The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations

EP 117: Scaling success: Structured hiring and effective onboarding in scale-up organizations.

• James Mackey: Recruiting, Talent Acquisition, Hiring, SaaS, Tech, Startups, growth-stage, RPO, James Mackey, Diversity and Inclusion, HR, Human Resources, business, Retention Strategies, Onboarding Process, Recruitment Metrics, Job Boards, Social Media Re

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Join our host James Mackey and his guest Jamie Olson, VP of People & Culture @ Continu, as they explore the keys to success in scale-up hiring.  Learn about efficient processes, aligning with leadership, and the value of slowing down approvals. Discover the parallels between candidate and customer experiences, and how a strong onboarding process boosts employee value and company trust.

     0:36 Jamie Olson's background
     1:39 Hiring for scale-up organizations
     8:56 The importance of culture fit for scale-up organizations. 
  14:36 Candidate & onboarding experience
  20:13 Measuring success of the people function.



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James Mackey:

Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, James Mackie. Today, we are joined by Jamie Olsen. Jamie, thank you for joining me.

Jamie Olsen:

Hey, James, thanks for having me.

James Mackey:

Yes, thank you for joining us and I'm very excited for today. Let's start off with a little bit of insight on your background. Can you share a little bit about yourself with us?

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, sure. So my primary experience over the course of my career has been in the recruiting and people space. I've done recruiting and recruiting leadership for companies of various sizes and for the last two years I've been focused on people more holistically at Continue. We're a scale-up organization in the SaaS space and basically my scope of responsibility covers everything in HR. So from building out our processes to how we hire, to how we evaluate performance and so on.

James Mackey:

Yeah, so you were at BNY Mellon, which is a huge company, if I'm not mistaken, like tens of thousands of employees, right?

Jamie Olsen:

Yes, pretty large.

James Mackey:

Yeah, pretty huge. And now going into the scale-up world, which is pretty cool, so I'm sure you've seen it all.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, quite a lot of variety. You can say that.

James Mackey:

Right, right, it keeps things interesting.

James Mackey:

Well, look, I think, just to kick us off today, I'd love to go ahead and get into our first topic. We want to talk about hiring as a scale-up. There's a lot of opportunities to mess up, I think, as, like companies are building out initial process, like we have to make sure that there's alignment, we have to make sure that there's, you know, a structured hiring process in place. We need to really ensure that we can make hiring and people a competitive advantage for organization, and the stakes are so freaking high because, as we both know, people are fundamentally the core of all success in business and that's how important it is to get the right people. No great product, no great go-to-market strategy. Really nothing great has ever been built without recruiting and enabling an incredible team. And I know you have some thoughts on this when you're thinking about recruiting for scale-up organizations, like when you're coming into an organization, like where do you start just to make sure alignment and hiring structure, structured hiring processes set up properly to ensure that you're getting great people on the team?

Jamie Olsen:

I mean first, I think you have to make sure that there is alignment across the leadership team and the hiring team around what you need. So what do we expect candidates to bring to the table? What are we going to expect these candidates to accomplish when they're here? How are we going to set them up for success? Really, what are the most important criteria that we need to evaluate throughout the hiring process, to make sure that we are even evaluating against the correct competencies? I think that's important, first and foremost, and then putting those consistent processes in place so that you can have a hiring process that is effective and efficient for you as a company, but also that is creating a good candidate experience, because you don't want to botch that up. Every single person that you interact with and scale-up is important. So you just want to make sure that you're clear about what you need and what you expect out of the role in the person.

James Mackey:

Right, and I think that sometimes that can actually be quite challenging working with function leaders, because a lot more goes into alignment than understanding a role description, for instance, like getting into well, why is this the right role description? The hiring manager is actually aligned with C-level executives on priorities properly, and are we thinking clearly about prioritization and which projects need to be worked on? Are we even sure we need more people?

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah.

