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.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 118: Building high-performing teams in late stage: Shifting from culture fit to culture add with Gianna Driver, CHRO at Exabeam.
Ready to revolutionize your hiring process and build high-performing teams that add value to your organization? Join our host James Mackey and Gianna Driver, Chief Human Resources Officer at Exabeam, and discover how to redefine 'culture fit' as 'culture add,' and boost innovation. They share insights on measuring diversity impact, addressing performance issues, and handling workplace toxicity in the tech sector.
0:34 Gianna Driver's background
1:43 Effective hiring for high-performing teams
11:38 Building diverse and inclusive workplaces
16:52 Handling workplace toxicity in the tech sector.
21:35 Importance of employee sentiment and feedback
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
#1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, james Mackey. Today we are joined by Gianna driver. Gianna, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thanks, james, I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're very excited to host you and before we jump into it, could you share a little bit about your background with everyone?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I am based in the San Francisco Bay Area and I've been in the HR tech space for about 20 years which is kind of crazy to think and I've worked in organizations that are everything from small startup companies with 10, 20 people all the way to many multi thousands of people big public companies. My sweet spot, and where I get really excited, is that 500 to 1000 person size organization, and at Exabeeam, where I am currently, we're a cybersecurity company and roughly 700 global FTEs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really great, and so I love the fact that you have experienced at different stages at scale and running different size organizations and specifically your sweet spot, talking about scale ups category leading companies. When you talk about performance, you really, when you get to that level of success and to sustain that level of success performance and how we think about critically building teams everything when it comes to performance, to diversity and everything else, becomes increasingly more important and some could say even challenging right, making sure that the entire organization is on board and aligned and whatnot. So let's start with hiring right. We're talking about building high performing teams. It's a big topic. Let's start high level philosophy approach to when you think about you're joining a new organization. You want to focus on ensuring that you're getting the folks that are going to be the best value add to the organization. What do you focus on? Where do you start?
Speaker 2:Mm, hmm, definitely. So. I love this question, partly because, you know, I think the philosophy that comes to mind is seek first to understand and then to be understood. So when joining an organization, I think it's important to understand what is our, what's our differentiator, what are the key, you know, components and competencies of this job, and then, as we go about trying to fill these positions, it's important to think through skills and competencies. Experiences matter because that helps to inform competencies, but I'm of the mind that we shouldn't over rotate for experience, and I think when we're able to think through competencies and abilities and also potential, we're able to really intentionally craft our organization.
Speaker 1:For sure, and so one of the things that we discussed on the prep call was getting into kind of the mindset shift from culture fit to culture ad. I've heard of that before. I don't think everybody has. Like you know, it's something that's coming up more and more, but would you mind explaining to us what that means and how you think about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you know, I think probably 10 or so years ago, the the invoke thing to say was culture fit. It's really important as we build and scale teams, that we look for the right culture fit, and I think the more evolved way of looking at growth and scale is around culture ad, and what that means is we're not looking to hire people who are exactly as we are today right, because then you end up having more of the same. We actually want to focus on intentionally creating environments where we're hiring folks who are different than our existing workforce, because we want people to be innovative and to bring new ideas and different ways of thinking into our product mix. Our sales strategy you know all of our bottom line processes so being intentional about hiring people who don't just fit the mold but who are also not so far afield that they're going to be disruptive, right? So there's that happy medium.
Speaker 1:So how do you go about doing that right, because you're leading quite a large organization and you know how much of it are. You working directly with function leaders, vps of engineering, sales, working with town acquisition? How do you ensure alignment and how do you think about like implementation of that? I mean, what does that process look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. I think part of it begins with hiring manager training. So making sure that we're all speaking the same language and that we are grounded in our commitment that this is something we as an organization value. We are committed to looking at culture ad. We're committed to looking at candidates through the lens of potential, not only experience.
Speaker 2:And then, I think, having a structured interview process where you've got different interviewers and hiring folks who are asking and screening on different parts of what we've just discussed. So I think there are probably many people who can relate to interviewing at companies and being asked the same question four different ways from four different people versus an environment where you've got someone who is primarily looking at the cultural attributes of a person how are they going to impact culture? What is it like to disagree with them? And then you've got someone who is looking at experiences and key achievements and things like that, and others who might be if it's an engineering position, as you were mentioning, they might be looking to make sure this person has the skills required to do the job. But I think it starts by, at the onset, being very structured and prepared as we go about growth and scale.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always think that it's. I think one of the biggest missed opportunities is that I feel like actually a lot more times should be spent upfront working with hiring managers and talent acquisition leaders prior to a role being opened.
