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.
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 113: Leveraging talent in LATAM and upskilling strategies for workforce retention.
Tomas O’Farrell, Co-Founder at Workana, joins our host James Mackey to discuss why we are seeing companies expand and shift remote teams to LATAM. They debate the complexities of upskilling at a large scale, exploring the relationship between layoffs, restructuring, and upskilling.
Additionally, they break down retention rates on a departmental level, seeking insights into talent retention strategies.
0:28 Tomas O'Farrell's background
1:18 Hiring engineers in Latin America
10:04 Remote work, global hiring shifts
16:09 Best practices for scaling up
22:37 Budgeting and upskilling workforce
28:01 Retention broken down by department.
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Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough High-Reach Show. I'm your host, James Mackey, Tomas O'Farrell. Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Hey James, How's it going? Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:It's going really well, excited for today. Before we jump into the topics, could you share your background with everyone?
Speaker 2:For sure I would say that I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I didn't have this plan growing up. I ended up starting a company when I was very young with a friend from school. We scaled that started at launching different businesses. After that one, I started Workana, which is a company that I'm here now. What we do in Workana is we connect remote workers in Latin America to the best job opportunities worldwide. Now, after the pandemic, and what we do likely, the platform has grown tremendously and we've achieved a very interesting scale. We've got about 200,000 people that join our platform every single month looking for our work.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of people.
Speaker 2:It is yeah for sure.
Speaker 1:I'm excited to talk about that scale and how you keep everything organized with that volume of folks, so maybe we can get into that a little bit later. Hey, look, I think, just to start us off, I want to get into really why companies are considering hiring engineers in Latin. I think one thing we discussed previously in our prep call was India has really been go-to provider and in many sense, I think what people think about offshore at least traditionally historically thought about India. I think we're seeing a large uptick in growth in the Latin market and of course, you're the expert here so you can tell me if I'm right or wrong. But I would love to talk to you about that and why companies are starting to consider getting into the Latin market.
Speaker 2:Orkana was 2012. So this idea of remote work in 2012, everybody said, hey, you guys are insane. There's always going to be a niche market. It's never going to reach mainstream or even anything close to an interesting volume.
Speaker 2:And at that moment, what India did very well from the start was they were able to package and offer the whole complete experience, and for companies, it was relatively simple to hire Indian companies. That gave them scale, gave them all the management, gave them all the compliance, all the vetting and matching and filtering, all the different talent pool, which is something that in Latin America we haven't been able to do. I'm from Argentina, so I've been around Latin America for most of my life and the level of talent that we have is amazing. But what we haven't had so far are companies that are more diligent in doing the organizing, the filtering, making it easy for US companies to hire, to manage, to work with people in Latin America, and I think that is happening in the past few years and that's why you see that the growth in Latin talent and companies hiring Latin talent is just exploding.
Speaker 1:I love it. So, tomás, what I really want to drive home for the audience and for myself I want to learn as well is I want to get into what exactly are the benefits of scaling out an engineering team in Latin. Can you just walk us through that?
Speaker 2:Sure. And number one is the access to the amazing talent that you have in Latin America, where the tech knowledge is very high and the English use is also very high. Number two is the advantage and cost. So hiring Latin America is way cheaper for companies than scaling a team in the US and it's relatively the same time. So because Latin America is very much aligned with the US, so you don't have issues of working with somebody on the other side of the world and having to coordinate with the night jobs, but you can actually collaborate in real time with your team as you scale.
Speaker 1:I love it. One of the things that really resonates with me is the time zone piece, as somebody that's worked with teams in Eastern Europe. It's there's brilliant people all over the world, of course, but being able to operate in the same time zone from a quality control perspective, from a timeline deliverable perspective, has something that I've seen make a significant impact. And so even within the realm of recruiting and I run a contract recruiting, embedded recruiting RPO firm I'm starting to see more firms and my industry start to consider OK, for our offshore talent, let's start to move to LADAM, and we've also seen this with big recruiting tech companies, ones that are providing hybrid solutions of technology backed by hands-on recruiters, are also starting to look at LADAM as the most viable option.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, because what many companies don't realize, and until you actually try it, is working with somebody, for example, in Eastern Europe, and collaborating with them. It's hard. It adds a level of complexity to the whole thing that, unless you're very good at great end async work and all those sort of things and being very clear in what you expect, what it ends up happening is that teams go slower because you have to wait up, and then there's all this misunderstandings. It's hard to sync up. Working with somebody in the same time zone. It's just amazing because you don't have that level of complexity and teams can go super, super fast.
