The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
Welcome to The Breakthrough Hiring Show! We are on a mission to help leaders make hiring a competitive advantage.
Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
You will learn how to:
- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
- Leverage data, process, and technology to achieve hiring success.
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 112: Scaling startups: Performance metrics, recruitment tools, and quality of hire.
Join host James Mackey and his guest Charmien Fugelsang, Chief People Officer at nTop as they discuss the journey of scaling a startup and the lessons learned along the way. They dissect the core elements of quality of hire and efficiency, going over the intricacies of the hiring process, goal-setting, and fostering a culture of excellence.
James and Charmien also navigate the delicate balance between time-to-fill and time-to-hire, providing valuable insights into how structured processes can ensure high-quality hires without sacrificing speed.
0:45 Charmien Fugelsang's background
6:08 Specialized sourcing and recruitment impact
20:56 Quality of hire and performance metrics
25:21 Quality over speed in hiring
29:39 Hiring managers in the recruitment process
43:04 Performance reviews and feedback frequency
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Our host James Mackey
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Thanks for listening!
Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough hiring show. I'm your host, james Mackey, very excited for today's episode. We are joined by Charmian Fugelslang. Charmian, thank you for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Hey, thank you, James. I'm so excited to be here. I'm just been looking forward to this all week.
Speaker 1:I really have been as well. My favorite thing I get to do is come on this show Again. Like what I was saying before, recording it's great because I learned so much from our guests. We're usually a bit official. I'm really thankful that you're here. Before we jump into the topics, I wanted to see if you could provide us with a bit of background.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would love to. Well, I'm coming to you as the Chief People Officer of N-Top. N-top is a startup here in New York City that is around 130 people. We're designing the next set of design tools for engineers who are solving some of the most complex manufacturing problems in the world, which is super exciting. This is actually my third startup.
Speaker 2:Before here, I was at Vimeo, which you probably all know as the video tech sharing platform. That was an incredible experience. I got to start there when it was about the same size as N-Top is today. We grew to 650 globally in my six years there, which was super fun. Prior to that, I was at the AdTech startup, appnexus, which is now Xander. That company I also joined really early stage at only 30 people, helped to scale that to 503 years, which was crazy. I am basically a startup addict, james. That's what it comes down to. I love early age startups. I love helping the crazy growth challenges be solved. Now that I'm in my third one, you always wonder are there patterns? Are there things that you've learned from doing startups before? Is it actually easier over time? I'm happy to say that that's my experience here at N-Top. Third time really is a charm.
Speaker 1:That's great. I always do wonder that, because I feel like just startup scale-ups, it's always hard. To some extent You're right. You've been around long enough. You've seen what works, what doesn't work consistently optimize. I'm sure it's never a copy paste, but there are fundamental ways to run the business that are going to be, again, fundamental, based regardless of which company you're at.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in this last pivot, you want to hear something funny. I actually planned my leaving Vimeo. I gave nine months notice. I joke, I was birthing my end date. I gave them nine months notice. Why I did was I wanted to have a really, really I wanted to have a good exit. If you're an HR person, you hear all about the bad exits of people who didn't do it the right way. But I wanted to have a good exit. My exit date. After all that planning, after making sure they got the next me in place, after they were all set up, everything was transitioned. It was perfectly done. That date happened to be March 12th of 2020. I kid you not.
Speaker 2:The day that everything shut down from COVID was my last day actually working as an HR leader. I think maybe I knew something was coming, but that also meant that I took a nice long break while I got to watch the sound of everyone else was actually dealing with this crazy change in our workforce and take a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do next. Did I want to go to another big company or did I actually want to go to a small company again and do it again? I thought to myself no, the first time I scaled a startup, I really felt like, wow, every single problem we're dealing with is just because of these people in this room. We just couldn't figure out. Or there's a startup next door who's got it all figured out, or there's some other HR leader who's?
Speaker 2:done this before, who has it all known? And these problems are because this person's in this role or whatever. And then I got to Vimeo and I was like wait, actually there's just some of the same problems you're going to encounter all the time, like once you get over I'd say, 250, communication starts really breaking down internally and people start to feel isolated in office or remote, distributed, et cetera. You know your systems start breaking or the systems you need at 500 are not the same systems you need at zero. And so I thought to myself what I'd love to do this time at EndTop is I'd love to come in and basically see if I could create the company that we're going to be at 500 when we're at 100 from an admin systems policy perspective.
Speaker 2:And if we did that the right way, would that make the painful point. When your team really needs you as an HR leader, need your partners to really be solving the people problems of scale, to not be focusing on the foundational administrative or even systems stuff that starts to break. Would that free up enough space if we built all the infrastructure for 500 now to actually focus on our people when they need us the most in the growth cycles, like actually helping them specialize or not be just a generalist lost in startup, that we can't pivot into a more specialized role as we scale, like what if we had more time to focus on that right? So that was the challenge, is why I sort of decided to come to EndTop right and to do this one more time. And, yeah, and I would love to talk to you about some of those things that I've learned today and which you know, some of the interesting things that we've noticed and we've done differently.
