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 161: Recruiting and Building Globally Distributed Tech Teams with Justt's Co-founder, Roenen Ben-Ami
Roenen Ben-Ami, Co-founder of Justt, joins host James Mackey to discuss the challenges of recruiting globally.
He shares his experience of scaling internationally while fostering a cohesive company culture and effectively communicating Justt's value proposition to globally distributed teams.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
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Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host. James Mackey Got a great episode for you today. We got Ronan Ben-Ami, who's the co-founder of Just. Ronan. Welcome to the show, thank you. Great to be here. Yeah, it's great to have you. We have a bit of a backstory here. My company, secure Vision, does a lot of the recruiting for Just and London and North America. So I've been working with the team here at Just a little over a year helping on a lot of go-to-market roles. So I think that primes this conversation quite well to talk about how to build teams, and today we're really going to be dialing into how to build globally distributed teams and what goes into that. So, ronan, I'm really excited to talk with you today and, just to start us off, it'd be great to share with our audience a little bit about you. Where are you based out of?
Speaker 2:So I'm based out of the Tel Aviv office.
Speaker 1:Nice, nice, and that's actually so. The company was initially founded in Tel Aviv, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, myself and my partner Ophir. We started the company in Tel Aviv, then started growing globally, having a lot of our customers in the US. We built out our US office as well as our London-based office.
Speaker 1:Nice and actually I haven't had a chance to speak with you if you're on the founding story.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:It'd be cool to hear that. What gave you both the idea to start the company?
Speaker 2:So myself, I come from the payment space. I actually worked in the anti-fraud space and then moved over to the payment side of the world of risk and I fell in love with the world of payments. To be honest, it's a very interesting world. I've been in this space since 2016, and I feel like I'm always learning something new, coming from the anti-fraud side of things and seeing how that space was revolutionized by top companies in the industry using technology and machine learning. I learned about the world of credit card processing and risk and compliance and how to build a strong risk and compliance and merchant screening and monitoring team. I actually built those teams out for a company called Simplex that does credit card processing for fiat to crypto, and they were also an anti-fraud solution. And then I saw the gap that you can do a great job stopping true fraud with a great anti-fraud solution. You can do a great job stopping true fraud with a great anti-fraud solution and you can actually deal with legitimate merchants that provide their goods and services properly if you screen your merchants with the right process, but chargebacks still come in. It's called friendly fraud, first party misuse or liar buyer, which is illegitimate claims by cardholders thinking that they might have done a mistake. They forgot what they purchased, someone else in the family made the purchase or they're actually trying to get something for free.
Speaker 2:I looked for a solution on the market for myself. I was a potential customer and I didn't see a solution that solved my pain point. After building a solution that was specifically tailored to the crypto space that saved millions of dollars a year for the company I worked for, I saw an opportunity to both tailor this across industries, across merchants, and use machine learning to optimize the solution. It's something that wasn't being done in the market. I met Ophir around 2018. Wasn't being done in the market.
Speaker 2:I met Ophir around 2018. We worked around the idea for about two years and in 2020, we went all in on the project and it's been a wild ride to bring something different to the market, showing the market that you don't just need a generic, automated, templated solution, but, using the right domain expertise and methodology and technology, you can build a scaled solution that's tailored per response to each specific chargeback, using dynamic arguments and tailoring each response and then using machine learning to optimize those results, finding where your weak spots are and running tests to improve over time. And yeah, it's been a very exciting ride working with top enterprise companies, mid-sized companies and growing out our partnership end as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been great to be part of the journey as well for the past year and just to give some people some context on where you are today, I know there's VC backing. Is it Series B right? Yes year? And just to give some people some context on where you are today, I know there's VC backing.
Speaker 2:Is it Series B right? Yes, yes, to date, we have raised Series B.
Speaker 1:Okay, and how many employees does JustGirley have?
Speaker 2:About 100, a little over 100 today, I believe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a significant growth over a four-year period. Yes, yes, that's wild. And so today we wanted to talk about building globally distributed teams. Given that the company was founded in Tel Aviv, expanding your footprint into London and the United States, I know there's a lot of lessons learned there in terms of being able to build that globally distributed workforce. What are some of the top lessons learned over the past few years? Building out an international team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, on one end, it's really exciting to grow and to be able to really our commercial side of the company is being grown out in the London and US based offices and to be able to get to that point. What I always say to the team is it's so exciting to know you have the top product in the market and now we need to help the world understand what we're doing here. That's so different. I call it the aha moment of why Just is so different in the market and how you can help potential customers understand that. But to get to that point is so exciting, but there's a lot of challenges that come along with that. But to get to that point is so exciting, but there's a lot of challenges that come along with that.