Speaker 1:So would you say? That's like when customers or prospects reach out to you. Is that like the primary value proposition or what is like the what is the biggest problem that they're looking at, the most immediate problem they're looking to solve?
Speaker 2:I'd say there's two types of clients, two very big pain points that we have. Number one is clients that just cannot find talents. It's not a matter of cost, it's not a matter of they just cannot. They've got job searches open for months and they cannot place new talent. And when they do hire, their turn is very big and they can only retain talent for six, nine months. And that's about it why? Because the market in the US it's very low employment. It's record low everywhere, but particularly, you see it, in tech. The second one is the advantages of price. Particularly now, in a down market, being able to scale cost effectively is more important than ever before. So the ability to hire 10, 20, 50, 100 people team at half the cost is something that is very interesting.
Speaker 1:That's. I've seen that in SaaS particularly. We had a fair amount of last year well, 12 to 18 months ago at this point category leading SaaS companies where we were billing out our recruiters and a lot of our customers had very ambitious goals to scaling engineering teams, like we had one customer that was building out they wanted to do hire 500 engineers in 12 months and most of these were domestic US based hires. And with the market started to shift about 12 months ago is when it, I think, started to get pretty. We started to see a lot of the mass layoffs. They basically cut almost their entire engineering team and started to build teams, I think primarily in Eastern Europe. They did a lot of hiring in Poland, but we definitely saw this massive shift in terms of cutting down engineering teams and going into other markets.
Speaker 1:So I think it's interesting. I don't think that is necessarily gonna fully shift back when the market shifts back. I think that this is something that maybe a little bit, but I think it's gonna just become this idea of a global workforce with solutions like yours and you also have sites like remotecom or deal, different tools and whatnot that make it easier to engage with talent globally. So I don't really see this. I think it like more so an acceleration than something that we're gonna backtrack when the market shifts.
Speaker 2:There is no way that the genie goes back into the bottle. This is what we see now. It's just going to advance more and more. Why? Because you've said it. There's all these tools like the deal remotes, et cetera, that make it a lot easier to work with somebody, say in Poland or in Colombia or in Brazil. Before, it used to be complicated. How do I pay them? Do I need to open an entity? I don't know. And the second one is that the communication tools that we have available will only get better and better.
Speaker 2:If you did this 15 years ago, there was no video. Are they actually working? How do I know? You had to have this expensive phone calls to get in touch with the team. Now you get video. Say 10 years from now, you'll get, I don't know, an AR or VR or whatever it is. It'll feel even more in person and what you see with that is. So the cons the cons are getting smaller and smaller, and the advantages of multiplying your potential talent pool by three X, four X, 10 X. It's insane. So you'll see that some companies will fight it, but eventually everybody will get to this place where the use of global talent is way, way higher than even we're seeing today.
Speaker 1:Well, I think this is also bringing up an interesting point when it comes to remote work and when we think about productivity and there's people on both ends of the spectrum that, some of which believe that in office is gonna be more productive, others think that we're most gonna be more productive. Of course we see in big tech pulling people back into office, at least in a hybrid model, but I think for the majority of the economy maybe for Google it might be a little bit different, right, or a company like that but I think it's almost a mute point when people are talking about if productivity is better in person or remotely. The reality is that talent, even domestically, so many companies offer remote that it's essentially become table stakes for companies to offer that. So it's okay, even if you could argue successfully which I think is very hard to do and I haven't seen conclusive studies that are peer reviewed and backed that show with any kind of level of high accuracy that end office is actually more productive, right.
Speaker 1:It's more of this feeling that people have based on my life experiences. Well, your experience is a very small percentage of the overall experiences of the world around you, so I feel like that's a little bit. I think people should be more skeptical about their opinions on these things. But regardless, my point is if it's table stakes to offer remote, even if you could argue that it's 5% more productive to be in office, it's not a viable option for your business. The way that you do is you optimize to make people as productive as possible in a remote environment. I think that's like a more sound forward thinking strategy.
