Customer success career advice: a talent playbook for CS job seekers and hiring managers 

Quick summary: This ZERO-IN 2025 keynote distilled practical customer success career advice from six experts for both job seekers and hiring managers, ranging from recruitment and titles to “fit,” community, and training. 

This October, six customer success leaders took to the ZERO-IN stage to officially launch The Customer Success Talent Playbook in a keynote session led by the book’s creator and curator, Swati Garg.

As founder & CEO of Melo Associates, Swati had talked to thousands of candidates and hiring managers, recognized that she kept seeing the same patterns and the same pain, and realized that there wasn’t a single, reusable resource that spoke clearly to both sides of the talent equation.

You can watch the keynote in full here, complete with audience Q&A, or keep reading for our top takeaways from the session.

Six essential pieces of customer success career advice from the experts.

Here are the biggest ideas from the session—and how you can start using them as customer success career advice to strengthen your talent strategy, whether you’re hiring or job searching.

1: When you’re recruiting, treat customer success talent like customers.

Swati’s advice began with the job search itself. She shared that only about 2% of applicants make it to an interview. If you’re a candidate, she advises:

• Be selective about the roles you pursue.
• Translate your experience into the language of the job description.
• Use your network intentionally, instead of relying purely on “Easy Apply” .

If you lead a CS team and are hiring, Swati recommends that you take the time to map a candidate journey the same way you would map a customer journey. 

Swati cautions employers to be mindful that the candidate experience can impact revenue. She showcased a UK entertainment company that discovered 18% of its rejected candidates were current or potential customers; their impersonal candidate experience was costing them about $5.5M annually. Once they discovered this, they redesigned the process to be more empathetic, communicative, and respectful.

2: Consider the signals you send with titles and salaries. 

Parul Bhandari, CEO of CustomerXSuccess and founder of South Asian Success, focused on titles and salaries: details that quietly shape careers and retention. 

“Titles tell the world internally and externally who we are,” she said, “and the process of how we create titles needs to change.” 

Creative titles like User Delight Manager or Director of Customer Happiness might sound fun, but they confuse expectations. Internally, people don’t know what power or scope the role carries. Externally, candidates and recruiters have no idea where it sits relative to standard CS titles. 

Mis-titling also often correlates with being underpaid and under-valued, which can make the employee a flight risk. For leaders, that means: 

• Rationalize titles across your CS org and tie them to clear responsibilities and salary bands.
• Use market data (salary surveys, job boards, even AI tools) tovalidate whether your structures are realistic. 

For individual CSMs, this is an invitation to understand the market language for what you do. If your title doesn’t match the scope of your work, gather data and start a conversation. It’s not just about ego; it’s about career mobility and long-term customer success career advice you can apply to yourself.

3: Structure, visibility, and opportunity into your career paths.

Elizabeth Blass, Chief Customer Officer at Karbon, focused on the importance of structured career paths and personal ownership of career progression. “No one will ever care more about your career than you,” she pointed out. 

She laid out career paths for individual contributors, people managers, executives, and those who don’t want to manage people but still want to grow. Each path is broken down by the skills and traits you need to get the role, what you’ll collect on the job, and suggested activities to move toward the next level. 

As Elizabeth put it, “The structure creates visibility, and the visibility creates opportunity.”  For CSMs and emerging leaders, that means:

• Document your wins.
• Speak your goals out loud.
• Ask for stretch assignments. rather than waiting for someone to tap you on the shoulder 

For CS leaders, adapt (don’t reinvent) a clear progression framework so your team can see what’s possible and your customer success talent understands how to grow with you. This kind of internal customer success career advice keeps strong talent from looking elsewhere.

4: Redefine “fit” to build truly inclusive CS teams.

Ejieme Eromosele, VP of Customer Growth at Quiq and founder of Success in Black, addressed the often vague idea of “fit” in hiring customer success talent and how to define it in a way that supports inclusion and performance. 

Ejieme’s optimal “fit” framework includes three dimensions:

• Skills and competencies—the actual job to be done
• CS organization maturity: Are you building from scratch, or joining a scaled organization with thousands of CSMs?
• Company context and culture: segment, product type, and, crucially, the real culture—who gets promoted and recognized, and why 

For candidates, this is a reminder that you have agency. Rather than ask if you can get the job, ask, “Will I thrive here?” 

For hiring managers, be honest about where your CS org really is on the maturity curve and what your culture actually rewards—then hire accordingly. 

5: Community and brand are your underused career accelerators.

Julie Fox, Global Director of Customer Success at Cin7, focused on the role of community and personal brand in accelerating CS careers and improving hiring outcomes for customer success talent. 

Her message to candidates: don’t wait until you need a job to show up in the community. Build a network and be active in it. Ask questions. Share what you’re experimenting with. Be visible about your journey, not just your polished outcomes.

This kind of proactive networking is powerful, real-world customer success career advice. 

And to hiring managers: your next great customer success talent hire may already be active in the CS community—so be present and engaged in order to find them. 

6: Don’t hire great CS talent, then leave them on their own. Train them. 

To close the loop, Kristen Hayer, Founder & CEO of The Success League, spoke about training and development as the mechanism that sustains all customer success talent decisions.

You can do everything else right—recruitment, titles, career paths, community—and still lose people if you don’t invest in their growth. Kristen’s advice:

• If you’re an employee, own your education. There are more free and low-cost ways to learn CS skills than ever before.
• If you’re a manager, it’s your responsibility to educate yourself and your team and to invest in your customer success talent—whether that’s with a formal budget or a scrappy book club.

How can you put this customer success career advice to work? 

The strength of The Customer Success Talent Playbook is that it’s designed to be used. If you want to make customer success talent a true growth lever for your CS org, you don’t have to overhaul everything at once.

Pick one small move from the playbook:

• Tighten a job description and improve the candidate journey.
• Clean up a confusing title and align it with real expectations.
• Have an honest career conversation with a team member, and one with yourself.
• Rewrite what “fit” means on your team.
• Show up to a community event and ask a real question.
• Start a simple learning ritual, even if it’s just a monthly article or book discussion.