A-Players - Build teams of top performers.: Recent Episodes
Robin Choy @ HireSweet
"Talent wins games, but teamwork wins championships".
In the world of recruiting, some people have seen it all. They built recruiting teams from the ground up, hired hundreds of people in the best companies in the world, developed their expertise year after year. I’m Robin Choy and I'm on a mission to collect their learnings
Follow me here on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbchoy/
Building a culture of recruiting early on in your company is critical.
Miss that step and everything will get harder as the company grow:
-harder to hire top performers.
-harder to reach your targets.
-harder to... simply grow.
Matt is an Operation Partner at Human Capital, a VC firm based in SF, in addition to being a former sourcer at Google.
In this episode, Matt explains:
-how to use your sales skills to recruit your first employees
-why and how to log every conversation you have with potential candidates
-how to pick the good hiring agency for your company
-how to fight against cognitive biases when recruiting
-how much time should a founder spend into recruiting
To follow Matt on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me, click here.
To know more about HireSweet, click here.
I often see recruiters addressing recruiting content like this:
-a video by there
-occasionally an article
-possibly a LinkedIn post.
All a bit random (and me the first!).
Why?
Because we were never given a simple, clear and efficient framework to know which type of content to do, and how to schedule it. So I wanted to find for you a playbook to get there finally.
This is the topic of the latest episode of my A-Players podcast, where I’ve invited Matěj Matolín, an employer branding and content creation strategist whose work I truly appreciate.
In this episode Matěj reveals to you:
-The 4 type of content that performs better for employer branding
-The STD framework he stole from Google to segment candidates and push to them targeted content
-The exact duration and touchpoints it needs to attract a passive candidate through content
-Examples of super easy-to-do content ideas
To follow Matěj on Linkedin, click here.
To follow me on Linkedin, click here.
To learn more about HireSweet, click here.
Everybody talks about search in sourcing: Booleans, X-Rays etc. But finding candidates is not as valuable as 10 years ago.
Because now almost everybody is on LinkedIn. The real valuable expertise?
Getting people to reply: copywriting, personalization.
That’s what I believe at least.
The thing is… Balazs Paroczay believes the complete opposite.
Balazs is a legend - a multiple speaker at events like SourceCon and Sourcing Summit, with more than 15+ years of experience.
We had a 30-minute debate together on A-Players.
In this episode, we talk mainly about:
-Is search dead?
-Why you are probably missing out on a lot of candidates on LinkedIn
-Why it’s so hard to get responses from candidates on LinkedIn
-Are reply rates better outside of LinkedIn?
-How to best reach out to candidates on Linkedin and outside, to increase your reply rates
To follow Balazs on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me, click here.
To know more about HireSweet, click here.
Everybody talks about search in sourcing: Booleans, X-Rays etc. But finding candidates is not as valuable as 10 years ago.
Because now almost everybody is on LinkedIn. The real valuable expertise?
Getting people to reply: copywriting, personalization.
That’s what I believe at least.
The thing is… Balazs Paroczay believes the complete opposite.
Balazs is a legend - a multiple speaker at events like SourceCon and Sourcing Summit, with more than 15+ years of experience.
We had a 30-minute debate together on A-Players.
In this episode, we talk mainly about:
-Is search dead?
-Why you are probably missing out on a lot of candidates on LinkedIn
-Why it’s so hard to get responses from candidates on LinkedIn
-Are reply rates better outside of LinkedIn?
-How to best reach out to candidates on Linkedin and outside, to increase your reply rates
To follow Balazs on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me, click here.
To know more about HireSweet, click here.
Christine had a very interesting challenged: engineer the Financial Times’s tech employer brand.
Of course the FT is famous around the globe for its business publication - but when Christine started working on it, the employer brand on engineering & tech roles was close to 0.
The way she improved the employer brand on engineering & tech at FT was actually very close to how any startup could do it - and I wanted her to explain to us step by step how to steal her playbook.
