Intrro: Scaling Stories: Recent Episodes

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It was great to catch up with Travis Baker, the VP of Talent Acquisition at Boulevard, as part of our Scaling Stories podcast.

Boulevard is a Client Experience Platform which is purpose-built for appointment-based, self-care businesses. Its mission is to “make it easier for everyone to look and feel their best”.

Travis has had a remarkable professional journey for more than 15 years, which includes stints at NextRoll, Carta and leading the tech recruitment at Zoom during the height of the pandemic when the video conferencing platform was setting the world alight.

The strategy at Zoom was to “build a warm lead pipeline”, says Travis, and “watch people’s careers develop and help them understand that Zoom could help them in their career and help them develop skill-sets and be a great destination to grow and contribute at a high level”.

This patient approach is a stark contrast to what Travis calls a “transactional sourcing method which is always gonna be slower and highly reactive”.

Travis says he benefited from starting his career at a recruitment agency, Aerotek, and describes agency life as “a tremendous boot camp for recruiting. It teaches you the fundamentals and really drills it into you. And it’s a high performance culture…it really weeds out folks who can rise to the occasion and those who can’t”.

In fact, Travis says that his colleagues with agency backgrounds are “some of the highest performers that I’ve ever had on my teams”.

“The basics of recruiting is it’s a numbers game. At the end of the day, if you have challenges that you’re encountering in the business, you can almost always solve it with volume and effort and hard work.”

As he’s gained more experience, Travis has learnt the value of developing meaningful relationships with candidates rather than simply ticking off names on a spreadsheet.

“There’s an over-reliance on looking at somebody’s profile and making an indication as to whether or not they’re a viable candidate,” Travis says. “I don’t think that's good practice. I think you have to talk to folks and you have to hear their story.”

“I find the people who are having the most conversations – you know, in-person conversations – they tend to be the most successful.”

It was great to speak with Travis – head over to our podcast page and have a watch ‘n’ listen.

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For this  Scaling Stories podcast we were delighted to speak with Jason Holness, a senior Talent Acquisition and People Success Manager at Reveal, a platform dedicated to helping B2B companies leverage their partnerships.

Jason was formerly a teacher and has worked in cultural curation within the museum space, so he offers a unique and distinctive voice on questions relating to company culture.

At Reveal, Jason and the team have built an interview kit which helps interviewers assess candidates objectively and probe for answers that give the fullest picture.

“These questions are often based upon the company’s values,” Jason explains. “We ask questions to test their adaptability, to see how well they’re solving problems or how well they function under stress or pressure. We ask questions around their optimism and test how well they collaborate. Each of these questions in the kits are tied to one of our company’s values, which is important for the culture.”

Jason also hosts workshops on “cultural competence” so that in a diverse, international workplace, hiring managers and staff are attuned to differences in behaviour and outlook.

“If we are a bit culturally competent, we know how best to break the ice and to better interact with the candidates and the people that we meet on a daily basis.”

In terms of “culture fit”, Jason starts with the principle that you should “know what the company values are, and really knowing the team and whether or not this candidate would fit well”. 

And in music to our ears, Jason is an advocate of employee referrals. At Reveal, Jason and the team put in place an employee leaderboard system for referrals, with incentives like a €2,000 reward. This “gamification” approach has been a “win-win” for all.

On the Intrro blog you can read more bright ideas to boost referrals. And for more insights from talent leaders, head to our Scaling Stories podcast page.

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In these shaky economic times, we recruiters are understandably keen to demonstrate ‘value’ to our organisations. So for our latest Scaling Stories podcast, who better to speak to than the smart and perceptive Emily Zahuta, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at Lattice.

Lattice is of course the ‘people success platform’ which, in Emily’s words, “helps companies drive performance and engage their employees to do their very best work”.

In our conversation, Emily makes a compelling case that TA’s responsibilities should go way beyond onboarding, and include certain functions that are traditionally associated with HR.

“I think we’ve gotten away with being on the front line of hiring,” Emily says. “We build the relationships with the candidates; we get them excited about joining a certain role in these companies; we hire them for a price that we all feel is fair, and then we pass them onto onboarding for the most part, and we say ‘good luck. Hope you love it… we’re off to focus on the next role’. And I think there’s a really big miss in that.”

Emily makes the point that TA professionals amass huge knowledge about the candidate, like “what’s important to this individual, what their fears are, what they’re excited about, what their growth tracks should look like based on what we’ve discussed”, but all too often, that knowledge evaporates within an organisation.

“It’s tricky because I’ve worked under leaders who say, ‘attrition is not your issue’... [But] my point is, yeah, it is our job. If we’re saying we’ll build the interview process; we’ll build the panel of folks; in fact, we’ll even tell you what questions to ask then. Why shouldn’t we be measuring if those things are actually successful in hiring someone that does their job correctly?”

As Emily explains, TA should be advising on all things talent related, not just getting those bright sparks through the door. For companies to thrive, TA leaders need to adopt a ‘talent delivery’ mindset, or what you might call ‘total workforce management’.

“In a shaky economy, in a really funky global environment, what we have is a team that really needs to get to the nitty gritty of what the business is trying to solve.”

Emily talks about “expanding the value of what we’re doing”, which essentially boils down to being “better than outside resources” like recruitment agencies.

If you’re a tad nervous about the future, Emily’s wise words provide hope that we recruiters can recalibrate our roles and add value in ever-changing ways.

Check out our blog on quality of hire – a key theme in our chat with Emily – and for more insights from TA leaders, head over to our Scaling Stories podcast page.

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In Scaling Stories podcast, we spoke with Sean Behr, CEO of Fountain, the high-volume hiring platform that empowers companies with an hourly workforce to streamline and scale their recruiting operations across the globe.

In a world where the perfect candidate is often idealised as a straight-out-of-Harvard MBA grad who speaks 17 languages and plays the clarinet, it was refreshing to hear Sean’s perspective on the value of candidates in the wider workforce.

Fountain’s mission, according to Sean, is “to open opportunities for the global workforce. That’s why we exist.”

“Our specific focus is the blue collar, grey collar, hourly worker. The frontline worker, right?”

Sean makes the point that blue collar workers – from delivery drivers to nursing staff and call centre operators – “really power our economies around the world”.

“I think what we’ve all learned over the last couple of years is how critical hiring and retaining and finding the right people for your business is.”

Sean challenges the orthodoxy that says CVs are always the best indicator of a candidate’s qualities.

