EP 138: Hiring strategies from Daniel Chait, CEO of Greenhouse, and Jamie Hodari, CEO of Industrious.

Join host James Mackey as he sits down with Daniel Chait, CEO of Greenhouse, and Jamie Hodari, CEO of Industrious. This episode provides a fresh perspective on tech hiring and recruiting strategies. 

It emphasizes the need for self-awareness, a clear understanding of roles, and positive interpersonal dynamics in building successful teams. Moreover, it sheds light on the challenges of managing in a growth-driven environment and the benefits of shifting towards a more sustainable growth rate.

   0:46 Jamie Hodari’s background
   2:04 Principles and mistakes in hiring
11:53 Changes in philosophy and hiring practices
17:14 Budget season and hiring uncertainty
22:51 Optimizing the hiring process

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Our host James Mackey

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:27

Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, James Mackie. Thank you so much for joining us today. We got a really fun episode planned for you. We're joined by Daniel Chait and Jamie Haudari. Daniel, thank you for joining us today. Welcome back. Thank you so much. Great to be back and I'm looking forward to co-hosting today. And Jamie, thanks for joining us today. It's your first time on the show. Before we jump into the topics we have outlined, Jamie, it would be great if you could share a little bit about your background with everyone.

Speaker 3: 0:53

Thank you for having me. I'm super excited for this one. I run a company called Industrious. We're one of the largest workplace providers in the world and that's obviously very tied up in talent and all that. And I was a journalist before or in a corporate lawyer, but actually right before launching Industrious I ran an education organization and I'm like dead on belief that educators are the best hirers, so that's been super helpful for me, even though now I'm 10 years in to running this workplace company, Industrious.

Speaker 1: 1:23

That's really interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Why do you feel that educators are the best hirers?

Speaker 3: 1:27

I've observed that educators seem to think about hiring, focus on hiring and apply more rigor to it than 99% of for-profit businesses I've seen. I don't totally know all the reasons, but I think one of the clearest is that it's pretty measurable, like you're able to see if a teacher is making gains in the classroom or not and therefore over time I'm really able to say what are the things that lead up to that and what behaviors or what qualities support that. And therefore I think, in a very basic sense, a lot particularly charter school networks but tend to be more data driven in their hiring than a lot of businesses.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Yeah, for sure. That's really interesting and I'd love to start us off too. Just thinking back to the early days when you were building the Industrious team. Can you share a little bit about some of the principles that drove how you hired? What were some of the core things that you looked on when you were building out the team initially, when onboarding new people?

Speaker 3: 2:19

In the early days of Industrious, I think the couple really clear principles were an extreme aversion to people who were unpleasant to be around, and that's probably still true. But now we're at 700 employees and that can mean more different things. But early on when you're such a small group of people, the dynamics within that group of people are so determinant of whether the company succeeds or not. I probably paid a little more attention in the early days to the interpersonal dynamics between the six people, the 10, the 30. And then I think from day one was very focused on hiring people, especially when I was directly hiring all the people in Industrious who were better than me, smarter than me, et cetera. At the very least, at one very pronounced thing, I think there were some early hires where they were experienced, but there was no spike. There was nothing where it's like, oh, they're gonna come to a meeting and think of something that me and my co-founder never thought of and very quickly realized, especially in the early days of a company, that wasn't gonna work.

Speaker 2: 3:20

And can you think about. How did you assess those things? Like, how do you, when you meet someone, figure out, are they gonna be someone that, yeah, they may be a contrary voice or they may think differently than I do, but we're gonna really get along well? And also that idea of they have to spike in being smart. How do you know that at an interview?

Speaker 3: 3:35

I think this is reductive, but 95% of the time people are open and honest about their failings in an interview process, people who can talk a lot about where they've gone wrong in their career, what they're working on, why they're working on it, what behaviors they would change that would most improve their performance and what the blockages are to them.

