The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
Welcome to The Breakthrough Hiring Show! We are on a mission to help leaders make hiring a competitive advantage.
Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
You will learn how to:
- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
- Leverage data, process, and technology to achieve hiring success.
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 140: Navigating Talent Acquisition from Series C to Series E with Cassandra Mingus, Director of Talent Acquisition at Signifyd
Join host James Mackey and his guest Cassandra Mingus, Director of Talent Acquisition at Signifyd, as she shares her career journey from recruiter to tech leader in a late-stage company. In conversation with James Mackey, they explore lessons learned, the evolution of talent acquisition, and hiring strategies for success.
Discover the importance of structured processes, approval mechanisms, and using tools like Greenhouse for streamlined recruitment. Uncover tiered recruitment strategies, capacity planning insights, and measuring quality of hire.
0:33 Cassandra Mingus's background
1:39 Lessons learned in talent acquisition progression
12:00 Key processes for effective hiring
19:24 Capacity planning and quality of hire
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Welcome to the Breakthrough hiring show. I'm your host, james Mackey. Today, we're joined by Cassandra Magus to serve the basic drawings. Yeah, thanks for having me. Let's do it Before we jump into the topics we outlined. I was hoping that you could share a little bit about your background with everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. I have been in recruiting for a little over seven, almost eight years now and I started out as a recruiter and then have moved out the ladder and have been very fortunate to have found a place at a company called Signified where I have essentially been able to move up into leading their global talent acquisition function there. And then, for some context, signified is in the tech industry. We provide fraud protection for e-commerce merchants. When I joined them they were about 100 people six and a half years ago. Now we're at the 500 mark and we are in our series E round of funding, so late stage company. I believe when I joined we were at our series C. We had just raised our series C and it's been an amazing journey to be able to grow out the talent acquisition function there and help essentially build out the company from small to now mid stage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it, and one of the reasons I reached out to you to come on this show is simply just because of your progression path.
Speaker 1:Going from the recruiter role in 2017 to now director of talent acquisition for a late stage tech company is really impressive, quite honestly, and I am really excited to talk to you a little bit about that journey because I think that's a unique perspective, like working for one employer during hyper growth and moving up from an individual contributor to a leader within the organization. To get us started, I would actually like to start with your own progression. There's a couple of things right Like. I would love to talk about the kind of lessons learned in light bulb moments going from an individual contributor into a head of or director level role Just like biggest lessons learned there and then we can move into maybe how talent acquisition has evolved from being mid stage to late stage. I think is also really valuable to folks tuning in. So going back to the initial topic would just be do you have any like highlights of biggest lessons learns or light bulb moments as you were progressing from an individual contributor to now the current role? You're in the director role.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and, mind you, I became a manager during the pandemic.
Speaker 2:I had become a manager right before the pandemic, and so for me it was a lot of change happening all at once in the market and the economy was drastically moving, and so I think some of the biggest changes were I didn't have all the control anymore of my own destiny and so, having a team report into me and building out a team, I had to essentially care and worry about my team members and making sure that they could be successful too, and so that was a big change for me personally.
Speaker 2:And then the other change was, rather than being tactical, I now had to be more strategic and think about the big picture of the company and understand the business goals and outcomes that we were trying to achieve and how the talent acquisition function can support that, and so that was a big change for me in making sure our presence was known, meeting with leaders and hiring managers to understand their challenges and how we, as the recruiting function, can support that with hiring, whether it was net new or backfills, and so that was a huge difference when I became a leader. Instead of just I got to source, interview people, find people to fill this role and then move on to the next one, so that was a big transition for me for sure. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1:It's quite interesting moving into management leadership when you're going through COVID. I think that's really valuable. Honestly, if you remember pre-COVID, right when we were in this massive kind of bull market for tech, that lasted several years and I think you had a lot of people that in that time, moved up from individual contributor to leadership because there was just such demand for growth there wasn't even there was just there were so many openings for leaders and people were moving up really fast in their career and I think it was like this massive shock when somebody was leading and managing, let's say, 2018, or 19, and then moving into COVID and you're like, oh wow, this is like hitting goals.