In this episode, Christine Reveals :
-How to attract tech talent when your brand doesn’t sound techy at all.
-The framework to succeed in your first month trying to build the employer brand
-Why you should consider your candidate journey exactly like a customer journey
-How to identify pain points in your candidate’s journey
-How to make your career’s page stand out
-How to attract more candidates to your company during industry events (without sponsoring the event)
-How to include DEI principles in your employer branding strategy
And many other things ...
To follow Christine on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me, click here.
To know more about HireSweet, click here.
Christine had a very interesting challenged: engineer the Financial Times’s tech employer brand.
Of course the FT is famous around the globe for its business publication - but when Christine started working on it, the employer brand on engineering & tech roles was close to 0.
The way she improved the employer brand on engineering & tech at FT was actually very close to how any startup could do it - and I wanted her to explain to us step by step how to steal her playbook.
In this episode, Christine Reveals :
-How to attract tech talent when your brand doesn’t sound techy at all.
-The framework to succeed in your first month trying to build the employer brand
-Why you should consider your candidate journey exactly like a customer journey
-How to identify pain points in your candidate’s journey
-How to make your career’s page stand out
-How to attract more candidates to your company during industry events (without sponsoring the event)
-How to include DEI principles in your employer branding strategy
And many other things ...
To follow Christine on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me, click here.
To know more about HireSweet, click here.
« Recruiters should personalize their messages to candidates to increase their reply rates.”
Ok. But what if we can’t personalize because we have to send messages to hundreds of candidates?
In that case, you’ll need a more advanced technique: making your messages stand out. Writing messages that are not personalized, but that have super high response rates.
Jonas Waloschek, Senior Technical Sourcer ar MANTA, and ex McKinsey, is the expert of this technique. So I invited him on my podcast to talk about it.
During our 30min conversation, Jonas explains to me the art of personalization at scale, giving me some tips and frameworks to apply in our outreach sequences to candidates.
Specifically, Jonah reveals:
-The difference between personalization and making your message stand out.
-Why poetic messages have a better response rate.
-Is sending videos to candidates effective? How can I personalize them?
-What’s the interest of making your message sounds like it was written on a very specific time.
-Why you should stop using emojis in your emails’ subjects.
And many other things.
To follow Jonas on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me on LinkedIn, click here.
To know more about HireSweet, click here.
Yelling at your recruiting team “be better” will never make them better.
Having a right-minded coach above them, will.
I’ve been wanting to do an episode on this topic for a while: how to coach your recruiting team well, to make them outperform. So I decided to bring Chris Ahsing on the podcast.
Why Chris?
Because in addition to having been a recruiter at Google and Dropbox, he is also... a football coach.
In this episode, Chris Ahsing reveals us :
-the first principle to know to be a good coach
-the simple technique Chris use to understand people better
-how to gain ICs trust faster
-the framework to give effective feedback
-the difference between focusing on the process VS on the results
And much more.
To follow Chris on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me, click here.
To know more about HireSweet, click here.
Yelling at your recruiting team “be better” will never make them better.
Having a right-minded coach above them, will.
I’ve been wanting to do an episode on this topic for a while: how to coach your recruiting team well, to make them outperform. So I decided to bring Chris Ahsing on the podcast.
Why Chris?
Because in addition to having been a recruiter at Google and Dropbox, he is also... a football coach.
In this episode, Chris Ahsing reveals us :
-the first principle to know to be a good coach
-the simple technique Chris use to understand people better
-how to gain ICs trust faster
-the framework to give effective feedback
-the difference between focusing on the process VS on the results
And much more.
To follow Chris on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me, click here.
To know more about HireSweet, click here.
The baseline experience for candidates is terrible - most companies don't really prioritize improving it. That's a blessing for companies who do, because a very small investment into candidate experience can turn into a strong competitive advantage!
Troy has been in the war for talent for years (previously founded a recruiting CRM called Resource.co), and recently launched a company called Guide.co that focuses on improving the candidate experience.