James Mackey:

And so much goes into it and I think that is one of the biggest mixed opportunities for scale-ups is actually going through a proper approval process and spending a lot more time before something becomes a new opening really determining. Okay, are we really clear on top priority projects? Have we maybe cut back on some things that aren't as critical to achieving North Star metrics and making sure there's not only that type of alignment is there first, and then actually making the determination of like, if we even are we even sure that we need five headcount, can we get this done with two headcount if we put a couple projects on hold? I think that there's a level of part of alignment. Is also being aligned on the number of hires.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, totally.

James Mackey:

Particularly in this market like we have to be very careful with cost right.

Jamie Olsen:

Well, not only that, but I feel like you have to be careful with just the value of people's time internally as well. If you start to just hire haphazardly without being sure about what you really do need, then you risk wasting so much time in the process. And again, like we were saying before, in a small company that's trying to scale the resources, the people that you have in front of you are so important. There's so much opportunity to make an impact every day that you don't want to be wasting those resources on interviewing against roles that you're never going to hire for.

James Mackey:

Oh yeah, that's like such a huge waste, Like whenever we see companies, whenever we see companies opening searches and then closing them down a month later, and I think, too, it's like when you have all the economic uncertainty and a lot of SaaS companies currently missing revenue targets and adjusting the amount of openings they have. I think, to some extent, maybe some of this is unavoidable as an earlier stage company when things are so fluid and volatile. However, maybe it always should be preventable to an extent, or at least primarily for the most part. I think I've seen plenty of examples where companies definitely don't have this approval process ironed out well enough, there isn't strong alignment and then a C-level catches wind of these hires and it's like well, no, we should be doing this next quarter, or why do we even need this headcount Again?

Jamie Olsen:

it's like.

James Mackey:

Slowing down so much on approvals is, I feel like, the most critical part of alignment.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, for sure. It's definitely important to make sure you're having those conversations up front.

James Mackey:

Yeah, I think just getting into culture which I know we're going to be talking about culture holistically in a moment and getting into hiring people that are a culture fit for your organization, I think part of that culture is really understanding. Look, alignment on hiring people being the initial calls of success and business, making sure that there's a buy-in from the executive team and making sure that hiring managers, too, are accountable for their hiring plan from a performance perspective, because everybody needs to be bought in. It's not enough to have great recruiters or a great VP of town acquisition or VP of people. If there is an alignment and clear expectations set for other executive leaders and function leaders, then we can't really control the outcome unless everybody's bought in across the organization Something.

Jamie Olsen:

I would say yeah, it almost needs to be a mindset like hiring doesn't stop when somebody has their start date. The hiring process lasts so much longer than that. We need to also appropriately onboard people. We need to enable them to be successful in their role. We need to be setting clear expectations. I consider all of that to be part of the hiring process. We all have to be involved if we want these individuals, or bringing on board, to be successful in the first place.

James Mackey:

Right that's also part of the approval and evaluation and alignment process is what are the outcomes that the role should achieve? What is onboarding going to look like? All of that stuff needs to be mapped out before a hire is made. It's not like, okay, we have an opera out, we got somebody starting in two weeks. Oh crap, what are we going to do for onboarding Right Now? What Right? Yeah, we have to think. It's like, if we're going to make this investment, have we done what we need to do to ensure that we're actually going to get a return on this investment? What probability? Think about it this way. We would never invest in a business that doesn't have a business plan after the investment.

Jamie Olsen:

Right.

James Mackey:

And yet a lot of companies are willing to hire folks, but then they don't even have an optimized onboarding experience or clearly defined success metrics. In what other world would it be appropriate to make an investment without knowing that?

Jamie Olsen:

Right, no, I'm totally with you.

James Mackey:

Yeah, yeah. So anyways, I think one of the things we talked about is evaluating culture fit. This is one of the first things we discussed in our prep call is something that you find to be very important. Let's start high level. Why do you put such a high emphasis on culture fit for scale up organizations?

Jamie Olsen:

Well, I think there is so much collaboration and connection and cross functional work happening in scale up organizations. It's really important to make sure that you have the right people on that team people that want to do the work in the way that you need them to do the work and who want to collaborate with one another and share experiences with one another and grow with one another. I just think each individual person makes such an impact when it comes to the overall dynamic of the team. When you're talking about a smaller team environment, I think it's important in large organizations too, but for me, it's even more important in the smaller organizations to make sure that you're getting that part right.