Speaker 2:We invested a lot on building the right culture when we were just a television-based company and as we grew out the London and US office and we even have several people that are remote we wanted them to be part of the just culture and who we are and what makes us unique.
Speaker 2:And that's not an easy task, especially because you're in different time zones, distance, face time, getting with the actual teams and just the level of collaboration you need to be successful. It takes a lot of investment in building those connections between the teams to get to that level. I always use the example that when Ophira and I started the company, all the decisions were being made by the two of us. We'd get on a call, we'd collaborate and we'd make quick decisions and we'd move very fast. Today, it's about how we help the teams make the decisions and how we help them work together so that they can crack the code of the challenging decisions we need to make within the coming years and the growth we're looking to do and what we've already done. There's a lot of challenges ahead of us and we want the team to be the decision makers and be hands-on making it a success.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure, and from a culture perspective, I'm excited to get into specifically what aspects of the culture need to be part. What do you really dial in on? My experience with Just has been the company is incredibly data-driven in decision-making Within the recruiting process. I don't think we made a single decision without looking at the data first, particularly when it came to role requirements and specifically, too, if it came to tweaking role requirements. I think every time we made any kind of shift, it was evaluating folks in the metrics of the recruitment process, everything from the interview metrics to that funnel down to the size of the candidate pool and the specific skill sets. Looking at industries and looking at adjacent industries and how that would impact. Looking at comp, how that type of stuff would impact the size of the talent pool.
Speaker 1:What was really cool about Just2 is once we put together all of the data and we'd present okay, here are our options. Right, if we make this tweak with the data, this is how it impacts the size of the candidate pool or whatever it was. I'm just using the candidate pool as an example. Just usually got your team would get back to us within 24 or 48 hours and it would be like even if it was a big decision, right, like when your team has the data in front of them, it's fast and we were able to correct course and move very quickly, which you start to see.
Speaker 1:Sometimes that starts to break down a little bit when you open up multiple offices in different time zones, but I've been impressed Just has always been very fast at making adjustments when they have the data in front of them. So I'm wondering to me that's what stands out. When we talk about culture, I see a very analytical, data-driven culture that moves fast. So I'm curious. There's, of course, a lot more to that, but from my seat where I stand, that's something that stood out to me about your culture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's true. We really want to have a culture around that we need to move fast. It's okay to make mistakes, but how do we learn from our mistakes or how do we learn from our experiences in general so that we can be better? And there's a lot of positions that we have hired or were hiring that they were the first time we ever hired for those specific positions. So we had a vision of what we wanted when we first started hiring for the position. But as you move along you learn what great looks like for just and what will make a successful candidate for that specific position. And many times when you first start you're not exactly sure what that looks like. So that's what's so great about when you are hiring to have that hiring team whether it be our internal team that we're working with that's part of the hiring process or with your team to figure out you know what does great look like for us and what are we learning along the way that we can learn from each other and collaborate.
Speaker 2:So I remember in the beginning, when we first hire, we would have everybody, would meet the individuals, and then we just write our, write our feedback, and there wasn't enough collaboration between us and we said, wait a minute, like then we'd get to the end, and we're like, oh yeah, but I read your feedback, I read your feedback. But once you put us all in a room and we talk about our feedback, that's when the magic happens. And wait, oh yeah, I can actually learn from you of. I saw that too. What does that actually mean? Do we want something like that in that position? And that's where it becomes really interesting is stopping along the way and communicating with one another of what we're seeing. Yeah, I think that's a key piece. What you mentioned is moving fast and learning from what we're seeing along the way. It's actually one of our core values. We call them our core principles here at. Just One of them is be the best, and that core principle is around learning from what we've done and improving as we go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's. Also there's a lot of nuance when it comes to moving fast. Right, there are some decisions where it's when you clearly have the data in front of you, it's make okay, now we have more information. Based on that information, let's make either continue with the same decision or make a new one, but let's just look at the data. Then there's other things when it comes to standards, where it makes sense to hold on to that standard, opposed to cutting corners and bringing, like, the wrong person on board. And so I think a good executive team, you always move as fast as you can, but if you need to leave a role open for a few months, do it until you get to that confidence level. It's never 100% confidence in hiring a person, right, so I'm going to have the perfect background, but there's still a ton of other variables, like where they might be in their life or anything else that could throw off the success. But we should be able to get to a 90% confidence rating and I don't think we should ever waver in that or say we need to move fast so we can hire tomorrow, because ultimately, getting the wrong person in the seat can set the company back several quarters. It can be a huge financial drain, a huge focus drain and a huge opportunity cost and it's massive. How just has done really well.