He's one of the best people on earth to talk about this topic. In this discussion, Troy shares his advice on how to win the war for talent by leveraging 5 key tenets:
- Proactive transparency. Be transparent without candidates having to ask for it.
- Rapid reponse. Everybody knows about this, but how to really achieve it?
- Empathetic opinions. You're in the driver seat. As the same time, always make sure to check in with your passenger.
- Consistent floor. Make sure the worse candidate experience possible is still OK.
- Repellent narrative. Know and embrace what in your company is going to repel candidates away.
To follow Troy on LinkedIn, click here.
To discover Troy's latest venture, check Guide.co.
To know more about HireSweet CRM, click here.
And to follow me on LinkedIn, it's here! See you there!
“In recruiting, trust your gut”. Bullshit.
Any recruiter worth his salt knows that it’s the best way to fall into every possible bias. Doing structured interviews is actually the ONLY way to recruit accurately. Now the question is how to do it.
Good news for you: I invited Adam Redlich, one of the first recruiters at Google back in 2003, to talk about it with me during a podcast episode.
Throughout his career, Adam has helped dozens and dozens of recruiters become better at their jobs. And for the past 3 years, Adam has been VP Talent Acquisition at Octane, where he has grown the company from 140 to 590 employees. So trust me: Adam gives battle-tested advice.
In this episode, I talk with Adam about:
-How to set up structured interviews in your company.
-The perfect number of steps to have in the whole interview process
-Specific topics to be covered in each of these steps
-Reference checks
To follow Adam on LinkedIn, click here.
To know more about HireSweet, click here.
And to follow me on LinkedIn, it's here.
Too many companies believe sourcing is an entry-level job. This is the worst way to look at a very critical function. Sourcing is NOT an entry-level job for recruiters! And Garrett is as convinced as I am.
Garrett joined Google when the company had 35,000 employees and left the company 7 years later when they were 180,000. Today, he builds the tech sourcing team at Grammarly.
So who better than Garrett to reveal to us in this episode the secrets of how to build and manage best-in-class sourcing teams.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this new episode:
-How to radically change your vision of sourcing
-How to structure a sourcing team
-How to decide on the right recruiter-to-sourcer ratio? 3 to 1, 2 to 1, 1 to 1?
-What are the standards for a sourcer in terms of number of emails sent per week, open rate, and reply rate?
-How to find, manage and optimize sourcing data
To follow Garrett on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me on LinkedIn, go here.
Finally, to know more about what we do at HireSweet, click here.
In that episode, we decided to address the specific challenge of DE&I in companies below 200 people.
Step by step, the challenge increases. Here's Claudia advice for companies at every step (0-20 people, up to 100 people, 100-200).
Claudia actually wrote an entire outline of this discussion, with links to all the resources she mentions in the recording. Here is it:
https://bit.ly/3NSz4hr
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To follow Claudia on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me on LinkedIn, click here
Finally, to learn more about what we do at HireSweet, click here
I’m convinced that nurturing your past candidates to finally hire them is a powerful strategy.
And Lance Sapera is as convinced as I am. He is so much in favor of past candidate nurturing, that his team made 48 nurtured hires the last year at @Talend.
Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:
- How to reach a target of 10% of hires coming from nurtured candidates
- Why they are incentivizing each recruiter with a day off for every nurture hire they get
- How 83% of candidates that don’t get a job at Talend said they were happy of the recruitment process.
- How to concretely nurture applicants on a daily basis.
To follow Lance on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me on LinkedIn, go here.
Finally, to know more about what we do at HireSweet, click here.
In this episode, I welcome Larry Anderson, Senior Recruiter at connect RN.
Larry reveals to me how to greatly improve your conversion rate and candidate satisfaction as a recruiter, by organizing preparation calls and debriefing calls with candidates.
Here’s what we talked about:
1/ Why organizing prep calls and debriefing calls helps improve conversion rates
2/ The 3 parts of a perfect prep call: logistics, process explanation, coaching.