James Mackey:

Yeah, because it's like I mean, the leverage that employees can create, particularly at early stages, huge. And I think one of the lessons I've learned as CEO of my own company, Secure Vision, is you really want to make sure, like somebody who you don't. We can't really have people that are going to maintain the status quo right, like maybe at a certain level of scale, you can have people that you're plugging into a process, that they just own one specific part and it's just very fluid and there isn't a lot of necessity to go outside of a job description or maybe the role isn't going to evolve quite as much as quickly as it can in a startup or a scale up. But for us I think it's important to really we need to the absolute best folks we can't that are going to be able to be adaptable and grow with the organization, and I think that's like a big part of the startup and scale up culture is evaluating for that right, because their role might look drastically differently six months down the line. Potentially, sure, Absolutely.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, absolutely yeah, and I think it's important too, when we're thinking about evaluating for culture fit, to have alignment like if alignment is kind of the theme of this conversation but to have alignment with that same team around what that even means.

Jamie Olsen:

Because I think that in some organizations people say the word culture fit and then they go out and they look for people who fit in with the team or people who seem to have a good personality or seem like they'd be good to hang out with, and I think that that like superficial way that some people default to defining culture fit is kind of dangerous. And so I know one of the things that we did early in my time at Continue was sit down as a leadership team and really hash out like what does culture fit mean to us at Continue when we talk about someone being a culture fit, like how does that look? How do we evaluate candidates against that? How do we decide whether or not someone checks that box or doesn't check that box? And I think it's more than a 30 second conversation. That's something that really takes a lot of thought in order to get it right.

James Mackey:

Yeah, for sure, for sure. And so, when it comes to evaluating culture fit if we get, let's get more specific. What are some things you're doing in the hiring interview process to evaluate this?

Jamie Olsen:

So we kind of start with okay, what like? What is culture fit even? Or what is culture even? And for me, when I think about culture, I think about like, how we do our work and how we make decisions. So then you back into that by saying like okay, how do we do our work, how do we make decisions?

Jamie Olsen:

Well, for us at Continue, we're really values driven, so it all falls back on what our core values are as an organization. So then, if we take it one step deeper than that, you kind of have to take those core values and operationalize them. So, like, what do they mean? Like, when we say transparency wins as a core value at Continue, what do we mean by that? Like, how do you show up? Show up and be that value on a day to day basis?

Jamie Olsen:

And then you can kind of back into the hiring piece, and so what we've kind of done is first that exercise as a leadership team, but then we kind of defined the competencies that align with those values and those are the competencies that we hire against, those are the competencies that we interview against. We've created interview guides and feedback frameworks that are all competency based, so that we're asking people questions that give us a little bit of insight into how they approach feedback, how they approach growth and accountability and things like that, and then all of that combined tells us whether or not somebody is aligned with the culture that we're fostering.

James Mackey:

Sure. So what is your applicant tracking system? Is your team using?

Jamie Olsen:

We use Lever today.

James Mackey:

Okay, all right, and so now they have. I personally usually I'm working with Greenhouse Lever. Do they also have the scorecard functionality where you're putting in values and these types of things and scoring against that, or how is that like implemented into your systems?

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, so they do have a feedback framework. I have to be completely honest with you, james, I don't know that I'm using that function to the best of its ability. I've kind of created a separate like feedback mechanism at continue that we use presently. So we kind of do that externally right now.

James Mackey:

And is that like more so based on like questions, just reviewing kind of answer the way folks answer questions?

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, yeah, how they answer the questions and then kind of like how we assess them as it relates to the different competencies that we measure against. So we have a handful of them and we kind of rate against each of those competencies based on the answers to the questions.

James Mackey:

Gotcha, gotcha. And I mean I think too. It's like when we get down to culture, one of the ways that we demonstrate culture is in terms of focusing on candidate experience.

Jamie Olsen:

Sure.

James Mackey:

When you walked into continue scale up organization, what were some of the things you were looking at to provide a great candidate experience?