Speaker 2:And I think that's exactly a point. So it becomes the whole conversation about that becomes irrelevant, because what you see is that if you want to hire top talent, it's very hard to not allow this remote component and force them to come to the office. And you're seeing I think this is one of great things that came where the balance of power is now more, and since the best talent know that there are scars and know that they have all these options available, why would they go to an option where they don't they have to go commute every day if it's not something that they want to At work? We saw two big jumps in signups. We saw like almost triple jump with the pandemic, when everybody became remote and people's, this whole thing started happening and people were adjusting. But then we saw another one, just as big, after the pandemic, which at first we didn't really know.
Speaker 2:Well, what's going on here? It's not news, but what happened was that companies were starting to force people back into the office and people that had gotten used to this way of working remote and they were able to adjust their work-life balance a lot better they suddenly said hey, I'm not going back there, I'm not going to look for options that allow me to maintain this lifestyle that I've chosen. And once a talent chooses that, it's very hard to make them choose other things, no matter what your status show and no matter what you see.
Speaker 1:I think this market is a perfect example of that, again, with the exception of big tech. Right Like the top thing. Right, like just because it's quote unquote like an employer market. Now right, which is like a term that's being thrown around which arguably we could say despite layoffs, it's still very hard to find the best people. The challenges just come at different parts of the funnel. Now you have to go through a lot more applicants and so a lot more budget has to go to the top of funnel sourcing and screening than before. So I think the challenges still arise but nonetheless, like this concept of an employer driven market is, companies are continuing to hire remote. Besides, like potentially fang, there's still pressure in the job market of folks, as you said, that are not going back to an office. If they had to consider it, they will, but most companies, to be competitive for talent, have not shifted back to an in-office model. Despite it being again, apparently like an employer market. The talent still has apparently, the power when it comes to making this choice.
Speaker 2:And there's I don't see any scenario in which that will happen, in which all companies collectively go back to forcing everybody to work remote in person in the office at the same time, because it doesn't make sense. It's like the prisoner dilemma the one that chooses the other option will get the best talent, so everybody will end up going there, and you see that not only in tech but, for example I don't know top enterprise sales. It's very hard right now to try to recruit somebody with top enterprise sales experience and not offering a remote job, and you see these more and more in positions where you require a lot of experience and where the talent knows that they're in scar demand, and they're the ones that set the rules and when they set the rules, more often than not, remote is one of those rules.
Speaker 1:I agree and you know. Just another follow-up point, when we were talking about the complexities that we used to see back in the day, 10 years ago. In tech, that's how it feels like a hundred years, right, but back in the day, when it was hard to set up remote, you know, remote employment, right, you had to set up like a subsidiary, and I actually I have experienced doing that all the way back in 2015 and 16. I built a subsidiary in Romania and I was in Bucharest for a year and a half, and not only the issues is like the difficulties that you initially anticipate. There's a lot of difficulties that you don't anticipate, right, there's oh, wow, there's this new regulation that's been passed. Like, in some of the countries that are offshore, things are changing and the government quite frequently, regulation is changing quite frequently, and so there was a lot of it was hard for us to set something up, and then that's what was in place.
Speaker 1:There was rules we weren't aware about. We'd go to some like a department and say, okay, what do we have to do to be compliant? And then somebody would come by six months later and say, oh, you're also supposed to do this and we're like, well, we were told we were supposed to do that. There's just all of these things and you know there'd be piles of paperwork, piles of signatures, and it ended up becoming a distraction from delivering the solution to our customer. We had this constant like workflow of just stuff we had to do, and I think it's again like with the solutions that are available today. That's no longer a problem Like you don't actually have to. We ended up closing ours down a couple of years back. We just didn't need it anymore. There was better solutions that were cheaper or just took the headache off our plate. We didn't even have to think about it. So that's. It's pretty cool to see that.