3/ The question Larry tells candidates to ask the hiring manager to succeed in every interview.
4/ The key steps and questions of a good debriefing process
Don’t hesitate to follow Larry on LinkedIn, by clicking here.
To follow me on LinkedIn, click here.
And to know more about HireSweet, it’s here.
Discovery is key in the recruiting process. A good discovery will save so much time later during the recruiting process, help you increase your closing rate and internal satisfaction.
Discovery is two-fold: Job discovery (aka the intake meeting) and candidate discovery.
In this episode, James shares his tips on how to run a proper discovery with both sides - he even goes further and shares the link to his actual intake meeting for everyone to read:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hIivRKWdAI2WZRApVb8mDjXCpGMZz87AVq4zI6arE0E/edit#heading=h.shjdhdtj8uzf
I hope you will have as much fun listening to this discussion as we did recording it!
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James mentions a link to his blog article "Solving the work problem". To read the actual article, click here (and discover James' blog).
To follow James on Linkedin, it’s here.
To follow me on Linkedin, click here.
And finally to learn more about what we do at HireSweet, just click here.
In this episode, we talk with Mike Cohen, CEO at Wayne Tech, about employee retention.
And you’ll see that Mike is brutally honest. Mike talks a lot about it’s own company culture, and why he thinks that strong, unique, and no-bullshit values are the key to employee retention.
Here are some of the topics Mike developed:
-The Start-Stop-Continue rule
-What Gen Z is seeking in its job
-What does Church teach you about employee retention
-Why employee hours is bullshit
-Why being truly vulnerable is a game-changer
To follow Mike on Linkedin, it’s here.
To follow me on Linkedin, click here.
And finally to learn more about what we do at HireSweet, just click here.
Talent acquisition is hard: you get overwhelmed with tons of notifications, open hundreds of Chrome tabs, send dozen of outreach messages.
And sometimes get no reply at the end of the day. That candidate who was sure a sure hire suddenly declines the job offer. You lose purpose.
A purpose and intrinsic motivation are so important in recruiting - much more than targets and metrics. That's why a lot of Talent Acquisition Managers wonder: “how can I inspire my team, give them an inner sense of purpose, so they always stay positive and go the extra mile for the candidate and the team?”
That's why we tried to answer this question with Mawulom Nenonene in this episode.
We also talked about some other broader topics. Here are some points we discussed:
1/ Why recruiters should first aim to become strategic advisors to the hiring managers.
2/ When should you split between full-cycle recruiters and sources?
3/ What are the activity standards in recruiting teams?
4/ Why recruiters should do a 6 month-checking after the person was hired
Don’t hesitate to follow Mawulom, by clicking here.
To follow me on Linkedin, click here.
Finally, check what we do at HireSweet, by clicking here.
I get questions about employee referral programs all the time:
-What’s a good target for our referral program? 15% of hires? 25%? 35%? 55%?
-What should be the reward? If it’s money, how much?
-How can I communicate with my team efficiently?
So here's a podcast to finally answer those questions!
Mostly people understand the value of hires coming from referral (they close faster, perform better and stay longer on average), but don’t know how to drive more referrals.
I went on the hunt to find the best expert on the topic - found Nasser (who founded Intrro, a company focused on referral) and invited him to talk.
Together we addressed:
1/ The 5 pillars of improving referrals: Building the culture, Setting the right incentives, Build the right process, Optimize and Track, Improve the candidate experience.
2/ A few market average numbers
3/ The concept of ELTV (Employee Lifetime Value)
4/ The “Recruiter Shakedown”, a recruiting technique used by Facebook and Google when new employees are onboarded, and when to execute it (after ~60 days)
5/ That most employee referral programs follow a Pareto rule: 20% of employees will make 80% of referrals. And how to empower “power-referrers”
And sooo much more.
Here’s the article on the memory palace Nasser mention in the episode : https://articles.sequoiacap.com/3x-referral-rates
Don’t hesitate to follow Nasser on Linkedin, by clicking here.
