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Send us feedback or episode suggestions.in this episode Knapsack's VP of Design Leadership, Richard Banfield takes a look back at a conversation between Chris Strahl and Emily Campbell. They discuss the convergence of design and code, and what that actually looks like. They walk through what a designer role looks like in a modern digital product team and Emily explains her idea that design and development are the same. They just have different approaches to the same process or medium.Other topics the duo touch on include questioning if designers should learn to code, intent around design and development, the importance of making intentional decisions, and more.View the transcript of this episode.Check out our upcoming events.If you want to get in touch with the show, ask some questions, or tell us what you think, send us a message over on LinkedIn.Emily CampbellNow the VP of Design at HackerRank, at the time of original recording Emaily was a Senior Design Specialist for InVision. Emily is a veteran design and product practitioner who focuses on human-centered design, translating creative strategy into business value, building a culture of leadership, and sharing ownership across disciplines. On the side, Emily enjoys exploring the desert around her home in Moab, Utah with her husband and three kids.You can find Emily on Twitter and LinkedIn.SponsorSponsored by Knapsack, the design system platform that brings teams together. Learn more at knapsack.cloud.Other Show NotesLearn about Conway's Law and the Portland Swifts.
AI is all the buzz, but it's particularly interesting to think about its impact on software development and coding. As a coder, AI is about about 70% accurate. Not bad, will only get better—but can it do its own regression testing? And if humans aren't doing the actual coding, isn't it harder to do code review? No one better than HackerRank to help us understand how software development changes with AI, how coders and engineers become orchestrators of AI agents, and how we reconsider necessary skills like prompt engineering.
Welcome to Growthmates with Kate Syuma — Growth advisor, previously Head of Growth Design at Miro. I'm building Growthmates as a place to connect with inspiring leaders to help you grow yourself and your product. Here you can learn how companies like Dropbox, Adobe, Canva, Loom, and many more are building excellent products and growth culture. Get all episodes and a free playbook for Growth teams on our brand-new website — growthmates.club, and press follow to support us on your favorite platforms.Listen now and subscribe on your favorite platforms — Apple, Spotify, or watch on YouTube (new!).In this episode, we chat with Emily Campbell, VP of Design at HackerRank. Emily shares her fascinating journey, from starting in economics to leading design at HackerRank, where she focuses on creating design systems that integrate AI while maintaining a human-centered approach. She is also the founder of Women in AI and The Shape of AI, where she explores how AI is reshaping design, creativity, and human interaction. In this conversation, Emily dives deep into how AI can augment human potential, the ethical implications of AI in social media, and why maintaining a human-centered approach is critical as AI evolves.—Brought to you by Command.ai — a user-focused platform offering an alternative to traditional popups or chatbots. Their AI “Copilot” answers questions, performs actions, and simplifies complex tasks. Use “Nudges” to guide users with timely, relevant messages, all within a no-code platform. Perfect for Product, Support, and Marketing teams to positively influence user behavior while respecting their needs:—Key highlights from this episode
Join us for a special live episode of The Future of UX podcast from the Hatch Conference in Berlin, featuring the insightful Emily Campbell, VP at HackerRank and founder of Shapes of AI. Back by popular demand, Emily dives deep into the evolving landscape of UX design in the age of artificial intelligence. In this episode, Emily shares key insights from her recent keynote, exploring the history and rapid evolution of AI from its early roots in cybernetics to today's machine learning models. We discuss the role of algorithms in shaping digital experiences, the ethical considerations designers must navigate, and how to balance user intent with AI-driven personalization. Key Learnings: The Evolution of AI in Design: Understanding AI's journey from the 1940s concept of cybernetics to the present and its implications for modern UX design. Designing with and for AI: Practical strategies for UX designers to harness AI tools to create more personalized, intuitive experiences while avoiding common pitfalls. Ethical AI and UX: Navigating the ethical challenges AI presents, from biases in algorithms to privacy concerns, and the importance of intentional design choices. Future of UX Roles: How the role of UX designers is evolving to include a more strategic, consultative approach, emphasizing deep user understanding and ethical considerations. Practical Applications: How designers can start experimenting with different AI tools, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and apply them to real-world design challenges. Emily provides actionable advice on leveraging AI in design while remaining user-focused and ethically grounded. Whether you're a seasoned designer or just beginning to explore the intersection of AI and UX, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help you stay ahead in the ever-changing landscape of digital design.
In today's episode, Poya shares his keynote from SaaStanak that took place in Croatia, and dives into the common mistakes founders make when expanding into the United States market, with practical advice and engaging storytelling from his experience working with over a dozen companies such as HackerRank, Automile, Plato and more. This episode is packed with actionable tips, real-world examples, and the immigrant mindset driving Poya's success. Whether you're a founder or aspiring entrepreneur, gain valuable insights to help your business thrive. Plus, a word from our sponsor, NetSuite by Oracle, on streamlining operations for scaling businesses. Get a free product demo at Netsuite.com/scale --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uncharted1/support
WHAT DO DEVELOPERS WANT? SKILLS & SENTIMENT REPORT 2024 One of the annual must read reports in the recruiting industry is the HackerRank's Developer Skills Report. With huge changes in the skills make up of the software developer workforce of tomorrow, we need to review what kind of skills developers care about, are getting good at and are letting go as the future leaves them behind. Who better to talk us through the insights than Vivek Ravisankar and Juan Herrera, the senior hombres of HackerRank. Millions of data points from developer behaviour on the platform, as well as 5000+ survey responses from developers, managers, talent acquisition managers and candidates. You will learn - What are developers concerned about? - Do engineers feel that there industry is growing or contracting - How do developers think AI will change skills demand / skills development - How do layoffs impact developers think about the job market? - What languages are up / down in popularity from employer side? - Is this a vibecession? - Has the value of a CompSci degree changed? - How do we really assess technical skills? - How do developers think about remote vs RTO? - Why do developers stay in their jobs? Why do they go? All this and more. We're with Vivek Ravisankar, CEO (HackerRank), Juan Herrera, President, Global Field Operations (HackerRank) & friends on Friday 22nd March, 2.00pm GMT. Follow the channel here (recommended) and register by clicking on Save My Spot Ep250 is sponsored by our buddies HackerRank HackerRank is a technology hiring platform that is the standard for assessing developer skills for over 3,000 companies around the world. HackerRank helps companies hire skilled developers and innovate faster by enabling tech recruiters and hiring managers to objectively evaluate talent at every stage of the recruiting process. Download the 2024 Developer Skills Report here
In this episode, we are joined by Mark Benliyan to learn about his experiences at tech companies as an intern. Mark shares some interesting insights and provides some useful advice. Items mentioned in the episode: HackerRank, CodeSignal, Byteboard Guests: Mark Benliyan Panelists: Ryan Burgess - @burgessdryan Augustus Yuan - @augburto Picks: Mark Benliyan - Rewind AI Ryan Burgess - Squid Game Challenge Ryan Burgess - Fargo Augustus Yuan - The Finals Episode transcript: https://www.frontendhappyhour.com/episodes/aged-to-perfection-crafting-your-internship-experience
TRF The year in review and predictions for 2024 How good were last year's predictions? Serge gets a standing ovation for his prediction from last December, ChatGPT and AI rocked the world. Although YouTube shorts did not clobber TikTok, we are seeing a drop in use among teenagers. Surprises in 2023 The swing from employee to employer market was quick. Pay transparency law in British Columbia was passed adn now in effect Joel Lalgee becomes a star! Predictions for 2024 Wager from Shelley Assessments will be all the rage! Skyrocketing in popularity will be the likes PLUM.io, Hiring Branch, HackerRank. A Linked In developer will harness AI to enable meaningful data mining on the platform & solve job matching Wager from Serge Quick Apply / Easy apply for jobs becomes obsolete Recruit Holdings buys ZipRecruiter One major employer will eliminate the old school recruiter role
TRF The year in review and predictions for 2024 How good were last year's predictions? Serge gets a standing ovation for his prediction from last December, ChatGPT and AI rocked the world. Although YouTube shorts did not clobber TikTok, we are seeing a drop in use among teenagers. Surprises in 2023 The swing from employee to employer market was quick. Pay transparency law in British Columbia was passed adn now in effect Joel Lalgee becomes a star! Predictions for 2024 Wager from Shelley Assessments will be all the rage! Skyrocketing in popularity will be the likes PLUM.io, Hiring Branch, HackerRank. A Linked In developer will harness AI to enable meaningful data mining on the platform & solve job matching Wager from Serge Quick Apply / Easy apply for jobs becomes obsolete Recruit Holdings buys ZipRecruiter One major employer will eliminate the old school recruiter role
Achtung (Werbung in eigener Sache): Jetzt mein Buch "Die perfekte Candidate Journey & Experience" unter folgenden Links bestellen: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-66875-7 https://bit.ly/3KEgwDF https://amzn.to/3mbzhUO Der inhaltliche Fokus liegt auf Recruiting für mittelständische Unternehmen sowie Startups und darum, wie die Candidate Journey und deren Touchpoints so gestaltet werden können, dass eine hervorragende Candidate Experience möglich wird. Tobias Mehre (Trainer & Coach für Recruiting & Mitarbeiterbindung - Podcast Host) Tobias Mehre ist Trainer und Coach für Recruiting und Mitarbeiterbindung und er versteht sich als „der Brückenbauer zwischen HR und IT“. Es gibt Geschichten, die beginnen mit einem Problem. Seine Unternehmergeschichte beginnt mit einem Mangel an Verständnis. Als Hiring Manager in der IT-Branche hat Tobias erlebt, wie ineffizient Recruiting-Prozesse sein können, wenn der Fachbereich und das Recruiting nicht Hand in Hand arbeiten. Mit einer einzigartigen Kombination aus Erfahrung als IT-Experte, Dozent, Hiring Manager und Recruiter, hat er sich auf eine Mission begeben: HR- und IT-Experten Seite an Seite zu bringen. Miteinander. Auf Augenhöhe. Sozusagen eine Brücke zu bauen. Tobias sagt: Ich bin nicht nur Trainer, sondern Sparringspartner für smartes IT-Recruiting mit System. Und so hat Tobias in den letzten vier Jahren über 250 Recruiter*innen, HR-Generalisten und Personalberater*innen durch die Evaluierung der wirklich relevanten Informationen dabei unterstützt, die Antwortraten bei IT-Experten zu steigern und damit die IT-Recruiting-Ergebnisse spürbar zu verbessern. Themen In der GainTalents-Podcastfolge 323 habe ich mit Tobias Mehre (Trainer & Coach für Recruiting & Mitarbeiterbindung - Podcast Host) über das Recruiting von IT-Fachkräften gesprochen und worauf Unternehmen bzw. deren Recruitingabteilungen diesbezüglich achten sollten. Vielen lieben Dank an Tobias für die vielen guten Tipps und für das interessante Gespräch. Darauf solltest Du beim IT-Fachkräfte-Recruiting achten: In Deutschland fehlen lt. Bitkom (siehe Shownote-Link) ca. 137.000 IT-Fachkräfte - Stand 2022 Die meisten IT-Fachkräfte wissen, dass sie eine “knappe Ressource” sind und haben daher hohe Ansprüche IT-Fachkräfte haben vor allem an inhaltlich interessanten Aufgaben ein großes Interesse und an kontinuierlicher Aus- und Weiterbildung IT-Fachkräfte suchen eher passiv als aktiv nach neuen beruflichen Herausforderungen Was sollten Unternehmen also tun, um der Herausforderung zu begegnen: Darstellung von Projekten und interessanten Aufgaben auf der Webseite/Karriereseite - Storytelling mit Personen aus dem Unternehmen Spannendes Angebot von Aus- und Weiterbildung (IT-Fachkräfte möchten immer technologisch immer “up to date” sein) Aber Achtung: auch in der IT gibt es unterschiedliche Aufgaben und Positionen, die verschiedene Themenfokussierungen benötigen (z.B. Software-Entwicklung vs. IT-Betrieb vs. IT-Infrastruktur vs. Testen/Qualitätsmanagement vs. Projektmanagement usw.) Landingpages nutzen, um IT-Fachkräfte entsprechend der zu besetzenden Position mit den jeweils spezifischen Inhalten anzusprechen möglichst viele digitale Inhalte anbieten - denn dann zeigt das Unternehmen, dass Digitalisierung wichtig ist und damit auch ein attraktiver Arbeitgeber für IT-Talente ist (Videos, Podcast, Blogartikel, etc.)! Definition der “richtigen” Candidate Persona Begriffe für das IT-Profil genau analysieren und verstehen (Recruiter:innen können z.B. ChatGPT zum “Lernen” nutzen) Briefing mit IT-Fachkräfte-Hiring-Manager:innen: auf welche Skills und Fähigkeiten kommt es wirklich an? Strukturiertes Erfragen der erforderlichen Fähig- und Fertigkeiten durch das Recruiting (Challenger-Prinzip) Reflektion der definierten Candidate Persona und des Stellenprofils mit IT-Fachkräften im Unternehmen (passt das?, ist das ansprechend?, etc.) Active Sourcing ist wesentlich für die Gewinnung von IT-Fachkräften Identifikation: in Communities von IT-Fachkräften (z.B. Github, Stack Overflow, Reddit, HackerRank, etc.) nicht nur auf LinkedIn und XING Weiterbildungsplattformen für IT-Fachkräfte nutzen Meet-ups und agile Stammtische Ansprache: Nachrichten, die zeigen, dass sich das Recruiting wirklich tiefgehend mit dem Profil der Person beschäftigt hat Kommunikation mit Community-Mitgliedern aufbauen Themenspezifische Informationen zu den in den Foren diskutierten Inhalten zur Verfügung stellen Mitarbeitende aus Fachbereichen oder die Hiring-Manager:innen in die Ansprache der IT-Fachkräfte auf den Plattformen mit integrieren das eigentliche Jobangebot nicht sofort in den Vordergrund stellen und dafür ggfs. auf Kanäle wie LinkedIn/XING switchen Kennenlerngespräche mit IT-Fachkräften immer Recruiting zusammen mit Hiring-Manager:innen Make or Buy im Recruiting ist im IT-Fachkräfte-Recruiting immer zu hinterfragen Entweder Aufbau einer dedizierten IT-Recruiting-Ressource oder Zusammenarbeit mit IT-Personalberatungen (Festanstellung, Freelance, etc.) #ITRecruiting #Talentgewinnung #Personalgewinnung #ITfachkraeftemangel Shownotes Links - Tobias Mehre LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias-mehre/ Webseite: https://tobiasmehre.de/ Zahlen zum Fachkräftemangel: https://www.bitkom.org/Presse/Presseinformation/Deutschland-fehlen-137000-IT-Fachkraefte#_ Links Hans-Heinz Wisotzky: Website https://www.gaintalents.com/podcast und https://www.gaintalents.com/blog Buch: https://www.gaintalents.com/buch-die-perfekte-candidate-journey-und-experience LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansheinzwisotzky/ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/gaintalents XING https://www.xing.com/profile/HansHeinz_Wisotzky/cv Facebook https://www.facebook.com/GainTalents Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gain.talents/ Youtube https://bit.ly/2GnWMFg
Achtung (Werbung in eigener Sache): Jetzt mein Buch "Die perfekte Candidate Journey & Experience" unter folgenden Links bestellen: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-66875-7 https://bit.ly/3KEgwDF https://amzn.to/3mbzhUO Der inhaltliche Fokus liegt auf Recruiting für mittelständische Unternehmen sowie Startups und darum, wie die Candidate Journey und deren Touchpoints so gestaltet werden können, dass eine hervorragende Candidate Experience möglich wird. Tobias Mehre (Trainer & Coach für Recruiting & Mitarbeiterbindung - Podcast Host) Tobias Mehre ist Trainer und Coach für Recruiting und Mitarbeiterbindung und er versteht sich als „der Brückenbauer zwischen HR und IT“. Es gibt Geschichten, die beginnen mit einem Problem. Seine Unternehmergeschichte beginnt mit einem Mangel an Verständnis. Als Hiring Manager in der IT-Branche hat Tobias erlebt, wie ineffizient Recruiting-Prozesse sein können, wenn der Fachbereich und das Recruiting nicht Hand in Hand arbeiten. Mit einer einzigartigen Kombination aus Erfahrung als IT-Experte, Dozent, Hiring Manager und Recruiter, hat er sich auf eine Mission begeben: HR- und IT-Experten Seite an Seite zu bringen. Miteinander. Auf Augenhöhe. Sozusagen eine Brücke zu bauen. Tobias sagt: Ich bin nicht nur Trainer, sondern Sparringspartner für smartes IT-Recruiting mit System. Und so hat Tobias in den letzten vier Jahren über 250 Recruiter*innen, HR-Generalisten und Personalberater*innen durch die Evaluierung der wirklich relevanten Informationen dabei unterstützt, die Antwortraten bei IT-Experten zu steigern und damit die IT-Recruiting-Ergebnisse spürbar zu verbessern. Themen In der GainTalents-Podcastfolge 323 habe ich mit Tobias Mehre (Trainer & Coach für Recruiting & Mitarbeiterbindung - Podcast Host) über das Recruiting von IT-Fachkräften gesprochen und worauf Unternehmen bzw. deren Recruitingabteilungen diesbezüglich achten sollten. Vielen lieben Dank an Tobias für die vielen guten Tipps und für das interessante Gespräch. Darauf solltest Du beim IT-Fachkräfte-Recruiting achten: In Deutschland fehlen lt. Bitkom (siehe Shownote-Link) ca. 137.000 IT-Fachkräfte - Stand 2022 Die meisten IT-Fachkräfte wissen, dass sie eine “knappe Ressource” sind und haben daher hohe Ansprüche IT-Fachkräfte haben vor allem an inhaltlich interessanten Aufgaben ein großes Interesse und an kontinuierlicher Aus- und Weiterbildung IT-Fachkräfte suchen eher passiv als aktiv nach neuen beruflichen Herausforderungen Was sollten Unternehmen also tun, um der Herausforderung zu begegnen: Darstellung von Projekten und interessanten Aufgaben auf der Webseite/Karriereseite - Storytelling mit Personen aus dem Unternehmen Spannendes Angebot von Aus- und Weiterbildung (IT-Fachkräfte möchten immer technologisch immer “up to date” sein) Aber Achtung: auch in der IT gibt es unterschiedliche Aufgaben und Positionen, die verschiedene Themenfokussierungen benötigen (z.B. Software-Entwicklung vs. IT-Betrieb vs. IT-Infrastruktur vs. Testen/Qualitätsmanagement vs. Projektmanagement usw.) Landingpages nutzen, um IT-Fachkräfte entsprechend der zu besetzenden Position mit den jeweils spezifischen Inhalten anzusprechen möglichst viele digitale Inhalte anbieten - denn dann zeigt das Unternehmen, dass Digitalisierung wichtig ist und damit auch ein attraktiver Arbeitgeber für IT-Talente ist (Videos, Podcast, Blogartikel, etc.)! Definition der “richtigen” Candidate Persona Begriffe für das IT-Profil genau analysieren und verstehen (Recruiter:innen können z.B. ChatGPT zum “Lernen” nutzen) Briefing mit IT-Fachkräfte-Hiring-Manager:innen: auf welche Skills und Fähigkeiten kommt es wirklich an? Strukturiertes Erfragen der erforderlichen Fähig- und Fertigkeiten durch das Recruiting (Challenger-Prinzip) Reflektion der definierten Candidate Persona und des Stellenprofils mit IT-Fachkräften im Unternehmen (passt das?, ist das ansprechend?, etc.) Active Sourcing ist wesentlich für die Gewinnung von IT-Fachkräften Identifikation: in Communities von IT-Fachkräften (z.B. Github, Stack Overflow, Reddit, HackerRank, etc.) nicht nur auf LinkedIn und XING Weiterbildungsplattformen für IT-Fachkräfte nutzen Meet-ups und agile Stammtische Ansprache: Nachrichten, die zeigen, dass sich das Recruiting wirklich tiefgehend mit dem Profil der Person beschäftigt hat Kommunikation mit Community-Mitgliedern aufbauen Themenspezifische Informationen zu den in den Foren diskutierten Inhalten zur Verfügung stellen Mitarbeitende aus Fachbereichen oder die Hiring-Manager:innen in die Ansprache der IT-Fachkräfte auf den Plattformen mit integrieren das eigentliche Jobangebot nicht sofort in den Vordergrund stellen und dafür ggfs. auf Kanäle wie LinkedIn/XING switchen Kennenlerngespräche mit IT-Fachkräften immer Recruiting zusammen mit Hiring-Manager:innen Make or Buy im Recruiting ist im IT-Fachkräfte-Recruiting immer zu hinterfragen Entweder Aufbau einer dedizierten IT-Recruiting-Ressource oder Zusammenarbeit mit IT-Personalberatungen (Festanstellung, Freelance, etc.) #ITRecruiting #Talentgewinnung #Personalgewinnung #ITfachkraeftemangel Shownotes Links - Tobias Mehre LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias-mehre/ Webseite: https://tobiasmehre.de/ Zahlen zum Fachkräftemangel: https://www.bitkom.org/Presse/Presseinformation/Deutschland-fehlen-137000-IT-Fachkraefte#_ Links Hans-Heinz Wisotzky: Website https://www.gaintalents.com/podcast und https://www.gaintalents.com/blog Buch: https://www.gaintalents.com/buch-die-perfekte-candidate-journey-und-experience LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansheinzwisotzky/ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/gaintalents XING https://www.xing.com/profile/HansHeinz_Wisotzky/cv Facebook https://www.facebook.com/GainTalents Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gain.talents/ Youtube https://bit.ly/2GnWMFg
