The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
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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.
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- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 121: Cracking the code of international hiring: Strategies, challenges, and embracing the startup mentality
In this episode, host James Mackey sits down with Daniel Brodie CTO & Co-Founder at Cynerio, and Aya Naveh, Human Resources Director, to tackle the challenges of hiring for international sales teams, especially in the healthcare sector. Discover key strategies for success in the US market, including fostering a culture of adaptability, leveraging networks, and streamlining processes.
0:34 Daniel Brodie's background
1:18 Aya Naveh's background
1:45 International team hiring challenges and strategies
14:42 Successfully hiring in the US market for non-US companies
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Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough hiring show. I'm your host, james Mackey, very excited for today. We have two incredible guests, aya and Daniel from Scenario. Thank you both for joining me today. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thanks.
Speaker 1:Daniel, could you please kick us off? Could you share a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so thank you, james. I'm Daniel. I've been in cybersecurity for close to two decades in both research and development roles, kind of presenting at a Black Hat US a few times and a few other conferences, and leading cybersecurity development in some startups, where we ended up reaching our current startup, which I found with my co-founder Leon, which is focused on helping protect healthcare IoT devices from cybersecurity attacks, ransomware attacks and so forth, and kind of trying to bring our cybersecurity experience to this interesting vertical of healthcare which has its own cybersecurity challenges.
Speaker 1:Love it. Thank you, daniel and Aya. How about you?
Speaker 2:I'm over 15 years in HR and talent acquisition, currently leading the HR force scenario. In the last two and a half years, before I worked as a talent acquisition and manager and HR business partner in a company called Zerdo which was sold to HP, and before talent acquisition recruiting in agencies and others.
Speaker 1:Love it, and so one of the things that we wanted to discuss today. Scenario is an international company, you have a presence in Israel, you also, of course, do a lot of work in the United States, and there are a lot of distinct challenges and opportunities for working in international teams. And over the years you know from my background too, having partnered with a lot of international companies to help them build, for instance, sales teams in the US market go to market strategy can be quite difficult, not only from a strategic perspective, but from a hiring perspective and management perspective. So I think we could just start high level. But I would love to get into a little bit about how do you go when you're talking about your go to market strategy for the US market. Where do you start? Are you initially thinking about more so tactics in terms of outreach? Are you thinking about more so, like the types of profiles that you would need to hire for the sales process? Like, how do you really start to think about your go to market strategy?
Speaker 2:So I think we start with the problem, what the problem we're trying to solve with the hiring, and in our case we have the sales managers, which are very difficult to hire good one. I know that the percentage of salespeople that are hitting their numbers in a company that usually are about 30%. So you want to hit those to get to those 30% of good salespeople. But we also are in a very niche vertical, which is healthcare. So in the past we hired people that are coming from IT security background. They didn't have the healthcare experience and we learned over the years that this is a game changer for us because they know the market, they know the people, they know the channels, the partners. It's easier for them to understand what to do, who to approach.
Speaker 2:Sales cycles are different than in other companies. They're usually they're longer. So this is something that we are trying to profile what's the best candidate for the job? And then we usually start with either outreaches, also internal references, which works good for us, but also we rely heavily on outside recruiters because we don't have anyone in the US and we know that usually those are the people that understand the market and they approach the right people and they get response which sometimes, unfortunately, although I'm very nice person, I don't get the same responses as they do.
Speaker 1:It's really hard to recruit talent particularly if your primary staff is based internationally. There's a lot of reasons. Before I jump into my perspective, I'm curious to hear from you, Daniel, when you think about hiring the US market. Does it make sense? When you think about hiring the US market, it sounds like particularly we're talking about sales leadership. I would love to get a little bit of your thoughts on some of the challenges and challenges that you focus on when you were first doing that for scenario.
