no more than 150 words: [a real scenario from your queue]. We read the answer before the CV.
Why each part is there
| Section | What it filters for |
|---|---|
| Volume and channel, stated numerically | People who want a quiet job self-deselect. Nobody is surprised in week two. |
| "What the first month looks like" | Signals you have thought about onboarding. The best candidates read this as competence and it is often why they pick you. |
| "You will not enjoy this if" | The highest-leverage paragraph in the ad. It costs you the wrong applicants, which is the point. |
| The written question | Selects on the actual job. Nobody can outsource a 150-word judgement answer to a CV writer. |
| Practicalities, in detail | Removes the anxiety that makes good candidates hesitate. Vagueness reads as something to hide. |
The three phrases to delete on sight
- "Rockstar / ninja / superstar." It selects for people who enjoy being called a rockstar. That is not correlated with anything you want in a support queue.
- "Fast-paced environment." Everyone writes it, so it carries no information. If you mean the volume is high, say the number. If you mean it is chaotic, say that instead and let the right person say yes anyway.
- "Other duties as required." Candidates read this as "the job is not defined". They are usually right, and the good ones apply elsewhere.
If a sentence in your job ad would be equally true of every other support job in the country, it is doing nothing. Cut it or make it specific.
The one thing most ads are missing
Put the rate in. The arguments against are all about your convenience, and the cost lands entirely on your applicant pool. Ads with a stated rate get fewer applicants and better ones, because the people who would have withdrawn at the offer stage never start. If you genuinely cannot publish a number, publish a range and mean it.
This matters more, not less, when hiring internationally. A candidate in Manila weighing your role against three others cannot afford to spend a week on a process that ends at a number they would have declined on day one. Withholding it does not win you a negotiation. It just filters for people with time to waste.
After the ad
A good ad narrows two hundred applicants to forty. Something still has to narrow forty to three, and that part is where most first hires actually go wrong. We set out the traits that predict first-year performance, and the questions that surface them, in our piece on support interview questions.