Ritchie Tendencia once set out to hire roughly a hundred people in two weeks. For a recruiter, that is an ambitious fortnight. For the founder of a bootstrapped outsourcing business, it is also an invitation for every weak point in the hiring process to introduce itself at once.
In his account of the exercise, published in May 2024, the action began with planning. His team mapped backwards from the required hires, chose recruiting channels, collected feedback and automated repeated tasks. Processes that failed to produce results were discarded. The headline number was memorable; the method was a series of revisions. Even a hiring sprint, it seems, benefits from knowing where the finishing line is.
Reported by Tendencia.
His more recent writing offers an interesting companion to that story. Faced with a growing support backlog, he describes looking beyond the obvious proposal to recruit. Old conversations carried over from a migration, uneven workloads and assignment problems were contributing to the queue. Extra people would have increased capacity while leaving several causes untouched. A founder whose business includes supplying staff was examining whether the staffing request made sense.
The recruiter becomes the employer
Tendencia arrived at entrepreneurship with a recruiting career that included AppDynamics, Facebook, now Meta, Houzz and Mixpanel. At Mixpanel, his roles progressed from senior technical recruiter to head of technical recruiting. These were businesses where finding a candidate meant understanding a technical job, persuading someone to consider it and helping both sides decide whether the match deserved a future.
That background gave him a practical starting point for CSV Now. He had spent years introducing people to other companies’ possibilities. Now he had to make an introduction on behalf of his own. “Being new, all I had was my name and my reputation,” he recalled. Recruiting experience could travel with him; an established employer’s recognition could not simply be packed into the same suitcase.
CSV Now’s proposition concerns smaller businesses that need offshore customer support without the budget or scale of a large corporation. Its delivery teams operate in Cebu, Philippines. Tendencia discussed that market in a June 2025 appearance on Beyond Borders. The commercial question is straightforward: how does a growing company add dependable support while keeping enough control over the customer’s experience?
Hiring is only the beginning of that obligation. Tendencia has described replacing a broad online learning platform, which employees were using less than expected, with training delivered in person and tailored to the work. He also outlined plans for a leadership development program in 2024. There is a useful candour in the first example. Buying access to learning is an easy decision to announce. Discovering what people will actually use requires another conversation.
A dashboard with excellent manners
As his attention turns to support operations, Tendencia keeps returning to the gap between a completed action and a solved problem. In one account, the number of closed conversations increased, giving the appearance of better productivity. A closer look showed reopened conversations, transfers between teammates and customers whose issues remained unresolved. The chart was perfectly capable of looking cheerful without consulting the customer.
His criticism is specific. Response speed, handling time and ticket counts can describe how a team works, yet leave out what the work achieves. He argues that support also affects retention, onboarding, product adoption and trust. Seen through that lens, a support budget buys more than replies. The important question becomes what those replies allow a customer to do next.
He also challenges the instinct to treat every incoming ticket as work that must simply be processed. Some contacts originate in a confusing product, a weak process or an unclear explanation. A team can become very efficient at addressing the same difficulty for successive customers. Efficiency then lends the original difficulty a rather comfortable hiding place.
Support sees the question. The cause may belong elsewhere in the company.
In another post, Tendencia describes the particular danger of successful frontline improvisation. Experienced agents can compensate for missing documentation, unclear policies and broken handoffs. The immediate issue disappears from the queue, along with some of the evidence that a wider repair is needed. An employee’s resourcefulness can become an invisible subsidy to a faulty process.
That makes his argument about leadership more interesting than a request for better reporting. He wants support involved earlier in product changes, onboarding decisions, refund rules and AI workflows. These choices can create demand before the first ticket arrives. A support manager who can explain that connection has something useful to contribute before launch day, when there is still time to alter the decision.
Who owns the clock?
A case can leave one inbox and remain very much in someone’s life. In October 2026, Tendencia described cleaning up a frontline queue, then recognizing that escalated work could form another backlog. The specialist receives the case. The frontline count improves. The customer continues to wait, possibly without knowing who is now responsible for the next step.
His proposed discipline is to give escalations an owner, a reason, a next action, visibility into their age and a route back when the obstacle is removed. These are modest requirements. Their absence can turn a transfer into a place where work acquires a new status and loses its momentum. Tendencia’s question is who keeps watching the elapsed time until the matter is actually resolved.
The same curiosity appears in a support experiment involving concurrent work. His team reduced how many conversations an agent could carry, aiming to improve focus. That exposed another problem: a person could have several assigned conversations with only a few moving forward. Restricting the amount held at once did not automatically give each case a next action. Capacity and movement needed separate attention.
“And clarity is one of the few things that scales.”
Ritchie Tendencia
His writing about confusion gives these observations a common language. Employees need to know who owns a task, what acceptable work looks like, when to escalate and how decisions happen. Without that clarity, managers become destinations for questions that the operation should already answer. The organization may have enough people while making it unusually difficult for them to proceed.
He applies similar care to reopened cases. A repeat contact might follow an agent’s premature closure, an automated workflow, a developing issue or a policy that prevented a full solution. Those causes call for different responses. Treating the reopen rate as an automatic verdict on an employee skips the investigation. A score can tell a manager where to look without settling who deserves the blame.
The answer after the answer
AI gives this concern another setting. Tendencia argues that an automated conversation can appear resolved while creating repair work later: a human corrects the answer, the customer returns or another queue inherits the consequence. He wants support leaders to specify which decisions an AI system can make, when human judgment takes over and who remains responsible when an answer goes wrong.
He has proposed the name Verified AI Resolution Rate for a measure that asks whether the answer was correct and the problem remained settled. His criteria include checking for repeat contacts, human reversals and downstream repairs. The proposal follows the result beyond the chat window. Its attraction lies in asking a business to inspect the consequences of an answer before awarding itself credit for delivering one.
A conceptual illustration of Tendencia’s proposed verified-resolution approach, rather than a performance claim.
Even the thread can be the wrong unit of attention. Tendencia describes a customer returning the next day in a new conversation. The system can register one closure and one new contact while the customer experiences a single unfinished problem. Looking only for reopened threads misses that continuity. “Did the problem stay solved?” is his compact way of asking for the longer view.
His doubts extend to satisfaction scores. A customer might leave happy because a process worked, or because an experienced employee rescued a process that failed. The scores can match while the underlying operations differ. Tendencia says this has increased his interest in consistency. A company would presumably prefer a service that works reliably to one that requires a small act of heroism at every other desk.
The career that began with finding people now offers a running examination of what happens after they arrive. Tendencia still runs a business built around teams. His public work increasingly concerns the conditions that let those teams be useful: clear ownership, sensible measures and a willingness to follow a case beyond its convenient stopping point. A filled role is a beginning. The work, as customers are apt to remind any business, continues.