Jamie Olsen:

Well, I think, first just remembering that every interaction that you have is important. I want everybody to walk away from their experience interviewing with Continue having a positive impression of the company and of the team, regardless of whether or not they're the right fit for that role, because you don't know if they're going to be a fit for a role six months or a year down the line. You don't know who else is in their network that they might refer to a role. So first I just try to approach it as every individual is important and I also try to make sure that we customize the experience for each individual.

Jamie Olsen:

I don't go into any interviews assuming what's important to someone or what someone's looking for. We always approach our interviews with a very like two way mentality yeah, we're trying to find out if the person's a fit for Continue, but equally importantly, they need to figure out if Continue the fit for them. So we kind of allow space for both of those things to happen simultaneously. And then there's so much buzz on LinkedIn these days about candidates getting ghosted, and so that's something that's really important to me as well is making sure that everybody feels seen and heard and that we don't leave any of those loops unclosed at the end of the day.

James Mackey:

And I mean this is just like one little tactical thing that I think companies can really probably should leverage more On Glassdoor. People can leave reviews for the quality of the interview process, so it's not just about for employees. You can actually have folks write reviews on Greenhouse or, excuse me Glassdoor to go through their experience, which could be a really helpful way to address potential issues or to get feedback on that. One of the other points that I do like to make and this is more so at a higher level is the relationship between experience and outcomes.

James Mackey:

I think a lot of times, the way that even people, leaders communicate experience, or even the way that experience is perceived by leadership, is they don't necessarily they haven't defined a true like ROI or causal relationship between experience and creating great outcomes.

James Mackey:

And the reality is that when we invest in candidate experience, we are going to be able to engage with higher, more relevant talent, I should say, but that is going to be the best fit for our organization. So it's we have to think about it as we would think about customer experience, right or prospect experience. We would, of course, be obsessive on creating, removing friction from that process, creating a great experience so that we can onboard, we can sign up onboard and retain our customers. And I think that same mindset needs to be applied to people and the same sense of urgency and prioritization should be given to candidate experience. As a result, it really matters. I mean even think about like. If you have a qualified like, just for the to go deeper on the revenue analogy, they say you have a qualified lead deal in your pipeline, you lose the deal. You're going to put those folks in a nurture campaign right, okay?

Jamie Olsen:

well it's a renewal.

James Mackey:

They're in an annual commitment. What are we doing to stay warm? How can we potentially win the business next time? Is the objection they had something we can actually solve for, and if they still fit your ideal customer profile? You want to maintain that relationship and I think you can look at it from that true ROI perspective. Of course, we don't want to ghost people either. We want to create a great experience. But the layer deeper in terms of like why this truly matters and impacts truly matters from the perspective of impacting North Star metrics is creating great experiences is going to lead to higher quality talent on your team, being able to get them on the team and retain them on the team. It's all linked and you can't have one without the other.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more, James.

James Mackey:

Yeah, very cool. So let's. I wanted to talk about like onboarding experience. This is very important to me and I feel like a lot of companies drop the ball here.

James Mackey:

Really, in scale up environments, I hear a lot of executives take the mindset of, like, we're looking for somebody who's scrappy, who can figure it out on their own. We don't have a lot of resources available, so we just need somebody who can just you know again, like, just figure it out. And I, of course, I understand that scale up organizations may have fewer resources, but I think how we communicate around this to our team is really important because we don't want to have the mindset of, like, because we don't have access to as many resources, we shouldn't invest in improving experience or finding ways to make it a better experience, because the reality is you don't need a ton of resources, in my opinion, to optimize onboarding. And again, the parallel to the revenue side like, I cannot imagine a CEO going to a qualified prospect and saying, hey, we're looking for customers who are scrappy and can just figure it out on their own, like, like, how stupid does that sound? Like? And yet we hear that type of language all the time on the candidate side when it comes to onboarding.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, I know it is crazy, isn't it? Like I said earlier, I feel like onboarding is such a crucial part of the hiring process and even if you do hire somebody who's you know scrappy and can figure it out on their own, you still have to set expectations with them and you still have to make sure that they understand your values and your culture and how they're expected to make decisions and what outcomes are expected of them. I feel like even the scrappiest, most qualified candidate in the world is not going to be successful within your organization if you do not set them up for success. So I agree with you it is such an important part of the process. I think you don't need a ton of resources. We're lucky because our product actually helped solve the onboarding challenge a bit, so I have access to that. But you know that has been a big area of focus for us just onboarding in general to make sure that we're giving people the right start when they join the company.

