Intrro: Scaling Stories

For this week's Scaling Stories we were delighted to speak with Dawn Sharifan, a people leader who's helped scale businesses such as Lookout, and most recently Slack, where she led the people function through the $27.7 BN acquisition and integration into Salesforce.With an enviable track record as a coach, leader and board member – and a former professor to boot – Dawn is well placed to speak about how to develop the careers of HR professionals and instill an effective (and inspiring) working culture.Dawn has a “passion for building” – not just replicating the same HR processes from one company to the next – and she's particularly adept in early-stage environments, or as she puts it, when “the cement is wet”.The beauty of working for a nascent startup, says Dawn, is that “you can put your fingerprints and still sculpt and change things because you can take a product driven approach to HR and people functions… Your customers are your employees. They'll give you feedback and then you just iterate on it.”While some board members can be detached from the realities on the ground, Dawn's journey has given her an acute sense of what employees really think, rather than working behind closed doors and “coming down with these stone tablets of ‘this is how we will do a review process', and then the employees are expected to clap and share and be happy about it”.These lessons ring true when Dawn thinks back to her time as a candidate. When the chance to work at Slack came along, Dawn believed it was “a great product at a great time”, but there was more to it than that. “I just knew I wanted to work with [Slack CEO] Stewart [Butterfield]. I knew I wanted to work for the team.”Dawn describes her former colleagues at Slack as “the best group of humans I've ever had a chance to work with, and I've had the chance to work with a lot of really great humans”.

In the latest Scaling Stories podcast, we caught up with Robbie Simpson, Global Head of Country Operations (Talent Acquisition) at Wolt, the food and merch delivery platform.Robbie previously led a globally distributed recruitment team at HelloFresh, and as someone who's made the transition from a recruiting specialist to an impressive all-rounder, Robbie instinctively understands the changing landscape of the hiring market. And boy, how the times are a-changin'...It's a sad fact that in today's challenging environment, recruiters have been some of the first to lose their jobs. Or as this Wall Street Journal article points out: “Tech companies that have cut jobs have, on average, slashed about 50% of their recruiting staff, compared with, for instance, 10% of software engineers and 12% of product and design staff.” In some cases, these layoffs have been unceremonious to say the least. Moreover, the recruiters who've kept their jobs may find themselves busier than ever.In this context, Robbie has some words of advice for how hiring teams can revamp their processes and adapt. “When we think about recruitment as a product, we should think about pain and gain”, Robbie says. On the employer side, that means asking, “what's the pain someone's willing to go through to get the gain.The pain might involve filling in a hiring request sheet, or previously time-stretched candidates finding time to complete assignments; as the market has changed, some candidates are willing and able to take the time to complete these. From the candidate's perspective, the ‘gain' may have changed too. Previously, people were looking to move job for more responsibility or money, for example, but now “the gain might just be having a job which is stable, which means that the pain you're willing to go through might be slightly higher”.Therefore, as Robbie suggests, because the market environment has changed so dramatically, the recruitment product may need to adapt dramatically too. While your customers are the same people, their needs and desires are now different.

In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we picked the brains of Anthony Rotoli, a senior people leader who's successfully scaled the HR and talent teams at companies like Karat, Assurance IQ and Quora.Among his many successes, Anthony scaled Assurance IQ's headcount ten times over – the insurance/fintech startup was eventually acquired for $2.3bn. He also made the transition from Microsoft to Karat – at the time, the interview tech company was a small startup, but is now valued at more than $1bn. All things considered, there are few experts better placed than Anthony to advise on how HR leaders can assess candidates, build a successful team and retain the best people.Anthony has come a long way, but says that when he first moved from Microsoft to Karat it was a “massive culture shock”.At the time, the idea of building a tech giant might have seemed fanciful. He thought: “Nobody has heard of this place. People are going to have to hear about it. How do I build a brand around this thing?”A key part of the journey was about finessing an interview methodology that identified the right talent. Here are three keys to success that Anthony identifies.