Speaker 3:So I think, at the end of the day, we're still a startup. We're an agile startup and one of the things that we want to make sure we're prioritizing with being people on board are people that know how to work with that Israeli startup mentality, which is being a little bit more agile, having innovations that's coming out at sometimes record pace and trying out new things and new ideas and kind of seeing what works. So there's a lot of trying to find that match between those different mentalities and also a lot of team mentality. At the end of the day, as in Israel, the way we work and we've heard that from a few of our US employees that they're not used to coming into our company and then being told, no, no, you should go talk to the R&D team. No, you should go talk to it, you should go. Make sure to involve as many people as you can to be successful.
Speaker 3:We really are looking for those people who are interested in that kind of team mentality and engaging the wider company and the Israeli team, even though they're far away, put as much effort that they can to be there to help and support and do those be agile on their feet to kind of help.
Speaker 3:Sure that we can get those go-to-market teams to help be successful. And sometimes it's a bit challenging to find people who know how to use those tools that we provide to those go-to-market people. And I think the last thing that's also very important is ownership. At the end of the day we're still a small company. There's a lot of stuff that in a small company that isn't necessarily have the most robust processes and we want to make sure people can come and take ownership of stuff that's going on and kind of look outside their lane and kind of help push the company to where it needs to be, because we provide the support, provide the help and provide the resources. But sometimes you got to think outside of the current processes that we have and the current box that we have to be successful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think a lot of people struggle working for not only for startups, but then when you add the element of it's an international startup, particularly if it's headquartered outside of the US, there's a lot of reasons. But I think the adaptability piece is huge. Right, you can't really put a job description together. I mean you can say working cross-functionally, you can say doing all these types of things, but some people, in terms of their I don't know if it's psychology or just like their wiring, their mental wiring they have a hard time kind of moving between lines on the JD and just kind of figuring out how to mold into the environment and adapt. As it is, the environment continues to evolve.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's a specific skill set, and like to find somebody who's just like very intellectually curious and open and proactive about solving things and doesn't really even think in terms of like structure, but it is more thinking in terms of like what's the most direct path for my answer. Like no, I'm not going to go to Daniel or Aya, I'm going to go directly to the R&D team. Like why am I going to create four more layers of communication just to get what I need? And somebody who doesn't feel like awkward about that. Or, you know, I think sometimes too, like people that come like, come up in different environments, maybe come up in the enterprise space where there's a very rigid hierarchy and process to doing everything, maybe some have a hard times pivot.
Speaker 1:I think sometimes it's that. I think sometimes it's just like more so. I don't know, personality is the right word, but you know, some people are just more comfortable with just taking the most direct path and other people feel the need to like. They're thinking about like oh, what about the social dynamic? What about the hierarchy? What about who I report to? What about? This isn't in my job description. Am I really qualified? Should I even be saying anything? Like there's like all of that and the right person is going to be thinking of that stuff. Like right person is just thinking like what's the damn answer? So I can get it done.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And, like you said, I think that's one of the challenges of, you know, having a company that has R&D on one side they have sales team in the US, sales team in the UK and other sales people it's really hard to create that culture where people feel that they can not go necessarily based on the company hierarchy right, where they can go across, where they can feel comfortable to say things and hey, maybe be wrong, right. I think that's it's much easier if it's people who are from the same area, from the same culture. It's much harder when the way you respond to somebody asking a question in a way that maybe shouldn't have been at like how do you respond to that, can really push people in a way that you don't want to push it right. You want to be in a way that people feel comfortable to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, one of the other big things that I would say a lot of my international customers over the years that we were helped hiring in the US market they really struggled sometimes with having enough structure and process, not only around the hiring process but in terms of their employment package that they were offering to candidates. So I don't know if this is something that you all dealt with initially, but when we worked with a lot of companies in Israel or that were at HQ in India or UK or EU or whatever, sometimes they would tell us like, hey, we want you to go out and hire a sales leader and we'd say, okay, well, what's your employment package look like? Like what's your benefits look like? Do you have retirement, do you have like PTO? And sometimes the feedback we get is like, well, just ask the candidate what they want, right? And I think that that was something that we we'd have to try to help a lot of our customers understand. Like that's not effective, like we can't do that because you're up against companies that have all of those things already put in place.