Speaker 1:Hiring over the particularly over the past year since I've been involved is very fast to make decisions on data, but not lowering standards, regardless of how difficult a search is. We've hired what a manager in the us market and we had incredibly high standards. It happened to get filled really fast. But there's been other searches where it it took longer. It took reaching out to people exhausting a candidate pool, saying okay, there's literally nobody else in this market we can reach out to, shifting, making a new decision based off the data, reaching out to that candidate pool and tweaking and tweaking and not lowering our standards until we can make the higher, and sometimes that meant keeping the role open longer than we wanted to.
Speaker 1:But ultimately that's going to give just the best opportunity to take advantage of the market opportunity that you have right now. So I think that's another piece. It's like your standards should be ridiculously high. Even if you're hiring the right way, hiring should be hard. If it's not hard, then you're not. If you're trying to recruit the best people in the market, the absolute best people getting the best people be hard. If it's not hard, then you're not. You're not like if you're trying to recruit the best people in the market, like the absolute best people getting the best people is hard.
Speaker 2:And do you know what great looks like Cause for each position. What great looks like looks different, and that's what I always think about when we're hiring for a specific position. Do we know what great looks like for this position? Have we seen great before in this position and if so, what does it look like and how can we discover it during the hiring process? And exactly what you said don't lower your standards. And there's been multiple times where it's defeating when you go through so many interviews and you're not finding that great, but when you do find it, you're like that's what we're looking for and they're not finding that great, but when you do find it, that's what we're looking for and they're few and far between.
Speaker 2:Yes, but when you bring on great, you see the difference. You see how fast they ramp up, how fast they get going, how fast they become part of the team. It's worth the wait, yeah it is.
Speaker 1:I think there's a misconception sometimes with executives when it comes to hiring. They're like, okay, if it's really hard and it's grueling and it's taking a lot of time, that means something's broken, and so the analogy that I like to use is winning the Super Bowl or the World Cup. Is that easy? No, it's hard as shit. It's incredibly freaking hard. The difference is, if you're really good at it, it's hard, if you're not good at it, it's impossible. You're just not going to hide, and so, again, it's like the standards should always be incredibly high, and sometimes that's hard to. As startup executives, in my experience, and I'm sure yours as well, there's this immense kind of pressure to move fast and take advantage of the opportunity today, but sticking to your guns and being really disciplined when it comes to building a team is so freaking important. Otherwise, you're just the headaches. It's like the headaches that you'll have six months a year down the road. Exactly. They can be life-threatening.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. That's also what I say a lot to the managers that are hiring is think about the individual that will hire. That will make your life easier because you have enough on your plate as a manager and how much you need to get done. You need to make sure your team is getting done. You want to bring additional people on the team that are going to make that easier for you and a lot of the times it's hiring somebody that you think is stronger than yourself as a manager too, and not to be intimidated to do that and understand what your weak spots are and who's going to be in part of your team. That can make the team more successful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. That actually brings up a good question. When you look at hiring for a function in any part of your business, how much weight do you put on looking at your manager's strengths to round out their abilities? Is that a core part of how you think through it? Okay, we have a manager who's really strong in these areas, so we need somebody to come in and help supplement maybe the parts that they're a little weaker at. I'm just wondering how much that thought process happens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I could say on a personal level, that's something that I've done myself. I also say that to a lot of founders that are looking for their partners. A lot of times, people come with great ideas and looking for their partner to build their great idea. That's how we started. Just, I had a really exciting idea and a lot of domain knowledge on how to do it, and I knew what I was really strong at and I knew I needed to find a partner that had the things that I wasn't strong at, and it's something that you have to ground yourself and think about. What you're really good at, what you really like doing too, what you want to focus on in the company and who do you need to bring alongside with you to make the company a success. And that's how I was able to choose my partner and how we've been so successful together is, of course, the personal relationship, but also we each know what we're really good at, and it's something I give those tips to hiring managers that I work with who are looking for the next person on their team, but it's really up to the manager in the end. Right, what do they need?