Speaker 1:We have a lot that we want to talk about on the talent acquisition side and the people side, hr and we can cover it. I think we can do this too from the perspective of like, how did you operate this on your first time, right Scaling, and how are you doing it differently? And then, if I have any experiences that I could share, that overlap, or if I have questions for you based on your experience, we can throw that in there too. But just to get us started, one of the insights you shared with me is you switched from a model where you're only would hire like full lifecycle recruiters to working with a split kind of hybrid sorcerer and with a sorcerer and then a full desk recruiter. What was the? Why did you decide to add on the sourcing layer? Because I think I want to talk about the value out of sourcing layer and then what's the proper way to implement it so folks tuning in can learn from this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so look for this is going to sound really interesting. I mean it's kind of crazy. I have never before I've worked in a top, worked with a sorcerer directly, like I've just never had a big enough team. When I was at Vimeo my team was six people on the talent acquisition side and I don't know. A sorcerer always was kind of to us like a luxury. Oh, big teams, you know you go to Facebook or Google and you get a sorcerer. Like that only happens when you're like hiring hundreds of people annually. You know that's when you get sorcerers. And so that was my bias and my personal bias and my perspective and what I believed. And you know every recruiter I've ever met also always asked me to get a sorcerer.
Speaker 2:I have to say, and it would always be like no, no, we're not big enough yet or that time will come, but we're not quite there yet. And what happened at end top was I hired a recruiter my full cycle recruiter to and because we were starting to build out our go to market team and we started talking about the challenges specifically that end top was facing from a recruiting perspective. And top does not have a sexy as sexy of a brand name as, like, say, vimeo, like. So I was very used to having Vimeo, where it's just like you send out Vimeo, people just write back to you right away. They're so excited like we had great brand love out there. So people were really passionate about like, if we sent out an email, it got picked up immediately.
Speaker 2:And tops a little different. We're a very niche software in the 3d printing space, which is a niche market. So it's basically, if someone had touched our product, if, like, they had touched end top or knew of it, like they would basically ask us to work for them, basically for free, like they want to come work for us. They don't even want money. They're just so excited because they understand how exciting our product is. But if you are of the most of the people who have not known our brand, do not know our company yet because we're relatively new or you're not in our industry. We really had to figure out a way to get you excited about what we were doing in a different way. We were not just going to get typical outreach, we were not just going to get people. Then the other layer of it is that we're doing highly complex engineering here. We need people with geometry backgrounds, with physics backgrounds, with simulation graphics design background. I'd say we're fighting Disney for the same people as engineers right.
Speaker 2:You have to imagine, if you're not known, you really have to sell the story in a different way. When I hired this new recruiter, one of the big differences was I hired her actually from Jem, the recruiting software. I don't know if you know Jem, but I am.
Speaker 1:Do you know, Jem? I want to bring them on as a partner for this job. I'm actually going to approach it. We approach Greenhouse first because they're like. I feel like Daniel chased the OG of recruiting tech. I got him on the show, but now I'm going to go for Jem and see if he'll come on as a partner too. Yeah, very familiar.
Speaker 2:Jem is amazing what they're doing. They're basically if you're not familiar with what Jem does. I mean it's a data analytics for talent acquisition, but it is also a CRM tool. I didn't even know this existed. I have to be honest, this is a whole new world for me where we could schedule and plan a communications, especially like multi-emails reaching out to people, telling our story, telling it from different people, sending emails directly from our CEO to potential candidates where they can respond directly to him as just part of an auto-programmed chain of communication, to really not just have that one introductory hope you answer this kind of recruiting email, but actually a series. So I pulled her from that company and she said to me look, if we actually have such specific candidates and we need to really sell the story and we're going to do a lot better if actually our candidate pool is much more targeted and specific because if they already know us, they're more likely to engage with us and enter into our funnel then we need a sorcerer. And I was like that's crazy and I did my whole thing and she was like listen, just take on this woman for three months as a contractor. Like, by the way, brilliant strategy If you're in a growing company, the three month contractor trial. It is really a good way to get headcount when you don't have a headcount, especially if you know you're bringing in a really amazing top performer. But anyway, I brought in her in and we started working.
Speaker 2:It was just the one recruiter and her and what instantly happened was, first of all, they were able to program an incredible email series to get engagement and get people actually talking to our execs and actually feeling like as you would feel it's special about our company. If you join our company today, you are going to have real face time with all the executive team. You are going to actually work closely with everyone across this company. Like it's a really exciting time and we wanted our email campaign to highlight that. Right If you just had a recruiter sending out these emails or trying to manage this without a tech system right. But we had a sorcerer who's fully her whole job is to focus on programming that, responding to it, making sure, if execs don't exactly respond right away, that she's responding or getting them to respond. So, like she's coordinating all of this and, as this pipeline is starting to generate and she's also directly reaching out to candidates herself and putting them into this funnel. Those are going to our recruiter who starts screening them right as they start coming back in. But the best part of this is, you know, in full cycle recruiting you are supposed to continue the outbound motion more as you got people in your funnel. But, james, let's be honest, what invariably happens once you get like a decent pipeline with their full cycle recruiter, what starts to drop because, first of all, is continuing to pipeline. Why? Well, because I actually now have to interview right, or I have to schedule, or I have to get them in the pipeline, and that puts a dip in productivity or a dip in your pipeline generation. So instead of that, we had one person who's basically doing outbound motion until the day we close an offer and the other persons whose whole job is talking to people getting them in funnel, getting them excited, getting them closed.