In this week's Scaling Stories, we caught up with senior talent brand strategist Matt Eyre.Matt's varied career has seen him work in marketing for the likes of Universal Pictures, EA Sports and Sega, and more recently, Silicon Valley Bank. When he joined Intercom, Matt made the leap from brand marketing to talent marketing, so he's well-placed to explain how this crossover works.“If you look for a definition of a brand strategy, you're generally gonna see something like a plan to achieve a series of goals resulting in the preference of your brand by consumers,” Matt explains. “So if we think about how to apply that to talent… you're thinking, how do I build a strategy that's going to last and that's going to enable us to build a brand that is meaningful to the people that we're talking to.”At its simplest, employer branding is “how you present your company to the world”, says Matt, and requires “very consistent messaging”.But when most brands offer similar talking points, how do you stand out? Matt draws lessons from self-confessed ‘employer brand nerd' James Ellis, who says that effective brand messaging is usually four things:SpecificAttractiveDifferentiatedReal.In our discussion, Matt also gives fresh insights on those well-trodden topics of mission, culture and values. In a world where young candidates can simply “jump on TikTok and find out what a company is like”, employers have to think hard about how they meet a candidate's expectations on culture, rather than simply “sticking 20 words up on your website”.“They want to know what a company stands for. They want to know what the work experience is gonna be like when they get there,” Matt says, and says that many candidates are looking for “validated values”.“What do these values mean to me and how am I gonna engage with them on a day-to-day basis? You know, it's not just ‘how much am I gonna earn and what's my title gonna be' anymore? Those days are gone.”Of course, companies can forge their own unique culture, and that's going to look different at JP Morgan than a crypto startup making monkey j-pegs. But as Matt says, perhaps there is merit in simply “being true to the values you hold”.

In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to catch up with Ben Newsome, a portfolio partner at Octopus Ventures, a very active multi-stage European VC. Ben previously helped build some of Europe's leading tech companies – from Monzo to Improbable – so who better to talk to about how VCs perceive the importance of talent within an organisation.Octopus supports and invests in approximately 180 companies, covering everything from unicorn companies to more traditional ‘safer bets' in industries as varied as health tech, fintech and ‘deep tech'. One of the things that differentiates Octopus is its close working relationships with founders, or what Ben calls a “robust end-to-end process” covering everything from an induction, a holistic look at the business and how capital is deployed.“It's very novel for VCs to be looking at driving performance through talent and people,” Ben observes.When it comes to hiring talent, Octopus is there to support its portfolio in an advisory position, rather than taking a backseat and advising on the odd hire. The Octopus talent team are positioned as ‘coaches', and they take a holistic approach to advising companies on their talent and people.A good VC, says Ben, should have capacity to service and support their portfolio, as “there's only an amount of companies that you can service at one time”, and essentially they should “operate as as an extension of that team”.But what's not always appreciated about VCs is that when it comes to getting the right talent, they're not just tasked with advising founders and senior staff – but the investors too.“The interesting part about the ‘deal flow' in VC is that there's a ton of research and due diligence and naturally, when you look at the success of businesses or the businesses that have achieved great things, it's [because] they get the right people and scale the business efficiently.”Ben explains that part of his role is to understand “red flags” and “potential areas of weaknesses” so he can have transparent conversations with investors and make sure they understand the importance of recruiting well – a “precursor to success”.Regular readers of this hallowed digital scroll may recall the words of Jim Collins, business management guru and author of Good to Great, who wrote that successful executives know how to “get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus)”, and Ben's keen understanding of why recruitment matters is a testament to this.