Speaker 2:And for sure, because, again, operating in Latin America, it gives you a masterclass in how to spend most of your week on non-productive and bureaucratic things. And in the beginning, in the old days, you had to, because that was what you had to do. We also scaled up and created some series and teams in all the countries in Latin America and that takes, as you mentioned, a lot of time, a lot of focus, and it also takes away flexibility, because once you created the entity in Romania but you found people that were amazing in Poland, I have to hire in Romania. So how do I do this? So it forces, it makes you a lot more rigid. The magic of this new approach is that you can have access to talent, you can have speed and you can have the flexibility. So I think as a company, you're a lot stronger by adopting the new model than what we did in the old days.
Speaker 1:And I think the other interesting shift too that we're seeing and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. But because there was such like almost a barrier to entry to working internationally, we more so saw companies like the Oracle's of the world, the HP's big enterprise tech, microsoft those were the ones with these global offices because they had the infrastructure in place to manage essentially like subsidiaries in these different countries. But for startups, smb, it really wasn't as much of an option. It was a lot harder for smaller growing businesses, for instance, like mine, to operate internationally. And I feel like these shifts have also lowered the barrier to entry where smaller growing companies that quite honestly might need the bigger you know pretty like large kind of elastic increases, if you will like flexible increases and headcount to actually enter the international market. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:But I think that's amazing because it's as you mentioned. So we're leaving that age of the bouncers that were there and didn't allow this small guy to go in and we're leveling the playfield. On the one side, we're leveling the playfield for the talent, because now it makes less of a difference if you live in New York versus if you live in Columbia, for example, or Peru. And on the other side, for companies, if a random startup can have the same access to talent and speed and flexibility than Oracle or SAP can have, well, what that can end up happening in, say, 5, 10, 15 years, it's amazing. So it's a very interesting time to be here.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I think one of the what I want to get into next is best practices, right? So let's say, a company is building out a team of engineers in LADAM. What are some? I don't know if we can consider like a checklist, best practices they should do. Maybe you can share some, even like lessons learned of, like in the early days where it's like crap, like we should have done it this way. I would love to hear some of those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure I'd say so. We're pretty much true believers in remote work and we love the potential and everything about it, but it's important to understand that you have to put some effort into it to make sure that it works. So what we see companies doing. Number one is when you create two tiers of employees at your company, you've got tier one, which are the employees that are in person, and tier two, the employees that are remote, and that ends up being very disruptive to your culture. So you have to make a conscious effort to make sure that everybody is on the same footing. The other one is to make sure that when you are in office, there's all this random interaction that happened and planned, where people bond and connect. So you have to make sure when you do it, everything that you do in your companies are 25 minute zooms and it should optimize the time that your team has in meetings. But if that's all you do, then the team doesn't connect and you lose that ability for the team to connect. So you have to consciously spend time and effort in figuring out how to connect.
Speaker 2:For example, for us, what we do is with a leadership team. We do an in-person offsite every now and then, and with the different teams, we force them to connect in person every now and then, or when everybody's remote and in person going to do it. Also find ways and paths of connecting Could be games, could be things In the pandemic. I think companies went way too overboard and they did the Zoom happy hour, which everybody hates. So don't do that. That's not the way to go, but just making an effort and finding ways in which you can make the team to connect and learn more about the other person, which is one of the magic of working in the office you learn more about the other person and you connect in a different way. I think that's key.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so, and I think that some CFOs and CEOs might struggle with the idea of doing offsites. But you can look at cost comparison when you look at how much you're paying for leasing office space versus the cost it is to do a company offsite, and I think in a lot of situations you're saving more money by doing the offsite. I think every company has to decide how important it is to have that in-person relationship. Maybe it's more important sometimes than others. I think that the same thing for what you're saying with getting folks to connect remotely. You do want to limit your time for meetings, and I think there's also this push of okay, we have a meeting that goes for 30 minutes. Let's add up everybody's salary Wow, this is really expensive. Again, though, when you compare it to in-office the amount of time that people might be in the lunchroom or talking back and forth, the collaborating there's still this idea where probably there's still like this net gain in terms of productivity At least, you could easily argue so it's. You may not know exactly, but just looking at it in terms of just purely from a cost perspective, we also have to consider the cost perspective of what we were spending when we were fully in office.