Speaker 2:And what ended up happening For our first VP of marketing role and we had never done an exact search in house. This was sort of a leap of faith that we could do it right the first three candidates we put in front of our COO all went to full rounds to the end. Now, james, also, how rare is it for the first three candidates you put up for anyone all three to be winners. And I would argue it was because the sourcing was so focused and dedicated for exactly what we needed and that our recruiter was also so focused actually on just actually finding what the person needed and making sure that that candidate experience was great, that we ended up saving so much executive time because they didn't have to go through a bunch of recruiting to just kind of start to optimize or make sure.
Speaker 2:So that dip of and here's the other piece guess what? Unfortunately we didn't close those three, but what was happening was and this got exciting the pipeline generation didn't stop, and so we were able to basically, even if those three went through the full cycle and we didn't actually close them, they didn't actually end up being our ones. What was amazing was when we got to that place where I've been before, where it's like, oh shoot, we're at the end and we didn't get a close and now we have no pipeline. We had a full pipeline because the other purse, our sorcerer, was still continuing to work on it, right, and so I just started to oh sorry, go ahead Ask me.
Speaker 1:Well, I just had a quick question. It was just and this is more so, I think, related to Jim as well would just be like so you're integrating like Jen, basically. So it's like almost part of the sorcerer's job is really managing Jen, which I'm sure is going to continue to get more robust now with what I'm assuming is more AI functionality, which I know they already leverage AI for some of the workflow automation stuff, but I think that that'll continue to happen more. It's almost like you have this like tool administrator that is doing sourcing, but it's more so like managing inputs and whatnot and search criteria. I'm wondering, from how much leverage are you creating having a sorcerer specialized in gem versus a sorcerer just doing kind of outbound like traditional through LinkedIn recruiter sourcing? I'm wondering, like how much more productivity or pipeline you get out of like 20%, 30%, like fifth, like how much.
Speaker 2:I mean, here's the thing I haven't ever worked with the full time spurser Right, Like I told you this was my first one, and yes, she is trained. She actually was also a gem employee, so not only was she trained? She was doing sourcing for gem themselves, which is amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is with the tool, so like that's incredible. So I did basically get two industry experts in gem.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:I don't know what it would look like because I haven't. I can only guess. But I am telling you I would say it's at least 50% at least from having whatever I was doing before. That was by 75%. So you know what I mean. Like I to me and my entire exec team, it's night and day and shocking Like, but yes, would I get the same results without someone who's using the analytics or the platform of gem? Questionable, I mean, there's some great sourcers out there who have a lot of tools, but sourcing does demand tools. Do I think gem is the future, with greenhouse and talent acquisition? 100%? I think, like, if you want the two pieces of technology, I mean obviously LinkedIn as well, I guess the three, those are my top three, right? Linkedin recruiter.
Speaker 1:We don't even think about them, because they're just like it's like oxygen, like we're just like duh. We need it.
Speaker 2:Right, can you even recruit without LinkedIn recruiter?
Speaker 1:I don't know they're like their pricing keeps going up. I'm like you know it's a recession of tech, right? Can you please give us a break? They're like no, we don't care about like you Like, if you don't use this, you're not going to like have a business so, and we're just like yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 2:I mean, I would say that when they gave me a three year flat rate, I knew that something was going wrong and it's recruiting because that has never, ever happened. I know.
Speaker 1:I read up like right before all this like stuff. But yeah, they're, they're. Yeah, I mean LinkedIn is. I mean honestly, I built my whole company on LinkedIn, even customers, right, like getting new customers doing what we do, like embedded recruiting, that kind of stuff. Like our first customer came inbound through like then it was Grubhub, yeah, awesome. That's crazy, I didn't know anybody at Grubhub, like they just reached out because they were hiring in the DC market and I was living in the DC market at the time.
Speaker 2:Well, LinkedIn. Actually it's interesting how much more I don't know I'd say respect LinkedIn has generated with the implosion of Twitter. Like it's fascinating for me to see Also creators trying to use LinkedIn as a Twitter because they're not quite sure where to bring their thing, which is fascinating to me. I just I actually hope that LinkedIn doesn't kind of ruin its integrity, because I actually lately have found it to at least be a hundred percent what it is, no drama, and I find it a very useful and actually great social media platform. Oh yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1:Well, they like, I think they monitor the content a lot more than a lot of the other sites.
Speaker 1:And honestly I remember it, it seemed like it was getting flooded with garbage like a couple of years ago. But I think the algorithms have gotten really good at like pushing quality stuff that's actually value creation for professionals and they're really sticking to their niche. Like they're not going well beyond that, like every once in a while, like I consider the post where it's like people are just talking about these like heartthrob kind of stories, like just stop it, exactly.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And not that they aren't like cute sometimes or whatever, but like, can we just keep that on Instagram, please, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I mean I find LinkedIn to be a really valuable source of daily information for me, Like I find great articles, great research. In fact, you are. You post incredible stuff all the time, Like I love. I love the following, James If you're not, you should be, because you post great stuff.