Speaker 1:Everything's 10x harder, right Employee engagement keeping performance on track, stress levels, like everything was just like a total rewire. And I remember that a lot of folks that I knew and leadership like really struggled with that transition and in fact a lot of them, I feel, like just got turned off from tech and ended up just doing like fractional roles and didn't really feel like getting back to it. It was just such a distinct like shift and so I really think there is an advantage to for folks like yourself that got started in that COVID environment and just learning how to be really scrappy and learning leadership and management style in a very difficult market. So it's interesting, it's like cool. Honestly, I see the leaders that coming up today, I just feel are going to be a lot more operationally efficient, budget efficient, critical with spend and probably even more empathetic and understanding how to connect with employees and knowing how to keep folks happy and engaged. So I'm sure it was pretty difficult moving in during COVID, but there's probably also a lot of benefits as well, right, oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think it did make me more empathetic. I had to learn how to adapt and be agile as a leader. Everything was changing every month, every quarter, every year, and I know that's how it was before COVID. But I think it just gave a new perspective on being agile and being able to adapt to changing situations.
Speaker 1:For sure. And so you started there with series C, now series E. Can you talk us through the evolution of talent acquisition, going from mid-stage to late-stage? Where were you at CREC? And then, basically, how did that progress in advance? What did you have to change or evolve in order to keep up with the growth of the business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So when I joined, it was like the Wild West. There was not really much process. We just started trying to scale and hire so that we can get to the next level. Obviously, we had just gotten our CREC in, so we wanted to make sure that we were meeting the goals and the metrics for our investors, and so that included a lot of hiring and, as the company has scaled, I think there's some critical areas that I focused on. The first was putting systems and processes in place, so creating policies and guidelines for the company around referral policies, interview, training, tracking documents and reporting. There was no reporting when I joined, but now we have lots of reporting features within our ATS and we have different metrics that we report on quarterly and annually.
Speaker 2:Making sure you have a foundation of tools, I think any company, when you get to a certain stage, you have to have an ATS, you need to be using LinkedIn, you need to be using certain calendar systems. And then I think another thing that I really emphasize is, as you're building out a TA network, you need to hire the right people. A talent acquisition team at a smaller stage 100 person to 250 person company going to be very different than a 1000 plus company. The people that you're hiring, they need to be okay with a lot of ambiguity and change, because that's going to be happening a lot. They need to be willing to get their hands dirty as a leader.
Speaker 2:You need to be willing to be a player coach. You're going to be a player coach in this type of role at this stage of company, and so ensuring that you bring people on that are okay with that, can adapt and can learn really quickly is super critical, and so I did that with my team over the years, and the people that I've seen be the most successful are those ones that have been able to learn quickly and be okay with constant change happening all the time. And then I've been fortunate to have a really good mentor in our chief people officer, and so using her as someone who can help me understand what are the best practices I should be following. Also, just my network in general. Asking my network hey, you've been at this company for this amount of time at this stage, how have you handled situations like this? And so just leaning on others as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. So real quick. What applicant tracking system are you working with? Did you implement?
Speaker 2:We use Greenhouse.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. Yeah, I don't know if I told you before, but Daniel Chait over the CEO Greenhouse is actually a partner to the show. He comes on once a quarter.
Speaker 2:Awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so check out his episode. I think we've done two of them now, but the first one he gives like a master class. He put out a book and he basically it's called talent makers and he talks about like structured hiring and like metrics and it's pretty damn cool, yeah. But yeah, anyways, I've definitely had a lot. We use Greenhouse as our internal tool at secure vision, my company and then it's also we've implemented it probably for 10 plus customers. We just we our business is embedded recruiting. But we need, we want our customers to be organized. So if we come in and they don't have the right ATS or like they don't have one at all or whatever, like we'll just come in and we'll just be like, look, we'll talk with Greenhouse, we're going to get you set up with them and manage through all that kind of stuff. So it's definitely been helpful.
Speaker 1:I think like one of the things that I see mid to late stage companies struggle with the most is having consistency across the entire organization and they're reporting as a total mess, right Like the stages, right For every department or whatever, like they're creating their own stages.
Speaker 1:So you try to pull a report and there's 50 stages behind and you're just like what the hell is going on, and so unifying that, I feel like, was a really big. When I was like billing myself as internal rules, like for internal rules, like that was always huge for me because then I could look at high-ply metrics, stages across department, across the company, whatever it might be, and I could see, okay, who's third, fourth rounds, stage three, stage four, who's approaching offer and then dial in because as a scale, company is still scrappy, I still want to dial in at some point and make sure things are going right. But yeah, I think process is incredibly important and it's surprising there's a lot of a fair amount of late stage companies that still struggle with getting process under control and reporting under control. And I think the earlier you can start on that, probably the better, because then it's like creating this culture of structured hiring earlier on and so there's like fewer hiring managers and leaders you have to convert or educate.