Speaker 3: 3:55

Making those behavior changes almost always turn out to be great colleagues and easy to work with. And people who are really resistant to that, very defensive, can't acknowledge where they've stumbled, for the most part end up being really difficult colleagues. So I don't wanna reduce it all down to that, but I think that line of questioning and really double clicking into those types of things is very helpful, and part of the reason I think it's helpful is that if you're not being rigorous about that in a hiring process, then oftentimes you fall back on. Does this person look like me? Could I imagine being in the same frat as them? Would they go to the same synagogue as me? And so you're more likely to get trapped, if you're thinking about those kind of things, into just hiring people who feel very comfortable for you, and obviously that, I think, over time is a huge problem for a business.

Speaker 1: 4:43

Yeah, I feel self-awareness is just critical to look at during the interview process, like making sure that somebody is again aware of their strengths, aware of, maybe, the shortcomings or areas that they need to improve on, or maybe it's a lesson learned, like hey, this was a challenge I had and this is how I overcame it, or something to that extent. And then to even add on that, I also like to dial into the awareness they have and the environment that they're in. So it's being self-aware, but it's also. Are you aware of how your team runs? Are you aware how the activities that you're doing cascade up to the company achieving North Star metrics? Regardless of their role within the company, whether it's an individual contributor or somebody in leadership, hopefully they understand how their point of impact influences the larger, bigger picture and I feel like that's another thing that's critically important.

Speaker 1: 5:30

There's a lot of folks that maybe they understand the tasks or the specific outcomes that they have to do on a day-to-day basis, but typically the folks that have created the most value in my own company and my customers' companies seem to not only have a lot of self-awareness but they have a lot of awareness about how their organization operates too. That sounds right. Yeah, it's just to piggyback on what you're saying. I just feel like it's really important. So let's talk about self-awareness. As you've been growing your company, can you tell us about maybe some of the mistakes in learning lessons that you might have had over the years when it comes to hiring?

Speaker 3: 6:00

Definitely Mistakes on the hiring front. I guess one red flag that I was not as good at picking up early on that I got better at is there is this I would say about 20% of candidates, if you really dig in, everything is someone else's fault, like all their stories. In the end I manager didn't understand this or the customer didn't understand this, and that, I think, is very highly correlated with people who don't work well in an organization, who are maybe lack self-awareness Early on. I was not particularly good at catching that, I think.

Speaker 3: 6:35

Second would be and this is probably true for a lot of people as they grow a business and it's like I just fell into this trap, in part because I got some advice saying okay, when you're a young company, you got to hire A players and there's no way around it. The successor failure of business is going to be built around that. But at some point you're going to have 300 employees, 400 employees, and there isn't a way to build a company where you're going to fire on all cylinders and always be hiring A players and therefore you have to shift to the kind of company that can hire B players and have such good training, such good learning and development that you can then get A performance out of those B players. And that's such an intoxicating concept, like I think about Bill Belichick with the Patriots, and it's like I don't like Bill Belichick but part of what seems to make him a great coach is like he doesn't need amazing people at every position. He knows how to somehow have the whole be greater than some of its parts, and I actually think that was a mistake in hindsight.

Speaker 3: 7:38

It sounds good on paper. I understand the concept, but eventually we came back around to like no, it's really painful to take someone who's capabilities and capacity is not quite up to snuff with the rest of the organization and like create such a magical personal and professional development program that you could somehow transform that. It's a hell of a lot easier to just make sure you stay great at hiring and bring in people who you respect and think are going to be wonderful in their roles. And so we moved back to the like no, you should hire amazing people. And it really produced a big change in the trajectory of the business and I wish I had not had those middle years where I fell prey to. You could be the next Bill Belichick philosophy.

Speaker 1: 8:21

Yeah, that's actually a really good point. I think it makes sense. What you're saying, though, like even if your goal, of course, is always to hire a players, it's like what can we do to limit downside? And that's where it's like thinking about learning, development, but even sometimes that's really hard when you're growing quickly. But process optimization like thinking about process and workflows and thinking about how to bake those workflows into technology help shorten the gap, hopefully, between A and B players, so you're at least preventing some of that downside. But, as you said, it's like always trying to compete for the best of the best, right, because it's almost like exponential, the difference over time when you hire several A players versus B players. Maybe at first it doesn't seem like a big difference, but it can have a huge long term effect. It's really interesting conversation, daniel. Do you have any follow up thoughts on that?