In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to speak with Mafalda Garcês, the Country Leader and Senior People Director at Dashlane, the renowned password manager.In a wide-ranging discussion, Mafalda shared her vision for how HR should not be viewed as some distant department where CVs get scanned and envelopes get stamped, but rather, “a central piece of solving business problems… because usually problems are created by people or solved by people”.Mafalda works with the senior leadership at Dashlane to help them develop (and implement) people initiatives. In order to do this, Mafalda believes in doing a “proper organisational analysis” to understand business objectives, then get under the skin of what's working (and not working) in a company's approach to hiring talent, and then deploy “tailor-made” solutions.Mafalda shares just some of the ways she approaches this ‘diagnosis and intervention' at Dashlane:Hiring leaders are encouraged to “always hear our internal clients frequently and systematically”. This can be as simple as holding one-to-ones involving “everyone in your organisation”, or more opportunities for “group moments where we can talk to folks and see what's going on”.Dashlane aren't afraid to “use company surveys…to really get a picture of where we are”. This can highlight “the problems we are solving and the blockers we have”.Mafalda has developed an “HR toolbox” with “specific proven tools and knowledge” to shape decisions. This includes everything from awareness of bias and protocols for remote working to data analysis on patterns of organisational behaviour.Mafalda's approach is the antithesis of ‘traditional HR'. She is not a fan of process for the sake or process, or as she explains: “My approach is a little bit different because I think we should always criticise why we have those processes.” And she understands the interconnectedness between an individual's ability to perform and the health of a business. “We are all living our own mini startup – that is our career”, Mafalda says.Mafalda also explains why it's important to have an adaptable approach when problems arise, and offer a human solution. For example, when there is a conflict between staff, “we can go through the normal process of coaching the manager in order for the manager to talk with the person”, or alternatively, “if we have the right level of rapport with the folks involved, maybe we can facilitate a discussion. Maybe we can use radical candour to move past that conflict”.On the subject of coaching, one of the great innovations at Dashlane is their strong “coaching culture”. In fact, every manager gets a dedicated person who will happily meet them weekly, listen to a brainstorm, and help them “understand more about themselves and more about their teams”. Often, the managers who benefit from the coaches will later become a coach themselves.“It's basically a one-on-one relationship that we build with every single manager and in my view this is worth more than any MBA or any type of management training,” Mafalda says.And perhaps this breaking down of the barriers between managers and the ‘managed' is catching on. Salesforce now has a scorecard where direct reports can rank the performance of their managers (it turns out around 90% approve of their bosses).There were lots of fantastic insights in our discussion, and Mafalda is a living testament to the idea that the most essential voices are often those with the courage to go against the grain.

In this week's Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to chat with Ariana Moon, the Head of Talent Planning & Acquisition at Greenhouse, the leader in Applicant Tracking Systems considered by many to be the gold standard in hiring software.Born and raised in New York, Ariana is now based in Las Vegas and has seen Greenhouse grow from a workforce of around 60 people to more than 800 globally.Greenhouse, according to Ariana, was founded on the simple idea that “hiring is one of the most important and strategic things that a company does.” Greenhouse's philosophy is “rooted in structured hiring,” and Ariana described Greenhouse's product as “the hiring operating system for what we call our people-first companies - companies that think about business strategy through a people lens.”About Ariana:Ariana is the Sr. Director of People Planning & Acquisition at Greenhouse and partners with Greenhouse's executive team to scale predictive hiring and people planning practices. She's proud to lead a team that has helped Greenhouse 10x in headcount across multiple new geographies and is passionate about the impact of equitable and inclusive hiring. Prior to Greenhouse, Ariana has worked on people-focused teams in various industries, including non-profit, public relations and FinTech. Outside of work, she loves exploring intentional movement through yoga, salsa dancing and rock climbing, and ping pongs between two cities she calls home: New York and Las Vegas.Check her out on LinkedInAbout Greenhouse:Greenhouse is the hiring software company. We help businesses become great at hiring through our powerful hiring approach, complete suite of software and services, Hiring MaturityTM methodology and large partner ecosystem – so businesses can hire for what's next.Based in New York City with offices in San Francisco, Denver and Dublin, Greenhouse has over 700 employees around the world supporting more than 6,500 customers. Some of the smartest and most successful companies like HubSpot, Buzzfeed, J.D. Power, Booking.com, Scout24 and The Knot Worldwide use the Greenhouse hiring software platform to improve all aspects of hiring, helping them to attract top talent.                 Greenhouse LinkedIn    Greenhouse Instagram     Greenhouse Twitter

For our latest Scaling Stories podcast, it was a great pleasure to catch up with Cierra Tavarez, the Chief of Staff to the SVP of Recruiting at Attentive, an SMS software platform and leader in conversational commerce.Chicago-based Cierra has worked in sourcing roles for the likes of Capital One, Facebook and Uber Freight, and as our discussion demonstrates, she's a big thinker with profound insights on everything from big tech recruitment formulas to the way we conduct interviews.Here are some topics we covered in our chat withAt Attentive, Cierra has developed an “interviewer training and calibration program”How Cierra helped to transform the candidate experience at Uber FreightThe differences between ‘sourcing' and ‘recruiting'Skepticism towards culture efforts that “ring a little bit hollow”As you can tell from these extracts, Cierra is a fountain of knowledge and committed to better hiring practices.  We hope you enjoy our chat as much as we did.