Achtung (Werbung in eigener Sache): Jetzt mein Buch "Die perfekte Candidate Journey & Experience" unter folgenden Links bestellen: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-66875-7 https://bit.ly/3KEgwDF https://amzn.to/3mbzhUO Der inhaltliche Fokus liegt auf Recruiting für mittelständische Unternehmen sowie Startups und darum, wie die Candidate Journey und deren Touchpoints so gestaltet werden können, dass eine hervorragende Candidate Experience möglich wird. Tobias Mehre (Trainer & Coach für Recruiting & Mitarbeiterbindung - Podcast Host) Tobias Mehre ist Trainer und Coach für Recruiting und Mitarbeiterbindung und er versteht sich als „der Brückenbauer zwischen HR und IT“. Es gibt Geschichten, die beginnen mit einem Problem. Seine Unternehmergeschichte beginnt mit einem Mangel an Verständnis. Als Hiring Manager in der IT-Branche hat Tobias erlebt, wie ineffizient Recruiting-Prozesse sein können, wenn der Fachbereich und das Recruiting nicht Hand in Hand arbeiten. Mit einer einzigartigen Kombination aus Erfahrung als IT-Experte, Dozent, Hiring Manager und Recruiter, hat er sich auf eine Mission begeben: HR- und IT-Experten Seite an Seite zu bringen. Miteinander. Auf Augenhöhe. Sozusagen eine Brücke zu bauen. Tobias sagt: Ich bin nicht nur Trainer, sondern Sparringspartner für smartes IT-Recruiting mit System. Und so hat Tobias in den letzten vier Jahren über 250 Recruiter*innen, HR-Generalisten und Personalberater*innen durch die Evaluierung der wirklich relevanten Informationen dabei unterstützt, die Antwortraten bei IT-Experten zu steigern und damit die IT-Recruiting-Ergebnisse spürbar zu verbessern. Themen In der GainTalents-Podcastfolge 323 habe ich mit Tobias Mehre (Trainer & Coach für Recruiting & Mitarbeiterbindung - Podcast Host) über das Recruiting von IT-Fachkräften gesprochen und worauf Unternehmen bzw. deren Recruitingabteilungen diesbezüglich achten sollten. Vielen lieben Dank an Tobias für die vielen guten Tipps und für das interessante Gespräch. Darauf solltest Du beim IT-Fachkräfte-Recruiting achten: In Deutschland fehlen lt. Bitkom (siehe Shownote-Link) ca. 137.000 IT-Fachkräfte - Stand 2022 Die meisten IT-Fachkräfte wissen, dass sie eine “knappe Ressource” sind und haben daher hohe Ansprüche IT-Fachkräfte haben vor allem an inhaltlich interessanten Aufgaben ein großes Interesse und an kontinuierlicher Aus- und Weiterbildung IT-Fachkräfte suchen eher passiv als aktiv nach neuen beruflichen Herausforderungen Was sollten Unternehmen also tun, um der Herausforderung zu begegnen: Darstellung von Projekten und interessanten Aufgaben auf der Webseite/Karriereseite - Storytelling mit Personen aus dem Unternehmen Spannendes Angebot von Aus- und Weiterbildung (IT-Fachkräfte möchten immer technologisch immer “up to date” sein) Aber Achtung: auch in der IT gibt es unterschiedliche Aufgaben und Positionen, die verschiedene Themenfokussierungen benötigen (z.B. Software-Entwicklung vs. IT-Betrieb vs. IT-Infrastruktur vs. Testen/Qualitätsmanagement vs. Projektmanagement usw.) Landingpages nutzen, um IT-Fachkräfte entsprechend der zu besetzenden Position mit den jeweils spezifischen Inhalten anzusprechen möglichst viele digitale Inhalte anbieten - denn dann zeigt das Unternehmen, dass Digitalisierung wichtig ist und damit auch ein attraktiver Arbeitgeber für IT-Talente ist (Videos, Podcast, Blogartikel, etc.)! Definition der “richtigen” Candidate Persona Begriffe für das IT-Profil genau analysieren und verstehen (Recruiter:innen können z.B. ChatGPT zum “Lernen” nutzen) Briefing mit IT-Fachkräfte-Hiring-Manager:innen: auf welche Skills und Fähigkeiten kommt es wirklich an? Strukturiertes Erfragen der erforderlichen Fähig- und Fertigkeiten durch das Recruiting (Challenger-Prinzip) Reflektion der definierten Candidate Persona und des Stellenprofils mit IT-Fachkräften im Unternehmen (passt das?, ist das ansprechend?, etc.) Active Sourcing ist wesentlich für die Gewinnung von IT-Fachkräften Identifikation: in Communities von IT-Fachkräften (z.B. Github, Stack Overflow, Reddit, HackerRank, etc.) nicht nur auf LinkedIn und XING Weiterbildungsplattformen für IT-Fachkräfte nutzen Meet-ups und agile Stammtische Ansprache: Nachrichten, die zeigen, dass sich das Recruiting wirklich tiefgehend mit dem Profil der Person beschäftigt hat Kommunikation mit Community-Mitgliedern aufbauen Themenspezifische Informationen zu den in den Foren diskutierten Inhalten zur Verfügung stellen Mitarbeitende aus Fachbereichen oder die Hiring-Manager:innen in die Ansprache der IT-Fachkräfte auf den Plattformen mit integrieren das eigentliche Jobangebot nicht sofort in den Vordergrund stellen und dafür ggfs. auf Kanäle wie LinkedIn/XING switchen Kennenlerngespräche mit IT-Fachkräften immer Recruiting zusammen mit Hiring-Manager:innen Make or Buy im Recruiting ist im IT-Fachkräfte-Recruiting immer zu hinterfragen Entweder Aufbau einer dedizierten IT-Recruiting-Ressource oder Zusammenarbeit mit IT-Personalberatungen (Festanstellung, Freelance, etc.) #ITRecruiting #Talentgewinnung #Personalgewinnung #ITfachkraeftemangel Shownotes Links - Tobias Mehre LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias-mehre/ Webseite: https://tobiasmehre.de/ Zahlen zum Fachkräftemangel: https://www.bitkom.org/Presse/Presseinformation/Deutschland-fehlen-137000-IT-Fachkraefte#_ Links Hans-Heinz Wisotzky: Website https://www.gaintalents.com/podcast und https://www.gaintalents.com/blog Buch: https://www.gaintalents.com/buch-die-perfekte-candidate-journey-und-experience LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansheinzwisotzky/ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/gaintalents XING https://www.xing.com/profile/HansHeinz_Wisotzky/cv Facebook https://www.facebook.com/GainTalents Instagram https://www.instagram.com/gain.talents/ Youtube https://bit.ly/2GnWMFg
This week's guest is Chris Buonocore. A seasoned engineering leader whose helped scale companies such as HackerRank, Toast, Drift and most recently Stavvy. His passion extends beyond the tech world into nature, where he explores and embraces challenges, much like his approach towards navigating the tech world. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uncharted1/support
As a reminder, if you are a mid-career high-achiever with the goal of entering the C-suite, let's talk about my new coaching program, Highly Promotable. Here's the link to learn more: https://exclusivecareercoaching.com/highly-promotable Today, we're talking about how employers are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in job interviews – and what that means for you as a job seeker. AI is being used in the interview process via Natural Language Processing (NLP), chatbots, sentiment analysis, facial expression recognition and visual perception, speech recognition, tone analysis, and decision-making. Let's start with some definitions: Artificial intelligence:Computer systems that can perform tasks that normally would require human intelligence. Artificial Intelligence-trained video interviewing technology analyzes facial features, moods, expressions, and intonations of the interviewees to select the most suitable candidates. Speech recognition, personality insights, tone analysis, the relevance of answers, emotional recognition, and psycholinguistics are used in this hiring process that uses technology automation. The best matches are shared with human recruiters along with AI's own notes on individual candidates. Chatbot:An artificial intelligence feature that is short for “chatterbot.” A chatbot is a software or program that simulates human conversations through voice commands and text chats. Chatbots are used for answering initial questions applicants have and to conduct preliminary “screening” interviews. Immediate feedback may be provided to the candidates. Natural language processing (NLP):The interaction between humans and computers using natural language. AI's machine learning skills derive meaning and understanding from language as it is spoken by humans. The most common uses of NLP in the market today include chatbots, personal assistants (such as Siri and Alexa), predictive text, and language translation. What AI tools are available to employers? There are at least four categories of tools: Video Conferencing ToolsEmployers often use video conferencing tools including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet to conduct remote AI job interviews. AI Powered Interview PlatformsSpecialized platforms like HireVue, Pymetrics, and Mya Systems use AI technology to conduct interviews. These platforms employ natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to analyze candidates' responses, assess their skills, and provide insights to employers. Online Assessment PlatformsOnline assessment platforms like TalentScored, eSkill, or CodinGame offer AI-related assessment tests and coding challenges specifically designed for evaluating candidates' AI knowledge, problem-solving abilities, and programming skills. Coding PlatformsFor technical positions, employers may use coding platforms such as HackerRank, Codility, or LeetCode. These platforms allow candidates to write and execute code, solve coding problems, and assess their programming skills. How should you prepare for an AI interview? This from Talview.com's website: “Candidates should prepare for an AI video interview the same way they would for a face-to-face interview. They must know everything there is to know about the company beforehand; look up the company website, Google news, press releases, and understand what the company and the industry are all about.“Candidates can also make a list of questions that they would like to ask their prospective employer. Practice makes perfect when it comes to an AI video interview. Candidates can make a list of expected questions and practice their answers. Once the video interview begins, candidates will not be able to stop, erase, or edit the interview and must, therefore, be prepared well in advance.“On the day of the interview, candidates must dress professionally. Position themselves in a straight-back chair and make sure the camera angle focuses waist up.“Although an AI video interview is recorded, it is for all purposes conducted just as a face-to-face interview would. So, candidates should sell their candidacy based on the company's needs and let the employer know how they will meaningfully contribute to their organization.“Finally, candidates are asked to keep calm and exude confidence through their body language.” The bottom line is this: There's nothing new that an AI interview does – it asks the same questions as a human interviewer would. But the deep analysis that goes into the assessment of an interview is beyond human undertaking. The speed, accuracy, and convenience of AI recruitment and AI video interviewing are very valuable. It's impossible that AI interviews will go off the grid – if anything, we will see an increase in its use. DIY vs DFYI'm going to combine the DIY and the DFY for this episode. If you want to improve your interview skills on your own, I recommend Yoodli – a free site that allows you to respond to the system's questions or input your own. Yoodli will help you with things like eye contact, use of filler words, and other vocal disrupters. If you would like human help with your interview preparation, my interview coaching program includes working with Yoodli + 2, 1-hour coaching sessions. In addition to Yoodli's help, you'll work with me to develop strategies to approach difficult and behavioral interview questions, such as “What is your greatest weakness?” “Tell me about yourself.” “Tell me about a time when…”
Whether you're trying to ace the coding interview, sharpen your programming skills or just have some fun learning new things, the world of competitive coding has something to offer you. Some people join with dreams of hitting the podium, and plenty of others are just competing to be their better selves.Either way, Mathis Hammel is a veteran of the competitive coding scene and he's going to give us a view into that world, tell a few war stories and share some tips how you can play better, faster and stronger…ICPC: https://icpc.global/Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com/Advent of Code, Day 18, 2022: https://adventofcode.com/2022/day/18Clash of Code: https://www.codingame.com/multiplayer/clashofcodeCodeForces: https://codeforces.com/CodeWars: https://www.codewars.com/HackerRank: https://www.hackerrank.com/Mathis on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mathishammelKris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkinsKris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/
Are you ready to step into a world where AI is revolutionizing talent acquisition? Together with HackerRank's founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar, we'll help you navigate this new landscape where skills, not pedigree, are king. We'll expose you to a world where candidates from various backgrounds are landing their dream jobs, and where hiring bias is being greatly reduced. We will also delve into the potential this revolution holds for the future of programming and assessments.But the power of AI extends beyond just talent acquisition. Join us as we venture into the realm of software development, and see how AI is lowering barriers, assisting in debugging and prototype creation, and even helping developers overcome writer's block. We'll also address the elephant in the room - the potential unintended consequences of AI, and how it could impact the roles of recruiters and hiring managers. So buckle up, and prepare for a deep dive into the future of AI in the tech industry.Listen & Subscribe on your favorite platformApple | Spotify | Google | AmazonVisit us at RecruitingDaily for all of your recruiting, sourcing, and HR content.Follow on Twitter @RecruitingDaily Attend one of our #HRTX Events
Indeed Shills, HackerRank Whack-a-Mole & Cardboard Chad War games, worker woes and Cardboard Chad littered our news feed this week, so it's fair to say this is one helluva show. Cardboard Chad is LinkedIn's hottest trend in years (IYKYK) and is making its way to SHRM in Vegas next week. (Gotta listen to make sense of this one, sorry.) Indeed is still messing up, but they're doing it on multiple continents this week. HackerRank plays Whack-a-Mole with ChatGPT and drones are going to kill us all. Unions and strikes are trending too. Oh yeah, Martha Stewart tells us why we should get back to the office.
Indeed Shills, HackerRank Whack-a-Mole & Cardboard Chad War games, worker woes and Cardboard Chad littered our news feed this week, so it's fair to say this is one helluva show. Cardboard Chad is LinkedIn's hottest trend in years (IYKYK) and is making its way to SHRM in Vegas next week. (Gotta listen to make sense of this one, sorry.) Indeed is still messing up, but they're doing it on multiple continents this week. HackerRank plays Whack-a-Mole with ChatGPT and drones are going to kill us all. Unions and strikes are trending too. Oh yeah, Martha Stewart tells us why we should get back to the office.
Ferretly, an AI-powered social media screening SaaS startup, announced today that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Bull City Venture Partners and prior investors, including a group of industry experts led by Dave Dickerson, founder and chairman of Accurate Background. https://hrtechfeed.com/ferretly-raises-1-5m-for-its-social-media-screening-platform/ HackerRank, the developer skills company, today announced the launch of its advanced plagiarism detection system, fueled by AI. By leveraging dozens of signals, including the use of external tools and certain typing patterns like copy and paste, HackerRank's AI-powered solution safeguards assessment integrity while providing developers with a fair and level playing field to showcase their skills. https://hrtechfeed.com/hackerrank-launches-ai-powered-plagiarism-detection-system-for-developer-hiring/ Clevy, a Paris headquartered international provider of AI conversational technologies for businesses, has been acquired by Fountain, the San Francisco headquartered leading high volume ATS provider for the hourly workforce. https://hrtechfeed.com/fountain-acquires-clevy-to-further-advance-ai-for-hourly-hiring/ Sense, the AI-driven talent engagement solution for enterprise recruiting, announced the availability of several new generative artificial intelligence solutions. Built using a combination of its in-house models trained on hundreds of millions of candidate interactions, along with some of the most trusted partner Large Language Models (LLMs), Sense's Generative AI solutions help global talent acquisition teams further accelerate hiring. https://hrtechfeed.com/sense-unveils-new-generative-ai-for-talent-engagement/ To transform multi-country payroll with the HCM industry's most adaptable, intelligent experience for multinational businesses, UKG Inc., a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions for all people, has reached an agreement to acquire Immedis, a leading global payroll provider with technology and services supporting over 160 countries. https://hrtechfeed.com/ukg-acquires-a-payroll-provider/
Michal Šimkovič alias Musho patrí medzi top svetových slovenských dizajnérov. Dva dni strávil aj na Slovensku, tak som to musel využiť. Musho to so svojím umom dotiahol až do Silicon Valley, kde už dlhé roky pracuje a býva. Ešte dávno som tam s ním aj ja zažil super príbehy, ktoré pozdieľame. Táto unikátna časť vás teleportuje do jeho hlavy a príbehov. Má úplne iný mindset a je to skutočne inšpiratívny človek. Upozorňujem, že tento diel je plný výrazov a slangov, ktorým nemusíte rozumieť, ale určite sa zabavíte. Musho si prešiel niekoľkými zaujímavými projektmi, ako napr. aplikáciou Circle, ktorá networkovala ľudí. Ďalej stojí za zmienku projekt HackerRank – ten dodnes pomáha s híringom developerov. Nemožno nespomenúť ani aplikáciu Miro, ktorá bola ešte donedávna väčšou aplikáciou než známa Figma. Musho tiež pracoval ako dizajnér v Amazon Web Services (AWS) a prešiel si niekoľkými startupmi. Nazýva sa náhodným investorom, pretože vďaka pár náhodným investíciám do správnych projektov prišiel k peknému balíku peňazí. Celá jedna kapitola v podcaste sa venuje práve týmto investíciám, z ktorých sa môžete učiť. V podcaste sme sa rozprávali o konkrétnych aplikáciách, na ktorých pracoval – a vysvetlil nám tiež, v čom boli unikátne. Michal sa snaží stále zlepšovať a verí, že mentálne zdravie je veľmi dôležité. Odporúča úplne klasickú chôdzu bez slúchadiel, ktorú ak nerobíte, mali by ste ju skúsiť. V závere podcastu sme sa rozprávali aj o rozdieloch medzi Slovenskom a zahraničím. Spomedzi všetkých mojich hostí práve Michal odporučil najviac kníh a podcastov. Tento diel je určený nielen dizajnérom – mal by si ho vypočuť každý, kto cíti, že má v sebe podnikavosť. Užívajte! --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kapitoly: 00:00:00 – Predstavenie hosťa 00:03:40 – Prvý startup v USA 00:12:18 – Čím si prešiel Michal Šimkovič? 00:17:32 – Náhodný investor 00:23:31 – Do čoho investuje Michal Šimkovič? 00:28:19 – Projekt Around a jeho predaj 00:35:54 – Prečo korporát? 00:38:30 – Dizajn, ktorý zarába milióny 00:43:07 – Projekt HackerRank 00:46:48 – Projekt Miro 00:47:51 – Plány Michala Šimkoviča 00:52:43 – Ako na sebe Michal Šimkovič pracuje? 01:00:54 – Silicon Valley v súčasnosti 01:03:03 – Umelá inteligencia 01:08:08 – Top tooly podľa Michala Šimkoviča 01:10:59 – Čo odporúča Michal Šimkovič? 01:13:34 – Rozdiel medzi Slovenskom a zahraničím 01:17:07 – Zmysel života podľa Michala Šimkoviča --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pre tých, ktorí nezachytili, vytvoril som v rámci svojich konzultácií aj komunitu. Je tam okolo 25 zakladateľov rôznych firiem, ktorí si zdieľajú know-how a svoje kontakty. Stretávame sa raz mesačne osobne a máme aj spoločnú appku. Pokiaľ chcete, aby bola vaša firma ešte lepšia, registrujte sa na: https://bezcyklenia.sk/komunita/. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Viac z podcastov nájdete na: https://www.truban.sk/podcast/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Všetky spomenuté knihy a podcasty nájdete v článku na blogu: https://wp.me/p5NJVg-NR --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Podcast si môžete vypočuť aj na streamovacích platformách: ● Spotify ▸ https://spoti.fi/31Nywax ● Apple podcast ▸ https://apple.co/3n0SO8F ● Google podcast ▸ https://bit.ly/3qAt5WU --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ● Najlepšie z podcastu na Instagrame ● https://www.instagram.com/truban.podcast/ ● Truban.sk ● https://bit.ly/3r1vYQJ ● Instagram ● https://www.instagram.com/truban/ ●Facebook ● https://www.facebook.com/miso.truban ● LinkedIn ● https://sk.linkedin.com/in/truban
Hackerrank is the next place on my list where you could learn to code for free with C++ and some other languages. Of course, in the Arena, we are working mainly with C++. Check out my Social Media Twitter - https://twitter.com/vigmu2 Tumblr - https://meedajoe0417.tumblr.com/ Discord - https://discord.gg/AYEAK5RmFR If you would like to donate for my current work and for further content! You can donate here -- https://bit.ly/3ea8q3u Provide thoughts on show and join email list for show notifications: https://bit.ly/3hGNqEP --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/vigmu2-games/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/vigmu2-games/support
Your product exists to help your customers solve a problem, but are you continuously trying to understand the challenges they face? Debra Squyres, Chief Customer Officer at HackerRank, says empathy is the best quality to have as a customer-facing leader. Once you can put yourself in your customers shoes, you can engage with them more effectively and get the feedback you need to improve. Listen in to this episode to hear Debra get deep on what levers you can pull to improve customer outcomes and, in turn, your bottom line.