Speaker 2:I can't make those decisions for the manager. I trust the manager that I've hired. You hire the right manager Exactly. He'll build their team. I'm there to help him, to support him, and he can bounce ideas off of me and the rest of the team, but in the end it's up to that manager who he wants to add to the team and if it's something that he feels can strengthen a weakness that's on the team at the moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure, I guess. My next question, just to stick to our theme on building a global team, what would you say is were there any mistakes along the way, or biggest lessons learned, or what was the most challenging piece? And I can chime in here too, on my own experience as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, mistakes. Of course we're still making mistakes, right, that's part of building a startup. You can't be afraid to make mistakes. The question is do you learn from your mistakes?
Speaker 2:I think, in the end, what I've I could say on my plate is believing in the team that you hire and handing over the keys to your team. Which I'm learning and constantly working on is how do you enable your team to be the decision makers and for them to make them feel that the weight is on their shoulders, the responsibility? They are the ones that are accountable. Of course, I'm there to support and I'm there to help, but they are the decision makers. They are accountable for their areas of the business and sometimes you have to let the ball drop too. Even if you see that it might drop, you have to let the ball drop and let your team make mistakes. So, not being afraid to let go so the team can learn and work together.
Speaker 2:Which connects back to what we spoke about before is I see a lot of the US and the UK team. They have to work with a lot of the team members in the Tel Aviv office and they need to collaborate together, and I love being an ear to hear that they want to talk to me about certain things, but they need to work together to figure out how to solve those problems. Which is hard and it's what I'm seeing now is they do need FaceTime and trying to figure out how we can give them more face time, because just having time on Zoom together is many times it's not enough, especially the ones that are working quite a lot together and making challenging choices together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I actually I believe in a lot. One thing we haven't talked about today is on in-person, in-office versus remote culture, and I'm actually I'm a big advocate of in-office. My opinion on remote has actually changed considerably over the past five years I think I was, I suppose, in 2021, 2022, when the market was exploding, there was, I think, probably in some cases remote might've made sense, depending on the growth opportunity for a company and how fast they needed to move and balancing how much they needed in office, Like what was going to give the company a bigger lift at that point in time when the market was insane and talent was very hard to come by. But I do think that there are certain aspects of in-person that you just you can't have. You're not going to get remote like the face-to-face. There's just some behavioral aspects of working together as a team. It is, everybody says, kind of collaboration strategy, it's that. But there's also just like more human elements that I think people don't emphasize enough.
Speaker 1:Like, one of my customers was a founder of a company called lending home, which is a pretty big company in the united states big scale, it's like a billion dollar valuation. Now he started another company called Sunday. He did it. He started a company with a co-founder Airbnb. He raised over like 150 million. So this guy he's repeat founder very successful companies and he talks about like the concepts of like loyalty and team building and having each other's backs and being able to pick up slack when somebody's out of office. That type of dynamic where you're really fighting together as a team. There's this level of closeness that you get with your team where you really see them as the whole person versus the face on Zoom. That does have a big impact on performance and I've seen that and I really do value it. And then there's also the stuff like you'll talk with people in different departments that you never would have. The conversations never would have happened on zoom. You go out to lunch and you're talking about problems and you're solving problems.
Speaker 2:There's all of those types of conversations that occur in person that just never happen on zoom yeah, that's a great point and to add to that, I'll even go down that path of when we first started the company, I had my own office and I'd have a lot of meetings and I'd sit in my office and I'd come out of the office and talk, but I'd see most of the people like around the office and in my office during meetings. And at a certain point we decided as an executive team to step outside of the office and sit in the open space and today I sit in the open space. Of course, when I'm in meetings, I go into an office for meetings, but I sit in the open space with the rest of the team. Because what I realized is, first of all, I want to be part of the team and I want them to feel like I'm accessible. There's a lot of ideas they want to bounce off of me, questions they want to ask. It's something I always say is keep asking questions until you ask questions. We didn't ask ourselves and that's how we're going to improve and I feel like it really works in the Tel Aviv office and I was like, how do I make that happen in the offices that, yeah, I fly.