Speaker 2: 9:04

I wanted to go back to something you mentioned earlier, Jamie, which was this idea that in the early days you really focused on that interpersonal dynamic, but it sounded like that. Maybe over time you deemphasize that.

Speaker 3: 9:16

Here's what I would say to try to add a little bit of color to the is the interpersonal dynamic as important in a 700 person company or we've hired 2000 people over time versus in the early days I do think it is just as important that you're hiring people who lift the people around them up, who can work in a group. And if you get to the end of your interview, right there, review, like at industrious, part of the performance management is how did you in individual role and what were the positive externalities or negative externalities of you being at the company? Did you make the people around you better? Did you make them want to be here more? Did you make them want to be here less? I still think that's every bit as important.

Speaker 3: 9:53

I do think when you're 10 people, there is a group dynamic. So if the whole group is extroverted, it's a little harder to have the one person who doesn't want to come to karaoke. If the whole group loves to like hang out on weekends, it's hard to have the one person who's like I don't want to be friends with my colleagues. So what are the really nice parts about being a larger organization? Is you still need people who can behave cohesively and lift the people around them up. But there's more room for introverts, extroverts, people who want to socialize with their colleagues, people who don't. But that doesn't mean you can start bringing in people who don't work well with others, who are a drag to be around for their company.

Speaker 2: 10:30

That's a really interesting nuance. Thank you. I want to see how it may be a very different thing to just be like the right fit in terms of getting along with everyone at a 10 person startup versus a thousand person organization, where there's more different kinds of community. I like that.

Speaker 1: 10:45

And when it comes to hiring, one last point that I wanted to touch on. I am curious to dive into something a little bit more topical. Right now, particularly in the tech sector, we've seen a lot of companies that have slowed down in hiring maybe not hiring at all and I would love to get both of your thoughts on what you're currently seeing and when it comes to hiring demand, and to learn a little bit about what you're experiencing, what your customer is experiencing and, like word on the street, right, what seems to be happening in the tech employment market. Are people starting to get a little bit more optimistic? I've talked with folks where they feel like it bottomed out over the past several months and hopefully maybe we're like in the very early stages of rebound. Based on who I talk to, some people believe that that's the case. Others are saying, no, the data doesn't support that. Jamie, maybe we can start with you. What are you hearing from your own experience with the other executives that you're speaking with?

Speaker 3: 11:39

So, dan, I'm going to have the real data driven, what's happening via the greenhouse platform. At industrious, though, we still have a lot of data, because we have 100,000 customers and you see which teams are growing, which teams are shrinking, and I do think we're in a moment of slowly growing teams. But I think there has been a shift in philosophy and context that runs deeper than just what is the annualized percentage growth rate and headcount for companies. The shift that I've seen is there was the zero interest, whatever you want to call. Essentially, the revenue growth at all cost is the thing that is going to be rewarded, and when that's true, then you have all sorts of series A, series B, series C companies whose primary prerogative, whose primary directive, is to try to double revenue every year. It doesn't matter if you don't make money, it doesn't matter if you're doubling revenue at crappy margins. You've got to be doubling revenue because that's the thing investors are paying for. And I think doubling revenue and we doubled revenue for seven years, so I've been in the thick of it on our end.

Speaker 3: 12:49

It is a hiring nightmare because you get to the company offsite and half the people at the offsite weren't at the last one, because they're average 10, more than half your company hasn't been there a year and it makes it hard to inculcate what the culture of the company is, etc.

Speaker 3: 13:04

Now we've moved into a world where that's not as true and as a result, I think I see a lot of companies that are healthy saying I want to grow at 30% a year not 100, but I want to try to do it profitably.

