In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas reconnects with Porter Williams, VP of Customer Success at BrightHire, a hiring intelligence platform that helps teams run better, more consistent interviews. Porter was a guest about a year ago, and this follow-up conversation picks up where they left off — checking in on what has changed, what has stalled, and what has accelerated.
Porter shares how his team’s adoption framework has evolved in response to the rise of AI hiring tools, why getting customers past core adoption is no longer enough, how BrightHire’s acquisition by Zoom has shifted operational priorities, and what it really takes to build automation when your data is still living in PDFs.
What You’ll Learn
- Why core adoption is table stakes and what lies beyond it
- How BrightHire restructured its adoption framework around use cases and customer outcomes
- What early executive alignment looks like in practice and why it matters for renewals
- How team segmentation evolved to reduce context-switching and improve delivery
- What the biggest obstacles to CS automation actually are — and why data is usually the culprit
- How being acquired by Zoom changed BrightHire’s operational priorities without slowing them down
Key Insights & Takeaways
- Core adoption is necessary but not sufficient. Getting customers to baseline adoption provides ROI, but it’s also commoditizable. The real defensibility comes from driving customers into deeper, use-case-specific adoption that competitors can’t replicate.
- Executive alignment has to happen early. When implementation gets operational fast, the strategic conversation can get lost. Deliberately pairing CSM-led executive alignment with implementation-led technical setup keeps both tracks running.
- Outcomes have to live in the customer’s language. When customers justify the investment internally, they use their own metrics — not yours. Building toward that from day one is still hard to operationalize, but it remains the right north star.
- Automation is only as good as your data. Before you can automate anything meaningful, you have to get the right data into the right fields. That unglamorous work — backfilling records, standardizing inputs — is what makes everything else possible.
- Team bandwidth is a real strategic constraint. Parental leave, headcount gaps, and life events affect velocity just as much as tooling or process gaps. Naming that honestly is part of leading well.
- Acquisition doesn’t have to mean absorption. BrightHire is operating as an independent business unit within Zoom, preserving its pace and culture while gaining access to greater resources.
Podcast transcript
Intro
Irina (0:06 – 0:42)
Welcome to Mastering CS Candidate Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success with industry leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Porter Williams, VP of Customer Success at BrightHire, a hiring intelligence platform that helps teams run better, more consistent interviews. Porter was actually on the podcast about one year ago, so this is a bit of a follow-up conversation to see what has changed since then.
Porter, I’m really happy to have you back. Thanks for joining.
Porter (0:42 – 0:59)
Absolutely. It’s great to be back. So it’s been a busy year.
A lot has happened in my world, but I’m still at BrightHire, and BrightHire is still absolutely killing it. And it’s been a very exciting year.
Evolving the Adoption Framework: From Core to Deeper Use Cases
Irina (0:59 – 1:22)
I look forward to hearing all about it. The last time we spoke, we talked about building systems in CS that drive customer outcomes. Since then, how has the organization evolved?
Did things play out the way you expected? Worse? Better?
Porter (1:22 – 4:58)
I would say slower. Nothing is ever as smooth or as easy as you intend. Building systems around customer outcomes is still very much our team’s North Star.
What has evolved is reframing amongst my team how we think about adoption and categorizing the differences between core adoption and deeper adoption of our platform. We’ve recognized that there is a base level of core adoption of our core products. That is table stakes. And if that isn’t achieved, then it’s very hard to achieve any of the other promises of our platform.
That core adoption provides baseline ROI and business value just from pure efficiency. That is meaningful, but it’s also commoditizable. Core adoption is a lot less defensible in the market.
Something that’s happened a lot over the last year is that as AI tools are evolving very quickly, we are continuing to stay at the forefront of what people can do with the new AI capabilities in the hiring space, but we can’t get a customer to use those capabilities until they use these capabilities first. That’s the order of operations. We have to get them through this core adoption threshold, but there are lots of other tools that can be used, not as well, not as robustly, to achieve similar outcomes.
So we have to reach this core adoption threshold, but then we have to keep pushing. That’s one of the biggest differences of this past year — the speed of evolution and the importance of my team really internalizing that this matters. If a customer doesn’t reach this threshold, they will almost certainly churn. But getting there is not enough, because there are a lot of tools that make us replaceable. If we can get a customer to go beyond that into deeper adoption use cases — and we define those more by use case — then we are a lot more secure and defensible, because those are levels of value and functionality that competitive tools cannot match. And those goalposts will probably keep moving for us.
Our company has really embedded in its values the importance of velocity across the entire business. That evolution related to outcomes is probably one of the biggest things that’s changed. It was there a year ago, but it’s become much more important and explicit to our business strategy.