“If you’re hiring somebody to stock shelves in a retail store, someone’s CV is probably a lot less valuable,” he says. “In fact, you could argue it’s sort of counterproductive.”

Therefore, Sean argues, “having the right technology to hire those people is really critical”.

Sean illustrates the point by explaining how for certain roles, it’s a question of volume, rather than finding that rare needle in a haystack.

“When you’re hiring a marketing person or a finance person or a salesperson, you’re typically hiring one really perfect person for your organisation. You’re looking for the best possible fit for your organisation. When you’re hiring 400 warehouse workers across the country, it’s a different game.”

Indeed, if you’re hiring at this sort of scale, it makes sense to review the quality of your candidate experience.

“Whoever does really great engagement, [and] who really gives you a great experience – but does it quickly – probably has the competitive edge,” Sean says.

We’ve previously covered how credentials aren’t everything, and in our discussion, Sean shares some sage advice on how talented candidates can really shine.

“Become known as the person who solves the biggest problems,” Sean says. “If you become known as the best problem solver, you will never have to work on a resume ever again in your life.”

Finally, Sean reflects on what has been “a crazy couple of years” for recruiting.

“You know, going back over the last three years, you could argue recruiters were the least important people in 2020, the most important people in 2021, pretty important in 2022, and yet to be determined in 2023.”

For more insights from talent leaders and HR heroes, hop over to our Scaling Stories podcast page.

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We were delighted to speak with Ernie Owusu, Senior Director of Sales Development at 6sense, for this week’s Scaling Stories podcast.

Ernie took a team of five sales development reps and built the team to 50 or so. Such was the positivity of the environment Ernie nurtured, there were years where the attrition rate of people they didn’t want to leave was just 2%.

Ernie highly recommends the book Leading Sales Development (by Alea Homison and Jeremey Donovan) for anyone building a team of sales development reps. The book examines data from the likes of Salesforce and Salesloft on the characteristics of their top performers from their sales development programs.

“And essentially what they notice is these four core traits,” explains Ernie. “Curiosity, conscientiousness, business acumen, and grit.”

Ernie goes on to explain what he believes each of these characteristics mean:

• Conscientiousness. “Someone who is constantly trying to find ways to improve themselves day in, day out.”
• Business acumen. “It’s not in the sense of ‘do they understand how an org works or how revenue is generated’...It's more about, specifically with SDRs, can they connect the dots? Can they take a piece of information they’ve seen online about a persona, tie it back to their product and explain in a concise way why they should buy your product?”
• Curiosity. “The SDRs that I’ve hired have [often] done research before they get on the call, like on a thought leader or influencer on specific tactics that can make them effective as SDRs. They’ve read books or they’ve read podcasts on the specific tactics to be effective in the role. They tend to be phenomenal sales development reps.”
• Grit. “Someone working towards a long-term goal and having experienced many plateaus or setbacks, but still being just as passionate and achieving that goal over a period of time.”

It’s one thing to possess these qualities, but how does Ernie codify the talent identification process into a meaningful framework?

Some of the technical tasks for SDR candidates include “mock calls where we're not expecting them to be perfect”, and “writing assignments where we ask them to take one of our customer personas and write them an email on [why] that person should buy our product”.

Ernie goes on to explain the wisdom of this written task in separating the brilliant candidates from the bluffers. “Does this person actually know what our company does and why this person should buy our product?”

It was great to catch up with Ernie – check out the pod, then head over to our Scaling Stories page for more expert insights from the Recruitment Kingdom.

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For our Scaling Stories podcast, Paul shared his philosophy on what human first leadership really means.

“Let’s say you have 10 people on a team. They’re 10 different human beings – they’re hardwired differently. They have different upbringings, they come from different places, they may be married or not married, straight or gay. It’s like a microcosm of the world, these 10 people that you have. Not everything has to be customised, but you have to get to understand those people a little bit to be able to lead them effectively.”

In a week where we’ve covered artificial intelligence in depth, our chat with Paul was timely. You only have to look at some of the clumsier spambot emails from robo-recruiters to remind yourself that there’s no substitute for human-first hiring. 

And who’s to say that candidates won’t become wise to the more implausible emails and ads? According to research by Clarify Capital, we are now in a world where many job listings are fake, as some employers advertise roles they have no intention of filling “to give the impression the company [is] growing”.

Similarly, we covered the topic of transparency in our chat with Paul. On pay transparency, Paul says: “Involve your employees. Explain the process to them so it’s not this secret-something where HR folks go behind a dark curtain in a dark room and make all these arbitrary decisions.”

Meanwhile, Paul offers a brilliant take-down of leaders who think that forcing everyone back to the office is the only game in town.

“If your culture is the four walls of an office, you’ve got bigger problems than running a business. You need to solve the culture. ‘Problem culture’ is not the four walls of an office or the foosball table or the ping pong table or the lunch or the fancy chairs… Your company’s mission and the values and how you treat each other and how you treat your clients and what it means to work at that company [is the culture]. Four walls don’t make culture.”

Finally, in a world of shrinking headcounts, Paul gave us his perceptive and entertaining take on how to navigate a nimble organisation.

“The smaller the company, the easier it is to impact change and influence change. And maybe not even change, but influence, before it needs to be changed. Influence how things happen, how a culture is, how a culture’s established, how values are established and things like that. It’s easier to turn a motorboat than a cruise ship… Clearly, I’m not a sailor, but you get the concept.”

We highly recommend Paul’s aptly-titled book, Human Beings First. And for more insights from hiring and HR leaders, we’ve got an ever-growing library of Scaling Stories podcasts and blogs to chew on, like this piece on how Dashlane took a sledgehammer to traditional HR processes.

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In this week's Hiring Highlights, we pit recruiters against investors in a battle royale to determine who talks the most sense. Plus we share some essential podcast insights from DEI leader Joahanna G. Thomas.

There is no better person to explore these issues than Joahanna G. Thomas, the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Epidemics Sound, and we were delighted to catch up with Joahanna for latest Scaling Stories podcast.

The good news is that according to LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting report: “Three out of four [recruiters] say that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring is not being deprioritized – in fact, nearly 20% say it’s a higher priority now.”

But that doesn’t always ring true, and for any businesses that don’t instinctively value diversity, Joahanna explains how DEI principles are not simply just – but common sense.

“If they can only understand numbers and profitability, diversity is great for the bottom line. Inclusion is great for the bottom line.”