Speaker 1:So it's true. Well, thank you. I that's a good. I benefit from having like the best G people officers on my show and then I can sound like I know what I'm talking about, which is which is great. It's like my whole strategy to business, like.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think that is just great business 101 right there Right. Surround yourself with great people who know more than you do. I mean, I think that is it Absolutely.
Speaker 1:But anyways, getting back to sourcing, you know we we had a, a secure vision Again, like contract, better recruiting, rpo for the tech industry. Like I initially I actually built out a whole subsidiary and we're mania. Uh, we had, I think, at one point, like a. We built probably the sourcing team out to like 10 people, maybe a little bit more and for us, like on the staffing side, I didn't love it, I really didn't. I mean, it was just a different experience, like for us, because I had people working on multiple customers.
Speaker 1:Our business model has changed now. Like we will have an embedded sourcer, we'll do that. But like when we were in this model where it was like more so traditional agency, we were doing like success fees, stuff. Um, that's what I specifically mean. I didn't love it for that on the staffing side, because what would end up happening is like we'd have sourcers working on multiple companies, we'd have full desk recruiters working on multiple companies and there was like more opportunity for like a disconnect. Yeah, so we were just like you know what I want a full life cycle person that just knows the customer, that's managing the entire flow of it. But then, yeah, like again, like when it's more of an embedded model, like I think it's it. It makes a lot more sense If somebody's I think. I think a sourcer needs to be like full time and really focused and partnered with, like in a pod I think it's another important thing, like they should be working like with the same recruiter.
Speaker 1:I know for your team it's like, I think, just one recruiter, one sourcer, yeah, it's like very organized, but I think even at like a higher level scale it really needs to be that, or it needs to be focused in like tech, a tech sourcer or like yes products or sort of like, because there there are areas where you get more people involved.
Speaker 1:There's opportunities for disconnects, I think to the extent where you can keep the team like really small Um. But then the question that the other issue that we sometimes have with like performance stuff, like you obviously like would have to the sourcer, should be focused on more like funnel metrics, opposed to dam funnel conversions. Just like an SDR shouldn't necessarily be accountable for revenue, they should be accountable for qualified pipeline Um. But I'm curious how do you think about like the performance relationship and the work relationship, equality and performance when it comes to a source or recruiter team? Do you have any thoughts there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, right now, we, we care about the quality of hire, right?
Speaker 2:I mean, this is the first part is I feel like I need to say something first, which is I've always struggled, like we have so many bespoke jobs, let me put it that way or very jobs that are very unique, or maybe only 20 people in the world have those specializations, so I'm not the best person to talk about volume metrics and what I think a sourcer should be doing, right, like, or how many, like I don't like minimums for recruiters actually I am, but look, I'm not a recruiting background, so I might not be the best person to talk about.
Speaker 2:I am very much grew up on the HR side, but to me, what always I care about as a leader is I care about quality of hire and efficiency and are we doing things more effectively and better and are we good partners to our hiring managers? And a lot of these things, yes, are qualitative, and the reason that they are is because I'm still small, like if I'm hiring 20 to 30 people a year and it's for jobs that are singular, jobs that we've never hired for before, may never hire for again. I don't want to be pushing people to go after some sort of metric I want my recruiting team to actually care about like are we delighting our hiring managers and are we filling that job at the time that we said we could Right? Like to me.
Speaker 2:I treat my recruiting team like I treat like how we have to be for our board of directors in the sense I want my team in fact, my entire team, to tell me how long things are going to take, to the best of their knowledge, and then, if that's too long, I want them to partner with me to figure out what is a better routine.
Speaker 2:And then I want us to hit those predictions appropriately and make sure that the outcome a year later is someone who we are putting as many meeting expectations from a performance perspective. So I do not demand that they do X amount of this, or it should be this percentage of that or anything like that. I actually part of the reason our culture is so is basically focused on choose how you want to work that's best for you, because we are remote, hybrid or in person right now in New York City. I also feel that way about my team and about the overall end top team. I feel like the more we treat and empower our people to set their own goals, to set their own parameters, to tell me what the strategy is, to let them be their own directors of their own projects, basically, and to be basically partnering with me to create our strategy and what great looks like always means that they do way more than I would have ever asked in a set goal? Yeah, do you know what I mean? I do.
Speaker 1:And I think it's like one of the things where companies struggle to the performance and whatnot.