Speaker 1:I think one other thing that's like really interesting that we're going to start doing, not so much in this market because things are tight on the hiring front, but when things start to recover, we're actually going to structure our company offsite around industry conferences. So for us, a big one is Saster, which is like a SASS conference in San Jose. Yeah, so we were a sponsor before. I don't think I'll sponsor it again, but I think what I'll do is we will structure an offsite where I'm going to have my entire team go to this conference. They're all going to be wearing our shirts. This is the way they're all out, basically meeting people, talking to them. They'll know where we work, what we do, and then on the weekend afterward we'll hang out.
Speaker 1:Right, we'll have a working session, we'll hang out together. We'll do our thing like more of a traditional offsite. But I liked this idea of combining those costs in a way to where we could actually turn it into a more productive return on investment by turning it into almost like a biz dev relationship, motion, right, and I think that's actually going to be more impactful than a sponsorship, because we're going to be going to every happy hour. All right, our entire team here, everybody go to a different happy hour. Let's just get in front of everyone at this freaking conference. So there are other, like creative things you can do to collaborate with the team, limit costs and get a maximize your return when it comes to when you do come together in person.
Speaker 2:I think that's a great idea, because one thing that we've found our goal internally at Workerna was okay, everything that we've saved by going fully remote. We want to make sure that we spend that much on getting the team together, but we just did that and we left it at that and what we found out was that people don't use the budget because it's hard to plan an offsite and you've got all this work and time and you never. You have to force yourself to it. So if you just leave it open, it won't happen. By doing things like you, what you mentioned you've got more chance of getting people together because you're doing two things You're connecting people, but then you're giving access to industry knowledge, so networking and you're getting your company name out there, so it's also marketing. I think those sort of things make sense, but you have to take the time to plan it and get the ball rolling In the beginning, which is left it open and said, hey, every manager should do whatever they feel the best. It didn't work, for us at least.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think so your business model. And just to be clear, a lot of your folks are billable, right? That's like they're billing out. Yeah, that's also. It can make it very difficult when there's a services element to your business, simply because folks are billing and productive.
Speaker 2:The opportunity cost is way higher correct.
Speaker 1:It's difficult, it's okay. They're supposed to be working on a customer account. That is, of course, everybody in tech is always like revving right, like fifth gear. Let's get this done right. We need this product deliverable or we need whatever else it is. So it's. It could be challenging, but I think if you do it intentional, as you said, top down opposed to disperse, that's probably the best bet. And I think, from a budgeting standpoint, the way that I would like to look at is like how do we actually turn this into? Like, how can we leverage this to create even more value for the company through develop, like relationship development, or kind of attaching it to something else that can really benefit the company in several ways?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, and I like your deal. The trade conference I hadn't heard that one. I think it's a good idea of combining everything together.
Speaker 1:I'll write that one down. Yeah, I'll do it. I'll do it. Let me know how it goes. I expect a referral fee if it works out. I'm kidding.
Speaker 2:Well for sure.
Speaker 1:Good, Well, cool stuff, man. Well, let's with. The second topic that we wanted to talk about was upskilling workforce. I think that, Look, I think a lot of companies, particularly tech, don't really get this one right a lot, and I think, too, there's significant budget concerns. There's also capacity concerns. How do we really make this a priority and have the time to do this with everything else that we have to do? And so can we start high-level philosophy how you think about upskilling, and then we could cascade down into specific examples and ideas for implementing this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. And here there's two things they're related and I think the hypothesis is similar to both which is what we do with a core team of work, kinda, or what we do with a talent pool that we manage and filter through work, kinda. So in our core team, startups are always changing, they're always growing, and you believe that you have to spend a portion of your resources time, bandwidth, money, whatever it is in this, but it doesn't need to be like pay for MBAs, which is what Google would do, but for most startups, that's just out of question. So one thing that we did, for example, when the markets started changing, I would say, okay, these are people that we don't wanna lose, but right now they're not going to be as busy as they were before because we have less clients going in and all that. And this is something that we heard with a lot of our clients, and what we did was we set up a team group of people that said, hey, these are the high potentials, the people that we do want to make sure that they stay with us and don't leave, and we make sure that every one of them was involved in a project that they really wanted, they really believed in that before there was no time to tackle that project, but now the magic is okay, let's make time to focus on this project, and only doing that was amazing.