Speaker 1:And I think, too, it's like when a company is younger and a startup particularly that's going, moving into a new market, initially there's not really this brand, right? It's not like they're interviewing with Google. Right? Like we have to prove legitimacy and how we show up in the interview process and how well organized we are is important. It's like, if we go to, we have a big customer that we're trying to land, right Like we need to show up prepared with a proposal with insights into how onboarding is going to work, with data, with the dashboard, with whatever we need to do. Because here's the thing, right, like if I there was like a sales leader who didn't ask me a ton of questions about, like, the employment package and didn't ask me a ton of questions about onboarding, like if they weren't really digging and they weren't concerned that we didn't have that data.
Speaker 1:I'd be very or I'd be very concerned too that it's not a good person. Like, is a player really going to accept an offer? Like when they don't know the things they need to know? So that was, I would say, one of the biggest blockers I've seen international companies have to getting great people on their team in the US market is just not being dialed in enough on to their hiring process and their you know benefits offering all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:So we have it. We are organized in that perspective and we are always trying to check the benchmark, how we are against the other players in the market that are, you know, competing on the same people that we're competing on. But we are sometimes tackling things that we are tackling first time. For instance, paternity leave. We're a small start up. We don't have many people, for instance, that are becoming dads in the US or in Israel, so we're trying to think about what time for paternity leave, as a company, we're going to give this person for the first time. So these are processes that we're trying to adapt as we go. Not everything is structured, but we're trying on the benefit back end, we're trying to be very structured.
Speaker 1:Do you use like an employer record, like anything, like a just works or?
Speaker 2:We're working with Trinat in the US to deal in everything that is outside of the US.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that really helped us as like a you know, a growing company.
Speaker 1:Yeah we transitioned to the PEO just works, which really helped our benefits offering and made us a lot. I mean, we didn't have a 401k beforehand. We didn't have there was a fair amount of benefits that we weren't offering just individually but we were able to I guess you know tap into their benefits packages, which I really I think a lot of startups, particularly international this is actually just another good tip, I suppose for Israeli based companies and international is go the PEO route. I mean, I think even companies like, if you're US based and you're building a team in the US, go PEO, don't even think about it to your like 150, 200 employees.
Speaker 2:It's easy. They help you with legal staff. They help you if you want to hire someone or, unfortunately, sometimes you have to terminate an employee. They help you that as well.
Speaker 1:So yeah, is China like there? It was like, try not.
Speaker 2:And I think ADP also has a PEO employer record more like payroll and benefits provider Because we do have an entity in the US. Deal is more a PEO in other countries.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, yeah. So what about so for China? They just works pretty flexible and like they have different levels, like levels of liability, like I don't think just works takes on a lot of liability for us, I think maybe like some helps with some compliance, but I think China it's a little bit more structured right, where they're like you almost have to do some things a certain way in order to, yeah, be a customer, right, are they pretty rigid?
Speaker 2:Yeah, but yeah, but we can. You know, we can decide on the benefits that we want to do, when want to give our employees and they support. The only thing that sometimes I'm struggling with is to understand the benchmark, because they don't, they cannot tell me what's the best thing for me to do. They say this is practice, but you know, once I sometimes I need the advice and it's like a little bit more blurry. They what did I want to take the the responsibility which I get, but then I need to understand what I need to do in specific situations. So yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting stuff for founders executives tuning in that are building teams in the US market right, they're internationally based. Are there any other kind of key takeaways that you can think about, daniel, things that they should be thinking of, holes that they could fall in or high leverage, you know, wins I what? What final takeaways can we give to help people would be successful moving into the US market and hiring?
Speaker 3:So I think we kind of touch a little bit on that right.