Speaker 1:Is I am a fan like at scale, like performance, especially like if you have a team of 20 recruiters. Like you have to have like some right, but like I think it's one of the things that they get wrong, is it? You can't just have a flat goal across the org because people are working on different roles and so performance has to be adjusted and you have to be really even careful, like even if you know that performance adjusted for like recruiter and product versus recruiter for SDRs. Like you have to be careful on what reports are visible to the team, because if somebody sees like this person made 10 hires and this person made three hires, it's like even if they know that performance is measured like slightly differently, it just it can give across the wrong vibes and you can have like top performers that are actually maybe even working on roles that are even more valuable and create a world leverage for the business, like feel like they're not getting you know the recognition that they need to. So I think performance can be tricky for recruiting or is, and there's also like nuance, like like if the hiring manager just like isn't good, right, if you have a problem employee that's hiring, that can really mess up somebody's metrics as well. So there's, there's just a lot of nuance and so I've always kind of veered like towards your like what you're saying, where it's just like this is just a massive shit, like this would just be my full time job trying to like iron out a performance plan when it's like we could just actually be focused on performing right versus like measuring all the time. But like I think transparency is like really important. It's like I guess like where I've kind of fallen is like I need visibility into funnel metrics. I don't really look at them.
Speaker 1:Unless I know something's wrong Exactly, I'll dial in and I can have like guidelines of like hey, this is kind of like where you should be at. This is time to fill. This is probably how many candidates are going to have to make it pass recruit or screening in order to make a hire. I don't care if you do it at 30 outbound messages or 500. Just make sure you get me my X amount of cans and this X about days to fill, and I want to know proactively if there's a problem.
Speaker 1:Don't wait two months to tell me about something and that's more the dialogue, and so it's that's, I think, like the one of the more effective ways to do it is just like you have to know the metrics of like. How do I know, is a role in the green art like orange, red, and what steps are managers taking, or am I taking something that slips into orange or slips into red Like? There are certain some of the metrics I do like is like candidates and process by a certain date and of course, again, that's going to look like different, like for an executive search than for SDRs, and I get it. But I do look at kind of metrics like that. Yeah, just to make sure.
Speaker 2:I'm on track. I mean, look, when I was, when I was at FNXS and we had a team they were not reporting to me, I was on the HR side only then but we had a team of 40 recruiters. Obviously all, I mean 40 on the recruiting side. They were not all recruiters. There was support, there was research, there was everything Right.
Speaker 2:We were also doubling in size year over year, Then, yes, those metrics really matter because you, as an executive, have to have a sense of what's going on and you have to see where you have aberrations. When you're hiring under 50 people a year, I would argue in-house typically. Look, yes, you have to, as a leader, know what typical numbers look like. Right, Like we know like an engineer is might be a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a. Maybe a four to six months search. Right For us, especially for specialized engineers, it might even be up to a year for engineering management sometimes.
Speaker 1:That's how. That's how specialized you are. That's wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's crazy to know, whereas we also know, like maybe, um, you know, a salesperson. We are expecting that to be a six week search, right. Right Like so I mean you sort of I do have time to fill. I'd say you know broad strokes in my head of what looks right, but I but what I think the main point is is to me I think, when I've seen places really incentivize time to fill in particular, I feel that works very much against quality of hire.
Speaker 2:It just and it's a tricky thing and I know we all want someone to go faster, we want them to push harder or whatever. But, like I said, I think you get that more when you really trust your recruiter to be an expert, you know.
Speaker 1:I think that the issue is that, like you know, you get CEOs that are a ton of pressure from, from the board, right and and there's just this culture of like faster, faster, faster, and there's, you know, that J curve they're looking for, depending on your, your growth, and it's it's challenging. I think that I don't have a problem pushing for time to fill like speed, but you got to solve for quality before speed, yep, and like, before you're going to push for speed, you have to have a structured hiring process in place, end to end Right, like every part of the process has to be Good, like really solid, and if you don't have that in place, then focusing on time to fill is is going to really screw up the company. So I agree with you, I think it's like it's it's let's make sure we have like the right training for the hiring managers, making sure it. To me it starts with, like the blueprint of their roles. Like when you're hiring for a leader, do they have enough time to actually hire, depending on, of course, like how many roles that they're going to need to hire for? Should we should know, okay, do they need half of their time? Should half of their time be focused on interviewing. Should it be less? Making sure that that's baked into their role in capacity planning, making sure that they understand hiring best practices, that they're partnering properly with the recruiting team, and then from there, do we have the right interview process mapped out, the right interview kits, the right custom questions? Are we aligned on the skillset, what we're looking for, that entire process?
Speaker 1:When you have all of that ironed out, then you can look at Okay, conversion rates and time and stage. Yeah, you can say okay, well, when we're going into the third round, we have that's taking two weeks to get people through, like, why, why, this should take four days. What's going on? Then it's solving for those problems, but again it's like you have to do it in the right order. I think that that's what most companies get wrong with the time to fill. It's like it shouldn't be your, it's not your North Star metric.
Speaker 2:No, it should never be. I think you're going to really approach, you're going to feel a lot of pain if it is ultimately in bad hires. Although I would also say what's interesting, as you were going through that and I 100 percent agree that you really have to have your process tight before you can really measure and it be meaningful at all or give you any valuable insights Is I still think the number one way you avoid a bad hire hands down is if you don't, if the hiring manager doesn't actually know what they want. I've seen this like. This is the number one thing, like if there's anything I would recommend recruiting leaders to push back against is you all know when a job is mushy and you all know when they actually don't know what they want and how much influence you can do or however you can help dissuade or help a hiring manager better define what they want before that search starts. Yeah, because that's where I find, that's where we usually, when I've seen things go wrong, it's usually because it starts there.