Speaker 3: 13:15

And then what the cascading effect of that is that I think that's a much more manageable growth rate. You still have to add people, but it's not this breakneck oh my God, I need to triple my sales team by this fall or else I'm screwed. And so I think it's having all sorts of healthy sort of salutary effects for companies in hiring, because essentially what's happening is they're growing at a more reasonable revenue growth rate. They're trying to do it more profitably, which means they're adding people in a way that is not so overheated that they're making bad hiring decisions and they have to unwind them, etc. And especially if they did layoffs last year and found that they were actually able to run pretty efficiently on a slightly smaller team than they thought, then every new person they bring in has to really earn that seat and I think for most companies that's probably going to produce healthier long-term hiring and talent management outcomes and healthier revenue growth and profitability outcomes than the breakneck pre-COVID version.

Speaker 2: 14:14

Yeah, I think Jamie's point certainly from the standpoint of a CEO running a tech company that is investor backed. We've seen a lot of those same dynamics play out in our own organizations and others alike ours, I think. If you zoom out a bit and you're like, hey, what's happening in the market? Overall it's a confusing picture. The headlines are all record low, unemployment has returned and been persistent, wage growth has been high and that all seems great if you just look at the headlines.

Speaker 2: 14:45

I think what's on the ground and what's borne out in our data at Greenhouse, across all of our customers and millions of jobs, is the interest rate environment has affected tech companies and companies with similar tech.

Speaker 2: 15:01

Let's call it dynamics to those growth dynamics has affected those companies much differently.

Speaker 2: 15:07

So if you're in the food service, hospitality industry, retail, hiring hourly workers is still very competitive and wages are up and unemployment is low.

Speaker 2: 15:18

But if you're hiring programmers, every tech company just had their interest rates reset from zero to five and so they've all had the layoffs that Jamie's talking about, and so there's a lot of talent out there and available up and down. You had a year two years ago where there were record IPOs. Nobody could hire a CFO, nobody could even get an investor relations from to help them write their S1, to try to list now like all that talent is available. So I think it's a very different adult landscape when you look at that tech and tech adjacent. So all the knowledge workers in a tech company, whether it's salespeople, customer success management executives and so on, it's a much different and much more cautious growth environment, in line with what Jamie has said, and so that just plays out in these different characteristics I think ultimately I very much agree that it's a healthy thing for those companies to go through, but it's certainly painful to be part of.

Speaker 1: 16:18

So there's a couple of other insights and I would love, daniel, if you have any thoughts in validating this or just getting your thoughts, or even if you don't. That's cool, but just curious. I was speaking with a CEO of a category leading company in the recruiting tech space and he was talking about consolidation of recruiting tech, people looking at, okay, what's their core, essentially hiring operating system like a greenhouse and, of course, retaining their core software, like greenhouse, for instance. But what he said is we were seeing a lot of other layers to that tech stack getting hit particularly hard. He mentioned a bit of a consolidation happening in the recruiting tech space and people being a lot more critical, so to speak, about which vendors. Are you seeing some of that?

Speaker 2: 17:11

For sure and obviously, as someone providing more of a core platform, a lot of ways that benefits us, and Jamie, I'm sure, can speak to this as well. I don't think it's limited to recruiting. I think every company is budget season right now. Every company is going through their stack and being like do we really need 12 project managers around the company? Do we really need every last bell and whistle on our Salesforce license, Like, how do we save money? The big checks that every company writes are payroll and right after it is like the nine million SaaS products we all bought in the last 10 years. Maybe we don't need as many of them.

Speaker 1: 17:43

Yeah, that's really interesting. So just with my business being embedded recruiting and RPO services for the tech industry, we are still seeing people being incredibly tight with hiring. We saw even more churn in customers in July and August, which is actually normal because August hiring to some extent is cyclical at least in my experience. So August has always been a little bit slower for us. But what's interesting is toward the end of August, as we were going into Labor Day, we saw a big uptick in our sales pipeline and we saw a lot of companies say, okay, we want to have conversations. Then what was interesting is that a lot of them stalled out a little bit and then they're pushing to October and so still seeing an incredible amount of uncertainty where people they're starting to get slightly more optimistic, but they're thinking about it, they're almost ready and they're like let's hold on another month or two, and that's been the trend I've seen actually a couple of times throughout the year On this issue of consolidation of infrastructure of recruiting.