Speaker 1:Yes, I feel like we see so much inefficiency in terms of, once a role is open, refining, changing, closing, opening, making the wrong hires and really just tripping all over ourselves a lot of the time, versus being a little bit slower and the planning phase being intentional about everything from culture and otherwise around what we should be hiring for, because it just saves so much time. I mean, I think one of the analogies actually was on a podcast yesterday, but I was, like you know, thinking about. It is like when you invest in a person right, you invest in an employee you believe that they're going to be great culture ad and value creator performer for the business. It's a large investment that you're making not only in their salary and total compensation package, but also in the hiring manager's time, the leadership's time, the recruiters' time, the candidates' time. I mean it's there's just all of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a huge cost, right, and it's significantly larger than I think a lot of folks truly realize. And what's kind of funny about is like if someone let's just say I'm going to pull out a ballpark number for and hire, let's just say it's like, you know, when you include onboarding and ramp everything, your initial investment from hiring to onboarding, let's just say, costs $100,000, right, something like that? Right, you wouldn't, like none of us would take $100,000 and invest it into a business with no business plan, right, we never take like hey, here's a hundred grand, like let's just hope it's going to work out, right. And yet, like I feel like we don't.
Speaker 1:Necessarily we aren't always consciously doing that, but sometimes I feel like in some organizations, like that's kind of the mindset, like we're going to hire the person and the risk can kind of take care of itself, but there isn't enough clarity into are we making the right investment? Do we really know what we need to be investing in and how do we have a plan to ensure that investment has the right ROI that we're looking for? Whether it be culture, performance, whatever else, I don't. I think that there also needs to be a mindset shift, not only from culture fits and culture ads, but also when we're thinking about investing in folks like are we really being as intentional as we should be?
Speaker 2:I agree 100% and I think once we've got that clarity as a hiring manager, hr team, talent team, whatnot then I think it's also important to make sure others in the interview process are clear about that.
Speaker 2:I don't know how many times I've been in interview processes where there's not that alignment throughout all of the folks who are on the interview panel and what ends up happening is we have a very protracted interview cycle and you know one person's looking for this and someone who can, you know, do XYZ, someone else is looking for someone who is an absolutely different profile, and it ends up we end up wasting a lot of time, right? So it ends up becoming very inefficient. The quote that comes to mind is that you've probably heard this measure twice cut once, and so you know spending some time measuring and being really intentional and thoughtful about okay, here is who, the who right, so kind of that profile of skills and competency and here's what they're going to be doing at our organization and here's how we want them to be doing it. I think that alignment upfront saves a lot of inefficiency down the road.
Speaker 1:Oh it does, 100% does. I would say just like and just so folks don't understand my perspective. I run a company called Secure Vision and we do contract recruiting and better recruiting an RPO. For the past decade We've done it for over 200 companies, primarily startup growth stage, a handful of enterprise, publicly traded firms, primarily in the tech space, and this is consistently. It's an issue more times than not when it comes to not slowing down enough and really defining everything from a culture to a performance to an onboarding, there just usually hasn't been enough prep time and strategy and process put in place before, hey, we got to go out and hire 30, 100 engineers or whatever it might be over the next year, right.
Speaker 2:Well, sometimes you have to slow down in order to really speed up, kind of being really methodical in saying, okay, here's where we are and here's where we want to go, and let's really craft that journey. I think saves time down the road.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so. I think it's just too, particularly in 2021,. It's like one of the conversations that's been happening a little bit more recently and specifically really led by Sam Jacobs. He's the CEO of a company called Pavilion, which is a community base for executives, a lot of revenue leaders, and they also have a CEO group. But one of the things that Sam talks about is that in 2021 specifically, a lot of people really didn't understand what scale meant. Scale is building repeatable profitability, maintaining somewhat similar unit economics, similar margin as we scale, and building a sustainable business. But it's like in 2021, it's almost like people saw scale as high as many people as fast as possible. Yeah, and it's. If you don't have the right plan in place, it's like you're really just adding a ton of overhead. I mean, you're not necessarily scaling the organization and you're not doing any favors to anybody, and it's not like, hey, if we just add 20 people, it's going to solve our problems.