Speaker 2:I meet the team every few months to see the teams in the other offices, but I don't get the same amount of FaceTime and that's why I keep telling the teams in the other offices is feel like I'm in the office with you and you have a question. Just throw the message in Slack. I'm there, I'll respond. We could jump on a quick call. We need a meeting. We'll jump on a quick meeting, but we have to use these lines of communication as though we're in the office together.
Speaker 2:If not, things are just going to drag on misunderstandings of what actually needs to be done or what is the information that was explained, because there's a lot of details in our solution. I always say that our solution is really domain expertise combined with technology and that's where the magic happens. Domain expertise combined with technology and that's where the magic happens. And some people come with domain knowledge in our space before joining Just and others don't. But we pick up that they're people. They can learn and learn really fast. But you need to not be afraid to ask questions in order to get up to speed really quickly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that all is a little easier in person. And actually, what's funny is, before we hit record, I was telling you about one of our customers with SimilarWeb and you. Just what we're talking about reminds me of a conversation that I was I had with SimilarWeb when we were scaling out their team. Donna Dror, I don't know if you are familiar with the team over there, but I think she actually started as like when they were early stage, as either account executive, I think, or sales manager, and it was one of her first jobs in tech and by the time they IPO, she was general manager of North America, like overseeing all of the North America revenue. Just an incredibly sharp executive, right Like one of the best I've ever worked with, and she was obsessed with just making sure her team had enough face time and at that point they were like a global team and at times she was also meeting with folks in Europe and Tel Aviv and she was bouncing around, but she always found a way to get in front of her team just because that's where, regardless, you can tell your team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, hit me up on Slack, but sometimes they may not just like the level of detail, the types of questions like they don't want to bother you. They're like oh, ron has so much on his plate, so just getting in person and honestly it's my experience just running my company there's times where I'm not getting as much FaceTime as I would like to. There's been situations where I have an employee in a certain if they are remote, because we still do have some folks that are remote Getting on a plane just to go see them right, just for an afternoon, that kind of stuff. Even if you just do it once or twice, it still makes a big impression in people's minds. Right, taking the time, finding a way to get in front of them, oh, yeah, for sure, and we do that both myself and Ophir.
Speaker 2:We've been doing that a lot, making sure that whether we're going to a conference or going to meetings abroad, we'll always stop in the offices and if not, then we'll make a flight specifically for meetings with the teams and sessions with the teams. But what we're seeing now is it's not enough that just for us to fly in and we need to also give the teams chances, more chances to meet each other and starting to decide strategically who are the right people that you want to fly to meet each other face to face so that they can work better together.
Speaker 1:And that does add a layer of complexity, with global teams too, right, because everybody's so busy, yeah. And then you look at your managers right, and it's okay, they're managing a function, they're hiring for their team, they're operating in multiple time zones, or at least need to figure out how to work in multiple time zones. And then you have the travel element. That's another element, that's another thing. That's, it can be very challenging to balance and figure out, like what the right balance is there, like, particularly at a stage where it's like you're growing quickly and if you doubled in headcount over a couple years, it's pretty tricky to do that.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, for sure it's exciting that the team grows, but you have to be aware of the challenges and make sure you have people on the ground and in the different locations that you trust and you feel are resonating the Just culture and can help others that join the company understand what Just is all about. So we and I say it now I feel like when I visit each office, I feel like each office today is an extension of the just culture, but in its own way. Each office has a very different vibe in some way, but also very similar that they're all just but they're all unique in their own way of the atmosphere that has been created there.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, for sure, For sure, Ronan. This has been a lot of fun. We're coming up on time here. So I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining me on the show today. This was incredibly valuable. I know the executives and really everyone tuning in is going to be able to learn a lot from the lessons that you've learned building just and I'm incredibly bullish on just future just based on the caliber of people you do have on the team.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, if you're a tech company, people build product right, Domain expertise, abilities, intelligence all of those types of things Working together as a cohesive team. Literally nothing great has ever been built without people working together. That's an accurate statement like nothing ever right, and so I think Just is doing a great job pulling in the right people. Clearly it's working and, again, like your advice is incredibly valuable. So thanks for sharing it today, Thanks for having me. This was fun. Yeah, it was a lot of fun and hey for everybody tuning in. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll talk to you next time, Take care.