Speaker 3: 18:45

I've definitely noticed that and I don't think, daniel, you're exaggerating or saying this because you happen to run greenhouse. I think I've heard so many companies saying I'm not changing my greenhouse spend, but I got to change my LinkedIn recruiter spend or something like that. And one of the dynamics I've seen is it feels like this SaaS proliferation. There are centralized SaaS decisions for major platforms made by the central apparatus of the company, the main leaders of the company, and then there was an era where you would allow mid-level employees to be like I'm going to put down the credit card for XYZ and a lot of the stuff that's getting chopped is the. I allowed the mid-level employee to put down the credit card for XYZ and I will say not to knock the people industry.

Speaker 3: 19:29

I think if I wasn't a CEO, I would want to be ahead of people, but that's always been a part for most companies where there was more of this going on and I don't totally know why. So, for example, our construction team there's a major piece of software they use, but over the years it's not like I keep finding our construction team being like actually, we use this new 3D modeling tool and we just signed a subscription for this, whereas at the people team it does oftentimes feel like they go to a conference and they come back and we have a fourth L&D software subscription or a special set of videos that everyone needs to watch, and maybe it's a very social part of companies and people connect with others. But I do think people somewhere where there was particularly this proliferation of mid-tier software that wasn't that necessary, that's being cut back in favor of the central stuff, like Greenhouse.

Speaker 2: 20:15

Yeah, it could be. I wish it was more true than that. But all getting aside, look, I see revenue teams. There's been a huge proliferation of the tech stack there. In the customer organization. There's a huge proliferation of finance organizations, and so those finance organizations tend to be as large. But in these other big distributed things, we've seen that as well. So, look, I think my only point is I think that era I like I call it this proliferation is really coming rapidly to a close, and I think we're in the era of simplification and consolidation. People want to spend less, they want to get more, but frankly, they know that they can get away without all the bells and whistles because it's not gross at all costs. It's a balance of gross and profitability and, yeah, I think that all sounds right and maybe to transition it to the culture of hiring.

Speaker 3: 21:06

I think, like hiring is very human and it's just the more time you're spending talking to people in a process, the better those processes you're going to go, and therefore I find the tools that enable that that mean you're spending less time sorting through candidates or less time trying to remember what the person's assignment answers were for the initial screening interview. The more time you're spending with candidates like that's the power, I think, in recruiting, or what are the either recruiting firms you can work with or recruiting software you can use that maximizes time spent with high quality candidates. That's really powerful and the stuff that's like you don't need to talk to candidates because we're going to use AI to sort through, but I feel like we're still far away from that being a particularly effective way to bring great people into your organization.

Speaker 2: 21:56

That's a great touch point. And just picking up on your comment that it's an inherently human process, I think that's often overlooked or wished away. I think you hear this kind of like glib phrase like, oh, recruiting is like sales and marketing it's just like funnel. And then, yeah, there's a funnel in the sense that there are stages and there's more people in the top of it than in the bottom of it. But it's very different in the sense that the product moving through that sales funnel is a human being, and human beings are complicated to figure out and they have their own experiences along the way, and so you got to make sure that it works for them as well. And so I guess can you talk about, with the time that you are trying to spend, like, how is it that you think about what that experience should be for candidates that come through a hiring process at industrious? And then I want to get into a little bit about how you and your leadership team actually do it.

Speaker 3: 22:50

I think it's really important to have the experience of being a potential candidate industrious, be a good one. Those people, even if they don't get a job, might be a future customer, and I just think looking for a job is a stressful experience and I think I've seen friends go through processes of companies that felt dehumanizing, that felt like their time wasn't being used fairly, and that can be really, I think, a painful for the candidate, reflects poorly on the company. I think that's compounded by the fact that sometimes you find a star halfway through the process and you're like now it damn well better be a good hiring process, because every touch point I have from here through the end of the process, half of it is trying to assess if this person is really as great as they seem and half of it is selling them on this company. So when the time comes where we make them an offer, they're excited to take it. Some of the things we do to make sure that it happens that way is try to minimize the early stage stuff. One of the big mistakes I see companies make is they do seven get-to-know-you interviews before they get to the meaty stuff. And now you've wasted so much that if you want to have a very substantive second half of the process with two assignments and a debrief and a panel role play, you've basically lost the ability to do that because the person's five hours in to their experience of the company through a bunch of redundant get-to-know-you conversations. So try very quickly to get to. We're either moving this person into the sticky kind of very intense stuff or we're not. And then, once you get into the intense stuff, to say in advance like this is our style is again pretty intense.