Speaker 2:And thus we find ourselves in the right sizing exercise. That's been painful for many of us in the tech space in 2023.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh yeah. It's been a brutal year in tech when it comes to that, for sure, so hopefully we're coming out the other end of that soon. We'll see. Yes, smarter, yeah, I'd like to fix that. It's like how many times do we have to have our?
Speaker 2:hand burn on the stove top right, We'll see, but anyway.
Speaker 1:So I think, just getting back to thinking about culture, out of big part of that is diversity. You know it's. You've seen a lot of companies make a big push over the past few years to improve diversity practices, inclusion, really thinking about how to measure this properly and actually have it be more than okay values we put on our careers page. How are we actually tracking toward these goals and everything that comes alongside that? I would love to get your thoughts when you're thinking about building diversity programs in a diverse workforce. How do you build a program that is actually tracking and making progress, and what are the different things that you take into consideration as you're building out your diversity strategy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. You know, I think a lot of organizations are in a place where they say that commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging is something paramount, and they're they want to make sure that they're building diverse teams. But what ends up happening is, without a holistic strategy and approach, we end up having these random acts of diversity. And when you have random acts of diversity, that typically leads to a pretty disorganized and fraught employee experience because, because we're not streamlined and consistent in our approach to diversity and inclusion and belonging, the examples of that might mean organizations are so focused and committed to hiring under represented talent and then they, you know, focus on other things. That's only one step and a many step journey to building a diverse and inclusive workplace.
Speaker 2:So, yes, having underrepresented minorities, you know, join an organization, yes, it starts there, without like representation matters, and if you don't have the folks there, then you know, yes, that's part of it, but then also ensuring that we have workplaces where people are able to, in psychologically safe environments, express their thoughts, that people are able to disagree in kind and respectful ways, that people are able to listen and that we're also clear about who has decision making authority. Now, what I think about is diverse workplaces come with built in disagreement. Inherent in diversity is that you're going to have people who are likely very impassioned and they've got different perspectives coming at trying to solve problems. That's wonderful and that's what we want, but we need to be really intentional about creating structures so that we don't just have a bunch of chaotic folks disagreeing with one another but we actually are able to harness and leverage the diversity of thought and experience to have really great solutions.
Speaker 1:So I think one of the things you said on your prep call specifically, it's like you know, a lot of companies are looking at diversity through the lens of from just hiring right, like their entire strategy or metrics or everything that they're tracking is specifically related to the hiring process and percentages and improving percentages and whatnot, like these types of things. But one of the things you said in the protocol is like, really the real work starts once you have built a diverse team, and I think it's like doing those two things in parallel while you're thinking about it, hiring more of a diverse team. Also, what are you doing to produce an environment that is gonna be inclusive and where folks are gonna be able to communicate effectively? And I think that's probably again something that should be done in parallel, where I think at a lot of times it's not. It's like we're focused on hiring and then they haven't focused on the other part of it and they're essentially already started off like falling behind and unsure about the right steps to take right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, because these things, to your point, can't be done in a linear fashion where, okay, we're gonna focus on hiring, okay, once we feel like we're doing a good job there and we're bringing diverse folks here, now we're gonna focus on the belonging piece. No, to your point, like all of this has to be done in a structured approach, concurrently. Right, and I do think I think you had mentioned this earlier. Looking at metrics and data helps us understand a baseline, but be, how are we doing so? And I don't mean just the metrics of having diverse folks in the organization, I also mean in our engagement surveys. Let's do data cuts where we're looking at this through the lens of underrepresented minorities. What is their engagement score? How are they feeling about things?
Speaker 2:Let's start to, and our merit processes, our promotion processes, look through the lens of gender and ethnicity and veteran status and all of these other types of ways that we organize and classify ourselves. Right, because I think then we start to see trend lines and we can correct and address. And I think it's important to note perfection is likely never going to be achieved and I think that's okay, but it allows us if we've got the North Star there, we can constantly pivot and shift because our workplace is constantly in a state of change. Right, like workplaces are dynamic, we have people entering and leaving all the time, so constantly evaluating and then correcting and addressing is gonna be critical to getting it right.