Speaker 1:I tell you what, like I remember, I took my first chief people officer role at Under Person SaaS Company several years ago. One of the very first things I did is I completely revamped their approval process to open new roles. I remember it was very hard. I came in and there was just it was a mess, like the ATS wasn't, like they had greenhouse, but it was set up incorrectly. So the data was already all screwed up, which is harder to fix than it is to start from scratch. So I had to come in there and basically optimize the entire ATS, rework all their structured hiring, like basically put a bunch of roles on hold, because it was just a total shit show. Meanwhile I have, like you have the CEO say we have to hire yesterday and it's like all this stuff. But we had to slow down and redo the entire approval process Because I mapped that shit out, it would take a week or two to open a role, even if it was priority because there would be.
Speaker 1:It was like a nine step process of all the things that had to be done, including you have to prove the causal relationship between the priorities of the role and the company's North Star metrics If it's ARR growth, if it's strategic customer success initiatives, if it's product roadmap, I want to know exactly how it's going to have an incredibly high leverage return on helping us achieve those metrics. And if you can't show me that causal relationship, why are you coming to me to open this role Period, right? The next thing would be like the 30, 60, 90 day plan, job description focused on outcomes, not tasks, salary requirements and there's probably a bunch I'm not thinking about. But and then it was a two step approval process where it had to go through finance first and then it had to go for us it was 100% company, so it went all the way to the CEO to approve the role. And so, like a hiring manager would come to us and say I want to hire like three software engineers because we're behind.
Speaker 1:And it's like well, why are you behind? Well, we need more people. Well, why? Like, what's your capacity? Like, what's the projects? Where's the gap? Like we'd really start to dive in. And I think that that's like where HR becomes like a true business partner. It's like how well do you understand the board metrics? Right? And then, how well able are you able to evaluate how much, like if, in fact, the headcount needs to be open and if there's clarity and, as you said, like that all happens before a role is opened up, because it's just so inefficient in so many different ways to get three weeks into a search and then for something to change Like oh it's the worst.
Speaker 1:And when you open the job, you're opening it like it's already, like it's built Right, like this is we're hiring for this. And if you're not, even like if a hiring manager can't even plan six weeks out to know what they need in six weeks, like why are they in their job, and so like it just goes to show how high leverage like leadership roles are hiring managers and that's why you need people that are, of course, really good because they're leverage not only impacts everyone in their department but when they're working cross-functionally, it can create massive inefficiencies across the entire organization just having like one bad leader in place. And I think honestly, like the experience that we have in people, leadership should weigh very heavily on like performance of hiring managers. Like it should be taken into consideration with how performance is kind of measured across like different departments, because it'll just show the massive inefficiencies if there is a problem.
Speaker 1:Because hiring is a team sport. Like, everybody has to be on the same page in order to get it done correctly.
Speaker 2:No, I agree with you and I mean, I think like, look, it's the kind of thing that you have to understand. Or a hiring manager has to be humble that he is actually given this partnership, right, or she, right, he's given this partnership to like I don't know. You have this team that's dedicated to your problem, right, and working with you.
Speaker 2:And I think one of the most devastating things or the worst thing is the hiring manager that's disengaged or not actively helping the process or not, like canceling interviews or not showing up. Like, as I say, you know, every moment that a candidate engages with us, they're evaluating the company and the culture and how people are treated, and if they are not treated as the most important person to you in every step of the process, you're likely not gonna close that person because that's what they're looking for. They're looking for that company that makes them feel from that first email that they were special and that's why they were called out to that first HR meeting, that the person's excited to Meeting the most important meeting, the HR manager who they, the hiring manager, who they will be working with and closely Like. If a hiring manager is not making prioritizing that call, like if they're distracted, taking notes, what else, you know, we will find out about it on Glassdoor and they will be angry, like it's basically the answer right, and so I mean I agree with you.
Speaker 2:I think, like candidate experience is critical. Hiring managers are really understanding how this has to be the focus of their job while we are hiring. The other thing that I just thought of as you were saying this. My other pet peeve, the one that I hate, is the one when the hiring managers go yeah, we're hiring an engineer, it can be any level. Oh, do you love that one? Like, why don't you just post a job with all levels? Just say all levels, and you're like and trying to help them understand how that's not how recruiting works.
Speaker 1:Like- Did you hear, haven't you seen, the talking about trash posts on? Like some of the trash ones? Like you know, don't hire for experience, hire for attitude. I'm like, yeah, I get it, like a good attitude matters. But like go see a get brain surgery without somebody with experience, go see how that works. Like get on like a plane, like without a pilot, without any experience. Like this is ridiculous. Like you need to know how much experience that is required for a role and it turns out experience does matter.