To follow me on Linkedin, click here.
Finally, check what we do at HireSweet, by clicking here.
For episode 6 of my podcast “A-players”, I received Shannon Toomey, who explained to me how to be a good first recruiter in a startup.
Shannon was a Senior Tech Recruiter at Dropbox, and was also most recently the first recruiter at Descript, where she had to hire 50 people in 1 year.
Here’s what we discussed (among many other things):
-What are the 3 key questions to ask to be sure a candidate is a good fit?
-Why you it’s not always efficient to use scorecards to assess candidates?
-What are the advantages of being the first recruiter in a startup, and is it for everyone?
Feel free to follow Shannon on LinkedIn, by clicking here.
To follow me, it’s here.
And to know more about what we do at HireSweet, click here.
Having Hung on my podcast was a dream come true. I'm a personal big fan of all his content, from Recruiting Brainfood to This Week in Recruiting (links below). For our discussion together, we tried to address a topic that we felt was not enough covered in the HR world, almost a taboo: How to deal with politics at work.
Should you take a stance as a company? Should you ban all discussions related to politics or social issues? We see that there is no easy solution - but we can take some inspiration from what companies have already tried: Coinbase, Gitlab etc.
About Hung:
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Connect with Hung here on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunglee/
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Subscribe to Recruiting Brainfood here: https://www.recruitingbrainfood.com/
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Subscribe to This week in Recruiting here: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/this-week-in-recruiting-6779688850651414530/
About myself:
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Connect with me here on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbchoy/
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Learn more about what we do at HireSweet: https://hiresweet.com/
Prior to being VP of Talent at Gusto, Emil was a recruiter in a recruitment agency, and an in-house recruiter for Zenefits, Okta or Lyft.
And his mission today at Gusto is to grow the company from 1100 employees to 3000 in one year. So who better to talk about capacity planning and forecasting in recruitment than Emil!
In this episode, we discussed (among other things):
-how Gusto is able to recruit so many people without having any full-time sourcers
-how to do your capacity planning when you don’t have an ATS or much data in-house.
-how to recruit effectively across different locations
To follow Emil on LinkedIn, click here.
To follow me on LinkedIn, click here.
Finally, to read my Definitive Guide to Sourcing, click here.
A lot of people enter the world of recruiting by accident, then develop a passion for it and go on to have exceptional careers as recruiters.
This is the case of Ginny Cheng, who started her career in PR and marketing, then discovered recruiting at Microsoft, before ending up a few years later in charge of recruiting for the M&A team at Facebook. Today, Ginny is the Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Oura Ring, and does career coaching in her spare time.
In this episode, Ginny tells us how she navigated her career as a recruiter, and shares her tips on how you can succeed in your career too.
To follow Ginny on Linkedin, click here
To follow me on Linkedin, click here.
Finally, to read my Definitive Guide to Sourcing, click here.
Closing candidates is an art & science.
It’s one of the biggest-leverage activities in recruiting - get better at closing and everything else just falls into place. Less sourcing, less interviewing time, and better internal satisfaction. So I brought in the best expert on the topic I could find!
Jose has been doing recruiting for 15 years, working for startups like Nebula, Edmodo, Dropcam, or large companies like Google and Cisco.
Jose has also worked at Andreessen Horowitz (helping on recruiting executive talent) - one of the most prestigious VC firm in the world, and then coached Y Combinator founders. He knows his stuff.
There’s one reason why I picked Jose to talk about closing: his impressive 92% closing rate at BuildTalent. See, that’s an agency dirty little secret: when a search firm works on a mandate, they’re only ~40% to actually find someone for the role (hence the reason why companies tend to use several agencies at the same time). Jose is at 92%. That’s twice the industry standard.
In our discussion, Jose shares his closing techniques, his numbers, and his secret sauce.
We used Jose’s learning and then more to write our chapter “Closing” in our Definitive Guide To Sourcing, check it out here.