Joahanna urges businesses to “find that untapped market of your industry that you’re losing on if you don't make diversity as part of your business strategy”.

Indeed, it’s notable that the LinkedIn report predicted that “Gen Z will reward employers who value development and diversity”.

And at a time of cost-cutting, Joahanna makes a persuasive case for how inclusion is not some added extra, but “tangible”, citing factors like “brand awareness, attrition and recruitment savings, [and] legal fee savings. We’ve heard of companies paying millions of dollars because of harassment and pay inequality”.

It was great to catch up with Joahanna, and you can watch more video interviews with hiring legends over at our Scaling Stories page.

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It was a great pleasure to speak with Michelle Randall-Berry for our latest Scaling Stories podcast. Michelle is the Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Teradyne, the designer and manufacturer of automatic test equipment (ATE) and robotics solutions.

With more than 20 years’ talent acquisition experience, Michelle is well placed to comment on how employers can navigate the ‘war for talent’ at a time when headcounts are getting leaner.

In our chat, we discussed how employers can adopt a skills-based approach to hiring, including objective hiring processes that mitigate the human biases around us.

Michelle discussed the importance of “creating places for pools of talent”, such as re-skilling opportunities or building internal pathways. “I truly believe that the most successful employers in the market are going to be the ones who are willing to make that investment.”

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In this week’s Hiring Highlights we were delighted to speak with Lisa McGill, an advisory board member and former Chief Human Resources Officer at CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity giant.

Lisa has spent much of her career in “high tech” at the likes of Silver Peak, and more recently, has advised VC firm SemperVirens, whose portfolio includes workforce tech companies like Karat and ChartHop.

Lisa arrived at CrowdStrike before its eventual IPO in 2019, so she understands the delicacies of stewarding a people team at a time of high growth.

Early on, Lisa identified that “50% of our new hires within the sales organisation were leaving”, which of course, would pose a problem for any company that was planning to go public. In fact, CrowdStrike would often lose talented staff members just one year into the job, just when they were reaching their “high optimal productivity”.

One solution was to really nail down a talent acquisition strategy. And according to Lisa, that meant answering some key questions: 

• “What kind of jobs do you need?”
• “What kind of skills do you need people to have?
• “Are skills changing?”
• “Do you already have those skills?”
• “Do you know how to recruit for those skills?”
• “And where are those skills?”
• “Are you going to be hiring in new geographies?”

By thinking about these details more deeply, CrowdStrike often hired in emerging engineering markets like Romania. But as Lisa adds, “In some cases, you might have to do some re-skilling as part of your talent strategy.”

Lisa also highlighted “salary compression” as a key watchout, where the higher salaries offered to new hires could leave the original staff members feeling out of pocket. “Yes, that person might have more equity, but until you go public, it’s meaningless to them.”

In our discussion, Lisa shared details of some helpful tools that helped CrowdStrike secure the right talent. For example, in order to identify the top sales candidates, CrowdStrike used an “AI based behavioral based assessment tool” called PerceptionPredict, which led them to conclude that the key qualities for a salesperson at CrowdStrike included communication, collaboration and grit.

Of course, there is no silver bullet when it comes to securing top talent, and as we covered recently, there’s a time and a place for internal hiring too. Everyone has a part to play in an organisation’s success, or as Lisa says: “No matter what your role – you can impact revenue, you can impact profitability.”

It was great to catch up with Lisa, and if you’d like to check out more Scaling Stories podcasts, you know where to clickety-click.

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In this week’s Scaling Stories podcast we spoke to Jody Atkins, the Vice President of Talent Acquisition at NextRoll, the marketing technology company whose machine learning platform helps companies target their ideal customers.

In order to create an equitable experience for candidates, Jody has been an advocate for “competency based interviewing”. Before even looking at a CV, Jody will sit down with the hiring manager and ask: “What are the top competencies that this person needs to be successful in their position?”

Rather than simply choosing which names should be on the interview panel, Jody and team will first and foremost reflect on the skill-set required to properly assess each candidate – from stakeholder management to conflict resolution.

Then they decide on “the most unbiased and even way that we can ask questions”, and produce a prep sheet for each interviewer with examples of what a “great answer looks like…so that everyone who is walking through the door has the same experience and the same chance”.

Jody also extols the virtues of using data in order to build trust with senior leaders and find the right people. That means using tools like LinkedIn Talent Insights to identify a small pool of A-listers, then “really look at the competencies” of successful past hires. “What do we interview for? And are those really the traits that make those people successful?”

Jody adds: “What we were able to do is find consistencies of those soft [skills]. You know – tenacity, resilience, ability to learn initiative. Those are all things that were important that aren’t on a resume.”

Moving forward, a priority for Jody and her team is to focus on internal mobility, with the rollout of a new “role shadowing” program where employees can experience a day in the life of a skilled colleague.

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For this week’s Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to speak with Alex Seiler, the Chief People Officer at GHJ, an accounting, tax, and advisory firm that partners with clients to help grow their businesses.”

Alex is a savvy people and talent leader who has developed countless approaches that connect organizations’ business strategy with their people strategy.

Alex has cut his teeth at what he calls “declining industries”, namely publishing, and learnt a great deal about scaling up (and down) from working in a resource-challenged environment.

A long-term strategic thinker, Alex describes accounting as “not the sexiest profession out there”, but invites his team on retreats where they can discuss how they can “defy convention” and change how people perceive the industry. “How do we attract more early career professionals to actually want to have a career in public accounting?”

A recent Wall Street Journal article, ‘Why are so many accountants quitting?’, touched on some of the industry’s challenges. As the author stated: “The field still suffers from a stigma that it is unappealing, with tedious work and daunting hours… The huge gap between companies that need accountants and trained professionals has led to salary bumps and more temporary workers joining the sector.”

Part of the solution, Alex suggests, is to be “purely focused on our staff and getting brilliant at the basics”, or in other words, “how do we refine and do things even better for them”.

This includes everything from pay transparency to resisting the temptation to force everyone back to the office. 

“All the data that’s out there says that people at the end of the day want a hybrid working structure,” Alex says.

Alex’s experiences have taught him the value of picking your battles and understanding the intricacies of each sector. Time-starved accountants and auditors, for example, don’t have time to absorb information about new strategies and concepts when they’ve got a hard accounting deadline coming up.

“That’s what I talk about when I say not taking a cookie cutter approach,” says Alex. “If you don’t understand the business you’re in and you try to roll things, you’re gonna get pushback if it’s got an adverse impact on the employee.”