Operationalizing Executive Alignment and the Customer Journey
Irina (4:58 – 5:49)
I know. And I remember that you told me that customer outcomes should be where the metrics were, what you measure, and how you define success should always be tied to the customer turns, not just through internal metrics. So they should be driven by the customer.
And somehow it relates to what you said about adoption and basically changing and making sure that some boxes are tweaked in the user journey. But for the users who are the listeners for the first time, they do not know the previous conversation.
I’m curious, how is this connected with what your team does on a day-to-day basis?
Porter (5:50 – 9:12)
That philosophy of mine still holds true and has always been that when it comes time for a customer to tell their value story internally, it needs to be in their own internal metrics that their business values. Their internal stakeholders, every executive sponsor, will have to go to their CFO to justify the investment. And that intensity has only increased this past year.
That’s always been a philosophy I’ve believed in. I’ll be honest, very candidly, it’s still hard. It is hard to operationalize. And if I’m being really honest with myself, I don’t think we’re a whole lot better at that now than we were a year ago, frankly, which I’m a little embarrassed to say. But that’s hard, and it is still the way to go about it. It is still, when it comes time to publish a case study, that’s usually when those things come out.
We are now trying to better operationalize an approach of early executive alignment with the executive stakeholder. Because the way our implementation works, the executive stakeholder tends to step out pretty quickly as we get into very operational stuff very fast. That’s driven by an implementation manager and their operational counterpart. We’re trying to operationalize a consistent execution of early executive alignment, involving an executive on our side, the exec sponsor from the customer side, and their customer success manager.
So while the implementation manager is driving the nuts and bolts and the technical setup, the CSM is driving that strategic alignment and making sure we identify and agree on the vision of what the executive sponsor is going to be accountable for. What is the story they want to be able to tell? Why are they making this investment?
That gives us the roadmap for the deeper adoption use cases. Based on the vision of what they want to accomplish, we can say, okay, we’re going to reach core adoption, and this is the roadmap to do that. And then from there, it’s about use case categories, not verticals. If you want this outcome, you need this use case, which means we need to focus on getting your users into these parts of the platform. Once we reach core adoption, we’ll push in this direction.
For example, if a customer is focused on reducing their level of effort for hiring, meaning they want to reduce the hours people spend in hiring, we’re going to push them into this set of tools. If they want to focus on talent density and the quality of hiring decisions, we’re going to push them into a different set of tools. There are a couple of different use case categories that align to different ROI outcomes that a hiring leader or head of TA at a company would be trying to drive.
What It Took to Build the Framework: Process, Tools, and Team Workshops
Irina (9:13 – 9:43)
So it seems like you’ve buckled up the adoption framework that you have. It’s basically 2.0 or maybe even 3.0. I’m curious, what did it take to end up one year afterwards? What did it end out? What did it take in terms of people, tools, processes, everything?
Porter (9:46 – 11:46)
Where we’re at so far with this is mostly in the realm of process and team alignment around what are we going to ask for and how do we get to this. And then what do we do with it.
In terms of where we are lacking, the next piece of trying to operationalize this is in the tooling. The vision does not exist yet in reality, but the vision is that for every customer we’d be able to go into our CRM and identify what they are focused on in terms of outcomes, and that is aligned to these adoption signals that we need to see from the platform.
We have identified that in an analog way right now, but the ability to report on those adoption signals is not as easy as I want it to be right now. It’s there, but you have to go dig for it, and that’s an area that needs to get tooled up better to make it easy for my team to get those answers and have it just flow into a nice scorecard. But right now the framework is there of, okay, what do they care about and what are we looking for, and how does that affect the story we’re then going to try to tell nine months from now as we prepare for the renewal. And so that is a motion that is running with new customers.
With legacy customers, it’s a matter of, okay, let’s refresh the relationship and try to get realigned on the direction we’re going, which you would do with an existing customer anyway, because their priorities evolve over time.
Irina (11:47 – 11:49)
What did it take to end up with this framework?
Porter (11:50 – 14:58)
It’s been team workshops in terms of figuring out and defining, okay, in terms of the outcomes that we sell into, if an AE is selling to a customer and saying here’s all the stuff that you can get from BrightHire, what does a customer actually have to do to get those results? Because there can be a significant breakdown between that point and this point, especially when there’s an implementation in the middle that is highly operational. It’s very easy to lose the forest for the trees. So what actually needs to happen, and defining those behaviors, is the thing that we workshopped.