Follow Jose on Linkedin here.
Follow me on Linkedin here
Chime’s: it’s a leading fintech of 1,500+ people, they raised $2.3B in total funding since their seed round in 2013, 3.7M users, they’re now valued at $25Bn after Forbes. Huge. Jeff shares his first-hand experience from scaling the recruiting team to 50 people in 3 years, his learnings from 20 years working in recruiting, from the early days to running a recruitment agency, to Chime today.
He covers how he built his team at Chime step by step, the importance of specializing sourcers vs recruiters, and the role of inbound.
Follow Jeff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffwintersearch
Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbchoy
Hiring is but the beginning - now you've built that team of A-Players, you need to create the perfect ecosystem for them to thrive. Learn how to get, give and encourage both praise and criticism, organize 1:1s, develop their careers. Kim Scott is the author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing your Humanity. She led AdSense, YouTube and Doubleclick teams at Google and worked with Sheryl Sandberg.
Hear from a management coach praised by top CEOs world-class tech companies (Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, etc.) - and enjoy our great season finale!
More on Kim Scott and Radical Candor on www.radicalcandor.com.
Madhura is Senior Director, Machine Learning at Workday and has a very specific view on recruiting: You shouldn't aim for A-Players but for A-Teams. Not necessarily rockstars, but people that work well together and complement each other. In this episode, she will tell us why this is particularly the case in Engineering & Machine Learning teams. How to hire for new roles (in this case - Machine Learning Engineers). How to write job descriptions and how to interview.
Lots of learning for anyone building a Data Science or Machine Learning team - that can be applied to all other teams as well!
Jon Stross is co-founder at Greenhouse, a leading Applicant Tracking System that built a very interesting framework: the Hiring Maturity Curve. 4 stages (Chaotic, Inconsistent, Systematic, Strategic) that every company needs to complete before achieving recruiting greatness. Wherever you feel your company belongs, listen to Jon's battle-tested recipes and escape your current stage!
Sultan is co-founder at Beamery, which they launched in 2016, having started working on the problems and space in 2012 at the tail end of the financial crisis. Now in face of a new enormous crisis, the recruiting industry will adapt and evolve even faster. Sultan shares his vision on what will change in the next few months - not the next few decades. He covers DE&I initiatives, candidate personalization, privacy, nurturing of talent pools. 30 minutes to make sure your company won't miss the boat!
Chris' story is intertwined with Reddit's. From its early days in 2005 to its sale to Condé Nast Publications in 2006 to the come back of the founding team in 2016. Listen to how the early website operated by a 4-person shop turned into one of the most-visited websites in the world with 52M+ Daily active users (and growing!). His story is one of rapid scale in the engineering team, of building skills as an engineering manager and of becoming a better CTO.
Rocki knows the recruiting field in & out and she's now the Chief Diversity Officer at a leading Talent Acquisition Software. She has a very clear view on why to improve diversity in any organization (and numbers to back) and how to tactically operate that improvement. In this episode, she discussed with me the 5 main reasons that might be preventing companies from hiring top performers from diverse audiences: lack of commitment, their brand, the sourcing strategy, the hiring experience, and unconscious biases - and how to address those. Let's commit now!
Follow Rocki here on LinkedIn and add me on LinkedIn here!
LinkedIn's the #1 tool in any recruiter toolkit - for a reason. Yet most of us are only scratching the surface and wondering how to dive deeper.
In this episode, Madeline explains how to leverage LinkedIn to its maximum. How to start, when to post, what to post. 30 minutes of very actionable advice for you to start today building your brand on LinkedIn!
Follow Madeline on LinkedIn on https://www.linkedin.com/in/madelinemann and on her website www.madelinemann.com!
Deel raised a total of $50M from tier-1 VCs in less than 18 months after inception to build a payroll company for distributed workers. This is their story, his view on hiring top performers, and his vision for the future of distributed work!
Follow Alex here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!