Moreover, at a time of layoffs and market uncertainty, Alex says it’s crucial to ask, “how are you continuing to upskill your people?”

For example, GHJ have introduced “high performance teams training that can scale across the organisation”, plus a “durable skills curriculum”, where staff can upskill on things like leadership or critical thinking as an alternative to “traditional manager training”.

Finally, Alex is a skilled operator who knows how to keep the C-suite sweet. He dismisses the idea that “all roads lead to the CEO”, adding that recruiters should develop “one-on-one relationships with each member of the C-Suite. And even before you’ve presented a strategy, start socialising your ideas”.

It goes to show that talent and people teams are more than just nice-to-haves, but rather, a strategic partner at the heart of a successful business. Similarly, when we spoke to Mafalda Garcês, the Country Leader and Senior People Director at Dashlane, she remarked how HR should be viewed as “a central piece of solving business problems”.

It was great chatting with Alex, and if you’d like to check out more of our Scaling Stories podcasts, you know what to do.

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In this week’s Scaling Stories we spoke to James Ellis, a self-confessed “employer brand nerd” who’s developed countless brands on their journey from small startup to Fortune 1000 giant.

The words ‘performance’ and ‘profitability’ are on many leaders’ lips, and given that employer branding is one of the lowest cost, highest return investments that a business can make for their TA operations, who better to speak to than James – an employer branding expert.

James lives and breathes all things brand, and was influenced by his mixed experiences at different firms – some with “great bosses, lots of freedom, lots of agency, opportunity and good benefits”, and others with “atrocious, micromanaging bosses”.

“From the outside they were the exact same movie. It’s like, are you walking into Star Wars or are you walking into the last Star Wars?”

James says part of his mission is to encourage companies to be “crystal clear about what they offer, what they reward”, meaning there is less chance of disappointment on both sides.

James has an instinctive understanding of the differences between traditional marketing and talent marketing. And it all comes down to choosing quality over quantity.

“What you want is two people to fall in love with this job. That’s all. You don’t need a million applicants. You don’t need a hundred applicants. You need two. So long as they’re great candidates and you pick two, ‘cos the hiring manager can make a choice and feel good about that. Otherwise, you really only need the one. That’s the difference.”

Equally, James believes that recruiters can learn lessons from consumer marketing, and in particular, connecting with the things that an audience really cares about.

“The problem is recruiters aren’t good marketers. They’re great salespeople, but they're not marketers.”

“What branding is trying to say is it’s not just about money. Money’s great, everybody likes money, but if you’re being paid fairly, wouldn’t you rather be in a place where you get more of whatever that thing is you care about?”

So, how do you know if your employer brand strategy is working? James has a simple mantra: “Everything you say must be specific, attractive, different and real.”

Here are some examples of what that means:

• Specific. Rather than say “we care about women”, James says it’s more powerful to cite actual specifics like 26 days paid parental leave, for example, or a dedicated mother’s room.
• Attractive. James underlines the importance of “understanding your audience and giving them something they care about because it’s attractive”. For example, pro-parent policies are attractive to some candidates, but pretty irrelevant to others.
• Different. “Be crystal clear about what you’re about.”
• Real. What you say about your brand “has to be real. It has to be something true”.

It was great to catch up with James. On our blog page you can read more on the topic of employer branding, or you can check out our Scaling Stories podcasts in full.

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In this week’s Scaling Stories podcast we chewed the fat with Adrian Obeso, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Superhuman – the awesome email app that aims to save people precious time.

Adrian is a smart and pragmatic technical recruiter and manager with a wealth of experience in engineering-focused recruiting. He has a track record of ‘systems building’, and helped to scale Honey (the shopping platform) to around 600 employees.

For Adrian, a crucial part of talent acquisition is maintaining the ‘culture bar’, based on a simple proposition: ‘Recruiting is the last line of defence.’

“Hiring is maintenance,” Adrian says. “One of the roadblocks that a lot of recruiting professionals face is convincing the people they’re partnering with that they’re truly there to protect the culture and bring people in who are going to add to the company. And they’re not just trying to hit numbers.”

Adrian is as far as you can get from a ‘spammy’ recruiter, and he says part of his remit is to get colleagues to think about “who we’re messaging; why we’re messaging them; what we are”.

“For me, it’s not just about assessing someone’s actual hard skills, but trying as best as you can to dig into their character”.

For example, how do they take feedback? Are they good at collaborating?

At Honey, Adrian learnt the importance of “using data whenever it’s appropriate and as often as possible”, and has since taken these lessons to Superhuman. “People respond when you can actually show tangible facts – numbers that relate to how work is being done at your company.”

For example, Adrian has looked to tackle “super bloated” interview formats, which have sometimes been too long. He noticed that some interviews resulted in excessively high pass rates of around 96%, which “wasn’t a very high signal as far as a candidate’s full ability”.

“I think that oftentimes hiring managers can treat recruiting as service providers. The way that you flip that relationship is by being a partner first, and again, using data, being thoughtful, checking in, showing that this is much more to you than hitting a number.”

In terms of using engineering time effectively, we cover some of these themes in our cost-per-hire guide. 

Influenced by his years working agency-side with numerous clients, Adrian takes a listening-driven approach to recruiting, which he explains:

“I mean try to do more listening than you are talking. Try to actually sit down and gather someone’s desires and again, try to communicate how your company might be able to meet them.”

But even with the best will in the world, we clearly live in turbulent times. Given the fluidity of the current market conditions, how does Adrian think recruiters should adapt?

“I think recruiters need to be flexible and need to develop skills across all of recruiting and not just focus on ‘the specific’ and specialised, like talent acquisition, but you know, pick up recruiting, pick up sourcing. I don’t think right now we’re in a place where recruiting can just focus on closing candidates.”

“If recruiters right now become more well-rounded, they’re going to be able to just be more successful.”

How are talent acquisition specialists getting stuck into different tasks at Superhuman? Adrian gives a few examples:

• Sourcing candidates
• Talking to candidates
• Looking at recruiting metrics

We also discussed some of the ‘red flags’ that should make any recruiter run away faster than Kylian Mbappé. Watch out for hyperbole, says Adrian, where “everything they’re saying sounds large and vague, like I am now speaking to someone who either does not have intimate knowledge of the work that was being done at their last organisation, or really can’t speak to it because of a l

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In this week’s Scaling Stories we were pleased to catch up with Stela Lupushor, a renowned HR leader and author whose books include Humans at Work and Humanazing Human Capital.