Speaker 2:Well, you know what is interesting when a lot of people like cause, of course I'm in. You know, I'm leading people, organizations, and everyone wants to know how they can get my job, which I'm telling you you don't want. No, I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2:I like, but like how do you get my job? And you know the one thing I say when they're like, well, oh, but I got my master's degree in HR. Like, can I get your job tomorrow? Like people don't really understand the true value of experience and I would argue the biggest thing that I've learned as a leader that experience gives you is actually not knowing the right answer on how to do something, but knowing what you don't know and knowing what you need to get other experts in to help you with. And you I'm sorry there is no school where you can learn that and that, I think, is the hardest thing for some people who are new in their careers to understand that, like you might think a job is just this because this is what you've been doing, and you think it will be this in 10 years, when in fact it's only a little piece of what this job can be because you don't know yet what you don't know.
Speaker 2:You don't know the next step or evolution in that job, in that role. And when you don't know what you don't know, you can make some pretty big mistakes because you don't know what your blinders are and you don't know where you need other experts or research or more information to make sure you're making the right decision right.
Speaker 1:It's funny. It's like we recently at my company established a board of advisors. It's not directors, cause I don't have investors, so they don't actually have voting power over me, which is really nice.
Speaker 2:Smart. Look at you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I listened to them cause they're really really smart and so we just stood that up. But it was kind of funny cause it's like what you're just saying, pulling in other people. It was just this total realization like damn, I'm never gonna be out of the recruiting seat Because I'm like recruiting the board, and it felt good. I was like man, I'm pretty good at this. It's been years since I've been like in an active recruiting role, but it felt really good to get back in there. But anyways, it was just-.
Speaker 2:Wait, can we pause on that for?
Speaker 1:a second.
Speaker 2:Because I will also say, having been spending the last year and a half recruiting the executive team for End Top, that I know shit there's something really magical about getting to recruit for like people that you get to like, get to help you grow Like. I mean. I'm sorry, it's different, it's a special, special thing.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, I just get. I'm like I got so like excited about my board cause it's just like they're so cool, like all like superheroes to me. Like we have like the first chief HR officer of LinkedIn he scaled LinkedIn from like 300 to 3000 people Amazing. He ran HR for EA as well and like just a bunch of like big organizations he advises like we have a finance legal guy who raised 70 million from private equity and scaled a SaaS company from like 5 to 30 million. We have a guy in my industry who built an incredibly successful business and a woman who owns one of the fastest growing recurring revenue services companies scaled from like a million to 20 something million in like a year and a half.
Speaker 1:And it's just like getting to recruit those caliber of folks is just incredible because it's your right Like you have to surround yourself with people that have experience. There's no substitute for experience and so you know, I think it's just so incredibly important to find the experts because and they have to be the best Like when you particularly get into leadership it shouldn't be like we need this type of profile or let's cast a net of like a hundred people. I think, honestly, the best executive recruiting that I like. It's like who's the who would be the perfect person for this Like? Who is it? Do we know it is in our network? Do we do we know somebody who knows somebody like? Who would be like literally ideal? Can we get to 10 candidates that would be like the best right? Who are those?
Speaker 1:And like, the smaller the pool you can get with, the higher the conversion like almost the better, and trying to like handpick people, because there's just such a big difference between outstanding and great. It's like you can find a lot of people who are competent, but if you can find that person who's just like a little bit better than everybody else, the exponential value creation by just getting the best versus the second best is freaking insane. And that's what I love about, like you know, recruiting and just like getting in really smart people is you can find that great person. It doesn't matter what discipline it's, like business or like even in science or philosophy. If you look at people who've accomplished great things, they usually had a great teacher.
Speaker 2:It's true. But what I would also say, when I'm taking from this, is anyone you hire you should feel as excited about as you feel about these people you just put on your board of advisors because, like that's how it should feel. It should feel like the wind, like holy cannoli, like I never thought we would get X person here.
Speaker 2:This is so excited, like that to me is that's when you know. The other thing I would also say and this is coming from the HR side and I say this a lot you know, if you hired a great person by day three, yeah, Sorry.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry, it is not two weeks, it's not a month, it's not even the first 90 days, it's day three. You know, and I have seen it a million times, and I'm saying and the other thing I've also learned is if in six months you're still asking yourself if you hired the right person, you did not.
Speaker 1:I couldn't agree more. I think it's like and this is what's so broken with like old school performance review annual basis stuff because it's like how much damage are you going to let somebody do to your organization and your customers and your employees in that first year?
Speaker 1:I think one of the tools I want to see more technology and data transparency around how people are performing in terms like onboarding and ramp time, like. Think about the like exponential value creation of being able to evaluate if somebody's going to be on track to be a top performer in three months versus six, and one month versus three, and two weeks versus one month. If you can find key indicators day three, day two, week or whatever the earlier on the better. Yeah, I think companies should be focusing more on that. Like, how fast are we actually evaluating if somebody's on track so you can help out, I agree.
Speaker 2:I agree with that. I mean to me look, I get a little bit. I'm going to be honest, I don't really love real time performance analytics in the sense of like we don't also want to stress people out that they're always being you know what I mean. Like there's a certain point where a big thing people want to do great work is trust that I'm doing great work right, yeah.
Speaker 2:I moved performance reviews to every six months and they're full reviews. They are not check-ins, they are full reviews. We do comp cycles twice a year based on your start date. So you're either in one cohort or another. So you get an annual merit increase but you get two reviews every year. I've tried to do quarterly reviews, I've tried to do real time reviews. I've tried to do. But there's also a point where you need a review to be enough data to be meaningful enough data and I have found like six months actually, I think, is the sweet spot. Ideally they're giving feedback in one-on-ones.