James Mackey:

Right and like to be clear, like I'm not saying that we shouldn't be looking for people that are scrappy, like just to the audience members out there, Like wait a second, I look, I get it. I'm just saying that, yes, find somebody who's adaptable and also empower them to be successful and get onboarding right. I think we had Daniel Chate, co-founder, ceo of Greenhouse, on the show and he's going to be coming on once a quarter to talk shop about hiring and one of the things that he really talks about a whole lot which I'm completely aligned with him about is employee lifetime value and the other like again when we talk about North Star Metrics return on investment. The reason that onboarding experience matters so much is when you can accelerate, ramp and decrease the amount of time it takes, you're turning employees into value creators a lot faster.

James Mackey:

One of the easiest parallels that I can make is for hiring salespeople. Right, if you can optimize onboarding and bring ramp down from six months to three months, you can increase quota. Increase quota is going to increase or, correlating, you can increase revenue close is probably a better way to say it and that's going to have a compounding effect on year over year growth, which is going to directly impact valuation of the company, and so that's the power of this. When we're talking about onboarding experience, we're not talking about perks or you know like it's. There's a lot of things that go into creating those experiences, but there's a real financial impact on getting this right.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, no, totally, and I know it's difficult sometimes. You're right. I feel like sales is the easiest department to point out when you're thinking about, like how can we measure this? So I feel like that's probably one of the hardest things for organizations to do is figure out, like, how do we measure that? I mean, I don't know the answer to it either, james, I think sometimes you have to be comfortable not being able to measure something numerically, but it is a challenge, I think, for a lot of organizations for sure. How do you talk to a lot of people in people roles? How do you see people evaluating that and measuring it?

James Mackey:

Right, yeah, I think it's not always an exact science, but it still is a science.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah.

James Mackey:

Logic-based ways to. I mean, like, I think, with product side you can. By accelerating onboarding, you are more likely to hit product release dates on time, right? So you could say okay, right now we are hitting X percentage of product release dates we're able to forecast accurately. Right, like we have.

James Mackey:

We know that it takes us this much time to hire and onboard folks properly. If we can accelerate ramp by one month, how much extra productivity does that give us a lift to potentially reach our product deliverables? And again, it may not be an exact science, but you can definitely translate that into something that's more numerically based and present that as a reason why to invest in an onboarding tool, whether it be continue or anything else, learning and development or anything at all. There's definitely ways to do that. I mean for HR roles, right, like, again, you could go through the onboarding, hiring experience, employee experience.

James Mackey:

How do we actually show numerically how these things are impacting the North Star metrics of the company? You might not get it down to the dollar, but I think the issue is that a lot of people don't understand the opportunity cost of this being done right, a lot of executives do miss on this and when you look down to people motions, whether it's recruiting or HR, often people think, oh, this is maybe a $500,000 problem, when really they have a seven or eight figure problem on their hands. When you look at onboarding across the entire organization being an effective, that can have significant, really serious, almost like life-threatening from a business perspective for the company's health impacts right.

James Mackey:

Absolutely you can see the difference between being a mediocre player in your industry and being a category leading company. It's that serious.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, no, I agree with you because it impacts not only the retention of people and the number of you know ramped employees you have at any given time, but it also impacts engagement so much across the team. So I think we're totally aligned on that.

James Mackey:

Yeah, it's really hard to come back from a bad first impression. So it's how do you show up in the hiring process? And then how do you show up when the employees starts Right, yeah, you get the first impression right. It's a lot easier to get engagement. But on the customer side keep going back to revenue analogies on this episode but you know, if you piss off your customer in the first month, then you're like you're digging out of a hole and no one's gonna be perfect. Whether it's a play experience, customer experience, it builds trust. If an issue, if somebody has an issue or concern and you show that you're gonna be able to adjust it and you correct course, then you know that's going to help him play engagement to like oh yeah, they actually heard me, they understood, they came, they helped me. I had this challenge and we were able to overcome that but again.