Our discussion centered on what it means to work in HR in 2023. So much has changed since BC, or “Before Covid”, as Stela puts it. Whether it’s the adoption of remote working, the emergence of new technologies, or questions about how diversity and inclusion programs are deployed, running an HR team has not exactly been straightforward lately.

Some changes have been profound. Remote working has caused a rupture in how HR interacts with staff, and in fact changed the make-up of a typical workforce.

Meanwhile, salary expectations have rocketed in the past couple of years, albeit there are now signs that wage growth is slowing.

And as the chair of the US Federal Reserve noted, one reason the labour market remains tight is because many workers sadly passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But while this rapid pace of change can take some getting used to, Stela offers some invaluable insights on how to forge a successful HR function in unpredictable times.

Rather than just mindlessly adopting technology and tools, Stela advocates “human-centric design”, or in other words, to understand “what it’s like to be a worker and how we might reimagine that journey and use technology to transform that experience so people can be productive – they can enjoy and be delighted by their experience”.

Stela suggests that HR leaders should proactively work to improve the workplace experience before a “contagion” effect takes hold.

“I think the reward structure is what shapes behaviour,” Stela says. “And we as humans are gonna react to the context…So HR really has an opportunity to think or rethink what that reward structure looks like and how certain behaviours can be rewarded – not only for the purposes of maximising the shareholder value, but also rethinking the entire stakeholder system and designing it for all the stakeholders in mind”.

Stela’s words are echoed in a recent Fast Company article by Lars Schmidt, who writes: “The shift toward pay transparency requires HR to think more broadly about compensation, equity, and how we define total rewards”. Lars also predicts a “shift towards skill-based hiring” rather than “role-based hiring”.

In our chat, Stela touched on a range of fascinating topics: the nature of value creation; the erosion of trust in institutions; and the importance of autonomy in the workplace. Stela was even kind enough to share with us three podcast recommendations:

• The Ezra Klein Show for its exploration of topics like economics, politics and culture
• Quorum for its Web3 and crypto insights
• Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View for its analysis of exponential technologies and their impact on society.

It was great catching up with Stela, and once you’ve had a listen, hop on over to our Scaling Stories hub and check out our latest interviews with HR’s finest.

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We were delighted to chat with the wonderful Melanie Naranjo for our Scaling Stories podcast. NYC-based Melanie is the VP of People at compliance training platform Ethena. Our conversation covered some fascinating HR terrain – from bias to burnout – at a time when companies are having to work harder to win the hearts and minds of workers.

Ethena’s mission, according to Melanie, is to “create more inclusive and ethical workplaces”, which inspires its innovative approach to harassment prevention training. Ethena embrace a human-centred approach, using everything from jokes to comic strips – not videos that “look like it was recorded in the 80s” – to ultimately deliver “compliance trainings that actually work”.

“I literally joined my company because of our harassment prevention training, which just so happens to be the product we put out,” Melanie explains.

Melanie is a smart and progressive people leader, and one theme we touched on was the scourge of credentialism in making hiring decisions.

“Bias leads to bias,” Melanie says, and described how too many company leaders undervalue the diverse experiences of non-graduates, including workers with experience in sectors like retail. Melanie says she has “all the empathy in the world” for candidates who feel embarrassed about putting their retail experience on LinkedIn, and thinks some recruiters may be missing a trick.

“The reality is, if you’re applying for a sales role, if you’re applying for a customer service role, even if you’re applying for an HR role, there are absolutely transferable skills that come from years in the retail world, right?”

Perhaps it underlines the importance of writing clear and inclusive job descriptions that don’t turn off promising candidates from non-corporate working backgrounds. Afterall, why should a promising candidate be dissuaded from applying because they’ve got four years’ experience rather than five? “We’re very clear about what's a requirement and what is not,” Melanie says regarding job descriptions.

Meanwhile, on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Melanie says it should “never be looked at in a silo”. Instead, DEI should be “woven into every piece of everything you do from recruiting to performance reviews, to core philosophy and growth structure”.

Finally, Melanie has some refreshing takes on resisting the “pressure to force your employees to have fun”. So, if you’re planning on booking the next team-building away day on an inflatable golf course – think again.

There were lots of great insights from Melanie, so head over to Scaling Stories and have a listen!

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For this week’s Scaling Stories we were delighted to speak with Dawn Sharifan, a people leader who’s helped scale businesses such as Lookout, and most recently Slack, where she led the people function through the $27.7 BN acquisition and integration into Salesforce.

With an enviable track record as a coach, leader and board member – and a former professor to boot – Dawn is well placed to speak about how to develop the careers of HR professionals and instill an effective (and inspiring) working culture.

Dawn has a “passion for building” – not just replicating the same HR processes from one company to the next – and she’s particularly adept in early-stage environments, or as she puts it, when “the cement is wet”.

The beauty of working for a nascent startup, says Dawn, is that “you can put your fingerprints and still sculpt and change things because you can take a product driven approach to HR and people functions… Your customers are your employees. They’ll give you feedback and then you just iterate on it.”

While some board members can be detached from the realities on the ground, Dawn’s journey has given her an acute sense of what employees really think, rather than working behind closed doors and “coming down with these stone tablets of ‘this is how we will do a review process’, and then the employees are expected to clap and share and be happy about it”.

These lessons ring true when Dawn thinks back to her time as a candidate. When the chance to work at Slack came along, Dawn believed it was “a great product at a great time”, but there was more to it than that. “I just knew I wanted to work with [Slack CEO] Stewart [Butterfield]. I knew I wanted to work for the team.”

Dawn describes her former colleagues at Slack as “the best group of humans I’ve ever had a chance to work with, and I’ve had the chance to work with a lot of really great humans”.

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In the latest Scaling Stories podcast, we caught up with Robbie Simpson, Global Head of Country Operations (Talent Acquisition) at Wolt, the food and merch delivery platform.

Robbie previously led a globally distributed recruitment team at HelloFresh, and as someone who’s made the transition from a recruiting specialist to an impressive all-rounder, Robbie instinctively understands the changing landscape of the hiring market. And boy, how the times are a-changin’...

It’s a sad fact that in today’s challenging environment, recruiters have been some of the first to lose their jobs. Or as this Wall Street Journal article points out: “Tech companies that have cut jobs have, on average, slashed about 50% of their recruiting staff, compared with, for instance, 10% of software engineers and 12% of product and design staff.” In some cases, these layoffs have been unceremonious to say the least. Moreover, the recruiters who’ve kept their jobs may find themselves busier than ever.