Speaker 2:No, I completely agree, and that was when I became a manager of recruiting. That was something that was really critical to me, and so we ended up doing a complete overhaul of greenhouse and cleaning up all of our data, and I am very on top of it if I noticed that a new stage was added, like you were talking about. We need to fix this immediately, because it just starts with one or two and then it can really spiral out of control, and clean data is really critical so that you can make sure that you are following up on those metrics and ensuring that over time, you can track those metrics and they're accurate.
Speaker 1:So this is one question too, because you've seen scale additional funding rounds since you started. Are there any checks and balances you have in place to ensure that hiring managers are following a structured hiring process? One of the things that I did in the past is we had a very tight approval process before roles can even be open to the system and only town acquisition could actually go in and make sure it opened the role. We would have approvals, I think, to some leadership role to get a final approval, but we made it so hiring managers actually couldn't go in and just open ruffles. They had to do a checklist of things in order and then we would have a kickoff with them where we would go through the hiring plan and set up the interview scorecards and everything like that. I'm curious to hear from you Are there any key processes that you implemented to ensure that folks are doing what they need to do company-wide?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and it's evolved over the years A couple of years into my role. We started out with one approval process and then we had to mold that and change it, and so essentially where we started was we only were doing approvals on offers, which I think most companies have in place. They don't just send offers out, except for very early stage companies. But then we started doing approvals on posting jobs, so ensuring that finance was on board with the budget, that the HR and talent team were on board, the leader of the department was on board with posting this job, and we recently implemented a headcount planning tool called Trace, and that is the tool that finance uses for their headcount planning, versus Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets, and we actually have an approval process there to ensure that everyone's on board with this being in the budget and they can see their budgets for headcount, which is great.
Speaker 2:So I think approvals are absolutely critical to make sure that everyone that needs to be involved is aligned on a role, the budget for the position, the title, the process, and then we also have a checklist. So we have a document called requirements and expectations for opening a position and it goes through the process of hey, you're a hiring manager. You want to open up a position. This is what we need from you, and I think about a year ago we actually started requiring the job description and the interview process to be documented before we could post a position. You'd be surprised how many hiring managers want to post a position without job descriptions. They are like we need to get this posted and they don't even have a finalized job description. So having those documents in place before posting just makes the process so much smoother so that you're not changing the interview process midway through, been causing a bad candidate experience.
Speaker 1:Right. It's like a bad candidate experience and, from a hiring manager standpoint, having like wasted salary payroll money going toward hiring, which is already a significant cost to a company, is the amount of time that leaders are investing and hiring. It's just a total mess. And yeah, I definitely. I think that a lot more time should be spent before a role is opened than we often see, even things like 30, 60, 90 day plans.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, we actually started doing that too, where, before we open a role, just a couple of bullets even two, three bullets for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days is really helpful for the recruiter. So they can set expectations with candidates when they're talking to them. And then even candidates if they see it in a job description, they know what's expected of them from the start, and so if there's any performance issues within the first few months, we can say we set these expectations with you from the very beginning, so it falls on them rather than the company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, 100%. So it held a talent acquisition, a leader, internal leadership role. This one was with a slightly earlier stage company. It was around 100 employees and we even had some kind of trying to remember exactly but some kind of role where like too much changed within the role post, like after it's posted that it actually had to go through the approval process again to just try to avoid false starts and we wouldn't hold it up for weeks Like we were fast about it. But there was like certain criteria where if the budget changed enough high enough, or if the role description changed from something really significant, from not like junior to mid but like junior to senior or like senior to player coach, leader or something like that, like you couldn't just keep change the rec mid structure, like it had to go through approval process again and that kind of forced hiring managers to Really be dialed into what they're looking for up front. Yeah. And so we did a lot of things like that and we also.
Speaker 1:One thing that helped us when we were growing quickly is we created tier one and tier two positions. So tier one were Positions that come straight from the executive team, is like the highest priority, because every hiring manager is going to think like their role's priority one, but really like the executive team is going to know the north star metrics of the business and ultimately what's going to be the most important. So we would have a certain percentage of the roles be tier one, and those are ones that our recruiting team was actively doing outbound sourcing with and managing the entire process. And then we had tier two roles, which is basically like monitoring inbound Scheduling. High managers could do some of their own work, whatever it might be, but it was.
Speaker 1:There is, when we fill priority one, we take a priority two role and put it into priority one, and we had that sort of structure as well, which helped us stay organized and focused when you're starting to scale and additional openings were opening up. That was something that we Leveraged to really help us, and we also had the reporting structured in such a way that where we could filter Priority one, priority two. So from a leadership perspective, like, okay, these are the five, ten, twenty, whatever roles that leadership is saying we have to get filled in the next quarter or eight weeks or whatever it is to achieve our whatever growth curve or whatever it is that we're trying to achieve I could really dial in into those specific roles and see, hey, how are things going? I'm not gonna have the same level focus on a priority one role as a priority two role. That's not gonna have as big of an impact on Growing the business.