Speaker 1:For sure, and I think also one of the other aspects to creating a healthy culture is we talked a little bit about. We wanted to discuss performance alongside culture, right, and in some cases we may have situations even where somebody may be able to perform the tasks or responsibilities or produce the outcomes that are needed from the perspective of a job description right, but maybe aren't necessarily the best folks to work with from the perspective of being toxic or something like that. So that's another really important part of culture which can be really difficult to manage to, particularly from an executive level, but it's also incredibly important. So when you think about performance and when you think about maybe some of the in this case, like challenges that you may have with somebody who might be toxic, for instance, how do you reconcile that and what your? What do you do? It's a tough one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know I've thought about this a fair bit and I'll give you some specific anecdotes and examples. I've been in situations where we've got someone who is performing from a metrics and numbers standpoint, meaning they're you know, they're crushing their quota, or, in non-sales environments, they're meeting the KPIs and the release dates or whatever it is. So, functionally speaking, they are doing a stellar job. However, culturally speaking, they're toxic. And so I think that the question is around how do we handle these types of situations where someone is crushing it from a goals perspective, but they're just not doing it in a nice way. This is where I think we as leaders are really tested and challenged.
Speaker 2:My personal opinion and I believe very strongly about this is the no jerks policy is super critical and, by the way, those out there in some organizations have more strong language around this. But for our conversation today, we'll say the no jerks policy. I think it is critical that we walk the walk and don't just, you know, do lip service to this. So the how someone does something, in my opinion, is equally important to the what. So if someone is achieving and the what part is being solved, but they are culturally cancerous to the organization, that, in my opinion, is unacceptable, and we need to have really hard and honest conversations with them, give them every chance to succeed and if they are still not, to a place where the how part is kind and respectful and inclusive, then I think we need to help them find their next opportunity.
Speaker 1:Sure, and so that's that makes a lot of sense to me. I think it's when we're thinking about implementing that right, or really delivering on that, particularly from your role right, which you have a rather large organization. You have a lot of different leaders that you're working with to ensure that they're aligned on the same page. First off, how do you really uncover if there's an issue, and then how do you do so in a way that's consistent and not biased? I mean, how do you structure that?
Speaker 2:Yep. So there's not a silver bullet panacea that's going to solve this. I can't say, james, oh, you just do this one thing, and if you look at that, then you know what. You got all your answers there. But typically it is a multitude of data points that we look at in aggregate. Right, and so it could be. Let's look at attrition. Then poor managers end up having pretty high attrition rates relative to the trend lines in the overall organization, so that could be an indication of a problem. We could look at engagement rates across different leaders and managers in an organization. But then also, aside from all of these types of things, have conversations, have an environment where people are okay giving feedback to one another. Have an environment where HR, business partners or people partners are front and center in a lot of these conversations. And if you listen, your employees know who's toxic and who's not, and so then it's incumbent upon us to act accordingly Once we have this information, to help someone get better and work with more respect, or let them know that it's acceptable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's made a really good point when you're honing in on leaders, specifically hiring managers, because the leverage and impact is so much greater. Right Like, he's leading an organization of anywhere from even if it's a small team of five people, to an organization of 20, 30 people. Plus that, that's going to impact everybody that bundles up through them on the org chart. So I think starting there and having a really firm grasp on that is probably the most important, I would say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and accountability culture, right when to your point, it's the work metrics, but also that these leaders are holding their folks accountable and they're holding themselves accountable.
Speaker 1:I think another interesting point you made was thinking about attrition rates on a per department level, on a per team basis and benchmarking based on that to identify okay, you heard something anecdotally about maybe something's going on here or we need to look into this but then, from a metric perspective, what can you actually look at to as a potential indicator?
Speaker 1:Not a standalone metric, but what are different things you can look at? And I think attrition is a really interesting one, and I've actually heard it brought up a couple of times recently when we were thinking about attrition on a per team or per department basis. For a lot of reasons, not only in this use case, but there's a fair amount of use cases actually, when it comes down to running an effective organization, understanding attrition on a per department basis and everything from how we think about recruiting to how we think about career progression and employee lifetime value and engagement, and there's just a lot to be considered and it's cool to see. I think the attrition on a per team basis is really important. I think a lot of organizations maybe ones that are a little bit younger, but a lot of them are looking at attrition basically at a company-wide level. They're not dialing in on a per team basis, which is, of course, I think, a lot more useful.