In this context, Robbie has some words of advice for how hiring teams can revamp their processes and adapt.

“When we think about recruitment as a product, we should think about pain and gain”, Robbie says. On the employer side, that means asking, “what’s the pain someone’s willing to go through to get the gain.

The pain might involve filling in a hiring request sheet, or previously time-stretched candidates finding time to complete assignments; as the market has changed, some candidates are willing and able to take the time to complete these.

From the candidate’s perspective, the ‘gain’ may have changed too. Previously, people were looking to move job for more responsibility or money, for example, but now “the gain might just be having a job which is stable, which means that the pain you’re willing to go through might be slightly higher”.

Therefore, as Robbie suggests, because the market environment has changed so dramatically, the recruitment product may need to adapt dramatically too. While your customers are the same people, their needs and desires are now different.

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In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we picked the brains of Anthony Rotoli, a senior people leader who’s successfully scaled the HR and talent teams at companies like Karat, Assurance IQ and Quora.

Among his many successes, Anthony scaled Assurance IQ’s headcount ten times over – the insurance/fintech startup was eventually acquired for $2.3bn. He also made the transition from Microsoft to Karat – at the time, the interview tech company was a small startup, but is now valued at more than $1bn. All things considered, there are few experts better placed than Anthony to advise on how HR leaders can assess candidates, build a successful team and retain the best people.

Anthony has come a long way, but says that when he first moved from Microsoft to Karat it was a “massive culture shock”.

At the time, the idea of building a tech giant might have seemed fanciful. He thought: “Nobody has heard of this place. People are going to have to hear about it. How do I build a brand around this thing?”

A key part of the journey was about finessing an interview methodology that identified the right talent. Here are three keys to success that Anthony identifies.

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In this week’s Scaling Stories, we caught up with senior talent brand strategist Matt Eyre.

Matt’s varied career has seen him work in marketing for the likes of Universal Pictures, EA Sports and Sega, and more recently, Silicon Valley Bank. When he joined Intercom, Matt made the leap from brand marketing to talent marketing, so he’s well-placed to explain how this crossover works.

“If you look for a definition of a brand strategy, you’re generally gonna see something like a plan to achieve a series of goals resulting in the preference of your brand by consumers,” Matt explains. “So if we think about how to apply that to talent… you’re thinking, how do I build a strategy that’s going to last and that’s going to enable us to build a brand that is meaningful to the people that we’re talking to.”

At its simplest, employer branding is “how you present your company to the world”, says Matt, and requires “very consistent messaging”.

But when most brands offer similar talking points, how do you stand out? Matt draws lessons from self-confessed ‘employer brand nerd’ James Ellis, who says that effective brand messaging is usually four things:

• Specific
• Attractive
• Differentiated
• Real.

In our discussion, Matt also gives fresh insights on those well-trodden topics of mission, culture and values. In a world where young candidates can simply “jump on TikTok and find out what a company is like”, employers have to think hard about how they meet a candidate’s expectations on culture, rather than simply “sticking 20 words up on your website”.

“They want to know what a company stands for. They want to know what the work experience is gonna be like when they get there,” Matt says, and says that many candidates are looking for “validated values”.

“What do these values mean to me and how am I gonna engage with them on a day-to-day basis? You know, it’s not just ‘how much am I gonna earn and what’s my title gonna be’ anymore? Those days are gone.”

Of course, companies can forge their own unique culture, and that’s going to look different at JP Morgan than a crypto startup making monkey j-pegs. But as Matt says, perhaps there is merit in simply “being true to the values you hold”.

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In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to catch up with Ben Newsome, a portfolio partner at Octopus Ventures, a very active multi-stage European VC. Ben previously helped build some of Europe’s leading tech companies – from Monzo to Improbable – so who better to talk to about how VCs perceive the importance of talent within an organisation.

Octopus supports and invests in approximately 180 companies, covering everything from unicorn companies to more traditional ‘safer bets’ in industries as varied as health tech, fintech and ‘deep tech’. One of the things that differentiates Octopus is its close working relationships with founders, or what Ben calls a “robust end-to-end process” covering everything from an induction, a holistic look at the business and how capital is deployed.

“It’s very novel for VCs to be looking at driving performance through talent and people,” Ben observes.

When it comes to hiring talent, Octopus is there to support its portfolio in an advisory position, rather than taking a backseat and advising on the odd hire. The Octopus talent team are positioned as ‘coaches’, and they take a holistic approach to advising companies on their talent and people.

A good VC, says Ben, should have capacity to service and support their portfolio, as “there’s only an amount of companies that you can service at one time”, and essentially they should “operate as as an extension of that team”.

But what’s not always appreciated about VCs is that when it comes to getting the right talent, they’re not just tasked with advising founders and senior staff – but the investors too.

“The interesting part about the ‘deal flow’ in VC is that there’s a ton of research and due diligence and naturally, when you look at the success of businesses or the businesses that have achieved great things, it’s [because] they get the right people and scale the business efficiently.”

Ben explains that part of his role is to understand “red flags” and “potential areas of weaknesses” so he can have transparent conversations with investors and make sure they understand the importance of recruiting well – a “precursor to success”.

Regular readers of this hallowed digital scroll may recall the words of Jim Collins, business management guru and author of Good to Great, who wrote that successful executives know how to “get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus)”, and Ben’s keen understanding of why recruitment matters is a testament to this.

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In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to speak with Mafalda Garcês, the Country Leader and Senior People Director at Dashlane, the renowned password manager.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Mafalda shared her vision for how HR should not be viewed as some distant department where CVs get scanned and envelopes get stamped, but rather, “a central piece of solving business problems… because usually problems are created by people or solved by people”.

Mafalda works with the senior leadership at Dashlane to help them develop (and implement) people initiatives. In order to do this, Mafalda believes in doing a “proper organisational analysis” to understand business objectives, then get under the skin of what’s working (and not working) in a company’s approach to hiring talent, and then deploy “tailor-made” solutions.

Mafalda shares just some of the ways she approaches this ‘diagnosis and intervention’ at Dashlane:

• Hiring leaders are encouraged to “always hear our internal clients frequently and systematically”. This can be as simple as holding one-to-ones involving “everyone in your organisation”, or more opportunities for “group moments where we can talk to folks and see what’s going on”.
• Dashlane aren’t afraid to “use company surveys…to really get a picture of where we are”. This can highlight “the problems we are solving and the blockers we have”.
• Mafalda has developed an “HR toolbox” with “specific proven tools and knowledge” to shape decisions. This includes everything from awareness of bias and protocols for remote working to data analysis on patterns of organisational behaviour.