Speaker 2:No, I love that and we've definitely implemented similar strategies there when hiring has just been Crazy and we just have so many roles to a point where we couldn't actually focus on all of them, and so we've done similar priority mapping. Just to dial back to on Something you mentioned, something that we have done and we continue to do is when a role has been opened for 75 days. Just for us personally, at signified or average time to fill tends to be around the late 50s, lower 60s, and so we have this trigger of when a role has been open for 75 days. We actually have a calibration sing as a team, so we have the HR business partner, the hiring manager and the recruiter and anybody who's really heavily involved in the process. I'll meet together and say, hey, this world's been open for 75 days.
Speaker 2:What's happening? What's causing this? Is there anything we could be doing to Change the process or the role to make it so that we can fill this position quicker? And if it's a case of we can't, there's nothing we can do, then we really just need to heavily invest in more sourcing strategies If it's a high priority role. If it's a low priority role, then we need to evaluate Is this role something that should actually happen, because is it a good use of our time and our effort and the company's money Working on a role that just isn't a high priority and is taking a lot of time?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think like one thing that some companies struggle to is like when they're getting to a later stage is actually doing proper capacity planning. There's the bandwidths of hiring and I think it's sometimes I don't think companies Really are looking at the full picture. When we talk about capacity planning, it's like one. You of course have to look at the capacity of the recruiting team. Do you have enough bandwidth to the actual amount of hours required to do everything from outbound sourcing to scheduling, screening calls, candidate feedback, hiring manager sinks all of that per role.
Speaker 1:But then the other thing is that I don't think leaders often look at do our hiring managers actually have enough time to Interviews? Let's say it's like we okay, we need to increase our team by five recruiters to hit headcount growth. Let's say we can get hiring managers an additional 20 interviews per week. Do they even have the bandwidth if we set up these candidates to get the additional like the interviews in place? So it's that's a big part of the conversation too, right, like when we start to see extended time to fills.
Speaker 1:It's like dial into capacity planning. Do we really understand the bandwidth of hiring managers and our recruiting team and are they aligned or do we have too much horsepower on recruiting and Not enough time on hiring managers, or vice versa. Those are Things we're looking at. Hiring plans, mapping out capacity, making sure there's enough hours in the day is Is also, I think, like really critical, and it could be very hard for companies that are growing fast, because you get this like Leaders saying okay, we got to add 20 people, okay, but you, I don't want to add 20 people one month, but you have one director of engineering.
Speaker 2:You actually gonna be able to interview all these people?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, like they're not. And so then you have the director of engineering like freaking out because they're not hanging growth. They're like upset with recruiting, recruiting like sending profiles and not nothing's moving fast enough. Cans are dropping out of process. It's just like this. I think the this is why like process is so important at scale, right, everything we're talking about getting in the right approvals, doing the right capacity planning. All of that ties into making sure that we can fill roles at an appropriate time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely and I also. So let me just see here what we have. Okay, so we also measuring quality of hire, so this one's always like a little bit tricky. Here's the thing, like the reason. I think it's hard. We all know this, but it's because you have to work cross functionally.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's not just the recruiting team that can measure this, because how the recruiting team doesn't always have information or visibility into performance of the hires after they're hired.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's one of those things it's like when I'm looking at as an executive metric, like a CEO, I love this and I do feel like, to an extent, talent acquisition should be accountable to a metric like this. As a TA leader, sometimes I'm like do I really want this to be a core metric that I measured off of because there's so much, and so I think it's just like the understanding from an executive level. If you're going to be using this metric, it's not necessarily indicative of one department specifically doing or not doing their job. You have to look at the entire kind of funnel almost from like an experience. Or if you were looking at customer experience all the way from SDR outreach all the way through customer success, it's not one department, it spans across several, and we have to look at quality hire through a similar lens as we might look at customer experience in a sense.
Speaker 2:I love that. I think it's fair to say that there's so many people involved in a quality of hire metric the hiring manager, the team in general, the recruiter, the HR team, onboarding that all contribute to the quality of hire, and so I think what we've established that signified is quality of hire is not a metric that we use heavily on a recruiter performance. It is measured for the purpose of looking at trends across a department, across a team, across a recruiter. If you start to see, hey, this recruiter has hired five people this past year that have all terminated within six months of joining, there's something a little off there, and so it's worth looking into, I think, and evaluating. Hey, is the team actually evaluating these candidates appropriately in the process and then making changes in the interview process? And so that's how we've been using this data is evaluating. Hey, we made a couple of bad hires in this one department. We need to change the interview process because it's clearly not working in evaluating what we actually need in the role, and so there's just a lot of action that you can get from that.