In this episode, Sam and Kyle are joined by Flashy, a mutual friend who started multiple successful side hustles and now attends a coding school with plans to become a computer programmer in the future. The trio discuss the successes and challenges of starting businesses, the importance of coding and its role in the future, and how sports cards and NFTs retain value. As always, leave a like and follow if you enjoyed the episode. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9YV12sIxHtT89RVjF7JkSw Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ASAP_Finance Learning Basics: Codeacademy: https://www.codecademy.com/ Hackerrank: https://www.hackerrank.com/dashboard Freecodecamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org Code Editor: https://replit.com/ IDE: https://code.visualstudio.com/ Code Practice: https://www.hackerrank.com/dashboard and https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/ Book: https://www.amazon.com/Common-Sense-Guide-Structures-Algorithms-Second/dp/1680507222/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3QA6VWCZ7ED1L&keywords=common+sense+guide+to+data+structures+and+algorithms&qid=1656269426&s=books&sprefix=common+sense+guid%2Cstripbooks%2C109&sr=1-1
I thought I knew what developers needed, but then I met over 200 people online to learn what unlocks their career. The results were surprising in some ways, and not in others. The first thing I learned was that having a plan for your career in software development is something programmers aren't getting enough help with. When I would need a new job, I often took the first reasonable offer instead of having more purpose. It seems other developers are treating their career the same way. The second thing I learned was that developers need more help getting a new job. They treat LinkedIn like an online resume when it's not. LinkedIn is a social profile for your career in software! Software engineers, programmers, data scientists, and other types of developers often have too many languages and technologies on their resume over time - and this bleeds into LinkedIn. I like to help them redo their profile to be more focused on their human side - and learn better techniques for networking to find the best job. The third thing I learned was that developers are suffering from burnout in their career in droves. I've actually had a company pay me to help their lead developer recover from burnout! Recovering from burnout is more than a better diet, exercise, or having a therapist - though people who come to me for help with burnout often already have one. You need help with setting healthy boundaries with your employer so you can be a healthy software developer! The fourth thing I learned unlocks the career of IT professionals in software development and engineering jobs is earning respect and getting recognition from their colleagues. Sometimes there's a difficult person they're dealing with who's a narcissist or just has unrealistic expectations. I use some of the techniques I've learned in IT consulting to help them appeal to the desires of the person they're frustrated with. Once they start earning trust and resetting expectations - rewards and promotions should follow! The fifth thing I learned developers really need to unlock their career is becoming more common. Most of the over 200 I met online were at least considering going into freelancing or IT consulting as a way to work for themselves. Showing developers that the paperwork and administrative tasks needed aren't as bad as they think is something I love to do. I would never go back to being an employee unless I had to at this point. I love being able to pick my own IT consulting clients. The sixth and final thing I learned developers really need in their career is to start using a new tech stack, cloud or data science platform, devops technologies, or maybe switching from a business analyst or product management gig into being a scrum master. Don't hit the books, and waste time on algorithm crunching sites like Hackerrank and Leetcode. Build confidence through having a better relationship with people who might interview you, and have great examples of work. Are there things you're struggling with in your software development career that don't fit into these 6? Leave me a comment! My career purpose is to help more people be healthy software developers. You can also watch this episode on YouTube. Episode timelinks: 0:00 Introduction 0:37 Have a Career Plan 2:09 Get a Better Job 5:31 Stop Burning Out 5:55 Earn Respect and Recognition 8:45 Work for Myself 11:17 Use New Skills or Technology Visit me at JaymeEdwards.com Find me on Facebook at JaymeEdwardsMedia Find me on Twitter as @jaymeedwards
Kaivalya leads enterprise products at HackerRank that help the largest tech companies recruit engineers effectively. He also owns HackerRank's integration strategy, app ecosystem, and API platform. In this episode, Kaivalya speaks with Dwayne about finding the next big play, hiring the right team, and a product culture that makes startups successful.
Ask anyone who's hunted for a job as a software developer what they did to prepare for their technical interviews, and they will more or less provide a similar general framework. At a high-level, we grind data structures & algo problems using some flavor of an interview prep site such as LeetCode, Hackerrank, Interview Cake, among many others. Armed with a copy of Cracking the Coding Interview at our disposal, we can even spend the majority of our evenings and weekends studying and hoping to land that dream job at our dream company. Frances Coronel, who is a racial equity advocate and former software engineer at Slack, realized the potential harm this cookie cutter interview process could really have on improving diversity for underrepresented folks in the tech industry. Seeing that there were so few members from the Latinx community in the tech ecosystem relative to the general population, she identified many holes in the tech talent pipeline and decided to land herself a role at Byteboard, a company disrupting the interviewing space. Tune into this week's episode as she talks about her journey into tech, how the industry is doing in terms of diversity & inclusion in general, and what suggestions she has for allies who want to help address the various issues that have created this leaky pipeline. Resources: https://francescoronel.com https://techqueria.org https://byteboard.dev
Why are electric scooters catching fire: This week, there have been instances of four electric scooters from Indian EV startups Ola, Okinawa and PureEV catching fire. While the investigations are still underway, Okinawa has claimed that the incident happened due to ‘negligence in charging the vehicle' - the electric scooter was plugged into an old socket which led to a short circuit - which sparked a fire in the vehicle. On the other hand, it is being said that Ola and PureEV's electric scooters have caught fire due to ‘thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries' - this happens when cells in a battery overheat and initiates a chain reaction among surrounding cells due to which the temperature of the battery increases rapidly in milliseconds. Furlenco lays-off 180-200 employees: After Lido Learning and Trell, now furniture rental startup Furlenco has laid-off around 180-200 employees involved in customer support roles. They've also (temporarily) shut down operations across Kolkata, Mysuru, Chandigarh and Jaipur. This news comes less than a year after Furlenco had raised $140 million (in a mix of equity and debt) and was even planning for international expansion. Ola to acquire Avail Finance: Ola is set to acquire financial services provider for blue-collar workforce Avail Finance - in a share-swap deal worth $50 million - which is down from their previous valuation of $86 million. It's worth noting that Avail Finance is founded by Ola's co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal's brother Ankush Aggarwal. With this acquisition, Ola plans to strengthen their financial services arm Ola Financial to cater to the financing need of their driver-partners and to launch their own neo-banking products. Chalo acquires Vogo: Bus transport technology provider Chalo has acquired scooter-sharing startup Vogo. This is Chalo's second acquisition in six months - previously they had acquired office shuttle service provider Shuttl. Chalo already has access to over 15,000 buses through its platform and with this acquisition they want to boost bus ridership by making it convenient for their users by providing access to Vogo scooters at major bus stops - for rides to and from these bus stops. FanCraze raises $100 million: Cricket NFT marketplace FanCraze has raised $100 million in a round led by Insight Partners to build a cricket metaverse - where users will be able to collect cricket NFTs, engage in play to earn cricket games and buy their own digital lands. Citymall raises $75 million: Social commerce platform Citymall has raised $75 million in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners at a $350 million valuation to expand to 100 cities in the next 18 months and add products across new categories like fashion and general merchandise. Classplus raises $70 million: Edtech startup Classplus, which helps teachers to manage, launch and sell their online courses, has raised $70 million in a round led by Alpha Wave Global and Tiger Global Management at $570 million valuation to expand their global presence. HackerRank raises $60 million: Developer hiring platform HackerRank, which helps developers hone their coding skills and connects them with software companies to ease their hiring process, has raised $60 million in a round led by Susquehanna Growth Equity at $500 million valuation.
Marketers make great bedfellows. Who knew? Candidate.ID and iCIMS, that's who. The boys dig into the hottest acquisition news of the week, plus review HackerRank's latest funding round. What else? Layoffs at a unicorn, a "GPS for your Career" and a job-related URL that commanded a six-figure price-tag. Say what? Lastly, porn star Bree Olson breaks down The Great Resignation like only a porn star can. Huzzah!
HourWork, a SaaS recruitment and retention platform for quick-serve restaurant (QSR) franchise owners, today announced the closing of an oversubscribed $10 million Series A funding round. HourWork will use the funds to scale its customer success, sales, and marketing teams to service explosive demand for the company's recruitment and retention solutions and execute on planned product development initiatives that will revolutionize hourly work and the gig economy for both employers and employees across all industries. https://hrtechfeed.com/restaurant-recruitment-tool-raises-10-million/ Accurate Background, a leading provider of compliant, automated workforce screening solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CareerBuilder Employment Screening (CBES) from CareerBuilder. The combined entity will operate under the Accurate Background brand and creates a uniquely positioned company focused on technology innovation, customer service, candidate experience, and delivery at scale. Through a strategic partnership agreement, CareerBuilder will continue to offer Accurate's employment screening services to clients. https://hrtechfeed.com/accurate-background-to-acquire-careerbuilder-employment-screening/ Sprockets announced the closing of a $10 million Series A financing round, which enables the company to accelerate the transformation of a hiring process that's fundamentally failing the nation's hourly workforce. The round was led by Forte Ventures. https://hrtechfeed.com/sprockets-raises-10-million-for-hiring-software/ HackerRank, the developer skills company, today announced $60 million in Series D funding led by Susquehanna Growth Equity. To date, HackerRank has raised more than $115 million in total funding. https://hrtechfeed.com/hackerrank-raises-60-million-series-d/ Talroo, the leading provider of technology to power the recruitment of essential workers, has released its latest innovation to connect job seekers with opportunities. With Smart Job Titles, employers within the Talroo ecosystem are able to differentiate their jobs beyond typical, often uninspired, titles. With enhanced and more varied verbiage, employers — with no effort — are able to present ads that stand out from their competitors. https://hrtechfeed.com/talroo-launches-smart-job-titles/ iCIMS, the talent cloud company, announced the acquisition of Candidate.ID, the marketing automation software built for talent acquisition. Candidate.ID enables recruiting teams to hyper-target best fit, most engaged candidates with unique lead scoring and automated marketing campaigns. Together, iCIMS and Candidate.ID are redefining recruitment marketing. https://hrtechfeed.com/icims-acquires-candidate-id/
Marketers make great bedfellows. Who knew? Candidate.ID and iCIMS, that's who. The boys dig into the hottest acquisition news of the week, plus review HackerRank's latest funding round. What else? Layoffs at a unicorn, a "GPS for your Career" and a job-related URL that commanded a six-figure price-tag. Say what? Lastly, porn star Bree Olson breaks down The Great Resignation like only a porn star can. Huzzah!
We sat down with Pymetrics own Frida Polli, a neuroscientist turned founder, in our latest episode of HackerRank radio, to learn more about the science behind Pymetrics and discuss the greatest strength HackerRank and Pymetrics share--powering unbiased hiring.
In this interview, Aubrey, Atlassian's Global Head of Diversity and Belonging and Gaurav Verma, HackerRank's VP of Customer Success, discusses why diversity and inclusion should be replaced with balance and belonging. Aubrey also shares concrete and practical ways companies can create balanced teams, establish an atmosphere where everyone feels empowered, and eliminate bias from the hiring process.
To commemorate HackerRank's first Developer Skills Survey, HackerRank's CEO & Cofounder Vivek Ravisankar sat down with veteran VP of engineer Jawahar Malhotra to unpack some of the findings. Jawahar's scaled up teams for all of Yahoo India, Open Gov, and Tealeaf. In fact, he's been at the core of the Web's evolution since his work at Netscape in the mid 90s.
This episode of the podcast is an excerpt from our HackerRank main() event in San Francisco. Vivek chats with Michael Glukhovsky, Developer Relations at Stripe, to understand how Stripe has become such a well-respected developer brand.
Screening tech talent is smokin' hot right now. You know the names: HackerRank, Byteboard, Woven, Triplebyte and others. But do you know Tech Screen? If the answer is NO, then you owe it to yourself to checkout this episode of Firing Squad. Chad & Cheese put CEO and founder Mark Knowlton on the hot seat to answer some tough questions. Does he make it out alive? Gotta listen.
Screening tech talent is smokin' hot right now. You know the names: HackerRank, Byteboard, Woven, Triplebyte and others. But do you know Tech Screen? If the answer is NO, then you owe it to yourself to checkout this episode of Firing Squad. Chad & Cheese put CEO and founder Mark Knowlton on the hot seat to answer some tough questions. Does he make it out alive? Gotta listen.
Screening tech talent is smokin' hot right now. You know the names: HackerRank, Byteboard, Woven, Triplebyte and others. But do you know Tech Screen? If the answer is NO, then you owe it to yourself to checkout this episode of Firing Squad. Chad & Cheese put CEO and founder Mark Knowlton on the hot seat to answer some tough questions. Does he make it out alive? Gotta listen.
On this episode of Innovations in Leadership Kristen interviews Debra Squyers, the Chief Customer Officer of HackerRank. Listen in as they discuss the twists and turns of their career paths, retaining and attracting strong talent to your customer success program, along with organization and motivational fit.
В преддверии Нового года, когда многие окидывают взором прошедший год и ставят цели на новый, мы с Борисом Шарчилевым - руководителем ML в Финтехе Яндекса, сделали для вас выпуск о том, как подготовиться и эффективно пройти собеседование на ML-позиции в выдающиеся компании. Борис лично провел больше ста собеседований и поделился своим опытом в выпуске! Поговорили о том из каких этапов состоит собеседование и чего вообще ждать, если вы хотите или только стать ML-инженером, или поменять место работы. Как подготовиться к собеседованию и стоит ли пытаться "хакнуть" систему. Насколько софт-скиллы важнее хард-скиллов, какие скиллы нужны обязательно, а какие подтягиваются прямо в процессе работы. Где и какие задачи решать, чтобы проходить алгоритмическую часть собеседования. Какая мотивация должна быть у кандидата, чтобы успешно строить карьеру в компаниях и какую мотивацию сотрудникам могут предложить компании. В общем, интересно и с пользой пообщались! Ссылки выпуска: Вакансии в команду Бориса (https://fintech.yandex.ru/ml-razrabotchik) Тренировки и соревнования по программированию Codeforces (https://codeforces.com/) Подготовка к собеседованию на HackerRank (https://www.hackerrank.com/) Платформа с большим количеством алгоритмических задач (https://leetcode.com/explore/learn/) Буду благодарен за обратную связь! Поддерживайте подкаст на Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/machinelearningpodcast) Оставляйте ваши комментарии там, где можно. Например, в Apple Podcasts. Они помогут сделать подкаст лучше! Напишите что вам было понятно, что не очень, какие темы раскрыть, каких гостей пригласить, ну, и вообще в какую сторону катить этот подкаст :) Подписывайтесь на телеграм-канал "Стать специалистом по машинному обучению" (https://t.me/toBeAnMLspecialist) Телеграм автора подкаста (https://t.me/kmsint) Со мной также можно связаться по электронной почте: kms101@yandex.ru Также теперь подкаст можно найти на YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzvfXLNpB2Bbf32dc7a8oDQ?) и Яндекс.Музыке https://music.yandex.ru/album/9781458
A Tamil narration which speaks about higher studies, life incidents of Kamarajar and Hackerrank motivation.