Then the thing that I’m actually working on right now is trying to orchestrate that customer journey. Right now, the customer journey is on paper and the team knows these are the things I’m supposed to be doing, but nothing is helping them along the journey of, okay, now it is time to be doing this, or hey, these are the things that matter to them, this is what needs to show up in this next touch point. That is what I’m working to orchestrate in the systems and tools right now, so that’s an open project.
We also have a company-wide OKR right now around driving these deeper adoption use cases. So every single month we’re doing a feature-focused webinar that my team is driving. Not a sales webinar, it’s customer only. It’s more of a workshop activity where we get into the system and give customers very practical guidance on here’s how you can use this to get this result. And then not just doing the webinar, but taking it and turning it into a toolkit that CSMs can use to follow up with their customers. So it’s a multi-channel adoption push.
Each month we’re picking a use case to really drive and focus on to help move the needle on adoption. We just ran one last week around helping recruiters and talent program managers use a specific piece of our platform to improve hiring decision quality for hiring managers. When people start using the tool, the question becomes, okay, what part of this actually helps me do that? That was the purpose of the webinar last week. Now we’re taking the results from that webinar and turning them into video snippets and one-pager guides that CSMs will use as follow-up over the next month. And then in parallel, next month we’ll have a new use case. Every month we’re just trying to drive this feature-focused adoption that helps our customers move into the deeper, wider surface area of our platform.
Scaling the CS Team and Evolving Segmentation
Irina (15:00 – 15:18)
I’m curious, what did you need to support all this change to support the implementation of the framework? What did you need to change into the team? How did the CS team organization change in order for you to be able to deliver all this?
What tweaks did you make?
Porter (15:18 – 16:46)
We’ve been evolving our segmentation model and aligning the different versions of our customer journey to those segmentation models. When we spoke a year ago, I was actually still personally running our scale segment, but my team has grown and that has now been taken on by someone else. We’re building scale tools in that motion to allow our team to communicate out to customers at scale a lot more, which is creating a lot more conversation touch points with customers and allowing us to do a lot more broadcasting, both in email and shared Slack channels with customers.
So there’s been a tooling element there, but in terms of segmentation, I’m continuing to expand my team. Part of that is having team members owning different segments so that they don’t have as much mode switching in the lifecycle they’re trying to deliver. That’s happening mainly around the mid-market and enterprise segmentation now. And then the tools that we develop in the scale motion will start cascading upward to help drive efficiency for all of the teams, but that’s where we build them.
The Biggest Challenge: Bandwidth, Data, and Automation
Irina (16:48 – 17:15)
What has been the biggest challenge that you had to overcome the last year with everything that you put in place? Because it’s like, you’ve been the new foundation where you upscale the existing foundation, you scale the team. There were a lot of things happening. So building the team, getting the internal alignment, coming up with a totally new philosophy.
What’s been the most challenging part?
Porter (17:17 – 21:27)
Here’s the cleaned-up version:
Honestly, the biggest challenge this past year has been team bandwidth. We’re a company that takes parental leave really seriously, and I had a rotating round of team members on parental leave with new babies. I haven’t had a fully intact team for six months, which means as the leader, I’ve been leaning in on those things and it has really slowed us down.
It’s one of those things where I’m so happy for my team members and their families, and I’ve been really happy to support them through this, but it’s hard. And it’s something I don’t feel like we talk about a lot. There’s a price to these more progressive family support policies, which I also know are taken for granted in Europe. The fact that our team members get the time they do is something I’m really proud of for our company, because not all companies give people the amount of time we do. It’s still nothing compared to what people get in Europe, but it’s more than many companies in the US do. And that actually got even stronger when our company got acquired by Zoom a few months ago, which I’m really happy about. But how we resource those things is hard, and that has slowed me down a lot in terms of having the bandwidth to make these changes within my team.
Finally, I feel like I can start moving a lot faster in the next six months than I was able to in the previous six months, so I’m feeling very energized about that.
One of the other big things that continues to be the mud you have to drag yourself through is data. Any kind of automation or intelligence you’re trying to build is very dependent on data, and getting the data where it needs to be in order to drive something is tricky. For example, I’m working through a project right now with my scale CSM on how to automate the renewal process. Doing that requires information that has historically been trapped in the PDF order form from a deal, which means in order to make their renewal plan, they have to go find that order form, read it, and manually pull the information out.
What we’re converting that into is a data step where we go and look at the order form to identify the pricing tier the customer was on, because the deal record in our CRM has the price they paid but not that specific piece of data. Now we’re creating that field on the deal so that when an AE closes a deal, that gets captured. Simple things like that, but without them, you can’t automate the process.