Speaker 2:What is tough is there's different formulas per se that companies will use. Some companies will have an actual formula, some companies don't, the way that we've essentially established it is. We look at tenure, we look at performance ratings, which for us that signified happened twice a year, and for sales, we look at sales metrics such as quota attainment, qualified pipeline and SLA attainment, and so those metrics, unfortunately, you can only get them on a monthly, quarterly or biannual basis, and so this data just takes a long time to actually look at. So, really, you can only look at the quality of hire six months to a year after someone has joined, and so we just started tracking this maybe eight months ago. So I'm excited to see in a few more months, or maybe six to months to a year, what we gather from this data.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the really important thing to track alongside quality of hire is employee experience and making sure that there's surveys and ways for employees to get feedback.
Speaker 1:And I've even some of the most successful CPOs I know actually get directly involved in speaking with ICs, like obviously not all the time, but they're talking with individual contributors or they're talking with teams about their experience and what it's like, or they're putting out anonymous surveys or there's different ways to go about doing that.
Speaker 1:But it's really important to look at that metric alongside, because then you start to understand like, okay, let's try to diagnose exactly where the issues there's, the trends, right, where, if you say one recruiters like struggling within a department which is really smart, by the way, that's not like a, not something that I've talked a lot about or heard about. So it's like a very smart way to apply quality of hire to directly impact performance on your team, which is really cool. But anyways, like I think what's cool about tracking employee experiences it's then we can dial in and, okay, maybe there's an issue with onboarding, is there an issue with a manager, is there a lack of professional development or engagement for some reason, or whatever it might be, and that's really important to know too, because a lot of the times there's we have to diagnose is it a problem with the employee or is it a problem with the department? And how do we?
Speaker 2:do that you don't want to blame just the employee. I think a lot of times you think of quality of hire, what's about the hire? So it must be all their fault. They're not performing well. But people aren't given the right tools from the start, from onboarding. They didn't meet the right people, they weren't given the right training, maybe they just weren't even given a shot to actually perform well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's huge. We briefly touched, actually, on leveling teams, making sure there's career development as a path to engagement or like one of several things that can impact employee experience. I would love to learn more from how you do that for your team. As a town acquisition leader, one thing that can be difficult is making sure that you're putting in enough levels so people can feel like they're moving up. Of course, there's a limited amount of roles to move into leadership, so I would love to talk to you a little bit about employee engagement retention experience in relation to how do you keep folks engaged and make sure that they have career development within the recruiting team.
Speaker 2:Essentially, yeah, I think it's really important to bring people on when you know you have a path for them somewhere. So would it be ideal for me a few years ago, when I was a manager, to bring on another manager, and so I focused on just bringing in recruiters that were entry to mid-level, because that was really what we needed and I knew that we could support their career development in the near future. And so if you bring on someone where there's not enough development, but they are really great, are really senior, they're going to leave. They're going to leave in a year or two for another opportunity. And I think it's really important to start talking about development early on, having development conversations frequently and asking your team members hey, how often do you want to talk about development?
Speaker 2:I have team members who I meet with on a monthly basis. I have team members who I meet with on a quarterly basis. It's really a personal preference and I've learned over the years that it's extremely critical to be transparent about performance and providing feedback. And providing that feedback can be difficult, but it will make your end of year performance or your performance ratings or discussions so much easier if you have transparent conversations about where they are in terms of their expectations of their current role and what they need to be doing to get to the next level. Yeah, it's something that I've had to learn and grow on, but I've been able to understand over the years what's best on an individual team or an individual team member level.
Speaker 1:All right, I love it. And look, this has been a really great episode. I think it was a good balance between high level and getting into actionable steps that folks could really think about in terms of how they can build scalable TA programs. So, sandra, I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming on today, had a lot of fun and you're welcome back anytime. If you want to come back on the show next year, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the discussion.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and so for everybody tuning in, we have a lot of exciting content coming up, so make sure to continue to tune in and, by the way, if you know anybody you think would be a good guest, make sure to reach out to me. You can hit me up on LinkedIn and feel free to ask any questions or make suggestions on content that we're producing on the show or suggest guests all that good stuff. But anyways, thank you for joining us and we'll talk to you next time. Take care.