Speaker 2:And I think, equally important to attrition is also employee sentiment, because, remember, attrition is a lagging indicator, right? So attrition means someone's already left, they've departed already, and that's useful information. So I agree 100%. Let's dive into a team and or manager level if needed. Equally important, though, is also employee sentiment. So this is how people feel today, because that is something we can do something about, right? If someone has already exited the organization, then they're gone, as opposed to employee sentiment or employee engagement. Here at ExitBeam, we call this ENPS, so the employee net promoter score, so that we're able to get a gauge and sense for, okay, across the organization and by function. Here's how people are currently feeling. There are also some really interesting tools and like analytics types of things that will do language processing on an aggregate sort of basis and, essentially, let you know, okay, here are pockets of potential concern, right, and then that becomes actionable for us, because, again, attrition is something that you can't necessarily do anything about because it's happened already, versus sentiment, information is actionable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and it's one of the many areas where you can have a revenue organization parallel to people organizations, in a sense running net promoter scores and whatnot. When you're doing net promoter scores assuming it's anonymous to an extent, but then also on a per department basis. So how do you do it in such a way that's anonymous but also specific?
Speaker 2:Yep. So there are lots of amazing tools out there that help with this. Usually, the end has to be five or greater for it to be reported, right? Because if the end, if the number of reporting individuals, is less than five, then often it's identifying information which, frankly, just defeats the purpose, right? Like, I think, as leaders and organizations, it's less useful to think about who is saying which things. But let's kind of rise above the you know that level of detail and kind of think about okay, what is the overall messaging that my employees and teams are telling me. So usually, whether it's you know, lattice is the tool that we use here at ExitBeam, which is fantastic at this. You have to have an end greater than five in order for it to give you, you know, information.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, that sounds like a good policy to have. Yeah, cause I would think like folks, if they're on a smaller team, would feel a little bit awkward about giving feedback.
Speaker 2:Right, no, you're exactly right, and I think that it's important that we respect and adhere to the anonymity threshold. Right, like if we tell our employees that it truly is anonymous, then we need to do right by that and ensure that it actually is, and many of the tools out there force organizations to stick to that. So we use an N of five. How often do you send these out? So we do an annual engagement survey, but then we do more frequent pulse surveys. So our thesis is that on an annual level, it's good to when I like many question format kind of get a sense for how we're doing, what's working, what are areas of improvement, and then, based off of that, we'll do more curated and targeted pulse surveys that are more frequent, and so that could be anywhere from one to four or five questions.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. So it sounds like it's a very regular, proactive, consistent feedback loop.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's funny, just depending on who you ask. I'm like, oh, that's it's too regular or it's not regular enough, right. So yeah, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:I know it's actually this is actually something that I'm seeing a trend with as well at a lot of the top performing organizations executives that I've been speaking with on the show really dialing into communication and feedback between executives and employees, and it's interesting, it's happening a lot Like a lot of executives are very adamant about it being on a monthly basis in some ways, in some ways communicating on a weekly basis.
Speaker 1:You know we had Debbie Shotwell she's the chief people officer over at Stack Overflow and she was talking about how their CEO writes a letter to the company every Friday. It said, yeah, not exactly what we're talking about, but the idea of communicating a feedback loops. And you know, it seems that a lot of the top organizations are really really very seriously and it's you get to a point where you start to hear this from a lot of the top chief HR officers, such as yourself and everybody else has been speaking to it. The folks that have been doing this a while are going to tell you that this is one of the most important things that they do in order to engage, increase employee engagement and hire and retain top talent.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I tell my my like fellow leaders, as well as my teams when you feel like you're over communicating, you're probably communicating just enough.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, I agree. I mean nobody's going to come back to you like you're being too transparent, Like you know what I mean Like giving me so much information and right yeah, context. Yeah, people want it. People definitely want it and they appreciate it. It goes a long way.
Speaker 2:Especially in a hybrid environment, which is the world in which many of us live and operate. I think for that to be successful, feedback, rich environments where communication is a norm is essential to success.
Speaker 1:I definitely agree. So, gianna, we're coming up on time here. I wanted to say thank you so much for joining me today. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 2:Thanks, james, thanks so much.
Speaker 1:Of course. So for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much. We'll see you next time. Take care.