Mafalda’s approach is the antithesis of ‘traditional HR’. She is not a fan of process for the sake or process, or as she explains: “My approach is a little bit different because I think we should always criticise why we have those processes.”

And she understands the interconnectedness between an individual’s ability to perform and the health of a business. “We are all living our own mini startup – that is our career”, Mafalda says.

Mafalda also explains why it’s important to have an adaptable approach when problems arise, and offer a human solution. For example, when there is a conflict between staff, “we can go through the normal process of coaching the manager in order for the manager to talk with the person”, or alternatively, “if we have the right level of rapport with the folks involved, maybe we can facilitate a discussion. Maybe we can use radical candour to move past that conflict”.

On the subject of coaching, one of the great innovations at Dashlane is their strong “coaching culture”. In fact, every manager gets a dedicated person who will happily meet them weekly, listen to a brainstorm, and help them “understand more about themselves and more about their teams”. Often, the managers who benefit from the coaches will later become a coach themselves.

“It's basically a one-on-one relationship that we build with every single manager and in my view this is worth more than any MBA or any type of management training,” Mafalda says.

And perhaps this breaking down of the barriers between managers and the ‘managed’ is catching on. Salesforce now has a scorecard where direct reports can rank the performance of their managers (it turns out around 90% approve of their bosses).

There were lots of fantastic insights in our discussion, and Mafalda is a living testament to the idea that the most essential voices are often those with the courage to go against the grain.

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In this week’s Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to chat with Ariana Moon, the Head of Talent Planning & Acquisition at Greenhouse, the leader in Applicant Tracking Systems considered by many to be the gold standard in hiring software.

Born and raised in New York, Ariana is now based in Las Vegas and has seen Greenhouse grow from a workforce of around 60 people to more than 800 globally.

Greenhouse, according to Ariana, was founded on the simple idea that “hiring is one of the most important and strategic things that a company does.” Greenhouse’s philosophy is “rooted in structured hiring,” and Ariana described Greenhouse’s product as “the hiring operating system for what we call our people-first companies - companies that think about business strategy through a people lens.”

About Ariana:

Ariana is the Sr. Director of People Planning & Acquisition at Greenhouse and partners with Greenhouse’s executive team to scale predictive hiring and people planning practices. She’s proud to lead a team that has helped Greenhouse 10x in headcount across multiple new geographies and is passionate about the impact of equitable and inclusive hiring. Prior to Greenhouse, Ariana has worked on people-focused teams in various industries, including non-profit, public relations and FinTech. Outside of work, she loves exploring intentional movement through yoga, salsa dancing and rock climbing, and ping pongs between two cities she calls home: New York and Las Vegas.

Check her out on LinkedIn

About Greenhouse:

Greenhouse is the hiring software company. We help businesses become great at hiring through our powerful hiring approach, complete suite of software and services, Hiring MaturityTM methodology and large partner ecosystem – so businesses can hire for what's next.

Based in New York City with offices in San Francisco, Denver and Dublin, Greenhouse has over 700 employees around the world supporting more than 6,500 customers. Some of the smartest and most successful companies like HubSpot, Buzzfeed, J.D. Power, Booking.com, Scout24 and The Knot Worldwide use the Greenhouse hiring software platform to improve all aspects of hiring, helping them to attract top talent.

Greenhouse LinkedIn Greenhouse InstagramGreenhouse Twitter

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For our latest Scaling Stories podcast, it was a great pleasure to catch up with Cierra Tavarez, the Chief of Staff to the SVP of Recruiting at Attentive, an SMS software platform and leader in conversational commerce.
Chicago-based Cierra has worked in sourcing roles for the likes of Capital One, Facebook and Uber Freight, and as our discussion demonstrates, she’s a big thinker with profound insights on everything from big tech recruitment formulas to the way we conduct interviews.
Here are some topics we covered in our chat with

• At Attentive, Cierra has developed an “interviewer training and calibration program”
• How Cierra helped to transform the candidate experience at Uber Freight
• The differences between ‘sourcing’ and ‘recruiting’
• Skepticism towards culture efforts that “ring a little bit hollow”

As you can tell from these extracts, Cierra is a fountain of knowledge and committed to better hiring practices.  We hope you enjoy our chat as much as we did.

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In our conversation, Kevin discusses the importance of knowing exactly what qualities will make a candidate succeed at an organsation. In the case of GRIN, those attributes include “‘extreme ownership’ and humility.”

• Kevin describes his team as being a “culture gatekeeper”, and explains: “We want to make sure that regardless of experience, and regardless of what their resume says or who they know – are their core values aligned and can they add to our core values in our culture?”
• “It's the character of the individual.” By following this approach, it means dispensing with the idea that credentials are everything. For example, during the interview process, “not overlooking in your gut those little red flags” can help you avoid making the wrong call.
• Moreover, this culture-focused strategy has been a long time in the making. In its early days, GRIN established a core list of values, and sought feedback from employees on the proposed list.
• GRIN continues to live and breathe these values even after an appointment has been made. For example, Kevin explains that new hires are invited to a face-to-face core values presentation by the CEO, rather than being asked to watch a pre-recorded video.

There was plenty of food for thought in our discussion, so check out the podcast and let us know what you think!

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In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to chat with Jessica Paddock, Senior Director of Recruiting at Unite Us, an outcome-focused technology company that builds coordinated care networks to health and social service providers.

It was a wide-ranging discussion, and one recurring theme was the human-centered approach to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) at Unite Us, and their approach to hiring in general. In fact, the walls of their New York office are emblazoned with the words: “Be a good human.”

We explored the topic of ‘seen and unseen diversity, and the steps employers can take to introduce bias mitigation in hiring.

While there are no quick fixes, the Unite Us team has put some solid foundations in place to embed fairness in the way they hire. We covered so much ground that we can barely do it justice in one nifty newsletter, but here’s a snapshot of the other tips and insights Jessica shared:

• “We really emphasize question-asking, and understanding what’s important to the candidate so that when we speak about Unite Us… they are hearing the things that are most important to them.”
• “We do quite a few internal workshops. I think my favorite one was just a team building exercise…we essentially each put on a mini presentation, if you will, of just who we are, and where we came from.”
• “We use things like Slack and Zoom and G Suite [and Calendly] and I can’t imagine not utilizing technology. But it has to work for you. It has to make it smoother to do the human parts of your job.”