Speaker 3: 24:25

We believe that all the data shows that the most effective interview methodology is stuff that is close as possible, reflects what you would actually be doing in the role, whether it's role playing or not, and therefore most of an interview process in industry is certainly for senior. Role is less like. Tell me about a time where you had to show great leadership under fire. Most of it is just role playing and working through critical thinking and problem solving of the exact things they'd be doing in the role. The closer the match, the better, and if the person finds that fun and interesting, that's a great sign. And if they're like this is a drag, then that's probably indicative in its own right and then I think we try to.

Speaker 3: 25:04

Basically I finished by saying we try to get a couple people into the middle slash, late stages very quickly, because you basically start a hire, you figure out we think the profile is what you think are going to be the capabilities or set of things you're looking for and what's the pond you want to be fishing in to find those people.

Speaker 3: 25:21

But you could be wrong. So I think what's helpful is you want to get a couple early strong candidates pretty deep into the funnel or pretty deep into the process and then take stock hey, is this right or wrong, or were we way off base on what we were looking for? And then you either double down on the places you're recruiting, on the way you're doing it, or you start tweaking it, and I see a lot of companies mess that up. They want to move everyone in lockstep through the process. So they try to get their 15 candidates to the second round and they wait until they have all eight candidates that are going to move to the third round before they move the first of the eight to the third round. And I really think that's the wrong way to run a hiring process.

Speaker 2: 25:57

James, anything you want to pick up on there I think you said it quite well In terms of just.

Speaker 1: 26:01

I suppose one correlated blind spot that I see a lot of top executives at a C level potentially make is, I would say, part of evaluating the success of a search is when you're a leader, you can't only look at the folks that are at a final round. So when you're looking at a pipeline, a lot of times executives are really only looking at who's made it to be into the process. And it's really important for executives for important searches, particularly other leadership searches, to go up funnel, if you will like, to previous rounds interviews to see who's dropping out there. Because okay, maybe you have one great candidate in the final round that you really love, but maybe there was somebody even better that didn't move forward after a second round interview. And so it's not only evaluating conversion rates, and sometimes if conversion rates are too high, just higher conversion rates isn't even necessarily a good thing.

Speaker 1: 26:53

I think sometimes there's this bias towards saying we're getting 50% of people through second to third round, so we're doing a great job getting relevant people. It's like also, now you have a lot more people to interview in a third round, which is going to take a lot more time and money in order to make that higher and maybe we haven't dialed in enough. So I think, opposed to looking at conversion rates, it's important to look at it, but really the executive should be or whoever is ultimately accountable for the role needs to go up funnel and see who's dropping out, specifically like dialing into profiles.

Speaker 3: 27:26

I have a specific piece of advice on that front, because I couldn't agree with you more and I've been doing that for years and finally arrived at a methodology for that really work. So I agree with you. An exec, or whoever, is the person who's going to make the final call on the higher, needs to audit the earlier rounds of the process. And I think when you're auditing the early rounds of the process you're looking for two things which you just flag, james. Basically one, are people dropping out before they get to you and if so, why? Maybe you call the person and say why did this feel? Like from your end it wasn't the right fit? And second, are the earlier parts of the process missing people who might be spectacular for this and for that second one, it's hard to look at 700 resumes and be like did we miss some spectacular people?

Speaker 3: 28:12

But what I've noticed over time is more junior employees or more less seasoned hirers fall back on experience. It's really easy if you haven't done a lot of hiring to be like this person has been ahead of Corp Dev four times, so they might be amazing. And they might be like this person works in private equity at Blackstone, like that's not Corp Dev and it's like what this person in private equity at Blackstone would probably absolutely crush this job and would be so excited to get into a more hospitable, manageable culture. And so I often audit the early stages specifically to look for people with odd experience or stuff where it might not, on paper, be exactly relevant, and make sure you add three or four of those people into the process that otherwise would have gotten screened out.