01:01 - Ian's Superpower: Curiosity & Life-Long Learning * Discovering Computers * Sharing Knowledge 06:27 - Streaming and Mentorship: Becoming “The Career Development Guy” * The Turing School of Software and Design (https://turing.edu/) * techinterview.guide (https://techinterview.guide/) * twitch.tv/iandouglas736 (https://www.twitch.tv/iandouglas736) 12:01 - Tech Interviews (Are Broken) * techinterview.guide (https://techinterview.guide/) * Daily Email Series (https://techinterview.guide/daily-email-series/) * Tech vs Behavior Questions 16:43 - How do I even get a first job in the tech industry? * Tech Careers = Like Choose Your Own Adventure Book * Highlight What You Have: YOU ARE * Apply Anyway 24:25 - Interview Processes Don't Align with Skills Needed * FAANG Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech) Influence * LeetCode-Style Interviews (https://leetcode.com/explore/interview/card/top-interview-questions-medium/) * Dynamic Programing Problems (https://medium.com/techie-delight/top-10-dynamic-programming-problems-5da486eeb360) * People Can Learn 35:06 - Fixing Tech Interviews: Overhauling the Process * Idea: “Open Source Hiring Manifesto” Initiative * Analyzing Interviewing Experiences; Collect Antipatterns * Community/Candidate Input * Company Feedback (Stop Ghosting! Build Trust!) * Language Mapping Reflections: Mandy: Peoples' tech journeys are like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Keep acquiring skills over life-long learning. Arty: The importance of 1-on-1 genuine connections. Real change happens in the context of a relationship. Ian: Having these discussions, collaborating, and saying, “what if?” This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: ARTY: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode 260 of Greater Than Code. I am Arty Starr and I'm here with my fabulous co-host, Mandy Moore. MANDY: Thank you, Arty. And I'm here with our guest today, Ian Douglas. Ian has been in the tech industry for over 25 years and suggested we cue the Jurassic Park theme song for his introduction. Much of his career has been spent in early startups planning out architecture and helping everywhere and anywhere like a “Swiss army knife” engineer. He's currently livestreaming twice a week around the topic of tech industry interview preparation, and loves being involved in developer education. Welcome to the show, Ian. IAN: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. MANDY: Awesome. So we like to start the show with our famous question: what is your superpower and how did you acquire it? IAN: Probably curiosity. I've always been kind of a very curious mindset of wanting to know how things work. Even as a little kid, I would tear things apart just to see how something worked. My parents would be like, “Okay, great. Put it back together.” I'm like, “I don't know how to put it back together.” So [chuckles] they would come home and I would just have stuff disassembled all over the house and yeah, we threw a lot of stuff out that way. But it was just a curiosity of how things work around me and that led into computer programming, learning how computers worked and that just made the light bulb go off in my mind as a little kid of, I get to tell this computer how to do something, it's always going to do it. And that just led of course, into the tech industry where you sign up for a career in the tech industry, you're signing up for lifelong learning and there's no shortage of trying to satiate that curiosity. I think it's just a never-ending journey, which is fantastic. ARTY: When did you first discover computers? What was that experience like for you? IAN: I was 8 years old. I think it was summer, or fall of 1982. I believe my dad came home with a Commodore 64. My dad was always kind of a gadget nut. Anything new and interesting on the market, he would find an excuse to buy and so he, brought home this Commodore 64 thinking family computer, but once he plunked it down in front of me, it sort of became mine. I didn't want to share. I grew up in Northern Canada way, way up in the Northwest territories and in the wintertime, we had two things to do. We could go play hockey, or we'd stay indoors and not freeze. So I spent a lot of time indoors when I wasn't playing hockey—played a lot of hockey as a kid. But when I was home, I was basically on this Commodore 64 all the time, playing games and learning how the computer itself worked and learning how the programming language of it worked. Thankfully, the computer was something I had never took apart. Otherwise, it would have been a pile of junk, but just spending a lot of time just learning all the ins and outs. Back then, the idea was you could load the software and then you type a run command and it would actually execute the program. But if you type a list, it would actually show you all the source code of the program as well and that raised my curiosity, like what is all this symbols and what all these words mean? In the back of the Commodore 64 book, it had several chapters about the basic programming language. So I started picking apart all these games and trying to learn how they worked and then well, what would happen if I change this instruction to that and started learning how to sort of hack my games, usually break the game completely. But trying to hack it a little bit; what if I got like an extra ship, an extra level, or what if I change the health of my character, or something along those lines? And it kind of snowballed from there, honestly. It was just this fascination of, oh, cool, I get to look at this thing. I get to change it. I get to apply it. And then of course, back in the day, you would go to a bookstore and you'd have these magazines with just pages and pages and pages of source code and you'd go home and you type it all in expecting something really cool. At the end of it, you run it and it's something bland like, oh, you just made a spreadsheet application. It's like, “Oh, I wanted a game.” Like, “Shucks.” [laughter] But as a little kid, that kind of thing wasn't very enticing, but I'm sure as an adult, it's like, oh cool, now I have a spreadsheet to track budgeting, or whatever at home. It was this whole notion of open source and just sharing knowledge and that really stuck with me, too and so, as I would try to satiate this innate curiosity in myself and learn something, I would go teach it to a friend and it's like, “Hey, hey, let me show you what I just did. I learned how to play this thing on the piano,” or “I learned how to sing this song,” or “I learned how to use a magnifying glass to cook an ant on the sidewalk.” [chuckles] Whatever I learned, I always wanted to turn around and teach it to somebody else. I would get sometimes more excitement and joy out of watching somebody else do it because I taught them than the fact that I was able to learn that and do it myself. And so, after a while it was working on the computer became kind of a, oh yeah, okay, I can work on the computer, I can do the thing. But if I could turn around and show somebody else how to do that and then watch them explore and you watch that light bulb go off over their head, then it's like, oh, they're going to go do something cool with that. Just the anticipation of how are they going to go use that knowledge, that really stuck with me my whole life. In high school doing little bits of tutoring here and there. I was a paid tutor in college. Once I got out of college and got into the workplace, again, just learning on my own and then turning around and teaching others led into running my own web development business where I was teaching some friends how to do web development because I was taking on so much work that I had to subcontract it the somebody where I wasn't going to meet deadlines and so, I subcontracted them. That meant that I got to pay my friends to help me work this business. And so, that kind of kicked off and then I started learning well, how to servers work and how does the internet work and how do I run an email server on all this stuff? So just never-ending stream of knowledge going on in the internet and then just turning around and sharing that knowledge and keeping that community side of things building up over time. MANDY: Very cool. So in your bio, it said you're streaming now so I'm guessing that's a big part of what you do today with the streaming. So what are you streaming? IAN: So let's see, back in 2014, I started getting involved in mentorship with a local code school here in Denver called The Turing School of Software and Design. It's the 7-month code program and they were looking for someone that could help just mentor students. They were teaching Ruby on Rails at the time. So I got involved with them. I was working in Ruby at SendGrid at the time where I was working, who was later acquired by Twilio. And I'm like, “Yeah, I got some extra time. I can help some people out.” I like giving back and I like the idea of tutoring and teaching. I started that mentorship and it quickly turned into hey, do any of our mentors know anything about resumes and the hiring and interviewing and things like that. And by that point, I had been the lead engineer. I had done hiring. I hired several dozen engineers at SendGrid, or helped hire several dozen people at SendGrid. And I'm like, “Yeah, I've looked at hundreds and thousands of resumes.” Like, “What can I help with?” So I quickly became the career development guy to help them out and over time, the school started developing their career development curriculum and I like to think I had a hand in developing some of that. 3 years later, they're like, “You just want a job here? Like you're helping so many students, you just want to come on staff?” And so, I joined them as an instructor, taught the backend program, had a blast, did that for almost 4 full years. And then when I left Turing in June of 2021, I thought, “Well, I still want to be able to share this knowledge,” and so, I took all these notes that I had been writing and I basically put it all onto a website called techinterview.guide. When I finished teaching, I'm like, “Well, I still miss sharing that knowledge with people,” and I thought, “How else can I get that knowledge out there in a way that is scalable and manageable by one human being?” And I thought, “Well, I'll just kind of see what other people are doing.” Fumbled around on YouTube, watched some YouTube videos, watched people doing livestreaming on LinkedIn, livestreaming on Facebook, livestreaming on YouTube and trying to think could I do that? Nah, I don't know if I could do that. A friend of mine named Jonan Scheffler, he currently works at New Relic, he does a live stream. So I was hanging out on his stream one night and it was just so much fun seeing people interact and chat and how they engage the people in the chat and answering questions for them. I'm like, “I wonder if I could do that.” The curiosity took over from there and you can imagine where that went; went way down some rabbit holes on how to set up a streaming computer. Started streaming and found out that I wasn't very good at audio routing, [chuckles] recording things, and marketing, all that kind of stuff. But I kind of fumbled my way through it and Jonan was very generous with his time to help me straighten some things out and it kind of took off from there. So I thought, “Well, now I've got a platform where I can share this career development advice having been in the industry now for 25 years. Now, I've been director of engineering. I'm currently the director of engineering learning at a company. I've got an education background now as an instructor for several years. I've been doing tons of mentoring.” I love to give back and I love to help other people learn a thing that's going to help improve their life. I think of it like a ripple effect, like I'm not going to go out and change the world, but I can change your world and that ripple effect is going to change somebody else's world and that's going to change somebody else's world. So that's how I see my part in all of this play out. I'm not looking to be the biggest name in anything. I'm just one person with a voice and I'm happy to share my ideas and my perspectives, but I'm also happy to have people on my stream that can share their ideas and perspectives as well. I think it's important to hear a lot of perspectives, especially when it comes to things like job hunt, interview prep, and how to build a resume. You're going to see so much conflicting advice out there like, “This is the way you should do it,” and someone else will be like, “No, this is the way you should do it.” Meanwhile, I'm on the sidelines going, “You can do it all of that way.” Just listen to everybody's advice and figure out how you want to build your resume and then that's your resume. It doesn't have to look like the way I want it, or the way that someone else wants it; it can look how you want it to look. This is just our advice kind of collectively. So the livestream took off from there and I've got only a couple of hundred followers, or so on Twitch, but it's been a lot of fun just engaging with chat and people are submitting questions to me all the time. So I do a lot of Q&A sessions, like ask me anything sessions and it's just been a ton of fun. ARTY: That's awesome. I love the idea of focusing on one person and how you can make a difference in that one person's life and how those differences can ripple outward. That one-on-one connection, I feel like if we try and just broadcast and forget about the individuals, it's easy for the message and stuff to just get lost in ether waves and not actually make that connection with one person. Ultimately, it's all those ones that add up to the many. IAN: Definitely. Yeah. ARTY: So can you tell us a little bit more about the Tech Interview Guide and what your philosophy is regarding tech interviews? IAN: The tech interview process in – well, I mean, just the interview process in general in the tech industry is pretty broken. It lends itself very well to people who come from position and privilege that they can afford expensive universities and have oodles and oodles of free time to go study algorithms for months and months and months to go jump through a whole bunch of hoops for companies that want four, or five, six rounds of interviews to try to determine whether you're the right fit for the company and it's super broken. There are a lot of companies out there that are trying to change things a little bit and I applaud them. It's going to be a tough journey, for sure. Trying to convince companies like hey, this is not working out well for us as candidates trying to apply for jobs. As a company, though I understand because I've been a hiring manager that you need to be able to trust the people that you're hiring. You need to trust that they can actually do the job. Unfortunately, a lot of the tech interview process does not adequately mimic what the day-to-day responsibility of that job is going to be. So the whole philosophy of me doing the Tech Interview Guide is just an education of, “Hey, here's my perspective on what you're likely to face as a technical interview. These are the different stages that you'll typically see.” I have a lot of notes on there about how to build a resume, how to build a cover letter, thoughts on building a really big resume and then how to trim it down to one page to go apply for a particular job. How to write a cover letter that's customized to the business to really position yourself as the best candidate for that role. And then some chapters that I have yet to write are going to be things like how do you negotiate once you get an offer, like what are some negotiation tips. I've shared some of them live on the stream and I've shared a growing amount of information as I learn from other people as well, then I'll turn around and I'll share that on the stream. The content that's actually on the website right now is probably 3, 4 years old, some of it at least and so, I'm constantly going back in and I'm trying to revamp that material a little bit to kind of be as modern as possible. I used to want to go a self-publish route where I actually made a book. Several of my friends have actually gone through the process of actually making a book and getting it published. I'm like, “Oh, I want to do that, too. My friends are doing that. I could do that, too,” and I got looking into it. It's like, okay, it's an expensive, really time-consuming process and by the time I get that book on a shelf somewhere, a lot of the information is going to be out of date because a lot of things in the tech industry change all the time. So I decided I would just self-publish an online book where I can just go in and I can just constantly refresh the information and people can go find whatever my current perspective is by going to the website. And then as part of the website, I also have a daily email series that people can sign up for. I'm about to split it into four mailing lists. But right now, it's a single mailing list where I'm presenting technical questions and behavioral questions that you're likely to get asked as a web developer getting into the business. But I don't spend time in the email telling you how to answer the question; what I do instead is I share from the interviewer's perspective. This is why I'm asking you this question. This is what I hope to hear. This is what's important for me to hear in your answer. Because there's so many resources out there already that are trying to tell you how to craft the perfect answer, where I'm trying to explain this is why this question is important to us in the first place. So I'm taking a little bit different perspective on how I present that information and to date I've sent out, I don't know, something like 80,000 emails over a couple of years to folks that have signed up for that, which has been really tremendous to see. I get a lot of good feedback from that. But again, that information it doesn't always age well and interview processes change. I'm actually going through the process right now in the month of November to rewrite a lot of that information, but then also break out into multiple lists and so, where right now it's kind of a combination of a little bit of technical questions, a little bit of behavioral questions, a little bit of procedural, like what is an interview and so on. Now I'm actually going to break them out into separate lists of this list is all just technical questions and this list is all just behavioral questions and this list is going to be general process and then the process of going through the interview and how to do research and so on. And then the last one is just general questions and answers and a lot of that is stemmed from the questions that people have submitted to me that I answered on the live stream. So it all kind of packages up together. MANDY: That's really cool. I'd like to get into some of the meat of the material that you're putting out here. IAN: Yeah. MANDY: So as far as what are some of the biggest questions that you get on your street? IAN: Probably the most popular question I get—because a lot of the people that come by the stream and find the daily email list are new in the industry and they're trying to find that first job. And so by far, the number one question is, how do I even get a job in the industry right now? I have no experience. I've got some amount of education, whether it's an actual CS degree, or something similar to a CS degree, or they've gone through a bootcamp of some kind. How do I even get that first job? How do I position myself? How do I differentiate myself? How do I even get a phone call from a company? That's a lot of what's broken in the industry. Everybody in the industry right now wants people with experience, or they're saying like, “Oh, this is a “entry-level role,” but you must have 3 to 4 years' experience.” It's like, well, it's not entry level if you're asking for experience; it can't be both. All they're really doing is they're calling it an entry-level role so they don't have to pay you as much. But if they want 3-, or 4-years' experience, then you should be paying somebody who has 3-, or 4-years' experience. So the people writing these job posts are off their rocker a little bit, but that's by far, the number one question I get is how do I even get that first job. Once you get that first job and you get a year, year and a half, 2 years' experience, it's much easier to get that second job, or third job. It's not like oh, I'm going to quit my job today and have a new job tomorrow. But the time to get that next job is usually much, much shorter than getting this first job. I know people that have gone months and months, or nearly a year just constantly trying to apply, getting ghosted, like not getting any contact whatsoever from companies where they're sending in resumes and trying to apply for these jobs. Again, it's just a big indication of what's really broken in our industry that I think could be improved. I think that there's a lot of room for improvement there. MANDY: So what do you tell them? What's your answer for that? How do they get their first job? How do you get your first job? IAN: That's a [chuckles] good question. And I hate to fall back on the it depends answer. It really does depend on the kind of career that you want to have. I tell people often in my coaching that the tech industry is really a choose your own adventure kind of book. Like, once you get that job a little bit better, what you want your next job to be and so, you get to choose. If you get your first job as a QA developer, or you get that first job as a technical writer, or you get that first job doing software development, or you get that first job in dev ops and then decide, you don't want to do that anymore, that's fine. You can position yourself to go get a job doing some other kind of technical job that doesn't have to be what your previous job was. Now, once you have that experience, though recruiters are going to be calling you and saying, “Hey, you had a QA role. I've also got a QA role,” and you just have to stand firm and say, “No, that's not the direction I'm taking my career anymore. I want to head in this direction. So I'm going to apply for a company where they're looking for people with that kind of direction.” It really comes down to how do you show the company what you bring to the company and how you're going to make the company better, how are you going to make the team better, what skill, experience, and background are you bringing to that job. A lot of people, when they apply for the job, they talk about what they don't have. Like, “Oh, I'm an entry level developer,” or “I only went to a bootcamp,” or “I don't know very much about some aspect of development like I don't know, test driven development,” or “I don't really understand object-oriented programming,” or “I don't know anything about Docker, but I want to apply for this job.” Well, now you're highlighting what you don't have and to get that first job, you have to highlight what you do have. So I often tell people on your resume, on your LinkedIn, don't call yourself a junior developer. Don't call yourself an entry level. Don't say you're aspiring to be. You are. You are a developer. If you have studied software development, you can write software, you're a software developer. Make that your own title and let the company figure out what level you are. So just call yourself a developer and start applying for those jobs. The other advice that I tend to give people is you don't have to feel like you meet a 100% of the requirements in any job posts. As a hiring manager, when I read those job posts often, it's like, this is my birthday wish list. I hope I can find this mythical unicorn that has all of these traits [laughter] and skills and characteristics and that person doesn't exist. In fact, if I ever got a resume where they claim to have all that stuff, I would immediately probably throw the resume in the bin because they're probably lying, because either they have all those skills and they're about to hit me up for double the salary, or they're just straight up lying that they really don't have all those skills. As a hiring manager, those are things that we have to discern over time as we're evaluating people and talking with them and so on. But I would say if you meet like 30 to 40% of those skills, you could probably still apply. The challenge then is when you get that phone call, how do you convince them that you're worth taking a shot, that you're worth them taking the risk of hiring you, helping train you up in the skills that you don't have. But on those calls, you still need to present this is what I do bring to the company. I'm bringing energy, I'm bringing passion, and I'm bringing other experience and background and perspectives on things, hopefully from – just increasing the diversity in tech, just as an example. You're coming from a background, or a walk of life that maybe we don't currently have on the team and that's great for us and great for our team because you're going to open our eyes to things that we might not have thought of. So I think apply anyway. If they're asking for a couple of years' experience and you don't have it, apply anyway. If they're asking for programming languages you don't know, apply anyway. The languages you do know, a lot of that skill is going to transfer into a new language anyway. And I think a lot of companies are really missing out on the malleability and how they can shape an entry-level developer into the kind of developer and kind of engineer that they want to have on the team. Now you use that person as an example and say, “Now we've trained them with the process that we want, with the language and the tools that we want. They know the company goals.” We've trained them. We've built them up. We've invested in them and now everybody else we hire, we're going to hold to that standard and say, “If we're going to hire from outside, this is what we want,” and if we hire someone who doesn't have that level of skill, we're going to bring them up to that skill. I think a lot of companies are missing out on that whole aspect of hiring, that is they can take a chance on somebody who's got the people skills and the collaboration skills and that background and the experiences of life and not necessarily the technical skills and just train them on the technical skills. I went on a rant on this on LinkedIn the other day, where I was saying the return on investment. If a company is spending months and months and months trying to hire somebody, that's expensive. You're paying a recruiter, you're paying engineers, you're paying managers to screen all these people, interview all these people, and you're not quite finding that 100% skill match. Well, what if you just hired somebody months ago, spend $5,000 training them on the skills they didn't have, and now you're months ahead of the game. You could have saved yourself so much money so much time. You would have had an engineer on the team now. And I think a lot of companies are kind of missing that point. Sorry, I know I get very soapbox-y on some of the stuff. ARTY: I think it's important just highlighting these dynamics and stuff that are broken in our industry and all of the hoops and challenges that come with trying to get a job. You mentioned a couple of things on the other side of one, is that the interview processes themselves don't align to what it is we actually need skill-wise day-to-day. What are the things that you think are driving the creation of interviews that don't align with the day-to-day stuff? Like what factors are bringing those things so far out of alignment? IAN: That's a great question. I would say I have my suspicions. So don't take this as gospel truth, but from my own perspective, this is what I think. The big, big tech companies out there, like the big FAANG companies, they have a very specific target in mind of the kind of engineers that they want on their team. They have studied very deep data structures and algorithms, the systems thinking and the system design, and all this stuff. Like, they've got that knowledge, they've got that background because those big companies need that level of knowledge for things like scaling to billions of users, highly performant, and resilient systems. Where the typical startup and typical small and mid-sized company, they don't typically need that. But those kinds of companies look at FAANG companies and go, “We want to be like them. Therefore, we must interview like them and we must ask the same questions that they ask.” I think this has this cascading effect where when FAANG companies do interviews in a particular way, we see that again, with this ripple effect idea and we see that ripple down in the industry. Back in the early 2000s, mid 2000s—well, I guess right around the time when Google was getting started—they were asking a lot of really oddball kinds of questions. Like how many golf balls fit in a school bus and those were their interview challenges. It's like, how do you actually go through the calculation of how many golf balls would fit in a school bus and after a while, I think by 2009, they published an article saying, “Yeah, we're going to stop asking those questions. We weren't getting good signals. Everybody's breaking down those problems the same way and it wasn't really helpful.” Well, leading up to that point, everyone else was like, “Oh, those are cool questions. We're going to ask those questions, too,” and then when Google published that paper, everyone else was like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb. We're not going to ask those questions either.” And then they started getting into what we now see as like the LeetCode, HackerRank type of technical challenges being asked within interviews. I think that there's a time and place for some of that, but I think that the types of challenges that they're asking candidates to do should still be aligned with what the company does. One criticism that I've got. For example, I was looking at a technical challenge from one particular company that they asked this one particular problem and it was using a data structure called Heap. It was, find a quantity of location points closest to a target. So you're given a list of latitude, longitude values, and you have to find the five latitude and longitude points that are closest to a target. It's like, okay and so, I'm thinking through the challenge, how would I solve that if I had to solve it? But then I got thinking that company has nothing to do with latitude and longitude. That company has nothing to do with geospatial work of any kind. Why are they even asking that problem? Like, it's so completely misaligned that anybody they interview, that's the first thing that's going to go through their mind as a candidate is like, “Why are they asking me this kind of question?” Like, “This has nothing to do with the job. It had nothing to do with the role. I don't study global positioning and things like that. I know what latitude and longitude are, but I've never done any kind of math to try to figure out what those things would be and how you would detect differences between them.” Like, I could kind of guess with simple math, but unless you've studied that stuff, it's not going to be this, “Oh yeah, sure, no problem. It's this formula, whatever.” We shouldn't have to expect that candidates coming to a business are going to have that a, formula memorized, especially when that's not what your company does. And a lot of companies are like, “Oh, we're got to interview somebody. Quick, go to LeetCode and find a problem to ask them.” All you're going to do is you're going to bias your interview process towards people that have studied those problems on LeetCode and you're not actually going to find people that can actually solve your day-to-day challenges that your company is actually facing. ARTY: And instead, you're selecting for people that are really good at things that you don't even need. [chuckles] It's like, all right! It totally skews who you end up hiring toward people that aren't even necessarily competent in the skills that they actually need day-to-day. Like you mentioned FAANG companies need these particular skills. I don't even think that for resilience, to be able to build these sort of systems, and even on super hardcore systems, it's very seldom that you end up writing algorithmic type code. Usually, most of the things that you deal with in scaling and working with other humans and stuff, it's a function of design and being able to organize things in conceptual ways that make sense so that you can deconstruct a complex, fuzzy problem into little pieces that make sense and can fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. I have a very visual geometric way of thinking, which I find actually is a core ability that makes me good at code because I can imagine it visually laid out and think about the dependencies between things as like tensors between geographically located little code bubbles, if you will. IAN: Sure. ARTY: Being able to think that way, it's fundamentally different than solving algorithm stuff. But that deconstruction capability of just problem breakdown, being able to break down problems, being able to organize things in ways that make sense, being able to communicate those concepts and come up with abstractions that are easy enough for other people on your team to understand, ideally, those are the kinds of engineers we want on the teams. Our interview processes ought to