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In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we caught up with Yanilda Gonzalez, head of Global Talent Acquisition Operations at Contentsquare, the leading platform in digital experience, intelligence and analytics. Contentsquare recently closed a $600m growth investment round, and any recruiter – especially those working in a company experiencing hypergrowth – will be interested in what Yanilda has to say about operational excellence in hiring.

How can you build a strong and consistent talent operation? Here are just some of the pearls of wisdom from our discussion with Yanilda:

• Consider building a university recruitment programme (which Yanilda is busily developing at Contentsquare).
• Have a sourcing team that is “dedicated to the top of the funnel” and “building that candidate pipeline”.
• Aim for “relationship based collaboration between the hiring manager and TA” – this can include “enablement sessions and training”, and holding office hours so that anyone can ask questions.
• Set targets, review your teams’ capacity, and introduce a hiring manager survey – these are just some of the “guardrails and processes to ensure that people are doing things the way they're supposed to”.
• Think global. Yanilda’s sourcing team is “fully distributed” – from Tokyo to Tel Aviv – which helps them “break into markets” and “hone in on those niche roles”.
• Embrace “streamlined standard onboarding that’s consistent across the board”. This means that regardless of where your recruiters are based, they’re aligned and have access to the same training and data insights.
• Embed tools – Yanilda’s team embraces channels like Gem, Phenom and LinkedIn Recruiter to “augment and expand our reach”. While HR is often seen as the last place to digitise (compared to sales and marketing ops which have been around since the dinosaurs), embedding tools company-wide can have a huge impact if hiring managers use them properly.

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In this episode, I learn from Alex Her, the head of Global Employer Brand at GoDaddy. Alex has made a massive impact in transforming the way the web hosting giant (and the world’s largest domain registrar) embeds its employee brand internally and attracts prospective candidates.

We discussed how effective employer branding can help lure the most sought-after people i.e. those A-players who are ultimately going to contribute to a great team and generate revenue

For any business leader who thinks that employer branding is something they can ignore, Alex has news for you:

“Just because you don’t have an employer branding person or a team managing that, it doesn't mean you don’t have an employer brand. Once you have a career page, once you say we’re hiring; you have recruiters and you’re making some sort of attempt to sell to potential job seekers, you have an employer brand.”

If we, therefore, think of employer branding as inevitable, Alex says the key is to “control the narrative”, even if that means simply listing your values on a job ad, such as a family-friendly culture, or “work hard, play hard”.

“We are storytellers” is a theme that Alex often comes back to. To help you capture and craft those stories into something useful, here are some tips from our chat with Alex:

• Embrace “employee advocacy campaigns” to highlight people in blogs, videos, or social posts. You can then ask your “natural advocates” – those who like working at the company – to share it.
• Use platforms such as Bambu, the “social gaggle app”, to amplify your employee advocacy campaigns.
• Make it easier for your advocates by “empowering and enabling” them with the right content to share, from hashtags, videos and graphics to suggested messaging and ways to tag the company on social media.
• Incentivize your advocates with an “internal system” (like points or gift cards) to reward those who deliver the most shares.
• Scale your efforts in content curation. Alex discusses the merits of enabling advocates to build their “personal brand” on the likes of LinkedIn. “If they build their personal brand, and then they keep talking about all the great things that are happening, someone’s gonna say, hey, you know what, Steve over here keeps talking about that GoDaddy life. Maybe I should talk to him…”

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In this episode I learn from Amandeep Shergill who is the Director of Tech Recruiting at Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr, Simplenote, Longreads, Crowdsignal, Atavist, Happy Tools, Day One, and more. 

They have been a distributed company for more than 10+ years, with more than 1,500 Automatticians in 84 countries, speaking over 90 different languages. Amandeep has previously scaled teams at ConsenSys, Cleo AI and Lendable. 

He brought some incredible insights about why distributed is the next level to remote working and how Automattic approaches candidate assessments. Automattic have a truly unique trial process, mandatory for every position in the form of a “project” related to the specific domain of the role. The objective is to work on something that you would as if you just started whilst being assessed for technical, cultural and written communication skills {how you write commits/PR’s in an async environment for example}.

Further, these assessments are overseen  by software engineers who have volunteered to spend their 100% of their time (from 3 up to 12 moths) just hiring other engineers and become “trial buddies,” to prospective candidates. 

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Read Matt Mullenweg’s: The Distributed Work’s Five Levels of Autonomy {CEO Automattic}

https://ma.tt/2020/04/five-levels-of-autonomy/

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Thrilled to release another episode of Intrro’s scaling stories, a discussion with talent leaders about their lessons building teams at some of the worlds fastest growing companies.  

In this episode I learn from Ruby B, who is leading technical tecruitment at Astra and is an acgive career coach. Astra is a uniquely cool company that manufactures rockets and are hiring some of the world's smartest minds {their CEO was the CTO of NASA}.

Recorded at “the office” Ruby spoke to us from the Naval Air Station Alameda, known as "Orion" which is a former naval jet engine testing facility!

Ruby has scaled teams ranging from small YC startups to Coinbase, Lyft and Waymo. We get into the nitty gritty areas of building a well oiled TA function from scratch at high quality and speed, as Astra are set to scale from 250 to 1,000 FTE next year. 

This was a remarkably candid conversation, with amazing actionable tips on eliminating practices that negatively impact the company’s D + I initiatives, the importance of interview standardization when scaling, building solid relationships with your hiring manager & so much more!

The link to listen can be found in comments. Please like, share and subscribe. Thanks for tuning in!

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In this episode I learn from Beatrice Domiguez, Head of People and Talent at Aviros. Founded in 2015 in Zurich, Aviros is building fleet management software in the cloud and is one of Europe’s fastest growing B2B SaaS companies.

Listen to how recruiting in the Bay Area and in Europe have subtle yet important differences such as definitions of what diversity actually means, why "Hiring managers are the keys” to an effective hiring process and why you’re only as good as the people as your recruiting for!

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Nicolas Bowles, is scaling Product & Design teams @ Productboard and is a mentor at Femme Palette 🌱

We talk about how recruiting is "project management" and how he's used that to help scale Productboard's headcount from 100 in 2020 to 300 today, how to provide a worldclass candidate experience, how to attract talent when the best are usually employed somewhere else, how leverage engineering + design communities and more!