Speaker 2:We saw people becoming way more engaged, people becoming way more happy and way more productive, because many of those projects that we never had the time to do not all of them, but a few of them end up being amazing and the foundation for the next stage of the company's growth. So taking the time to do that is something for us that's worked very well and for the time we're managing, we're kind of. Again. It's hundreds of thousands of people that come to our platform every month, so we realized that not just being mindful of the job matching and finding the best career opportunity for them, but also what are the hard and soft skills that they're needing to achieve the next phase and, as the systems become better, for understanding this thing, that scale you can understand hey, you're very good at this part, but these are the options that you need to improve on to make sure that you can access higher-paying jobs and higher-paying career. I'm again just outlining those and giving them options to pursue those. It's also very powerful.
Speaker 1:And I think that this is more of an assumption, and I really want to next time I have, I want to get your opinion on this and I also I'm going to make sure to ask this next time I have an exec from Microsoft on the show too, because I think in a sense, this potentially could get harder at scale. Right, Having the organization to do upscaling? Is that? Does that seem right to you, or?
Speaker 2:It could in the sense that depends on what you mean by scale, but it could in the sense that it's harder to understand where each person is, what everyone else is doing. So it does kind of get harder, and also the bigger you are. When you add up the expense of everybody else, the whole number in aggregate it's just a big number, and that's when some, if someone is going to say no, no way, we're scratching this.
Speaker 1:And so that's what I'm wondering and one stat I would love to see is like the relationship between like layoffs and restructuring and upscaling. And, for instance, when you have a large tech company, how often are they upscaling, moving people to different roles throughout the organization, versus just saying, all right, we're just going to do a massive cut over here and then over the next year to start to build out these divisions? I think some of the big tech companies that I'm familiar with their workforce planning upscaling is not necessarily robust or it's not centralized to the point where they're able to do so very effectively, and I think sometimes it's more of just looking at the PNL saying how do we remove this cost and how can we reallocate it or improve our earnings or whatever else. So it's just an interesting thing to think about for large scale, larger organizations how they think about balancing those two things.
Speaker 2:And I can understand what happened in the past year. Companies, particularly the bigger ones. They realized that they'd gone overboard. So they gone overboard in the amount of people that they had, the benefits that they offered, the salaries, everything else. So whenever that happens, there's always a pushback and people maybe try to do an overcorrection and go to the other side, and I think that's part of what we're seeing happening in the past year or so. But again, as a philosophy, I think it makes sense for a company to always dedicate a portion of your bandwidth and resources to this, because, in the end, all of these startups, all these companies, they're just based in people. We're not based on materials or particular IP or whatever it is. It's just people. So making sure that you have the best people and that you're looking 12 to 18 months ahead of what sort of skills that you're going to need at the company and have an understanding of that is key. Everybody should do that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I think one of the it's correlated to doing this well is thinking again as you start to grow. Maybe there's only an opportunity for a small percentage right of your existing team to potentially move up, at least in the foreseeable future. How do you think about engagement? So you're focused on upskilling, you're trying to move people along in their career, but along the path, how do you focus on keeping them engaged? And what if there are situations in which you have somebody who's solid but they're really good at the role they're in? Right, maybe not to move up into the next thing, but how do you keep those folks engaged? Do you have any ideas around that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that it could be. We screwed this up a number of times before, many times, and we realized that there's two things. The one is people that have high potential, people that are very good performers at the level they are, but they don't have this high potential of going somewhere else, and there you should understand that is what you need to do. And also, we've also had people that we thought were high potential to go and sample ourselves but didn't want to go in that direction, and we're just trying to force them to go there because we thought, no, but if you did, did it be great? I said yeah, but I don't want to do that. I might be here. So understanding the company's expectation, the talent's expectation and making sure that those two align are key. We didn't do it in the past in a few places and it never works out.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I'll be honest, in the early days of my company, I lost some good people because I was like, yeah, but if you could do this, you're crushing this. Imagine the leverage and impact you could have over here, and it's like pushing them into it a little bit too much and I did lose a couple of good folks. That way. It's like understanding that not everybody they're going to have different perspectives. Just because it's something that you would want to do Doesn't necessarily mean that everyone's like. You're right. It's not only looking at potential. It's looking at, like, their interest and what they're looking for. And I think, too, is like, when it comes to engagement and retention, we should be doing things to optimize. Even when people are in the role that maybe they're, for whatever reason, they're not going to move to the next step and we might be a little bit worried about losing some of those people. We, of course, should be focused on retention, but one of the things that I do preach is that it's important to have a retention strategy. It's also very important to have a nutrition strategy. You need to have a realistic understanding that that people are not necessarily going to stay with you for your entire career, and so we have to work within reality and if your retention is that you're seeing people stay between 18 months to two years, all right, let's set a target. How do we get that up to two years and three months right? Two years and six months, let's do that Also.