Speaker 3:It's kind of how do you bring your best foot forward when you're coming as a Non-us company right to kind of talking with the US employees in that regard of like, like you mentioned. Right the same, similar to how you want to be seen very mature when you're talking to a company. You want to seem very mature when you're talking to an employee and it's doing the proper homework. So when you're coming to talk to the, to the people you want to hire, they feel that they're the right processes, whether it's kind of the payroll and the bubble, whether it's the onboarding, whether it's the communication process that that need to happen in place and kind of how that happens. Another thing that I think we found and Actually corona really kind of hit at home was the importance of Face-to-face communication. At the end of the day, doesn't matter how easy it is to be remote, you have to make sure you have face-to-face communication. I think we've even kind of made sure as part of the hiring process, even now that we do have a US team, you've been making sure there that the US team ends up meeting face-to-face as part of the hiring process. It's just. It's just something that you can't skip out on. The benefits just are so significant right. So it's something that, especially with sales team and sometimes even like even if a sales team and your US company, your sales can probably be pretty diverse and spread up all over the place Still need to make sure we get that face-to-face communication and also making sure as part of that that we ship People from Israel or from wherever we want need to have those communications to there as part of QBRs, when needed, or the other way around, also bringing people over here so we can kind of have that communication and that's Really critical for building up their relationships for later.
Speaker 3:So I think the last thing is really kind of how we approach them also to begin with, because If you just have some Israeli company reaching out of nowhere to a US candidate, it's really hard to get them to even pick up the phone or get that initial conversation going.
Speaker 3:And I think one of the big challenges you want to make sure we have is kind of how do we get that foot in the door and how do we leverage our network, the people we know whether it's High people who help us do hiring, whether it's people that we know from other companies, whether it's Bring the right people to begin with when you're starting to build your go-to-market team that can help you open up that door, whether it's board members or or advisory people and kind of using all the leverage you can from all our network so that when we Get that initial introduction to those candidates that we're trying to reach, they are willing to open up the, you know, pick up the phone and actually have a conversation with us because the Israeli credentials that we bring to the table that are very helpful for us for hiring in Israel right, it could be stuff like 8200 unit alumni or all these other different things that are very helpful in Israel and kind of building out that this is a potentially successful company.
Speaker 3:You should come in here. We have to say those things don't translate as easily to a global market unless they're Israeli candidates.
Speaker 2:They probably know us a little bit better than others. But yeah, that's, that's a struggle.
Speaker 1:And I. Do you have any additional tips based on what Daniel said?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what I usually do when I am on board people, and during the interview as well, is make sure that I see people that are, you know, can fit our culture, even if they're different. They maybe think differently, but I guess that they're open, that we can connect, that they can. I'm a different HR than, I guess, the US HR and I have a different perspective. This is how Israeli operates, so we want to make sure that they'll open up, they'll talk to me, they'll say what's on their mind so we can do something with it, right? So this is also something that we're trying to figure out during our interview process and during our first conversations with them when they're hired, to make sure that they can fit us.
Speaker 1:Love it. So there's just a few kind of like let's just do a quick checklist for those tuning in that you can write down as a takeaway. So again, it's a lot of it has how you show up, as Daniel put it, like being mature. You really need to have a mapped out hiring process. You need to have mapped out onboarding. You need to have everything mapped out in terms of like what you know, for example, sales leadership, what an initial quote is going to look like, your deal size, your sales process. Even if you don't have all the answers, you want to put together some kind of framework. And if you don't know how to get the framework, then talk to an advisor. If you don't have somebody on your board, that's the right fit. Find an advisor you know. But you have to be able to show up, organize and kind of prove that you're legitimate.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I would say is like showing lasting power. If you don't have any other employees in the US market, what's to say, six months, you don't change your mind and don't want to break into the US market. It really happens all the time. So if somebody's going to like who's really good is going to put their faith in you to deliver. They're going to want to know that you are committed to the US market. What's the budget look like? How many people are I going to be ready to hire? When am I going to hire them? How long am I going to be in an IC role? Do I get to immediately start to build a team? What about, like tech? Are you going to give me money for tech Sales operations, revenue ops like? What does that look like? How often am I going to be able to speak with Daniel Right? I mean like those types of communication.