select for those day-to-day skills of things that are the common bread and butter. [chuckles] IAN: I agree. ARTY: What we need to succeed on a day-to-day basis. IAN: Yeah. We need the people skills more than we need the hard technical skills sometimes. I think if our interview process could somehow tap into that and focus more on how do you collaborate, how do you do code reviews, how do you evaluate someone else's code for quality, how do you make the tradeoff between readability and optimization—because those are typically very polarized, opposite ends of the scale—how do you function on a team, or do you prefer to go heads down and just kind of be by yourself and just tackle tasks on your own? I believe that there's a time and place for that, too and there are personality types where you prefer to go heads down and just have peace and quiet and just get your work done and there's nothing wrong with that. But I think if we can somehow tap into the collaborative process as part of the interview, I think it's going to open a lot of companies up to like, “Oh, this person's actually going to be a really great team member. They don't quite have this level of knowledge in database systems that we hope they'd have, but that's fine. We'll just send them on this one-week database training class that happens in a week, or two and now they'll be trained.” [overtalk] MANDY: Do they want to learn? IAN: Right. Do they want to learn? Are they eager to learn? Because if they don't want to learn, then that's a whole other thing, too. But again, that's something that you can screen for. Like, “Tell me what you're learning on the side, or “What kinds of concepts do you want to learn?” Or “In this role, we need you to learn this thing. Is that even of interest to you?” Of course, everyone's going to lie and say, “Yeah,” because they want the paycheck. But I think you can still narrow it down a little bit more what area of training does this person need. So we can just hire good people on the team and now our team is full of good people and collaborative, team-based folks that are willing to work together to solve problems together and then worry about the technical skills as a secondary thing. MANDY: Yeah. I firmly believe anybody can learn anything, if they want to. I mean, that's how I've gotten here. IAN: Yeah, for sure. Same with me. I'm mostly self-taught. I studied computer engineering in college, so I can tell you how all the little microchips in your computer work. I did that for the first 4 years of my career and then I threw all that out the window and I taught myself web development and taught myself how the internet works. And then every job I had, that innate curiosity in me is like, “Oh, I wonder how e-commerce works.” Well, I went and got an e-commerce job, it's like, okay, well now I wonder how education works and I got into the education sector. Now, I wonder how you know this, or that works and so, I got into financial systems and I got into whatever and it just kind of blew my mind. I was like, “Wow, this is how all these things kind of talk to each other,” and that for me was just fascinating, and then turning around and sharing that knowledge with other people. But some people are just very fixed mindset and they want to learn one thing, they want to do that thing, and that's all they know. But I think, like we kind of talked about early in the podcast, you sign up for a career in this industry and you're signing up for lifelong learning. There's no shortage to things that you can go learn, but you have to be willing to do it. MID-ROLL: Rarely does a day pass where a ransomware attack, data breach, or state sponsored espionage hits the news. It's hard to keep up with all this and also to know if you're protected. Don't worry, Kaspersky's got you covered. Each week their team looks at the latest news, stories, and topics you might have missed during the week on the Transatlantic Cable Podcast. Mixing in-depth discussion, expert guests from around the world, a pinch of humor, and all with an easy to consume style - be sure you check them out today. ARTY: What kind of things could we do to potentially influence the way hiring is done and these practices with unicorn skilled searches and just the dysfunctional aspects on the hiring side? Because you're teaching all these tech interview skills for what to expect in the system and how to navigate that and succeed, even though it's broken. But what can we do to influence the broken itself and help improve these things? IAN: That's a great question. Breaking it from the inside out is a good start. I think if we can collectively get enough people together within these, especially the bigger companies and say like, “Hey, collectively, as an industry, we need to do interviewing differently.” And then again, see that ripple effect of oh, well, the FAANG companies are doing it that way so we're going to do it that way, too. But I don't think that's going to be a fast change by any stretch. I think there are always going to be some types of roles where you do have to have a very dedicated, very deep knowledge of system internals and how to optimize things, and pure algorithmic types of thinking. I think those kinds of jobs are always going to be out there and so, there's no fully getting away from something like a LeetCode challenge style interview. But I think that for a lot of small, mid-sized, even some large-sized companies, they don't have to do interviewing that way. But I think we can all stand on our soapbox and yell and scream, “Do it differently, do it differently,” and it's not going to make any impact at all because those companies are watching other companies for how they're doing it. So I think gradually, over time, we can just start to do things differently within our own company. And I think for example, if the company that I was working at, if we completely overhauled our interview process that even if we don't hire somebody, if someone can walk away from that going, “Wow, that was a cool interview experience. I've got to tell my friends about this.” That's the experience that we want when you walk away from the company if we don't end up hiring. If we hire you, it's great. But even if we don't hire you, I want to make sure that you've still got a really cool interview experience that you enjoyed the process, that it didn't just feel like another, “Okay, well, I could have just grind on LeetCode for three months to get through that interview.” I don't ever want my interviews to feel like that. So I think as more of us come to this understanding of it's okay to do it differently and then collectively start talking about how could we do it differently—and there are companies out there that are doing it differently, by the way. I'm not saying everyone in the industry is doing all these LeetCode style interviews. There are definitely companies out there that are doing things differently and I applaud them for doing that. And I think as awful as it was to have the pandemic shut everything down to early 2020, where no hiring happened, or not a lot of hiring happened over the summer, it did give a lot of companies pause and go, “Well, hey, since we're not hiring, since we got nobody in the backlog, let's examine this whole interview process and let's see if this is really what we want as a company.” And some companies did. They took the time, they took several months and they were like, “You know what, let's burn this whole thing down and start over” as far as their interview process goes. Some of them completely reinvented what their interview process was and turned it into a really great process for candidates to go through. So even if they don't get the job, they still walk away going, “Wow, that was neat.” I think if enough of us start doing that to where candidates then can say, “You know what, I would really prefer not to go through five, or six rounds of interviews” because that's tiring and knowing that what you're kind of what you're in for, with all the LeetCode problems and panel after panel after panel. Like, nobody wants to sit through that. I think if enough candidates stand up for themselves and say, “You know what, I'm looking for a company that has an easier process. So I'm not even going to bother applying.” I think there are enough companies out there that are desperately trying to hire that if they start getting the feedback of like you know what, people don't want to interview with us because our process is lousy. They're going to change the process, but it's going to take time. Unfortunately, it's going to drag out because companies can be stubborn and candidates are also going to be stubborn and it's not going to change quickly. But I think as companies take the step to change their process and enough candidates also step up to say, “Nah, you know what, I was going to apply there,” or “Maybe I got through the first couple of rounds, but you're telling me there's like three more rounds to go through? Nah, I'm not going to bother.” Companies are now starting to see candidates ghost them and walk away from the interview process because they just don't want to be bothered. I think that's a good signal for a company to take a step back and go, “Okay, we need to change our process to make it better so the people do want to apply and enjoy that interview process as they come through.” But it's going to take a while to get there. ARTY: Makes me think about we were talking early on about open source and the power of open source. I wonder with this particular challenge, if you set up a open source hiring manifesto, perhaps of we're going to collaborate on figuring out how to make hiring better. Well, what does that mean? What is it we're aiming for? We took some time to actually clarify these are the things we ought to be aiming for with our hiring process and those are hard problems to figure out. How do we create this alignment between what it is we need to be able to do to be successful day-to-day versus what it is we're selecting for with our interview process? Those things are totally out of whack. I think we're at a point, at least in our industry, where it's generally accepted that how we do interviewing and hiring in these broken things—I think it's generally accepted that it's broken—so that perhaps it's actually a good opportunity right now to start an initiative like that, where we can start collaborating and putting our knowledge together on how we ought to go about doing things better. Even just by starting something, building a community around it, getting some companies together that are working on trying to improve their own hiring processes and learning together and willing to share their knowledge about things that are working better, such that everybody in the industry ultimately benefits from us getting better at these kinds of things. As you said, being able to have an interview process that even if you don't get the job, it's not a miserable experience for everyone involved. [chuckles] Like there's no reason for that. IAN: Yeah. MANDY: That's how we – I mean, what you just explained, Arty isn't that how we got code of conducts? Everybody's sitting down and being like, “Okay, this is broken. Conferences are broken. What are we going to all do together?” So now why don't we just do the same thing? I really like that idea of starting an open source initiative on interviewing. Like have these big FAANG companies be like, “I had a really great interview with such and such company.” Well, then it all spirals from there. I think that's super, super exciting. ARTY: Yeah. And what is it that made this experience great? You could just have people analyze their interview experiences that they did have, describe well, what are the things that made this great, that made this work and likewise, you could collect anti-patterns. Some of the things that you talked about of like, are we interviewing for geolocation skills when that actually has absolutely nothing to do with our business? We could collect these things as these funky anti-patterns of things so that people could recognize those things easier in there because it's always hard to see yourself. It's hard to see yourself swinging. IAN: An interesting idea along those lines is what if companies said like, “Hey, we want the community to help us fix our interview process. This is who we are, this is what our business does. What kinds of questions do you think we should be asking?” And I think that the community would definitely rally behind that and go, “Oh, well, you're an e-commerce platform so you should be asking people about shopping cart implementations and data security around credit cards and have the interview process be about what the company actually does.” I think that that would be an interesting thing to ask the community like, “What do you think we should be asking in these interviews?” Not that you're going to turn around and go, “Okay, that's exactly what we're going to do,” but I think it'll give a lot of companies ideas on yeah, okay, maybe we could do a take-home assignment where you build a little shopping cart and you submit that to us. We'll evaluate how you did, or what you changed, or we're going to give you some code to start with and we're going to ask you to fix a bug in it, or something like, I think that there's a bigger movement now, especially here in Canada, in the US of doing take-home assignments. But I think at the same time, there are pros and cons of doing take-home assignments versus the on-site technical challenges. But what if we gave the candidate a choice as part of that interview process, too and say, “Hey, cool. We want to interview you. Let's get through the phone screen and now that you've done the phone screen, we want to give you the option of, do you want to do a small take-home assignment and then do a couple of on-site technical challenges? Do you want to do a larger take-home and maybe fewer on-site technical challenges?” I think there's always going to be some level of “Okay, we need to see you code in front of us to really make sure that you're the one that wrote that code.” I got burned on that back in 2012 where I thought somebody wrote some code and they didn't. They had a friend write it as their take-home assignment and so, I brought them in for the interview and I'm like, “Cool, I want you to fix this bug,” and they had no idea what to do. They hadn't even looked at the code that their friend wrote for them it's like, why would you do that? So I think that there's always going to be some amount of risk and trust that needs to take place between the candidates and the companies. But then on the flip side of that, if it doesn't work out, I really wish companies would be better about giving feedback to people instead of just ghosting them, or like, “Oh, you didn't and pass that round. So we're just not even going to call you back and tell you no. We're just not ever just going to call.” The whole ghosting thing is, by far, the number one complaint in the tech industry right now is like, “I applied and I didn't even get a thanks for your resume. I got nothing,” or maybe you get some automated reply going, “We'll keep you in mind if you're a match for something.” But again, those apple looking at tracking systems are biased because the developers building them and the people reading the resumes are going to have their own inherent bias in the search terms and the things that they're looking for and so on. So there's bias all over the place that's going to be really hard to get rid of. But I think if companies were to take a first step and say like, “Okay, we're going to talk to the community about what they would like to see the interview process be,” and start having more of those conversations. And then I think as we see companies step up and make those changes, those are going to be the kinds of companies where people are going to rally behind them and go, “I really want to work there because that interview process is pretty cool.” And that means the company is – well, it doesn't guarantee the company's going to be cool, but it shows that they care about the people that are going to work there. If people know that the company is going to care about you as an employee, you're far more likely to want to work there. You're far more likely to be loyal and stay there for a long term as opposed to like oh, I just need to collect a paycheck for a year to get a little bit of experience and then job hop and go get a better title, better pay. So I think it can come down to company loyalty and stuff, too. MANDY: Yeah. Word of mouth travels fast in this industry. IAN: Absolutely. MANDY: And to bring up the code of conduct thing and now people are saying, “If straight up this conference doesn't have a code of conduct, I'm not going.” IAN: Yeah. I agree. It'll be interesting to see how something like this tech interview overhaul open source idea could pick up momentum and what kinds of companies would get behind it and go, “Hey, we think our interview process is pretty good already, but we're still going to be a part of this and watch other companies step up to.” When I talked earlier about that ripple effect where Google, for example, stopped asking how many golf balls fit in a school bus kind of thing and everyone else is like, “Yeah, those questions are dumb.” We actually saw this summer, Facebook and Amazon publicly say, “We're no longer going to ask dynamic programming problems in our interviews.” It's going to be interesting to see how long that takes to ripple out into the industry and go, “Yeah, we're not going to ask DP problems either,” because again, people want to be those big companies. They want to be billion- and trillion-dollar companies, too and so, they think they have to do everything the same way and that's not always the case. But there's also something broken in the system, too with hiring. It's not just the interview process itself, but it's also just the lack of training. I've been guilty of this myself, where I've got an interview with somebody and I've got back-to-back meetings. So I just pull someone on my team and be like, “Hey, Arty, can you come interview this person?” And you're like, “I've never interviewed before. I guess, I'll go to LeetCode and find a problem to give them.” You're walking in there just as nervous as the candidate is and you're just throwing some technical challenge at them, or you're giving them the technical challenge that you've done most recently, because you know the answer to it and you're like, “Okay, well, I guess they did all right on it. They passed,” or “I think they didn't do well.” But then companies aren't giving that feedback to people either. There's this thinking in the industry of oh, if we give them feedback, they're going to sue us and they're going to say it's discriminatory and they're going to sue us. Aline Lerner from interviewing.io did some research with her team and literally nobody in recent memory has been sued for giving feedback to candidates. If anything, I think that it would build trust between companies and the candidates to say, “Hey, this is what you did. Well, this is what we thought you did okay on. We weren't happy with the performance of the code that you wrote so we're not moving forward,” and now you know exactly what to go improve. I was talking to somebody who was interviewing at Amazon lately and they said, “Yeah, the recruiter at Amazon said that I would go through all these steps,” and they had like five, or six interviews, or something to go through. And they're like, “Yeah, and they told me at the end of it, we're not going to give you any feedback, but we will give you a yes, or no.” It's like so if I get a no, I don't even find out what I didn't do well. I don't know anything about how to improve to want to go apply there in the future. You're just going to tell me no and not tell me why? Why would I want to reapply there in the future if you're not going to tell me how I'm going to get better? I'm just going to do the same thing again and again. I'm going to be that little toy that just bangs into the wall and doesn't learn to steer away from the wall and go in a different direction. If you're not going to give me any feedback, I'm just going to keep banging my head against this wall of trying to apply for a job and you're not telling me why I'm not getting it. It's not helpful to the candidate and that's not helpful to the industry either. It starts affecting mental health and it starts affecting other things and I think it erodes a lot of trust between companies and candidates as well. ARTY: Yeah. The experience of just going through trying to get a job and going through the rejection, it's an emotional experience, an emotionally challenging experience. Of all things that affect our feels a lot, it's like that feeling of social rejection. So being able to have just healthier relationships and figuring out how to see another person as a human, help figure out how you can help guide and support them continuing on their journey so that the experience of the interview doesn't hurt so much even when the relationship doesn't work out, if we could get better at those kinds of things. There's all these things that if we got better at, it would help everybody. IAN: I agree. ARTY: And I think that's why a open source initiative kind of thing maybe make sense because this is one of those areas that if we got better at this as an industry, it would help everybody. It's worth putting time in to learn and figure out how we can do better and if we all get better at it and stuff, there's just so many benefits and stuff from getting better at doing this. Another thing I was thinking about. You were mentioning the language thing of how easy it is to map skills that we learned from one language over to another language, such that even if you don't know the language that they're coding in at a particular job, you should apply anyway. [chuckles] I wonder if we had some data around how long it takes somebody to ramp up on a new language when they already know similar-ish languages. If we had data points on those sort of things that we're like, “Okay, well, how long did it actually take you?” Because of the absence of that information, people just assume well, the only way we can move forward is if we have the unicorn skills. Maybe if it became common knowledge, that it really only takes say, a couple months to become relatively proficient so that you can be productive on the team in another language that you've never worked in before. Maybe if that was a common knowledge thing, that people wouldn't worry about it so much, that you wouldn't see these unicorn recruiting efforts and stuff. People would be more inclined to look for more multipurpose general software engineering kinds of skills that map to whatever language that you're are doing. That people will feel more comfortable applying to jobs and going, “Oh, cool. I get the opportunity to learn a new language! So I know that I may be struggling a bit for a couple months with this, but I know I'll get it and then I can feel confident knowing that it's okay to learn my way through those things.” I feel if maybe we just started collecting some data points around ramp up time on those kind of things, put a database together to collect people's experiences around certain kind of things, that maybe those kinds of things would help everyone to just make better decisions that weren't so goofy and out of alignment with reality. IAN: Yeah, and there are lots of cheat sheets out there like, I'm trying to remember the name of it. I used to have it bookmarked. But you could literally pull up two programming languages side by side in the same browser window and see oh, if this is how you do it in JavaScript, this is how you do it on Python, or if this is how you write this code in C++, here's how you do it in Java. It gives you a one-to-one correlation for dozens, or hundreds of different kinds of blocks of code. That's really all you need to get started and like you said, it will take time to come proficient to where you don't have to have that thing up on your screen all the time. But at the same time, I think the company could invest and say, “You know what, take a week and just pour everything you've got into learning C Sharp because that's the skill we want you to have for this job.” It's like, okay, if you are telling me you trust me and you're making me the job offer and you're going to pay me this salary and I get to work in tech, but I don't happen to have that skill, but you're willing to me in that skill, why would I not take that job? You're going to help me learn and grow. You're offering me that job with a salary. Those are all great signals to send. Again, I think that a lot of companies are missing out and they're like, “No, we're not going to hire that person. We're just going to hold out until we find the next person that's a little bit better.” I think that that's where some things really drop off in the process, for sure is companies hold out too long and next thing they know, months have gone by and they've wasted tons of money when they could have just hired somebody a long time ago and just trained them. I think the idea of an open source collective on something like this is pretty interesting. At the same time, it would be a little subjective on “how quickly could someone ramp up on a, or onboard on a particular technology.” Because everybody has different learning styles and unless you're finding somebody to curate – like if you're a Ruby programmer and you're trying to learn Python, this is the de facto resource that you need to look at. I think it could be a little bit subjective, but I think that there's still some opportunity there to get community input on what should the interview process be? How long should it really be? How many rounds of interviews should there be from, both the candidates experience as well as the company experience and say, as a business, this is why we have you doing these kinds of things. That's really what I've been to teach as part of the Tech Interview Guide and the daily email series is from my perspective in the business, this is why. This is why I have you do a certain number of rounds, or this is why I give you this kind of technical challenge, or this is why I'm asking you this kind of question. Because I'm trying to find these signals about you that tell me that you're someone that I can trust to bring on my team. It's a tough system when not many people are willing to talk about it because I think a lot of people are worried that others are going to try to game the system and go, “Oh, well, now that I know everything about your interview process, I know how to cheat my way through it and now you're going to give me that job and I really don't know what I'm doing.” But I think that at the same time, companies can also have the higher, slow fire, fast mentality of like, “All right, you're not cutting it.” Like you're out right away and just rehire for that position. Again, if you're willing to trust and willing to extend that offer to begin with. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. It's a business decision; it's not a personal thing. But it's still devastating to the person when they don't get the job, or if they get fired right away because they're not pulling their weight, but if they're cheating their way through it, then they get what they deserve to. MANDY: Awesome. Well, I think that's a great place to put a pin in this discussion. It is definitely not a great place to end it. I think we should head over to our reflection segment. For me, there were so many things I wrote down. I loved that you said that people's tech journey is like a choose your own adventure. You can learn one thing and then find yourself over here and then the next thing you know, you find yourself over here. But you've picked up all these skills along the way and that's the most important thing is that as you go along this journey, you keep acquiring these skills that ultimately will make you the best programmer that you can be. Also, I really like that you also said something about it being a lifelong learning. Tech is lifelong learning and not just the technical skills. It's the people skills. It's the behavioral skills. Those are the important skills. Those skills are what ultimately it comes down to being in this industry is, do you have the desire to learn? Do you have the desire to grow? I think that should be one of the most important things that companies are aware of when they are talking to candidates that it's not about can this person do a Fibonacci sequence. It's can they learn, are they a capable person? Are they going to show up? Are they going to be a good person to have in the office? Are they going to be a light? Are they going to be supportive? Are they going to be caring? That's the ultimate. That right there for me is the ultimate and thank you for all that insight. ARTY: Well, I really, really loved your story, Ian at the very beginning of just curiosity and how you started your journey, getting into programming and then ended up finding ways to give back and getting really excited about seeing people's light bulbs go off and how much joy you got from those experiences, connecting with another individual and making that happen. I know we've gotten on this long tangent of pretty abstract, big topics of just like, here's the brokenness in the industry and what are some strategies that we can solve these large-scale problems. But I think you said some really important things back of just the importance of these one-on-one connections and the real change happens in the context of a relationship. Although, we're thinking about these big things. To actually make those changes, to actually make that difference, it happens in our local context. It happens in our companies. It happens with the people that we interact with on a one-on-one basis and have a genuine relationship with. If we want to create change, it happens with those little ripples. It happens with affecting that one relationship and that person going and having their own ripple effects. We all have the power to influence these things through the relationships with the individuals around us. IAN: I think my big takeaway here is we have been chatting for an hour and just how easy it is to have conversation about hey, what if we did this? How quickly it can just turn into hey, as a community, what if? And just the willingness of people being in the community, wanting to make the community better,
TWIRT this week in rec tech Stride Health, the leader in portable benefits for independent workers, announced that it has raised a $47 million Series C, bringing its total funding to $96M. The round was led by King River Capital with participation from Mastercard and Allstate along with existing investors Venrock, NEA, Fidelity's F-Prime Capital, and Moderne Ventures. https://hrtechfeed.com/stride-raises-47m-to-provide-affordable-benefits-for-independent-workers/ Upwork has announced Virtual Talent Bench, a series of features that makes relationship building central to the customer experience on Upwork by empowering clients to discover, organize, revisit and hire the independent talent they trust, collaborated with to drive successful outcomes or want to work with in the future. Virtual Talent Bench features enable clients to establish a network of top independent professionals they can work with time and time again on their most critical projects or to complement skill sets on their full-time teams. https://hrtechfeed.com/upwork-introduces-virtual-talent-bench/ GoodTime, the leading AI-based hiring experience solution, with clients such as Box, Shopify, and Zoom, has added enhanced interviewer training functionality to its features set to remove bottlenecks, reduce time-to-hire, and ensure a great candidate experience, no matter who conducts the interview. https://hrtechfeed.com/goodtime-adds-enhanced-interviewer-training-functionality/ HackerRank, the developer skills company, today announced a record-breaking quarter fueled by increasing demand to recruit and hire tech talent virtually. The company reported its highest-ever level of new and expansion bookings — seeing a 100% increase in expansion revenue alone over the past year — as companies accelerate their remote hiring efforts due to broader shifts in the labor market. https://hrtechfeed.com/hackertanks-says-remote-tech-hiring-still-surging/ Ladder, the next-gen professional community platform, announced the launch of its new mobile app and raise of $3.7 million in funding from Forerunner Ventures, On Ladder, members can join professional communities, consume high-quality career content, engage in fun discussions, land their dream job, and form meaningful relationships with peers and mentors. The platform aims to become the go-to professional social network for Gen Z. Ladder was founded in 2020, during the height of COVID-19, when millions of college students across the country were sent home with no job lined up, no idea what remote work meant, and no sense of community. https://hrtechfeed.com/professional-community-platform-ladder-announces-3-7-million-in-funding/
This week we have storytelling about HackerRank with Vivek Ravisankar. During this episode, Vivek and I talk about how practitioners make the business case or the use case for purchasing HackerRank.Vivek is an expert in all things recruiting and tech. His passion for transforming the hiring process to be based on skills over pedigree really comes through during the podcast.