In our conversation, Kevin discusses the importance of knowing exactly what qualities will make a candidate succeed at an organsation. In the case of GRIN, those attributes include “‘extreme ownership' and humility.”Kevin describes his team as being a “culture gatekeeper”, and explains: “We want to make sure that regardless of experience, and regardless of what their resume says or who they know – are their core values aligned and can they add to our core values in our culture?”“It's the character of the individual.” By following this approach, it means dispensing with the idea that credentials are everything. For example, during the interview process, “not overlooking in your gut those little red flags” can help you avoid making the wrong call.Moreover, this culture-focused strategy has been a long time in the making. In its early days, GRIN established a core list of values, and sought feedback from employees on the proposed list.GRIN continues to live and breathe these values even after an appointment has been made. For example, Kevin explains that new hires are invited to a face-to-face core values presentation by the CEO, rather than being asked to watch a pre-recorded video.There was plenty of food for thought in our discussion, so check out the podcast and let us know what you think!

In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to chat with Jessica Paddock, Senior Director of Recruiting at Unite Us, an outcome-focused technology company that builds coordinated care networks to health and social service providers.It was a wide-ranging discussion, and one recurring theme was the human-centered approach to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) at Unite Us, and their approach to hiring in general. In fact, the walls of their New York office are emblazoned with the words: “Be a good human.”We explored the topic of ‘seen and unseen diversity, and the steps employers can take to introduce bias mitigation in hiring.While there are no quick fixes, the Unite Us team has put some solid foundations in place to embed fairness in the way they hire.  We covered so much ground that we can barely do it justice in one nifty newsletter, but here's a snapshot of the other tips and insights Jessica shared:“We really emphasize question-asking, and understanding what's important to the candidate so that when we speak about Unite Us… they are hearing the things that are most important to them.”“We do quite a few internal workshops. I think my favorite one was just a team building exercise…we essentially each put on a mini presentation, if you will, of just who we are, and where we came from.”“We use things like Slack and Zoom and G Suite [and Calendly] and I can't imagine not utilizing technology. But it has to work for you. It has to make it smoother to do the human parts of your job.”

In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we caught up with Yanilda Gonzalez, head of Global Talent Acquisition Operations at Contentsquare, the leading platform in digital experience, intelligence and analytics. Contentsquare recently closed a $600m growth investment round, and any recruiter – especially those working in a company experiencing hypergrowth – will be interested in what Yanilda has to say about operational excellence in hiring.How can you build a strong and consistent talent operation? Here are just some of the pearls of wisdom from our discussion with Yanilda:Consider building a university recruitment programme (which Yanilda is busily developing at Contentsquare).Have a sourcing team that is “dedicated to the top of the funnel” and “building that candidate pipeline”.Aim for “relationship based collaboration between the hiring manager and TA” – this can include “enablement sessions and training”, and holding office hours so that anyone can ask questions.Set targets, review your teams' capacity, and introduce a hiring manager survey – these are just some of the “guardrails and processes to ensure that people are doing things the way they're supposed to”.Think global. Yanilda's sourcing team is “fully distributed” – from Tokyo to Tel Aviv – which helps them “break into markets” and “hone in on those niche roles”.Embrace “streamlined standard onboarding that's consistent across the board”. This means that regardless of where your recruiters are based, they're aligned and have access to the same training and data insights.Embed tools – Yanilda's team embraces channels like Gem, Phenom and LinkedIn Recruiter to “augment and expand our reach”. While HR is often seen as the last place to digitise (compared to sales and marketing ops which have been around since the dinosaurs), embedding tools company-wide can have a huge impact if hiring managers use them properly.Please like, share, or subscribe, thanks for tuning in!