James Mackey:

It's so much easier when you make the first impression right. It's lifts engagement, the lifts mood is going to lift productivity, more likely to refer great people to you. There's just a massive lift across the board.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, absolutely.

James Mackey:

So I think one of the last things that I wanted to discuss on the show was in terms of measuring success, that feedback loop when it comes to Employees, when we're thinking about providing constructive feedback. Measuring success what's, what is your framework for measuring success? And then that feedback loop with employees.

Jamie Olsen:

So we we look at a couple of different metrics when we think about the success of the people function. So of course we're looking at turnover. I don't think turnover is necessarily always a bad thing, but there is a mismatch for the person or for the company and it makes sense. But I think it's important to evaluate, you know, turnover itself, the cause of it, the reasons for it and kind of what you can Do better in the future to improve it. And we also do measure employee engagement at different points of the employees life cycle. So we have surveys that go out around on boarding to kind of measure how we're doing there. And then we also measure engagement across about 20 different categories and Really look closely at those results. So we take them pretty seriously.

Jamie Olsen:

And I think it kind of goes back to what you said before Showing people that you're listening. It's about more than just measuring it. You have to do something with it then. So we measure against those different categories and when we see trends we act on them and we talk to the team about them and I think that has helped us quite a bit. I think you've got to be you've got to be comfortable Receiving constructive feedback. You have to be comfortable being told that you could do something better. You can take that personally. You have to be kind of ready to receive it so that you can improve, and that's kind of the mentality that we try to have when it comes to asking for feedback.

James Mackey:

Hi. So we recently had Debbie shot well on the show. She was, or she is currently the CPO of Stack Overflow and what's really interesting is, when I'm speaking with these executives at these category leading companies very Basically saying what you're saying, they're really honing in on feedback loops with employees Communication right yeah.

James Mackey:

Communicating with the team, what's going on, what key initiatives are in the business, asking for feedback, engaging not only in surveys but in person with the exact or not in person, but you know what I mean like one-on-one or in groups with different executives within the company.

James Mackey:

And what I've found interesting is that, out a lot of the most successful companies like this is a very common motion, like, in Some ways, it's weekly, right, like the CEO of Stack Overflow, he sends a letter to the entire company every single Friday, it doesn't matter if he's traveling or anything else.

James Mackey:

Like he's always sending a letter, out to the point where Debbie was telling a story about how, like one week, he was like totally swamped I think he was doing a release for his AI product in Europe and they were like, hey, why don't we just let somebody else do this for a week? He's like, no, right, like I'm gonna do this and I think it's like that level of commitment. And Again, when you look across the board at like, all of these executives, like what you're saying, like all these other executives We've had on the show, it's pretty consistent. The most successful companies are Really dialed into communicating with their team, collecting feedback, making it actionable, when it's appropriate to or when they're able to Communicating that. And it's just this constant flow of information back and forth between the executive team and the employee base.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, totally. And it all comes back to transparency too, and I I didn't mean to end the conversation how we started it, but I think that a lot of companies say that they're transparent and a lot of companies Say that they try to do that. I don't know that all companies do it Successfully, but I do think it is kind of a game changer and it's important to to kind of like even define what transparency means, because I think some people hear transparency and think, oh, that means I have to tell the company Everything that we're doing at all times. And it's not about telling people everything. It's about helping bring the employees Along for the journey, helping them understand why you make the decisions that you make and help give them clear insight into, kind of Like, the direction of the company and where things are going. Yeah, I think those things combined make a huge difference 100%.

James Mackey:

And look, jamie, this has been a really fantastic episode. I really appreciate having you on today. I thank you so much for coming on and sharing your expertise with everyone.

Jamie Olsen:

Yeah, thanks for having me, James. It was great chatting with you and for everybody else tuning in.

James Mackey:

Thank you so much for joining us today and we'll see you next time. I

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