Iceland declared its 4-day workweek experiment a resounding success. With New Zealand, Germany, Spain, and the UK looking to follow suit is a compressed workweek the new norm? TheSoul Publishing is attempting to abolish emails and meetings thereby entering territory no organization has ventured into before and Adam Grant finally put a word on how we've been feeling for a while now. Join Ankita as she discusses these topics with her two favorite people from the world of HR - Aadil Bandukwala, Senior Director of Marketing at HackerRank, and Atma Godara, Production HR Generalist for Netflix.
On this episode of The Shape of Work podcast, we hosted Aadil Bandukwala, ranked among ‘India's Top 20 Most Influential People in Human Resources'. In addition to being the Senior Director of Marketing at HackerRank, Aadil is the author of 'Outbound Hiring: How Innovative Companies are Winning the Global War for Talent.'Aadil goes beyond traditional recruiting concepts to craft narratives that reshape the candidate's journey. Having worked as a Talent Acquisition Advisor for years, he talks about evangelizing talent by bringing stories from his experiences.We picked his brain to know about the role of analytics in recruitment, and other significant concepts in hiring such as inbound and outbound hiring, zero waste recruitment, building candidate journey maps, and the power of empathy.EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:How to ensure the success of a hiring process?Aadil takes us through methods of hiring- inbound and outbound. Inbound hiring is the process of posting jobs and then waiting for people to apply. According to him, this process turns out to be a failure. A company might receive plenty of leads, but they will churn out eventually. Instead, as Aadil mentions, companies should go for an outbound hiring process. They should find out the leads and approach them. It is a targeted approach where personalized talent acquisition and business efforts merge to hire people who will succeed in a company.This process is similar to the method of outbound sales. In order to achieve good results:Companies need to treat candidates like customers. They need to ensure a good candidate experience for them.Recruiting should be aligned with the nuances of the business. More often, the HR team does not align with the views of the business team. Their version of the candidate and feedback is very different from each other.Building a candidate journey map for a better candidate experience:Aadil explains how the Sales and Marketing team of a company curates the ideal experience for a customer. New product managers build a user journey when they startup. It helps them understand problems the customers might face with the products with the customers and its solution. However, one cannot find such an attempt made for the candidates.It is necessary to help recruiters help go through the candidate journey. They need to understand the entire emotional journey of the candidates.Tips on employer branding and employee experience to startups:Candidate experience is not a one-time activity. It needs to be effective in every step of the hiring and the post-hiring process. The problem arises when the candidates switch jobs within a few months. Thus the company must figure out ways to retain them. They need to be delighted in every step of their career journey. It is also about relaying the brand story, the technical statistics, stories of your employees, etc., to the customers. The candidate needs to know the benefits and growth they can receive by applying to this company. Lack of this clarity leads to an increase in job switching.Follow Aadil on LinkedInProduced by: Priya BhattPodcast host: Yashwanth JembigeBONUS: Interested to know more about advanced recruitment? Get the answers to all your questions in our recent article: The role of data and tech advancements in ensuring hiring success.
Welcome back to the MicroAdvice Podcast. Thanks so much for watching and please subscribe to stay informed of more CX leading practices!Today, our spotlight topic is on the role of the Chief Customer Officer (CCO). We'll deep dive into this role, and discuss the considerations for hiring the right skills for this position to achieve the best outcomes. To better understand this concept, we're here with Debra Squyres, Chief Customer Officer of HackerRank (https://www.hackerrank.com/).In this video, you will hear Debra and I discuss the following practices:1.) A day-in-the-life of a CCO, and how this role is invaluable to a growing a business.2.) Deep dive into leading practices on informing customer strategy versus strategy execution and integrating various teams/divisions of the company around the customers' needs. 3.) Balancing strategy development/execution with resolving day-to-day customer challenges.4.) Core skills that help make a CCO successful. 5.) Understanding the right stage of a company's journey to hire a CCO.6.) How to empower the various teams to deliver a consistently great CX across all of your customers.7.) Specific examples of how to deliver a strong customer experience. If you have ideas for Podcast episodes, please email info@microadvisers.com or join me on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimbuscaglio).Stay connected to leading #CX practices at https://www.microadvisers.comSubscribe to the the MicroAdvice Podcast on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/6bT3xk3dKS5uQYXeVc1i0w-OR-Listen to MicroAdvice on iTunes at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/microadvice-podcast/id1536424275YouTube Link:https://youtu.be/xpAnCkJYph0#Customersuccess #CX #Customer #Customerexperience #customersupport #SaaS #startup #growth #revenue #PM #HackerRank #AI #Cloud #ROI #returnoninvestment #VOC #voiceofthecustomer #microadvisers #developers
This week we welcome Vivek Ravisankar, CEO of HackerRank, to the podcast. Vivek co-founded HackerRank in 2012 with the mission of using skills assessments to match developers with the right jobs. Since then, the company has helped more than 2,000 organizations go beyond résumés and ‘pedigree' to find talent with proven programming skills. Topics include: the advantages and limitations of using résumés in hiring for technical roles, the issues with relying on educational or career ‘pedigrees' as proxies for technical skill, the biases introduced when screening based on measures like GPA, why software development has been one of the last fields to “digitize” its screening processes, the role of emotions in making hiring decisions, the hidden costs of communication when hiring a remote workforce, the meaning of culture and the implications for remote workforces, the necessary ingredients for creating a thriving tech eco-system, how a city's “vibe” dictates which industries will thrive there, the attrition problem facing engineering departments, and the ways in which technology can enable career development within an organization.
Vivek Ravisankar is the CEO and co-founder of HackerRank, a company that is on a mission to match every developer to the right job based on skills, not pedigree. The company has raised $60 million from investors like SV Angel, Khosla Ventures, Battery Ventures, JMI Equity, and ZenShin Capital.
Guest: Nicolas Draca - Chief Marketing Officer @HackerRank (Formerly @Twilio, @LinkedIn, @Infoblox) Guest Background: Nicolas Draca has over 20 years of experience in sales and marketing. He is currently the CMO at HackerRank. Prior to HackerRank, he was the Vice President of Marketing at Twilio. Prior to Twilio, Nicolas spent five years at LinkedIn, holding the position of senior director, global marketing operations. Before LinkedIn, in 2004, he co-founded Ipanto and served the same company as the chief marketing officer. Ipanto was acquired by Infoblox in 2007, where he spent another 3 years as a Director, building their Demand Marketing function globally. Nicolas holds a master's degree from ICN Business School, France. He is also an advisor and early investor in several startups and incubators (like Y Combinator). Guest Links: LinkedIn Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - The Science of Marketing Playbook - 4 Pillars (Talent, Insights, Operations, and Lifecycle) - The Formula for Hiring, Onboarding, and Developing Successful Marketing Teams - Critical Alignment w/ Your Manager and Stakeholders: What is your job? - Data and Measurement - Moving from Data to Intelligence - The Account-Based Marketing Method Full Interview Transcript: Naber: Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to The Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest growing companies. Enjoy! Naber: Hey everybody. Today we have Nicolas Draca on the show. Nicolas has over 20 years of experience in Sales and Marketing. He is currently the Chief Marketing Officer at HackerRank, who have raised $58 million in capital. Prior to HackerRank. He was the Vice President of Marketing at Twilio. Twilio IPO's back in 2016, and they currently have a $17 billion valuation. Prior to Twilio, Nicolas spent five years at LinkedIn holding the position of Senior Director of Global Marketing Operations. LinkedIn IPO'd back in 2011, and they were acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $27 billion. Before LinkedIn. In 2004, he co-founded Ipanto and served the same company as the Chief Marketing Officer. Ipanto was acquired eventually by Infoblox in 2007, where he spent another three years as a Director building their Demand Marketing function globally. Nicolas holds a Master's Degree from ICM Business School in France. He is also an advisor and early stage investor in several startups and incubators like Y Combinator. Here we go. Naber: Nicolas, awesome to have you on the show. How are you? Nicolas Draca: I'm doing fantastic. Thank you for having me. Naber: Yes, I'm so glad to have you. Hearing your French accent makes me think about the French holiday I just had, the French holiday that you just had, in addition to being in Greece and having all the amazing food. I am so excited to have you on. I've learned a lot from you in a short space of time when we've worked together in the past. Gotten to know you a little bit personally. Many of the people I've worked with have gotten to know you personally and professionally, and there's just so many good things to say about you, as a person and as a professional operator. So I'm more than excited for the audience to hear what you have to say. So why don't we jump in? What I think we'll do is, we'll get into some of the professional jumps that you've had through your career, talk about your career, as well as a bunch of the frameworks, the mindset you have, some of the methods that you've gone through and used in your playbook, if you will. But first, I think it'd be helpful, if it's okay with you, is to start to get to know you a little bit personally so that they can build up the same fascination as I have with you as an individual, and maybe we'll start back in the day, if you will. Maybe, we'll start in your childhood. So why don't we start with...I mean, you grew up in France, you were based in Strasbourg, you were born in Strabourg and grew up there, you were based in Frankfurt, then Strasbourg again, San Francisco, you've got so many global experiences. What was it like as a kid growing up as Nicolas Draca? And what are some of the things you're interested in? Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So I grew up in France, in Strasbourg - border with Germany - East. And what was it to be Nicolas Draca? Well, I would say not much, pretty shy kid. Just following my friends wherever they would go. I was not the leader, that's for sure. I was average in every single sport. I was okay with it, no ego there. It's just, like, anything I would play, I was just average. I think that summaries what it was when I was young. I think school, I was average. Sport, I was average. I think great friends. I lived in the countryside. So after school, I was more about going outside, playing in the forest, playing with my bike. And that was my life as a young kid. Naber: Very cool. And what were some of your hobbies, your interests as you were growing up? Nicolas Draca: It was being outside, and I think this is still the case today. We lived in a small village. There were like 200 people, in my class were nine, on my level. Being with friends, outside, playing whatever, playing soccer, running around, jumping on our bike, whatever you can imagine. Naber: Very cool. Very cool. And as you're going through high school, were there certain subjects or anything you acceled at where you thought at a young age, you were pretty good at it naturally? Nicolas Draca: Yeah. I specialized pretty quickly in math and physics. I have boys. I was a boy. I was just going with the flow. I'm just no big plan, no ambition, no nothing. To be fair, ,when I talk to friends today, and they look like where I am today, they struggled to connect between what I was when I was young, and what I do today. Like, really? That's what you've done and that's who you are. So yeah, just I go back to that just an average kid. Naber: It's funny, I'm laughing so much, and I have to hold it in because of the microphone, but I'm laughing. That's really interesting...What did your parents do for a living? Nicolas Draca: My father was a Sales guy, and my mother was a teacher. And then my father moved from Sales in consulting to building his own company. Actually he created two companies, two startups. Naber: Wow. So that was in your genesY Nicolas Draca: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Part of the education was you started in a job early, starting when you're 16 - it's like, first job, same for my sister, I have one sister. And you're going to have to work. Yeah, that was in our genes, that's for sure. Naber: Very interesting. And what was the first thing you did to make money? Nicolas Draca: The first thing I did to make money was to work in a restaurant as a waiter. And then the second thing, I ended up driving ambulance. Naber: Whoa. Nicolas Draca: Yeah. That was my summer job. So this was when I was 18, you'll can only drive in France when you're 18. That was something really unique, learned a ton from it, specifically on the people side. And I think if I didn't have started computer science at that time, maybe I would have moved into being a doctor or something in the medicine field. Naber: Wow. What were some of the things that you learned? You're probably about to say that. Nicolas Draca: Yeah. Wow. So when you drive when you drive an ambulance, you drive people from home to the hospital, or you drive them back. So quite quickly you understand and you see where they live, and you see all type of people, all social aspects of it. And so that was one part of it, which when you're young, I was like 18, 19, that's just wow, it was pretty surprise, I'd say. The other thing is, we will also doing ER type of thing, I don't know how we say it in English, but like we would go...there are car accidents, and we would go there and pick up the people. And yeah, we did a couple of ones where...once we went for somebody who committed suicide to pick 'em up. Naber: Wow. Nicolas Draca: so it's a, I mean a, you guys can go a little bit on it to give you an idea, but the, you arrive there and the person tried to, cut is they yeah. And yeah, but, but survived it. And so it was really a weird kind of set up because you arrived, you don't know the person, so you're completely disconnected. whereas there's a lot of drama going on around the seminary. You come here and you just try to do your job and then you have those weird part of the story where actually, which we have to do is to chase a cat with trying to leak the blog. We're story, but we ended up running in the k frame to chase that cat was trying to lead all the blog. yeah. Yeah. It's just kind of weird setup slash weird experience and we had many of those, which I'm not sure I want to share. Naber: Oh Wow. That's an amazing short story. You walked into a storm on a bottle and you have to write into the bottle every single time. Yeah. Yup, Yup, Yep, Yup, Yup. Wow. That is, that's probably the most interesting answer I've gotten to that question. That's a really good answer. Nicolas Draca: It says a, it was a unique experience actually. I a I still remember that, that job and I think I got lucky to get that job for a couple of months, a few years. And yeah. Do you find a lot? I think where I am today. Naber: Very cool. Wow. You always learned something really interesting about somebody. You have these types of conversations, so you're in Strasburg, driving ambulances, working at restaurants, being, being, being, being a average, probably not average. You're probably overselling the average part of it. But, so then you're making decisions about where you want to go to school for university. how, what's the decision you make at that point? And tell us, walk us through, your decision around school. After, after high school Nicolas Draca: I started, I had the chance of a started coding when I was young, like 11 year old. I'm 46 today, so 11 mean like in 84. at that time, you do not have access to computer, but we were lucky that intermediate school, we had computer. I think there was somebody who was passionate about it, was able to get a couple of computer for us. And so I'd have passion for it. Then decided quickly to move into computer science. I'm a major, and then got my bachelor in computer science. And then, my idea was you're going to find this weird, I wanted to work in a golf. I played golf. I loved it. I taught my other job, my third job on the weekend. And super weird. So I interviewed for a golf school, to be in management. And at the same time I interview for interview for a business school, meaning to go through the process to be accepted and went for business school and went from my business school aftermy computer degree, the master in business and then, took my first job. Naber: Wow. Not In the Gulf company. Nicolas Draca: no, not a in a golf company. I still, I don't play actually anymore. but at that age, I don't know. And my parents were highly supportive. They're hey, you want to go? Even though you graduated for computer science, who went to be in the gold business? Go for it. so I had the oldest support up to me to make some decision, super happy about what happened. Naber: Nice. Cool. I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to compete with you on the links. I'm sure that you're much better than you're saying you right now. So let that, does that get us to GE Capital? Is that the first role out of school? Nicolas Draca: Yeah. Out of school. My first job was, a Sales guy at GE Capital. And here I was selling infrastructure, so laptop, desktop servers, printers applications, for a large company in the east of France. So that's what my first job and that's where I met. I started the same day somebody called a Duchenne. Why cool. Founded a pencil, later on with Naber: very cool. And so you were up, that's really interesting story. I'm sure we'll get to that in a second also. And you were obviously quite technical walking into that role. Was that really helpful walking in as with the quite technical mind to get into an account management slash Sales role at GE Capital and for it solutions? Nicolas Draca: Yeah, it was, it was a, it wasn't nice to have actually two is not that complex. A, it was a new laptop computer, right? Yeah. To have a passion for it. So I had a passion for it, but not treating immediate at that stage. like here was really hardcore Sales. It was my first job, in back in the day you would start, there was no internet then I'm going to speak like an old guy. So actually you had the yellow pages. That's what I remember. And I was pretty shy. Like you have to remember that the, why am I in trail? Good question. and on a on day one, I get the yellow pages, which is not the best way to onboard somebody and say, hey, good luck and go and try to sell. And I had the number of to deliver on. Nicolas Draca: the story is as well as the on friends factors actually what is happening in inferences. Sometimes they do a writing test where they analyze how you write. I think it tell them that country, I'm not sure. Yeah. Long Story Short, I started day one and then my boss come to see me and saying, hey, they just finished on an icing your the way you're right and we cannot keep you because more or less a summary, you get a report, three pages on the report. and the reports say you're a loser and you will never be able to handle pressure, and grow in your career. So are, you're going to have to leave tonight, and you can not stay. And I'm what? So it came back pretty upset to meet with the VP of Sales of GE. Nicolas Draca: Excellent. its in Paris and then hey, that, that's not how it's gonna play out. Right. You were first from a legal standpoint, you're not allowed to do that. Number two, it's highly, disrespectful to onboard needs to get started to two and then decide after day one based on how I write. I agree with that. My writing is terrible, but then decide who I am as a person. so I kept that, I kept the report, and I showed it to my kids later. I'm yes, that's what your dad was. That's where happened. So that was my first job, actually. They one I came back home. Naber: Well Nicolas Draca: I'm I'm I was already withmy wife. Naber: Yeah. Oh my gosh. so in a marathon you're not supposed to pre sprint from the start, but we are sprinting with good stories so far. This is hilarious and great. It's just excellent. So, what is the, what's the biggest thing you learned at GE Capital? And then we'll talk about your jump to CSC. Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So a g tactical here was, so, I learned what it cost to be on the first real job and being a Sales person, what it took and how to be a, leave you smart. And what I mean by that is how can you make your quota the fastest way possible. and here we add professional services on one end, which was like 30% margin. We had a infrastructure which was 5% margin. And of course my quota was based on a much more genuine would bring to the table and decided where as we were in a selling hardware emotion in the company, decided to do all of my business in services, and professional services, sorry. This is my learning is what is the fastestto achieving, to beating quota was the learning of spending a couple of years at GE. Naber: Yeah. Nice. That's great. Yeah. You've quoted a couple of times. whatever you're doing, somebody else's probably done it better than you. Don't reinvent the wheel, learn from others and be lazy, smarter. Yeah. I really liked that quote. And it's obviously something you can learn really early in your career. okay. Yeah, Nicolas Draca: I actually have the, it's a, it's a big, big one is a, it's trying to look and does, this is what I did unconsciously though looking around me and there was one Sales rep who was highly successful and one was working really hard but not like I was working like 14 hours a day, but not being as successful. So I loved that the successful one. And I tried to understand the dynamic of the deals then and learn from it, then cloned it. Naber: Nice. Excellent. Okay. So you're at GE Capital, you're learning a lot about what it's like to carry a bag, be a Sales person for the first time, you're making a jump to CSC. What did you make the jump to CSC, and what were you doing at that job? Nicolas Draca: Yes, so CSC, one of my friends was leading one of the team at CSC, Computer Science Corporation, it was in the outsourcing business and it was focusing on transformation. And transformation at CSC will assign hundred of millions of dollars of deals where they will start outsourcing both infrastructure and people, and moving them into CSC. And our friend was putting a team together to help him through this transformation phase. And so you will work on an account for like 6 to 12 months max. And your job would be as fast as possible to be able either from an infrastructure standpoint, from a people standpoint, from a process standpoint, to migrate to CSC. So here it opened up to all of Europe because all of those contracts where across Europe or across the world and more of an international angle to what I was doing before. Naber: Very good. Okay. And so you made that jump, and Program Manager. So day to day, what are you doing? Nicolas Draca: Yeah, day-to-day the way it would work is we would be in charge of projects, all of those transformation projects. And depending on the project we had lined up, or our goal would be to work with a set of people...I had a couple of project manager working for me, you will have infrastructure people, you will have architects, you will have procurement, and so on. And just being able to orchestrate and to coordinate all of it to deliver on time. So the way it would work is as part of the process before starting on anything, you would send a quote to your customers saying this is a how many hours I'm going to spend, and this is how much it's going to cost. So you just ship within the hours you're committed to. Naber: Are you creating that estimate or is someone else creating it and you're delivering on it? Nicolas Draca: No, I have to create that estimate. And it was like massive, like millions of dollars every time. So, it was the first time I worked on really, really large contracts, so pretty exciting. Naber: Yeah. Excellent. Okay. So you're at CSC, this is what you're doing day to day, and you are six and a half, seven years into your career at this point, your belt to make your first major entrepreneurial jump for Ipanto. Tell us about why you decided to start Ipanto, and the story for how it started, as well how you're ultimately acquired by Infoblox, which sounds like a great story. Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So what happened is...one of the projects we were managing - so I was still working with my friend Eric from GE, we went together to CSC - and one of the projects we were working on is IP address management. So what was happening is people were trying to find a way to manage their IP addresses on their network. And they were using spreadsheets, which seems surprising, but that was more or less the go-to. And if you think about it like every single device, like your laptop here, your printer, whatever, has an IP address. And as you can imagine pretty quickly, you can not keep up. If you have 5,000 employee, and I don't know 3-4 IP addresses per employee, you cannot manage IP addresses in a spreadsheet. Then we looked at it for a customer and realized, that there was only one company that was doing that as a software, and they were charging per active IP per year, and it was $1.50. And with the explosion of IP addresses, we looked at it and were like, oh man, we have to create a company. So we started looking what other competitors were doing on the side, and at some point decided to create our own company...We had hired...So what we're doing is more or less, we stayed at CSC as consultants. So we work for them. So our daytime job was CSC. Our nighttime job was building our company, which many people do. So it was all bootstrapped and it took us like a couple of years to get an MVP and we started closing customers. And we did a decent job I think on the Marketing side, we did a decent job on our footprint where people believed we were a large company. With Skype you could open...we had, not fake, but we had numbers in Australia - a phone number in Australia, we have numbers in the US - phone numbers. So, as we had global reach, we will send quote like across the globe, and we would time our email to look like we were in the region. We also created a set of names, so I had multiple names. I was Shawn, the product manager. I was Nicolas, the CMO. I was also John, from support. And so emails we're going out, and we automated all of it, to make you believe that we were a large organization, but to ensure that people could engage with us through support, which we call customer success today. Or through the product team, saying hey, what do you think about the solution? And so on and so on. So, yeah, that's what we did. Naber: So you're effectively like the equivalent of a chatbot with all of your names, and you are your own follow the sun model, as in like you did everything probably 24 hours during the day. How many people did you eventually have a on the team? Nicolas Draca: So we went up to 10 employees, mostly engineers. So we build a small engineering team in Strasbourg. And then we had that rule, as a Sales leader you would appreciate it, and this was coming from my father. So my father, had a rule for a Sales rep that if you go to Paris at that time, you need to have three meetings a day. If you travel three meetings a day. We applied the same rule at the European level. So if we had people pinging us from any country, and we were able to secure a free meetings a day, we'll go and we'll take a flight. So we went to Dubai multiple times. We went to Saudi Arabia. We went to Turkey. Meaning that's where inbound was coming from. Was it rational in terms of like weighted pipeline and how much money we would make, it was not, we did not have that experience. What is it efficient in term of meetings? Yes, it was. And then we were having long meetings and we built partnerships across most of the Europe, which was pretty cool at that time, and got us to meet some great prospects. And then at some point, we decided...two things happened. I'm going to get you to Infoblox. One is...I don't know for what reason actually, I can not recall...we decided to raise funding. And the plan was, with my associate, he said, hey, you know what, you're going to go to the valley, and you're going to meet with VC. And I never met with VC before, nor have I ever put a business plan together the way a VC in the valley would expect it. So, one of the leaders in the space, Infoblox, just raised 20 million at that point. We send an email through some connection, and we end up with like 20 meetings in one week. I'm like, rule of 3, works. Jump on a plane. And I went there alone, when I think about it, it's pretty, I don't know if it was stupid, but it was interesting. Went there alone with my deck, seven slides. And my first meeting, I think it was Accel, I end up with like five people in the room, like partners. Tell me about your company and so on. I go through the meeting, I explained what I could explain. Was pretty weak on the finance side of the deck, which was the last part of the deck, focusing more on the customers we had, and the dynamic of the business, and the size of the market. But more or less, I did one meeting after the other like this. We didn't raise any funding, to be clear. Somebody told us unless I can call you at 11 first to have lunch together, we're not gonna work together...But we learn a ton through the process. We started discovering how people think here. How do they see the world? How do they manage their businesses? And actually, on the last two or three meetings, people just starting giving us advice, which I highly respect the US for...anybody, like trying to grow a company or be an entrepreneur in general. And people are really nice and friendly to give us advice about what we should do next, and how we should think about our business...And in parallel what we did is we ended up working on a deal with a company called PG&E. So coming from France, I have no bloody clue who PG&E was. It's not that I haven't done my homework, but we had all that inbound and we were just...And so we ended up in final on PG&E against a company called Infoblox. And we didn't win, whereas we had the support from the engineering team. And then Infoblox reach out to us getting really upset just starting to see us in deals, incuding that large PG&E deal. And the BD person, as well as the GM for Europe, Karl, ping'd us and said, I need to meet you. I need to spend time with you. I need to understand who you are. And this is where the initial discussion started. Naber: Wow. Really interesting. Someone to reach out to directly from Infoblox and said, we need to meet you. Were you pretty guarded with those conversations? Did you feel like it was a com-partnership, or did you feel like it was more like them kind of feeling you out as competition? Nicolas Draca: Yes. So we already had another competitor in the space who approached us, and our first feedback was we're not going to talk to. Like, we don't want to talk to you. And Karl, Karl changed our life somehow. We saw him at a show, and he's like, I want to see your product, like, show me, show me, show me. And we're nah, dude, we don't want to, we already had this. It happened two weeks ago. We were again pretty young, and we're like, no way, we're not showing you your product. That's not going to happen. Screw that. And then he pushed again and got the VP of Marketing and the VP of Sales to ping us and they say, hey, you know what we're going to do? Actually we're going to fly to Santa Clara. And you're going to come and present, and we're going to sign an NDA, pay for your travel, and everything. And at that point we're like, okay, again the rule of a couple of meetings, let's go to the valley. And then based on our learnings, meeting with all the VC in the valley, we were really set up for success in the meeting we would have there - understanding how they think, understanding how they approach things, and being able to engage in the right way through all the meetings. So it ended up being a successful week. There was really a good fit between their team and our team. They really love our technology and loved the way we were working. And then we quickly within a few months closed the deal, sold the company, and moved everybody in California, the engineers, and so on. Naber: Wow. That's great. You've been a part of...you were required Infoblox at Ipanto, you had Talentoday that you're an investor in who was acquired by Medix in 2018, you've been a part of multiple IPO businesses. Do you have any advice for people going through that acquisition process, especially as a founder, especially as a Senior leader on the exec team? Nicolas Draca: I think when when you go for that process you need to be...so a couple of things. One, we were pretty clear that based on our skillset, and based on our capacity to raise funding, we could not grow the company more. Okay. It didn't end up being a large company, it was a small startup, but we were aware and self aware that hey, we reached our limit. And so we decided to go on the path to...It's not like a week before Infoblox ping'd us we were like, we're going to sell. Like I think we built and designed the company for six months with a path to sell the company. So that was one. There was no ego involved on this one - that was the second one. And number three goes back to what you want to do as part of that opportunity. Right? You as a leader, do you want to be part of the adventure still? Or, I'm going to sell and stay six months and go. For us, again, we were clear we wanted to sell. We still believe in our product, and we wanted to push it and get that product / solution successful and growing, becoming the leader on IP address management. That's what our dream. And we executed on it. The last piece is of course, culture fit, or the fit with the team that are going to acquire you. Pretty often what you see, you get acquired and then everybody disappears, right? And you're not even sure your product is gonna survive that acquisition. And here for us it was really, really important that, we would get on well with the people that are acquiring us, that we were clear that we would be part of the adventure moving forward, and we could still execute on our vision to lead or yeah, to own IP address management, which was what we were doing. And this is what we did. Naber: Nice. Excellent. It's a really good segue into Infoblox and you building the Demand Marketing function there. So as someone that went through an acquisition, you're founder or co-founder of the company going into that new company, tell us about what you were doing at Infoblox. And can you give it to us from the perspective of someone who just got acquired? Because someone that is thinking of their business with an exit strategy, it might be good for them to also hear it from a lens of, we were acquired and this was what it was like in the aftermath or the afterlife in the new company. Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So first we were acquired. It took us some time to understand that...it was by a smart team. We did not realize - we just moved to the Bay, we had no sense of the dynamic here. It took me like a couple of years actually. I understood they were smart, but those people, it was their 4th IPO. They we're trying to go to their next IPO, they've done three of them. I was like, cool, what is an IPO? Congratulations. But the quality of talent that they assemble and the success they had in the past, I think just facilitated the vision of how we would work together. But again, this we didn't know about, right. I learned it later. But quickly, we agreed...We had a bonus structure based on revenue of our company, revenue of our product, sorry. And what happened, and I think you're going to love that one. So, Ipanto the IP address management product, was a highly successful lead gen product. Why? Because replace your spreadsheet to manage IP addresses was something everybody would understand and would get excited about, versus the other products that Infoblox that had at the end of the day are not that sexy, and actually you're competing with free. So it was kind of a Trojan horse. And the Sales strategy, which I didn't know, was to use our product to enter into accounts, to start a discussion. But the goal is to sell the other products. Naber: You're the land. Nicolas Draca: Yeah, I'm the land play, but on the discussion, not even selling it. And I got pretty quickly upset about it because again, we had with my buddy a vision that we wanted to lead IP address management, and they were using our leads just to do that, which is to land a discussion. And the piece you're gonna like is what I'm going to tell you now, is at some point this was also channel business. Okay. And they were not managing all the leads. And I found a channel partner to take over all the leads. So I went to see the Head of Sales, and I'm like, Hey, your team doesn't seem that excited. I have a bonus tied to it. And we went to execute on the vision, it's all good - and I was like, Director in that company, Director of Demand Gen, I was a nobody - and I'm like, I'm going to move over all the leads to that channel partner, and actually I'm going to Seattle to train them next week. Okay. And at that point, my boss, the VP, Marketing came andsaid hey, we are we going to have a timeout - like, you have to stop. And I'm like, why?...We understand you have a bonus tied to everything. We're going to pay your bonuses, we're good. And we are going to stick back to our strategy. But I think they did appreciate the commitment and the passion around that, saying, hey that's cool. Now can you do what you do to the rest of the business, and not focus only on your world? Naber: Wow, really interesting. I mean you brought an entrepreneurial, founder mindset and you went in hot with an executive that's the Head of Sales. And that is not an easy thing to unlearn that mindset once you're running a startup, once you're a founder of a business, that is not an easy thing to unlearn when you go into a larger environments. I'm sure they really appreciated both the structure and method of the problem solving, as well like you said, the dedication to solving the problem, which is great. Nicolas Draca: Yeah. And it's not being a jerk as part of the process. What I say sometimes to my team...we were at some point, agreeing in our disagreement on the vision, and it's about having a discussion saying, Hey, this is the issue, the way I'm going to solve is okay, I'm gonna move on. And I think being able to have that level of discussion in a constructive way, and agreeing in your disagreement, is always a good thing to decide what to do next. Naber: Nice. Excellent. And I'm sure that'll play a little part of talking about some different pieces of your playbook a little bit here. So we're gonna jump from Infoblox into LinkedIn, Twilio, and HackerRank. Heavy hitting, awesome, really interesting hyper-growth organizations that you've joined at very different stages, and endured for very different stages. And you've just done such amazing things at these businesses. So why don't you talk about the jump into Linked, what you were doing at LinkedIn, maybe for a couple minutes. And then I'll pull up, I want to talk about a couple of what I know are your superpowers, as you're going through both that role...and you can jump into examples before you get to Twilio, before you get to HackerRank. But just jump into how you joined LinkedIn and what you did there. Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So when I joined LinkedIn, I focused initially on the Talent Solution business. It was before the IPO, again, I know you're pretty familiar with that business. And here if the goal was to build a Demand Gen engine to support that Talent Solution business. And if I recall it correctly, I'm not 100% sure about the number, I think our prior year the revenue was like 80 million. And I come, I think their Marketing team was like 30 people all together, reporting into Nick, and my team was like two people. And I look after two weeks, and I put a plan together, super proud of how fast I did my plan. You'll see what happened next. I go and meet with the CMO of LinkedIn, and I'm like, Hey, here it is. Here is my vision, this is how we are going to grow from...I'm going to build an organization to support $500M, from $80M. And he looks at me, and he's like, I like your plan. It's a good plan. It's not ambitious enough. And I say, what? I'm like, 80 to 500. He's like, yeah 10x. Like the rule at LinkedIn was like 10x always. And I'm like, what about 10x? He's like, year, you need to build a plan for to support a $billion because Talent Solutions is going to be our first billion dollar business. And I'm like, you're joking, right? He's like, no, no, I'm not. Can you please come back next week with an update on your plan? And I'm like, of course. So I go back to my cubicle work on my plan. Then he pings me, Hey, can you come to see me in my office the day after. I come to see him the day after in his office, he's like, Hey, I really liked your plan. This was Talent Solutions. It's like I just hired a lead on the Marketing side for Marketing Solutions, and I love for you to help her to build a Demand Gen engine again. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Yesterday you told me to go from 80 to a $billion, now you asked me to to focus on this. I'm like, I cannot do that, I have two people. He's like, nah, figure it out. And this is how is has been since day one. And this is where you learn the scaling muscle, hyper-growth muscle. More or less, I mean you've been through that journey, being on a high speed train and building the tracks at the same time, at scale. Naber: Yeah. Speed. The ultimate function of speed. Nicolas Draca: Speed. I think it's the ultimate function of, okay, speed and demanding excellence, which is a core value. Because whatever you're going to do as an experiment, if it's works, you're going to have to 10x that experiment. And 10x can mean the same thing you build in the US is going to have to work in Europe, in Australia, in Brazil, or it's going to have to scale across the organization, across all business lines. And when you are initially...I remember the first couple of months being exhausted. But not exhausted because I was working, I wasn't working 16 hours a day, not in like number of hours. It's the intensity of the meeting. Like in half an hour, and again you've been through that, you'll have a meeting in half an hour, and you come with a V1 of something, after half an hour you would be at V5. And if if you had to check your phone for two minutes during the meeting, you would be lost. Like if you did not follow the discussion, you're like what are you talking about? That's level to speed, yeah, you went back to it. Speed, demanding excellence, and all the core values of the company. Yeah, it was incredible. Naber: Amazing. Okay. So you're at LinkedIn and you're undoubtedly iterating on and building new pieces of your playbook. One of the things that you've talked about in a few different forums, you've been interviewed on this, you've been on stage talking about this, is your Four pillars of the Science of Marketing - Talent, Insights, Operations, and Lifecycle. What I'd love to do is start picking apart each one of those, because we're at LinkedIn now and I know you've developed quite a bit of muscle fiber putting together a lot of the playbook there, and then ultimately exercising it more and more, and iterating more and more at Twilio and HackerRank. Can you go through, the basics of those four pillars, and give us a little bit of sense for how your frameworks work within each of them. So maybe we can start with talent, and then move from there. Is that okay? Nicolas Draca: Yeah, of course. So talent is about, I mean it's number one. And it doesn't come from me, it comes from LinkedIn as the driving force for success. And it's something I learned at LinkedIn. I appreciated at Twilio, and I appreciate it even more at HackerRank. It's about how you're going to build your team, who you're going to hire, and how are they going to be able to scale, right? Not having any compromise on who you're going to hire. And the process we had, and I think it was across the company, but you can tell me, was when you hire somebody...So first we want to somebody for their current job or their job description, but we're hiring somebody for their capacity to grow, and scale, and be in a job two years from now... But when you are in a high growing startup, you never hire people for what they're going to do the next six months. That's not gonna work. And the number one thing is, people who will go through the interview process will decide who will test on what, but at the end of the day when we will regroup after talking to a candidate, 100% have to be a yes. I know it was the same on your end, I think. 