Speaker 1:It's what's interesting about what you're saying, though, is, like, you know, day three, and it's like what one of my concerns is like trying to like evaluate, like we don't want to wait six months to know if somebody like particularly if they're in a customer facing role or like something critical yeah, here's what I think it was like if they're in a critical role, it's like if it's not a critical role, why do you hire for it?
Speaker 2:Exactly. Well, I would. What we are doing for that is two things. One, we are doing a, we do a. We do at the 30 day mark. We just do a quick check-in of quality of hire with the hiring manager. We do something like that with the team member.
Speaker 2:At 90 days we do a coffee check-in in person with an HR person because we're small right now, so we can do that just to see if they also got, because it's a two-way street, right, like, did they actually get sold the job that as it was? Did they get told what they needed to be told? Are they being set up to be successful? Right, because we know like it is a two-way street, like it's not just we hired the wrong person. Sometimes it's a person's not being enabled appropriately or was sold a wrong job or whatever. So we do both checks to kind of get both sides.
Speaker 2:We do a manager really early on just for that reason, because it is important, because there are some roles that can be damaging really quick out of the gate. Hopefully, not, not if you're doing your thing right, but it can happen. And then, like I said, we do a little later for an employee because we think it takes them a little longer to get their feet on the ground, to really even have any sort of sense of you know. Like you know, you're kind of in a high when you first started job. You're trying to learn it. We wanted to get them in a place where they actually, if there were concerns, there was enough time for them to develop right, which is slightly different.
Speaker 1:For sure, hey. So I'm going to drop something in the chat. We just had the two founders of this company confirm on the show.
Speaker 2:Really cool Check out the website real fast.
Speaker 1:These guys are doing some really really cool stuff. Basically, the concept they gave me kind of like a masterclass on this, but it's organization or network analysis and so basically, like opposed to traditional performance reviews, which they have a lot of studies, it is like massive in the efficiencies and biases and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah yeah, just send out like surveys saying, like asking questions, like who do you go for for help, like who's making bigger, like asking questions interesting, you mean.
Speaker 2:oh, that is actually super fascinating, like sort of who is? If you had a boat and you could pull two people on the team with you and save them, who would you pick? Kind of idea Adding the most value.
Speaker 1:Who's like, who do you think needs our support or help? You know there's nothing like negatively focused. It's, of course, a hundred percent confidential, but they blast it out for everybody, so like anybody can just put anybody's name across the organization and they use that as more of like almost like this performance tool versus like old school performance reviews, and I like the more cause I had a bunch of objections because I like I always do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not like I didn't say I didn't actually have an issue with it, but like I, since I have experience in like people and talent, I'm like okay, but what about this? What about this? What about this?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Every time I had an objection they came back and just dropped logic on me and it was just so logic driven. I was like, damn, like I want to buy this product. Like it's. It's, it's pretty cool, so I would check it out. And it's just like a whole kind of mindset set shift For those tuning in it's it's with David and Josh, the co-founders of a company called confirm. It's backed by sherm, and they're doing some really interesting stuff on the performance review side. So I was I was really fascinated by it.
Speaker 2:Well, I can't wait to hear it. It sounds super interesting and I'm oh look. I think I'm always fascinated by people who are trying to get to more meaningful actions to actually support people in their growth, and if they're unlocking that, then I'm super excited to learn more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's just like some areas in talent where you feel like it's like there hasn't been a ton of progress, or there's just still like we're trying to, we're almost picking from like the least bad option, opposed to like finding something that we really love or we feel like a great solution.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think again it kind of goes back to me about our performance review reviews really embodying vulnerable leadership, and what I mean is I think they actually are incredibly effective with care, emotional intelligence, thought and actually like connection, if they're done right. I think that often that's not the goal. It's something else to like try to prove something or prove some hierarchy. That actually I think is quite damaging. So I I mean, that's how I roll, Like I agree with you a process for a sake of a process or a software tool for the sake of a performance review tool. They are as good as your training or how you approach them and how your culture you know activates on these things right.
Speaker 2:But I also see a lot of good in performance reviews.
Speaker 1:Still Maybe I'm old school but I'm always curious to hear new.
Speaker 2:I just I get nervous. When you said it was very logical, that actually struck me as skewing, probably male, and that made me nervous. So personally yeah that was my take when you're, because, well, like I said, we could talk for a long time about this topic.
Speaker 1:Maybe another episode? Yeah, I think we can do. I don't we gotta, we gotta jump. But maybe next time we could do something that's more like we can even get more dialed in into, like I think we did like a lot of really cool, like higher level stuff, but we can even get more like dialed in into like performance reviews and different different aspects too, cause I feel like there's a lot of ground we could cover. Based on your experience. This was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:And I'm really thankful that you came on the show today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, James. I really enjoyed it. I hope you have a wonderful day.
Speaker 1:Yes, Likewise for everybody tuning in. We want you to have a wonderful day too. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Take care.