Speaker 1:At the same time, we need to build our town acquisition strategy, our onboarding, optimize that to get people to ramp faster. Our process documentation and line to prevent knowledge gaps. Making sure that our managers have capacity to interview right and ramp people. All of that's part of what I would consider not only good employee experience. It's not only going to help with retention but we have to be looking at it through the lens of attrition too. So it's like there's no sense, like, if the average tenure in tech is two years, to put all your energy and how do we turn that into five? I'm not saying this is a bad goal. I'm just saying the reality is people don't necessarily want to be there five years. How do we make our company successful if people are only staying a year and a half? I feel like that's it's just not talked about enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I understand that and you'll see that changes that average the average is sometimes are misleading, since that maybe in one area is one year in an area, in another area you may have four years of tenure and that gives you very different things to work with. Okay, what is happening in the one year area? That's clearly a problem because that's not sustainable. What are the things that are working in the four year area that you can export to the other areas? And once we started doing that internally at work, we found many things that were working one place that we could take to another one.
Speaker 1:That's actually a really, really smart idea and I don't actually think a lot of executives look at a retention rate on a per kind of department or specialization level. I feel like most companies and maybe this is because I work with a lot of startup scale up growth stage companies they're just looking at it holistically, company wide.
Speaker 2:The averages can be very misleading when you cross them over, also by managers and who the managers are, because sometimes this big or low attrition really what covers is a manager issue. And those are things that the data and numbers show you. You can focus in on the reasons why.
Speaker 1:I think this is really good stuff. We've done like 105 episodes. We haven't covered that, so thank you. That's really valuable and honestly, I'll admit, I hadn't given that as much thought as you have in terms of breaking it down per department or per manager. That's really smart stuff, so thank you.
Speaker 2:But we got there by screwing up a lot many times. It's one of those expensive lessons learned.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are. Look, I've made plenty of those. I think most of the lessons I've learned in life are quite expensive. Sometimes I feel like I'm that guy who has to have his hand held to the stove before I learned my lesson.
Speaker 2:The sign caution hot doesn't. I need to get burnt before I can actually learn it? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right and I'll be honest, there's once or twice where I felt like an idiot for getting burnt twice.
Speaker 2:So sometimes you know you try to maybe know it's not that hot. Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, it's like it's hot, but we're trying to do this new variation of it, yeah, but yeah, I hear you, man, that's some really good stuff, you know, I think. Let me see here, from a budgeting perspective, a lot of folks are fake thinking about okay, I want to focus on upskilling workforce management. Can we talk about high impact, low budget items that folks could be doing to improve upskilling the workforce?
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I think number one is reviewing your workforce and understanding, particularly for high performance, high performers, which are the top projects that you can assign them. That would they be very engaged and the things that they're really believing doing, and those are things that particularly the ones that you had in your pipeline that you never got around to doing those are things that are free and it will keep your workforce way more engaged. You'll see a lot of productivity optic and many of those approaches will end up being the big drivers of growth in the future for your company.
Speaker 1:I love it. Very good stuff. Look, Tomas, this has been a really fantastic episode. We've covered a lot of ground, a lot of the topics. Again, we haven't really died too much in detail before now. So I wanted to say thank you so much for coming on the show today. I know that this episode is going to be guiding talent strategy for many of the top executives in the world. This has been a fantastic episode. Thank you so much for contributing.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, james, it was great and again, thanks again for the invite.
Speaker 1:Of course, and for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much for joining us today and we'll talk to you next time. Take care.
Speaker 2:Bye.