Speaker 2:We're trying to make sure that we're hiring people or it's not easy and it takes us forever. I can, for me it's forever. But we're trying to make sure that these that we are, you know, we're able to hire those that are more independent. They don't need all the resources that others do, even if they come from big companies, which sometimes have more resources resources than small startups but the quality is of an independent person that, can, you know, can do everything, like a mini CEO of their territory.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's a good point, of course, like being super independent, I think the last thing I would say is sometimes, again, like I hear from leaders, they'll say something like well, we can't set the quota, or we can't set the quota, or we can't do it because we just don't know what it's going to be yet, or we can't put a process or a plan in place because it can change.
Speaker 1:And what I always say is it's better to have a plan and change it than not to have a plan at all. You're going to have a lot more and this is just, like, I think, solid leadership advice to employees. Like it's you can say look, we're a startup, things are going to evolve quickly. This might look different in six months. Here's the plan, right, and it's like and that works with candidates a lot, because if we just show up not having a plan, saying like I don't know, we'll see what happens. Like you know, people are going to be like well, I don't know about you, like I don't know. But so I think that that's important too is better to have a plan and change it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I really like that last point of yours and I think it's very significant, right, if you come and you have your, if you're coming with a plan, right, you can't just say, oh, deal size, it's I don't know $100,000, whatever, like it has to make sense with. Okay, this is a plan, this is a deal size, this is how you're planning to look at the regions, this is how the people how is that we're gonna split up amongst the different sales people and the team? This is and then this is a revenue we're planning to reach by the end of the year. Right, all those numbers have to add up and, like you said, even if they end up not hitting those numbers, even if they end up going over or under, you end up splitting the regions differently. It doesn't matter. But you need to make sure that it looks like you've done your homework and the math checks out and what you're saying makes sense, cause that's, at the end of the day, what people wanna see. They wanna see that what you're saying makes sense and what the plan is moving forward.
Speaker 3:And also, internally for yourself, you have the KPI, the metrics, the tracking of it, to be able to say in a quarter to hey, this does not make sense at all. We have to change the plan. But you had the plan there, you knew what you were trying to do, and then it's also much easier to communicate why you're changing the plan. Right, you can come and say in half a year, hey look. Or in three months, whatever it is, the numbers are enriching. Whatever we said we would wanna reach, we have to change the plan. And then people are on board for changing the plan because it makes sense, right?
Speaker 1:at the end of the day. Yeah, I mean it should be logic-based. It should be. We're always making the best decisions based on the data that we have and as we collect more data, we will change our mind if we need to. We will change the path if we need to. There's power in changing our mind. There's power in adapting and evolving. It doesn't mean that we were wrong. It means that, well, it might mean we were wrong. Actually, let me take that back. But yeah, so it could be that we're wrong, or it just could be like look, we had this data, this is what we thought we could do, but now we've collected, we've done all these deals in our pipeline, or whatever it might be. So we need to adjust and I think people, even if it's unpredictable and that you couldn't predict the change, it gives people comfort in knowing that the business is being run in a predictable way. Okay, this is how we operate. We're gonna review data periodically and we're gonna pivot and adjust the business to that.
Speaker 2:But that's why you need agile people that understand that you're here one day and then three months, maybe six months later, you're in a different place because the market is changing or there's something that has changed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're right, you're right. Well, daniel and I, this has been a lot of fun. We're coming up on time actually flew by. I really wanted to say just thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your expertise with our audience. I really do appreciate both of you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having us on. It's been fun.
Speaker 1:Thank you both for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much for joining us today and we will see you again soon. Take care.