Mike Moriarty is the Global Head of Recruitment at Dropbox, helping to lead a team of 100+ Dropboxers developing and innovating cutting-edge staffing practices and outcomes. Previously, Mike built the tech staffing function at Dropbox from the ground up (2017-2020), and prior to that, rose the ranks at Google redefining the way sourcers and recruiters use data to own and tell their story to business leaders. In this episode, Mike tells us how to build a professional hiring architecture, inspired by the best practices in sales and marketing.
Follow Mike here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!
Alexandre Pachulski is a very eclectic person. Founder in the leading HRIS Talentsoft ($100M ARR, 700 people in the team), he's also a movie freak and a big sports fan. When he set out to write a book, it wasn't yet another business book on hiring: it was a book on Artificial Intelligence in the history of cinema. In this episode, Alexandre shares his view on the future of recruiting (with the Beatles), on how to improve decision-making in recruiting (with Brad Pitt's Billy Beane in Moneyball), and on the Golden State Warriors. Buckle up!
Follow Alexandre here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!
Carmen started working in recruiting in 2000 at Amazon. Then Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter. In this episode, she shares her history which crosses that of the Silicon Valley: Dot-com crash, Microsoft-Yahoo war, LinkedIn launch. Live that history with her!
Follow Carmen here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!
Kris is a leading CMO whose sweet spot has been getting companies into a position so they can be acquired or IPO: she has contributed to seven acquisitions and two IPO filings. This expertise requires moving fast and aligning quickly the marketing teams to new objectives. In this episode, she shares the playbook she used at LogDNA and Bitnami. This playbook includes: a full day offsite to map the team’s new roles, have distributed teams act as one, and send grocery cards! Don’t wait for an exit or IPO to apply this battle-tested strategy and start aligning your team now!
Follow Kris here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!
Remotive.io has been around for 6 years and is one of the strongest remote workers community. They talked about remote working way before the pandemic. Rodolphe tells us about how remote working used to be a niche phenomenon, how most content on organizing remote teams was not created for beginners and how remote can be one future for work - but not the only one.
Follow Rodolphe here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!
James Ellis is the biggest Employer Branding Nerd on earth (I'm not saying this, Google is!). With great energy and humor, James walks us through the groundwork of employer branding: drafting your company story and hammering it. 86% of people listening to this episode had an epiphany and completely revamped and turbocharged their employer branding. Good for recruiters and C-levels alike! If you're struggling writing your latest job descs, listen to James: he has the answer!
Follow James here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!
Yariv is CEO and cofounder at Flytrex, a drone delivery company of 31 employees with a team spread between Israel and the US. Yariv shares his story of building a team (while being right in the middle of the journey), why he crashed a spacecraft on the moon, and his thesis on delegating.
Follow Yariv here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!
Nate is one of Lever's cofounders - a leading ATS (serving 2,500 customers) that you probably all know. He started as CEO, turned CTO, and then CEO again. In this episode, Nate shares all Lever's backstory (starting from the underlying technology DerbyJS), his vision for recruiting, the broader evolution of technology - AND how Lever hires their own team. A great episode that we release on the day we (HireSweet) also celebrate joining Lever's official partners' ecosystem!
Follow Nate here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!
Kulveer Taggar is CEO at Zeus, a tech-enabled rental company for business travelers. In this episode, Kulveer candidly shares how Covid-19 redefined the company, their struggles when they had to lay off part of the team, and how they adjusted to the new environment for the better. His key messages? Listen to your inner voice, learn to make principal choices & your values have to cost you something.
Follow Kulveer here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!
Michael is the CEO at Y Combinator - the world's most famous accelerator who launched over 2,000 startups. In this episode, Michael shares YC's 5-step recipe to select the best founders and the main advice he gives to pre-Product Market Fit and post-Product Market Fit startups. Listen to it if you're a founder, point-blank!