So now we’re doing a big backfill where we pull all the PDFs from last year, run them through AI, and extract that data point. Once we have this process in place, the next round of deals that come in will automatically have that data. But getting caught up on data integrity so that we have the inputs to automate with is a project in itself, and we’re working through it. I think we’ll be wrapped up on this one in the next couple of weeks, and then that piece of workflow will be automated. That’s the nitty gritty work of building toward that kind of automation. But once that’s there, we can do some pretty cool stuff with the tools that are available to us. We just have to get that data out of a thousand PDFs from last year. I know it’s silly, but this is the work.
What’s Next on the Automation List
Irina (21:28 – 21:45)
And you are totally right. We, in theory, everything looks simple. It’s actually those tiny little things that we have to do until we end up automating everything.
What else besides the renewal process is on your list to automate?
Porter (21:46 – 24:07)
Sequencing customer onboarding. Right now for an implementation, we meet with the customer and they have some things they need to go do. Then we have to go check: have they done it? We’re emailing back and forth until we’re ready to move to the next checkpoint.
What I’m wanting to do next is create automated feedback loops in the system so that as the customer does this thing, it automatically makes this update and moves us to the next step. In a high-touch implementation, that means I just have the information I need. I can run an AI model that tells me, okay, the customer’s done this, on your next call this is what you need to do, like a quick prep.
But at the lower end of my implementations, that allows me to set up automations where, okay, they hit this milestone, now trigger this communication for that SMB implementation playbook. It keeps moving, and I either didn’t need to do anything or all I needed to do was approve the action, either fully autonomous or semi-autonomous.
Right now that’s an easy thing to miss. When someone’s running an SMB implementation and it falls through the cracks, hey, this customer has actually been on this step for three weeks, what is going on? That’s a moment to lean in. Or hey, just keep it moving along so it’s not waiting on me to take the action. But right now it gets done, but it’s not being logged in a place that the system can run on.
Some of these things will be deterministic automations in the CRM, very much classic automation. Some of them are more AI playbooks using a different tool, where based on these things, here’s your suggested next step, here’s a draft of what is probably appropriate here. Not just telling you something that needs to be done, but helping get you there in a more evaluative way.
Being Acquired by Zoom: What Actually Changed
Irina (24:08 – 24:28)
You mentioned that BrightHire was acquired. Were there any downsides from an operational point of view? Did it slow down in any way?
Porter (24:28 – 27:56)
This is probably not the normal experience that folks are going to have when they get acquired, but BrightHire got acquired by Zoom in December, which was fantastic. We’ve had incredible momentum in the market, and our platform is all about hiring, and Zoom is the biggest hiring platform in the world. It gets used for more hiring conversations than anything else. It was a very exciting opportunity for the business.
What’s been unique is we’re continuing to operate as an independent business unit within Zoom. We are part of the Zoom business now, but we have the luxury of still very much running our game. None of our teams are being absorbed into the larger company. I have a new Zoom laptop, a new Zoom SSO, I submit expenses a different way, but one of the really important things that our CEO insisted on in the transaction is that we maintain our ability to continue running with the velocity we’ve been driving in the market. Zoom is a very different scale of business. They are enormous and they move at a different pace, and our pace in the market was part of what appealed to them about us. They don’t want to mess that up. So they’re allowing us to continue running our race. Very little is changing, but now we have a lot more resources to draw upon to get things done.
I feel really lucky in this regard. My team is not getting absorbed into the Zoom customer success team. I’m sure there will be greater collaborations and influence and potential absorption down the road someday, but not anytime soon. And that’s a blessing. We’re still running like crazy. Last year was a phenomenal year for BrightHire, and I think this next year is going to be just as phenomenal.
There is an evolution of accountability within our business though. I’ve always cared about GRR and NRR, gross revenue retention and net revenue retention. Historically, we cared a lot more about net revenue retention. One of the operational changes is that there’s a lot more focus on GRR now than there was a year ago, because it’s part of a reporting motion that matters in Zoom’s quarterly process. It’s a slight change, but it does change the conversation, and it’s a healthy move for my team. In my forecasting motion, I am talking about GRR a lot more. Over the last few years, GRR has been improving from decent to now trying to push it to really good, and that brings it into a level of focus that requires attention and effort. GRR is a metric that matters more now. It is an active part of executive conversations in a way that it just wasn’t in previous years.
Irina (27:57 – 28:34)
Porter, it was great to reconnect and hear how the last year unfolded since our previous chat. I really appreciate you coming back on the podcast. Maybe we’ll do another check-in in a year from now and hope the story continues.
I’m curious because for sure it will be an interesting journey for you and also the whole BrightHire team. So I’m going to monitor it closely. Thanks for coming in and to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in.
Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