In this episode, I learn from Alex Her, the head of Global Employer Brand at GoDaddy. Alex has made a massive impact in transforming the way the web hosting giant (and the world's largest domain registrar) embeds its employee brand internally and attracts prospective candidates.We discussed how effective employer branding can help lure the most sought-after people i.e. those A-players who are ultimately going to contribute to a great team and generate revenueFor any business leader who thinks that employer branding is something they can ignore, Alex has news for you:“Just because you don't have an employer branding person or a team managing that, it doesn't mean you don't have an employer brand. Once you have a career page, once you say we're hiring; you have recruiters and you're making some sort of attempt to sell to potential job seekers, you have an employer brand.”If we, therefore, think of employer branding as inevitable, Alex says the key is to “control the narrative”, even if that means simply listing your values on a job ad, such as a family-friendly culture, or “work hard, play hard”.“We are storytellers” is a theme that Alex often comes back to. To help you capture and craft those stories into something useful, here are some tips from our chat with Alex:Embrace “employee advocacy campaigns” to highlight people in blogs, videos, or social posts. You can then ask your “natural advocates” – those who like working at the company – to share it.Use platforms such as Bambu, the “social gaggle app”, to amplify your employee advocacy campaigns.Make it easier for your advocates by “empowering and enabling” them with the right content to share, from hashtags, videos and graphics to suggested messaging and ways to tag the company on social media.Incentivize your advocates with an “internal system” (like points or gift cards) to reward those who deliver the most shares.Scale your efforts in content curation. Alex discusses the merits of enabling advocates to build their “personal brand” on the likes of LinkedIn. “If they build their personal brand, and then they keep talking about all the great things that are happening, someone's gonna say, hey, you know what, Steve over here keeps talking about that GoDaddy life. Maybe I should talk to him…”Please like, share, and subscribe. Thanks for tuning in!

In this episode I learn from Amandeep Shergill who is the Director of Tech Recruiting at Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr, Simplenote, Longreads, Crowdsignal, Atavist, Happy Tools, Day One, and more. They have been a distributed company for more than 10+ years, with more than 1,500 Automatticians in 84 countries, speaking over 90 different languages. Amandeep has previously scaled teams at ConsenSys, Cleo AI and Lendable. He brought some incredible insights about why distributed is the next level to remote working and how Automattic approaches candidate assessments. Automattic have a truly unique trial process, mandatory for every position in the form of a “project” related to the specific domain of the role. The objective is to work on something that you would as if you just started whilst being assessed for technical, cultural and written communication skills {how you write commits/PR's in an async environment for example}.Further, these assessments are overseen  by software engineers who have volunteered to spend their 100% of their time (from 3 up to 12 moths) just hiring other engineers and become “trial buddies,” to prospective candidates. Please like, share and subscribe. Thanks for tuning in!Read Matt Mullenweg's: The Distributed Work's Five Levels of Autonomy {CEO Automattic}https://ma.tt/2020/04/five-levels-of-autonomy/

Thrilled to release another episode of Intrro's scaling stories, a discussion with talent leaders about their lessons building teams at some of the worlds fastest growing companies.  In this episode I learn from Ruby B, who is leading technical tecruitment at Astra and is an acgive career coach. Astra is a uniquely cool company that manufactures rockets and are hiring some of the world's smartest minds {their CEO was the CTO of NASA}.Recorded at “the office” Ruby spoke to us from the Naval Air Station Alameda, known as "Orion" which is a former naval jet engine testing facility!Ruby has scaled teams ranging from small YC startups to Coinbase, Lyft and Waymo. We get into the nitty gritty areas of building a well oiled TA function from scratch at high quality and speed, as Astra are set to scale from 250 to 1,000 FTE next year. This was a remarkably candid conversation, with amazing actionable tips on eliminating practices that negatively impact the company's D + I initiatives, the importance of interview standardization when scaling, building solid relationships with your hiring manager & so much more!The link to listen can be found in comments. Please like, share and subscribe. Thanks for tuning in!

In this episode I learn from Beatrice Domiguez, Head of People and Talent at Aviros. Founded in 2015 in Zurich, Aviros is building fleet management software in the cloud and is one of Europe's fastest growing B2B SaaS companies.Listen to how recruiting in the Bay Area and in Europe have subtle yet important differences such as definitions of what diversity actually means, why "Hiring managers are the keys” to an effective hiring process and why you're only as good as the people as your recruiting for!

Nicolas Bowles, is scaling Product & Design teams @ Productboard and is a mentor at Femme Palette