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Gorgias grew from 20 people to 90 people in the last 12 months, one of the fastest ramp up we've seen, right in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis. Romain is one of the most impressive entrepreneur I've met - and a long-time friend. In this episode, he shares his personal experience on going from $1M to $10M ARR. He shares his view on building a team of executives (promote the most promising existing employees), on keeping a strong team culture while growing the team 5X (write it down), on the advice he'd give to his $1M ARR younger self (hire engineers earlier) and a lot more!
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Alison joined Sqreen super early (Employee #13) to help the founders build a great team and culture. She believes recruitment needs to be fixed and shares her tips on moving from transactional to relational recruitment. Listen to her now!
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Tido built engineering teams at early-stage Facebook, Dropbox, now Segment - his mandate has always to build world-class engineering teams. Learn how to work with agencies, how Segment built their strong engineering brand and how to improve intake meetings!
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Chris has 23 years of experience in Talent Acquisition in the Bay Area - with a strong tech focus. He ran his own agency, he worked in sourcing, recruiting, people ops. Twitter, Google, now Apollo. He shares his experience building robust interview processes, how everyone should start a process with a MOC (Mission, Objectives, Competencies) and how he built a Door-to-Door referral technique.
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Bryant, Sergie, and Vlad co-founded Webflow in 2013 with a very strong focus on building the best team. The three of them hired the first 100 people in the team, a dedication that's rarely seen in founders. Created in 2013, a Seed round in $3M in 2014, and then a massive Series A of $72M in 2019 - they're even growing faster during Covid. Is the dedication to hiring A Players the reason why Webflow is unstoppable today? Listen to the episode to hear Bryant's thesis on hiring, his tips on recruiting as a founder, and his formula for hiring ICs and strategic roles.
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Charles has seen recruiting as every possible stage of a startup. Hear his learnings from scaling Gusto from 30 to 600 employees in 3 years, learn how to set up a scalable, standardized and unbiased hiring process and take your referrals to the next level!
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Phil and his team spend hundreds of hours researching the best HR and recruiting software to build deep and unbiased buyer guides. In this episode, he tells us about how to accurately assess a new tool, what he thinks the next generation of CRM/ATS will look like, and how to build business cases to push new tools.
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Chez worked in recruiting for 7 years, starting on the agency side, and made the move to in-house recruiting. In this episode specifically tailored for recruiters, Chez shares her current tech stack, some key numbers, and her top inspirations as a recruiter. She also shares her vision on building diverse teams and how to minimize hiring biases.
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Ross currently leads a Talent Acquisition team at Uber and believes Talent Acquisition roles evolved (and will keep evolving) into a much more strategic role. In this episode, he shares his vision for the future of recruiting and his best recommendations to grow as a recruiter.
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In less than six years, Jason grew Ironclad to a company of 160 employees and raised a total of $84M. Jason faced two stages at Ironclad:
1 - Find Product Market Fit (where founders should do most of hiring)
2 - Scale as fast as possible (and hire a recruiting team)
In this episode, Jason tells us about this journey and about why he thinks you should hire a great exec team as soon as possible.
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Jason Lemkin was co-founder & CEO at EchoSign, sold it for $400M to Adobe, went on to create Saastr - the largest community in the world for Saas entrepreneurs. On this episode Jason speaks directly to his fellow Saas CEO and shares the mistakes he made (and saw other people make) on the road to assembling a world-class sales team, starting with the VP Sales. How to find & assess a great VP Sales, how to improve conversion rates thanks to micro-PR, how to build a hiring routine - a must-listen for CEOs & sales execs building their sales teams.
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Amanda has been in recruiting for 10 years and has seen in all. In this first episode, she tells us about her experience building teams of A-Players at Yelp, Lever and now Retool. She shares her opinion on what common traits are most share among A-Players. She shares her secret sauce on how to build a great candidate experience and increase the engineers offer acceptance rate in a super-competitive San Francisco. 30 minutes packed with highly actionable insight, advice & energy. A must-listen if you're currently building a team in the Bay Area! $
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