100% have to be yes. Otherwise, we'll pass on the candidate. It doesn't mean the candidate was a bad candidate. The guy could be like super smart, super...it's just, it did not work. But two things that are really important. Number one is people knew that if the said no, there will be consequences, right? Meaning that person would not get hired, right? So you have to work with people who understand that. Number two is if somebody said no, you can go back, if you have one out of seven people saying no, you had the opportunity to get back to that person and say, Hey, you are the only no, just doing one last check that you are 100% no, because we're going to pass on this candidate. And the person has to be, I'm going to say smart to even maybe come back and say, hey actually let me re check my notes. Let me check that, and maybe I was wrong, which not many people are able to say. Or I was right, and I picked my my view...And I was wrong, I'm actually a yes, and let's move forward. So first is no compromise on hiring talent and spend the time between needed to find the right person. The other one is hiring is a full time job. And initially when you build a team, it's not the thing you're going to do at seven at night. You just want to block your calendar to just have that muscle, and spend the time partnering with your recruiter, looking yourself in your network, and so on. But it's a full time job. And then when you've done all that job of hiring, next step is onboarding and after it's nurturing, right? It's how you going to help people understand who they are as a professional, and what are they good at, what are they less good at, and it starts there. And what is the path for them to grow? It can be a year plan, a 2 year plan. Whatever it takes to ensure that you assembled the best team possible, a team that is going to collaborate. I think collaboration is at the heart of it. I think specifically in Marketing, I'm not going to talk about other organizations, but in Marketing you are the center of so many things that if you don't have like collaboration / communication skills, it's going to be a little bit hard to succeed. So that's one. The second one for me is demanding excellence. Demanding excellence across anything you do. And the third one is passion. Passion for your job. I can talk more about it, but I think when people ask me what do you look for in a candidate? I'm like, okay, you look for the skills and so on. I'm going to look for culture fit and passion. And both are going to be equally important. Naber: Yeah. Excellent. When you were going through these interviews...ABP always be pipelining, like you said, just building that muscle all the time. You're the CEO of the hiring process, you own the hiring process. As you're going through, and you're going through the interviews, what was the calibration exercise like after that? What were the nuts and bolts of that method you use to calibrate with the rest of the team after you were done with the interviews? Nicolas Draca: Yes. So they way it was working is, we do this today at HackerRank, we have something called job guidelines. When we agree what are the skill set that are needed for the job. And we defined the skillset and what we expect from them. And the same way I love to had passion for the company, passion for the job, which I have two different, which are different. And then I had culture, values as part of the scorecard. Okay. What we do is everybody has to...so there no like, oh yeah, I didn't have time to update, and I'm just sending you an email and this thing is going to be okay. No, everybody has to [complete] the scorecard. It is super important. At HackerRank, and depending upon your entry level, if it goes Director and above, actually the entire package goes to our CEO, he wants to review it. And it's really, really... Like if you don't have the package ready, he's not going to approve it. Like he's not even going to interview with the person. And if he's not part of the interview process, he's not gonna approve the package. That person would never get an offer and a reference. So it's pretty core. So we have alignment and discussion, a pre-interview process. Not for every interview, but when start a job search. And then what we do, which takes time, but it's worth it, when you interview a couple of candidates is that meeting debriefing session. I do believe that often the first two or three candidates you're going to bring on sight could be for calibration, calibrating the team. What is happening when you are going that path is you have many new hires, and you're going to have to understand their interview style, and what they value, and what they don't don't value. And I think those post interview meetings, meeting with the team of interviewers and just agreeing and - saying, hey, I he was strong of that, and somebody else saying, no, he was like super weak, and ensuring that everybody's on the same page on what we expect, and how we value those skills, is really, really important. So calibration on a couple of first candidates is my take. When you have a more junior team or a new team within the organization. Naber: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Your teams at such hyper growth businesses, those teams are always new, always getting used to the process. Also a smaller business, obviously always getting used to the new process. So as you're bringing people on board and you're onboarding them, do you have any couple of tactics you use to make sure you bring them onboard and starting to onboard them most effectively? Nicolas Draca: Yes. So actually took me time to find the right onboarding process. Of course you want to put that document together. That's what you then have to do. And I think that recently, I finally, found a good way to do it. And what is happening now is on my team when you start, you know on day one, it's already on your calendar actually when you start, there is day 30 - you have to present to the entire Marketing team. Naber: Very, very cool. Nicolas Draca: And what do you have to present? So we provide them a template. I'm a big template guy. And the template is... What is your job - you're familiar with that - in less than 15 words? What did you understand is your job? Less than 15 words. To execute your job, I have something called Relationship 15 - who are the 15 people for you to be successful? We can go deep on that. And list those people. You have five people which are for you to be successful, five for your team, and five for you to grow in your career. Then a stop, start, continue. And people are surprised by it. They're like, I just started. I'm like yeah, but I hired you based on your expertise. If you're super junior in your job, I'm sure you have a point of view on what we should Stop doing, Start doing, Continue doing. Naber: And fresh eyes. Fresh eyes. Nicolas Draca: Yes. And give your point of view. And it's just to empower people to say, tell me what you think. Like actually, I'd love to know what you think. And the last one is, what are you gonna achieve at the 60, and what do you plan to achieve at day 90? So this is a forcing function for many, many things to happen before the presentation. Because by doing that, by presenting this to the rest of the..So they presented the entire Marketing organization, to my entire team. And the goal is not like to boo them, and say this and that. That's no what it is about. It is about the person to be accountable for what they are going to do. Number two is to understand why they were hired for, and just set a high bar. Like not day one, but it's kind of like you're going to have to do that. And people realize that that presentation better be good. It just sets the bar for how they're going have to deliver and ship moving forward. And three is, for people in the team to understand who they are, and what they're going to do, what the new hire is going to do. So it solves a lot of things, and have those meetings & milestone day 30...Wherever I go next, I'll repeat that because I'm happy with it myself. Naber: It's in the infamous Nicolas Draca playbook. So there's so much to pick apart there. Two things I want to you to expand on just a little bit. One is, you talk about, what is your job? I think it's from Fred Kaufman's Conscious Business - 15 words to define it...That you talk about, and when looking at some of your content you've referenced that in the past. You talk also about how that as an exercise can be a good calibration and way of helping manage up within your job? Can you explain that a little bit? Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So what is happening, and it happened to me at the Twilio. I worked with somebody called Francois that I know really, really well. And it took us four months to be on the same page on what my job was. And you might find it silly, it's not silly. It's just that, you come as a new hire and you have a vision for what you want to do. And when it grows that fast, and it grows at that speed, you're going to have to be pretty, pretty clear about what you're going to do. And I think you have to be more clear about what you're not going to do. It's as important. And I think the key to it is being on the same page as your boss on what is your job? And we spend four months with Francois discussing it, where even on my one-on-one, I would bring it on a biweekly basis saying, hey, this is what I'm going to focus on. And I will get that feedback saying yes, but maybe. And I'm like, wow, we really have to get to the end of it. And the why of the discussion is pretty simple. One is, let's assume you do that. You decide by yourself and what your job is without agreement with your manager, meaning without sign-off and really being on the same page. After 12 months, you're going to do a 12 months review, and you're going to claim victory! You're going to think you're going to claim victory. You're gonna say, Hey, this is what I did. It is amazing. And the person is going to look at you and say, this is not what I expected from you. And you're like, what? I've been working my ass off building that team, shipping A, shipping B, shipping C, delivering here, moving that KPI. And if you replay it in your head, I'm sure it happens to many people in the past, where the person is looking at you saying, yeah, Nah, that's okay, congrats. And so you want to avoid that type of gap or misunderstanding on what you need to solve for. It's not only about your personal review, and progression in career, and everything, it's just about being sure that you tackle and address things that you were supposed to, in alignment with your boss. Because he or she may have other things to solve for, and they have a bigger vision, they have information you don't have, that needs to be to be solved when thinking about the overall strategy - which you could miss a piece. I had another boss at LinkedIn, it was the same like Nick, where I'm kind of intense, and I move fast, and I love to do things, an so on. And I close on the topic in a meeting, and two weeks later he would come back and say, what about that? And in my head I'm like, I don't understand. We already talked about that. I thought we we closed on it. And then you need to - listening is a big, big thing - pause, listen, and say, okay, it looks like I missed it. And the goal for you is not to push it and just repeat what you need two weeks ago, it's more to clarify and say, okay, what is the gap? What is the issue? And what do you expect from me? And you will see that, and I've seen it multiple times...Where people, and I do it the same with my team...If I have something bugging me, I'm like how can you solve that? And they're yeah, of course. And then they don't do it. And two weeks after I'm going to come back to it because I had it top of mind for me. I'm like, what is the progress on that? And they look at me like, what are you talking about? And so I think driving that alignment, managing up...It's more about aligning than managing-up I think, and setting up expectation, is key to success in a collaborative relationship. Naber: Nice. Excellent. And one more quick side note on that. You had mentioned, so thinking about managing stakeholders, and we'll get to that in a second here. But managing close stakeholders in your close sphere - managing up, managing sideways, and managing down. You talk about this also it has an application to managing sideways and managing your stakeholders, correct? Can you explain that a little bit? Nicolas Draca: Yeah, yeah. thanks for that, I forgot to mention it. Yeah, good catch. Yeah...So by being clear on what is your job... So first you're clear with yourself, which is a good starting point and this is where you want to start. You have managing up, and then again when you're in a company growing that fast, everybody has priorities, everybody has work to do. And you want, and I ask my teams do that when engaging on projects, when asking for bandwidth, and time from somebody else on your team or not on your team, you want to explain every time the why. Okay, you want to spend time and say, hey, actually I'd love for you to spend time with me, or allocate x hours of your time to my initiative. And let me explain the why and impact it's going to have. It's kind of a Sales pitch internal, it is a sales pitch. And to ensure that that person is going to focus more time with you that they would on another project. And I think explaining clearly the why, and what is your job is part of it, people will appreciate it. And if they disagree, or if they don't understand, just pause, put yourself in their shoes, try to understand what they have to solve for, what are the issues they have and why they're not getting it, and spend the right amount of time on that. When you build a a big Initiative, large initiative, you want to ensure that people are inspired by the project you're trying to lead and push. And I think this will help one, you get successful, two, people understand why they should spend time on it, and three, deliver and ship at scale. Naber: Excellent. Thank you for that. Really good tips and insight. And then the last one I want to talk about within Second last thing I wanna talk about within talent. You mentioned the Relationship 15. Can you explain a little bit more about that? You kind of grazed over it, but I do think it's important. So the five, five, five, can you explain a little bit more about that? Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So, what we do here is we try to get a sense and invite people, I invite people on my team or I do this across the company, also sometimes I did it here at HackerRank...Is can you please list...And I invite everybody to do that. It's always an interesting exercise...who are the five people for you to be successful personally, that work in our company. Then who are the five people for your team - and the team can be the team you belong to within Marketing... - to be successful? And who are the five people to help you grow in your career. Okay. And all of these people are mutually exclusive. So they are like 15 different people, right? And afterwards you do a 2x2, everybody loves a 2x2. One is connective tissue - low versus high. And the other one is core versus strategic. And you put the 15 names in that 2x2. It's up to you to decide on low versus high and connective tissue. Connective tissue doesn't mean that you need to talk to them on a daily basis. Okay, let me be clear. But it means that if you contact them, or you send them an email, they would reply to that email and make time available for you. So when you do that, people came to come to a realization most of the time that they have gaps. The first they are sometimes unclear about who should be those people. They realize that they have gaps. They realize that, hey, actually those 10 people within the company, they don't know what my job is, and these are the people you should interact with and explain because they are key to your success. They'd better know what you're solving for. And then as people put together a plan to say specifically, there is a gap on the not in your company for you to grow. And they put together a plan saying, Hey, I need to force myself to go to user groups, to conferences, and make friends, or get to start knowing people and learn from them to be able to grow. Again, it goes back from the assumption...Meaning in my day to day life, when when I work on a project, if it's a big initiative, one of the first thing I will do is I will ping between five and 10 of my friends saying, Hey, I'm thinking about that. That's how I would like to do it. What's your thought? What's your 2 cents? And I can tell you like within a day I get everybody's feedback. I listen to feedback. That's really important. That's another part is just not asking for feedback for the sake of it and process it, package it, and get your idea from V1 to V5 or V10, and learn from it. Naber: Nice. Excellent. That's great. Okay. let's stop into, so we talked about talent, talk about hiring, onboarding, talked a little bit about about developing a dart, developing that talent as well. Understanding them as people where they want to go. from a, from a development perspective, let's hop into insights. you've talked about, moving from data to intelligence and you also have talked about smart data versus, not just big data. Explain the insights pillar to your, of your science, of Marketing pillars. Nicolas Draca: Yeah. So on the Marketing side today we are, we are lucky because we have more and more data. We have data for everything. There is no lag of a, of metrics. on, on one end we're lucky on the other end it's overwhelming. and why? Because there's too much data and now you can spend your days and just looking at spreadsheets to everybody and a, as far as they know, you don't need a business by just looking at spreadsheet. All right? 12 hours a day. So here are the eight year is first based on your priorities and everything. I come from the science of Marketing. it's to be able to, and dishpan how are you going to measure success early on? and maybe the first time you do it, you don't have the right number. But I invite everybody to try it. Nicolas Draca: And they're, I'm pick a number. and maybe their first quarter is to test your capacity to deliver up to that number, but what you wanted a success as to being controlled and then descend the dynamic of how you're going to get there. And w w when you are able to do that, the first time, then you'd be able, you're going to be able to build on it and become, become better. But I believe for that, for whatever you do in general, there is a measure of success that you can apply. and you should apply that measure of success, learn from it. My framework all the time is I have a high KPI and then I have free metrics reporting that KPI. I know I'm saying conceptual than meaning is there so many, as I mentioned, you could apply and when you have these under control and when this is working and you are able to predict, okay. Plus minus 10% what you're doing, it's to move to the next level. And being able to leverage meaning machine learning, data science, depending on the, on the team you have, if you have good Ascentis working for you to be a model is a big drewhich is to predict capacity of people to buy or to predict something unless at the time predict capacity of a customer too to buy your product. Naber: Yeah. Excellent. And when someone has very little data or limited data, what's the mindset that they should have as they're getting started doing that? Nicolas Draca: Yeah, so I think they are. so I don't, so first most of the time of people I have the data,and why? Because you have historical data and so the feedback everybody's gonna share is oh yeah, but they stopped. I'm yeah, okay. But it's still really, that's it. And so every time I build something, I'm going to go like hardcore Demand gen here. You're okay, well many SQL Sales qualified qualifying today, deliver next quarter. And I invite people, I'm like back and they're it's sex. I'm yeah, I got that part. Look back, it doesn't matter. And try to make a guess about how many and then try to define a target for yourself and you show you the next quarter and how many you want to deliver and you will, you will learn. So that's one. because looking at historical data, you always add something to learn. Nicolas Draca: There is no perfect data and nobody, no marketer will tell you like you have the best data in the world. So, you just have to put your ego aside and just process of past data to try to understand what's going on. Or you can look at benchmark. of course, they are, there is no lack of website with benchmark data. I think as a core, you should look at historical data. And my guiding principle here is you just want to become better quarter of a quarter, right? If your number was 50, the way you want it to become 60, like something higher and let's these 10%, that's how I look at it. And you need to take into consideration the cycle that it wouldn't take you like three to six months, which is okay to understand it and to be able to grow it. Success all the time is being in control. Agasomething I learned in many companies is you can miss something like the word assist mess and not being in control and not understanding the why. If you're in control, it's a great starting point for you to become better at what you do. Naber: Nice. I love that. That's great quote. You can put that on a, put that on a license plate, put that on a, on a tattoo, something like that. So two more pieces I want to talk about with an insights. one is, I mean, I don't know if people know this about you. You have six U s patents. I mean that's, that's ridiculous. So one of those patents that comes from the use of data insights and moving back against an account based Marketing model, yeah, you've gone from a data to intelligence and applied that to how can I impact revenue as much as possible. Can you talk a little bit about, your account based Marketing thought process structure, the mindset? yeah, but let's start there. Nicolas Draca: Yes. So on the ABM you want me to talk about the patents, like what we did, how did we get there? Okay. so what we do, I go back to the talent buckets that we ensure that we spend 20% of our time experimenting, always. and why is because we live in a world where things are changing fast. and whatever you did and whatever failed six months ago doesn't mean it's going to fail today. So we, we build a culture, all empowerment where you can succeed or fail. And actually if you fail, it's okay. As long as you know why? that's why we go back to, yeah. You need to know why you need to be in control. And so by doing that, there are some experiments that are going to fail and and died and some other that are going to be highly successful. Nicolas Draca: And here we were working with a teon the Sales op side, data science side and business insights. Okay. We'd love to predict propensity of an account to buy. And what we did initially, we started on a a on a Friday putting on a whiteboard. Like how would we score an account? And and today everybody in Sales and Marketing you the framework, your called decision, a demon waterfall. And that demon wonderful framework as a little bit of an issue is there's not yet you move from it lead a contact I mentioned to an account I mentioned. So more or less he does not really connect because in a perfect 12 you want to do a funnel, which is a full account funnel from Marketing qualified accounts. That's where the new concept of the time up to your SQL and close one business. So looking at this, we're okay, we need to identify, defined something called working quantified accounts. Nicolas Draca: I think we called it ais. I count into our score. Initially the idea was to say, okay, let's look at all the contacts associated to the account, their level of engagement, and do kind of a weighted nps average on how, the account score should be. I'm geeking out a little bit, but as you can see, it started more with a brainstorming with somebody on my team called fat and saying, Hey, how should we think about that? And then explaining the why as a vision, partnering with Sales operation, partnering with a data fence theme and some of the tewe assembled this team saying, okay, this looks pretty cool. let's put some science behind it. what we did is what started an experiment, ended up being a success because it was one of the dimensioned core to how we will plan into account or location or account follow up. Nicolas Draca: moving forward, at LinkedIn and with all the support of the company. We went through the patent process and after I think, I'm sure, you also when on the product side, where people looked at it and maybe integrated it in their algorithm. I'm not sure about that. I don't know what they did with it, but, that it was a great story. There's a, an experiment on a Friday afternoon discussion culture of hey, let's push it to the next level, see if it works. Partnering with people who could operation and being able to put it together. Naber: Yeah, the common, yeah, that's what I was thinking. The combination of collaboration, cross stakeholder management, cross stakeholder partnerships and projects that you had to work on in order to get that done. Plus it's the vision that you had in order to get that done. It was, it was really impressive. so, one more, one more thing I want to talk about around data. Let's pull it up a level and we're going to talk about stakeholder relationships for
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