Speaker 1: 28:59

Love that, and Daniel, I think we have time for one more question for Jamie, so what last question do you think we should finish with?

Speaker 2: 29:06

First of all, Jamie, that's great advice, Thank you. I guess where I wanted to go is what is the conversation among you and your leadership team around hiring? Are there numbers you look at, reports you look at? Is there an empty you included in your weekly or monthly like staff reports or board decks? How does that show up in the way you think about and talk about the business with your leaders?

Speaker 3: 29:28

We have historically, at the leadership level, taken a more qualitative and quantitative approach to looking at aggregate hiring data at the company, and that might be a mistake, although I agree with you, james.

Speaker 3: 29:38

I think the like what's our matriculation rate and conversion rate and I've not found it tells you that much, and then you manage what you measure. So now everyone's obsessing over what the conversion rate on hire, something like that, is. So I do think for me, the place where it lives the most is especially for people on the leadership team. These are great professionals, like if they run construction. They're going to be damn good at running construction, if they run engineering and oftentimes, if you had to pick what are a couple of things that they're good but not great at yet, it's hiring, especially if it's someone who was an individual contributor six years ago, has only been a manager for four years, but they're an all-star and they are now in their first true leadership level role where they're basically managing people who are, in turn, managing people and having to hire and therefore I would say probably a third of the professional development, coaching and like really getting in it with people feedback for my direct reports or the people one level below that tends to be around hiring.

Speaker 2: 30:45

I love that Thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 30:46

That's super helpful. I love it. I love it. I think we could keep going. I almost wish we booked another hour. This is a lot of fun. Look, I wanted to say thank you so much for both of you for coming on today and sharing your thoughts with everyone. Jamie, again, welcome first time on the show and you're welcome to come back on anytime you want to.

Speaker 3: 31:05

I would love one final piece of advice from you guys. Now I got to go back and spend the next spent years doing hiring. I've got two hiring pros right here. Is there something based on what you've heard or what you know of our business that you think is like a standard takeaway you want most executives to take away about how to be great hires?

Speaker 2: 31:26

I guess I have a lot to say here. I would say one thing I've been fond of lately is make sure hiring decisions don't turn into political projects where you're just trying to avoid getting questions or making other people unhappy, but actually focus on what's going to be the most important criteria for this person to be successful, even if it means that some people interview the person, said no, that's okay. Ultimately, the hiring manager should feel empowered to make the best decision for the business they're trying to build.

Speaker 3: 31:56

I love that. I feel like there is a thin line between consensus and the lowest common denominator, and that totally makes sense to me.

Speaker 1: 32:03

I would say one of the biggest lessons that I've learned over the past decade running my company is experience and performance have a very tight relationship and I think that sometimes, when we're looking through the lens of the outcomes we want to create, we have to remember that creating great experiences is at the core. So when we're looking at every part of the recruiting process, keeping experience top of mind is going to ensure that you are able to hire the best people, and keeping great experiences and onboarding is going to not only create happy employees but it's going to accelerate the time it takes to ramp and make people productive faster. So when I'm thinking about performance, the first place that my brain goes to is are we optimizing for experience first? And typically, creating great experiences is going to lead to great outcomes. So I think looking at recruiting through that lens has been really helpful, and this has been my evolution as a recruiting leader over the years. Love it.

Speaker 3: 32:57

We're all on the customer service business in some way or another. Okay, this was great. Thanks a lot, guys.

Speaker 1: 33:04

Thank you so much for joining us today and for everybody tuning in. We got a lot of great episodes coming up. We're going to be releasing an episode with Christian, who's the CEO of Glassdoor. We have my good friend Amit, who is the CEO of Tenable, publicly traded cybersecurity company, coming on the show, and we have executives from GoPro and DocuSign coming up on the show as well. So make sure to continue to tune in and thank you so much for being part of our community and we'll talk to you soon. Take care.