How to hire your first chatter
A shortlist, a trial week, and the four questions that tell you more than any interview answer.
Hiring your first chatter is mostly a filtering problem, not an interviewing problem. The people who are good at this are rarely the best talkers in a video call — they are the ones who write clearly under pressure.
Start with the trial, not the interview
Ask for a written sample rather than a live interview. Give someone a scenario: a fan who has not replied in two weeks and is clearly drifting. Ask them to write the reply.
You learn three things from one exercise: their tone, whether they ask clarifying questions when a brief is vague, and whether they respect your brand voice or overwrite it.
The four questions worth asking
- What is the first thing you send a new subscriber, and why?
- How do you decide when to stop upselling in a conversation?
- What do you do when a fan asks for something outside the content policy?
- Show me a conversation that did not go well and what you changed afterwards.
Question three is the one that matters most. The answer tells you whether they have actually done this.
Pay structure that keeps people
A guaranteed base with commission on top outperforms commission-only almost every time. Commission-only churns hard, and churn is expensive: you re-train from zero and your fans notice the tone change.
On hours
Overlap is the part agencies get wrong most often. If your audience is split between the US and Europe you need coverage across both windows, which means either two part-time people or one person whose hours genuinely flex. Decide which before you post the role.