Intrro: Scaling Stories

It was great to catch up with Travis Baker, the VP of Talent Acquisition at Boulevard, as part of our Scaling Stories podcast.

Boulevard is a Client Experience Platform which is purpose-built for appointment-based, self-care businesses. Its mission is to “make it easier for everyone to look and feel their best”.

Travis has had a remarkable professional journey for more than 15 years, which includes stints at NextRoll, Carta and leading the tech recruitment at Zoom during the height of the pandemic when the video conferencing platform was setting the world alight. 

The strategy at Zoom was to “build a warm lead pipeline”, says Travis, and “watch people’s careers develop and help them understand that Zoom could help them in their career and help them develop skill-sets and be a great destination to grow and contribute at a high level”.

This patient approach is a stark contrast to what Travis calls a “transactional sourcing method which is always gonna be slower and highly reactive”.

Travis says he benefited from starting his career at a recruitment agency, Aerotek, and describes agency life as “a tremendous boot camp for recruiting. It teaches you the fundamentals and really drills it into you. And it’s a high performance culture…it really weeds out folks who can rise to the occasion and those who can’t”.

In fact, Travis says that his colleagues with agency backgrounds are “some of the highest performers that I’ve ever had on my teams”.

“The basics of recruiting is it’s a numbers game. At the end of the day, if you have challenges that you’re encountering in the business, you can almost always solve it with volume and effort and hard work.”

As he’s gained more experience, Travis has learnt the value of developing meaningful relationships with candidates rather than simply ticking off names on a spreadsheet.

“There’s an over-reliance on looking at somebody’s profile and making an indication as to whether or not they’re a viable candidate,” Travis says. “I don’t think that's good practice. I think you have to talk to folks and you have to hear their story.”

“I find the people who are having the most conversations – you know, in-person conversations – they tend to be the most successful.”

It was great to speak with Travis – head over to our podcast page and have a watch ‘n’ listen.

For this  Scaling Stories podcast we were delighted to speak with Jason Holness, a senior Talent Acquisition and People Success Manager at Reveal, a platform dedicated to helping B2B companies leverage their partnerships.

Jason was formerly a teacher and has worked in cultural curation within the museum space, so he offers a unique and distinctive voice on questions relating to company culture.

At Reveal, Jason and the team have built an interview kit which helps interviewers assess candidates objectively and probe for answers that give the fullest picture.

“These questions are often based upon the company’s values,” Jason explains. “We ask questions to test their adaptability, to see how well they’re solving problems or how well they function under stress or pressure. We ask questions around their optimism and test how well they collaborate. Each of these questions in the kits are tied to one of our company’s values, which is important for the culture.”

Jason also hosts workshops on “cultural competence” so that in a diverse, international workplace, hiring managers and staff are attuned to differences in behaviour and outlook.

“If we are a bit culturally competent, we know how best to break the ice and to better interact with the candidates and the people that we meet on a daily basis.”

In terms of “culture fit”, Jason starts with the principle that you should “know what the company values are, and really knowing the team and whether or not this candidate would fit well”. 

And in music to our ears, Jason is an advocate of employee referrals. At Reveal, Jason and the team put in place an employee leaderboard system for referrals, with incentives like a €2,000 reward. This “gamification” approach has been a “win-win” for all.

On the Intrro blog you can read more bright ideas to boost referrals. And for more insights from talent leaders, head to our Scaling Stories podcast page.

In these shaky economic times, we recruiters are understandably keen to demonstrate ‘value’ to our organisations. So for our latest Scaling Stories podcast, who better to speak to than the smart and perceptive Emily Zahuta, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at Lattice.

Lattice is of course the ‘people success platform’ which, in Emily’s words, “helps companies drive performance and engage their employees to do their very best work”.

In our conversation, Emily makes a compelling case that TA’s responsibilities should go way beyond onboarding, and include certain functions that are traditionally associated with HR.

“I think we’ve gotten away with being on the front line of hiring,” Emily says. “We build the relationships with the candidates; we get them excited about joining a certain role in these companies; we hire them for a price that we all feel is fair, and then we pass them onto onboarding for the most part, and we say ‘good luck. Hope you love it… we’re off to focus on the next role’. And I think there’s a really big miss in that.”

Emily makes the point that TA professionals amass huge knowledge about the candidate, like “what’s important to this individual, what their fears are, what they’re excited about, what their growth tracks should look like based on what we’ve discussed”, but all too often, that knowledge evaporates within an organisation.

“It’s tricky because I’ve worked under leaders who say, ‘attrition is not your issue’... [But] my point is, yeah, it is our job. If we’re saying we’ll build the interview process; we’ll build the panel of folks; in fact, we’ll even tell you what questions to ask then. Why shouldn’t we be measuring if those things are actually successful in hiring someone that does their job correctly?”

As Emily explains, TA should be advising on all things talent related, not just getting those bright sparks through the door. For companies to thrive, TA leaders need to adopt a ‘talent delivery’ mindset, or what you might call ‘total workforce management’.

“In a shaky economy, in a really funky global environment, what we have is a team that really needs to get to the nitty gritty of what the business is trying to solve.”

Emily talks about “expanding the value of what we’re doing”, which essentially boils down to being “better than outside resources” like recruitment agencies.

If you’re a tad nervous about the future, Emily’s wise words provide hope that we recruiters can recalibrate our roles and add value in ever-changing ways.

Check out our blog on quality of hire – a key theme in our chat with Emily – and for more insights from TA leaders, head over to our Scaling Stories podcast page.

In Scaling Stories podcast, we spoke with Sean Behr, CEO of Fountain, the high-volume hiring platform that empowers companies with an hourly workforce to streamline and scale their recruiting operations across the globe.

In a world where the perfect candidate is often idealised as a straight-out-of-Harvard MBA grad who speaks 17 languages and plays the clarinet, it was refreshing to hear Sean’s perspective on the value of candidates in the wider workforce.

Fountain’s mission, according to Sean, is “to open opportunities for the global workforce. That’s why we exist.”

“Our specific focus is the blue collar, grey collar, hourly worker. The frontline worker, right?”

Sean makes the point that blue collar workers – from delivery drivers to nursing staff and call centre operators – “really power our economies around the world”.

“I think what we’ve all learned over the last couple of years is how critical hiring and retaining and finding the right people for your business is.”

Sean challenges the orthodoxy that says CVs are always the best indicator of a candidate’s qualities.

“If you’re hiring somebody to stock shelves in a retail store, someone’s CV is probably a lot less valuable,” he says. “In fact, you could argue it’s sort of counterproductive.”

Therefore, Sean argues, “having the right technology to hire those people is really critical”.

Sean illustrates the point by explaining how for certain roles, it’s a question of volume, rather than finding that rare needle in a haystack.

“When you’re hiring a marketing person or a finance person or a salesperson, you’re typically hiring one really perfect person for your organisation. You’re looking for the best possible fit for your organisation. When you’re hiring 400 warehouse workers across the country, it’s a different game.”

Indeed, if you’re hiring at this sort of scale, it makes sense to review the quality of your candidate experience.

“Whoever does really great engagement, [and] who really gives you a great experience – but does it quickly – probably has the competitive edge,” Sean says.

We’ve previously covered how credentials aren’t everything, and in our discussion, Sean shares some sage advice on how talented candidates can really shine.

“Become known as the person who solves the biggest problems,” Sean says. “If you become known as the best problem solver, you will never have to work on a resume ever again in your life.”

Finally, Sean reflects on what has been “a crazy couple of years” for recruiting.

“You know, going back over the last three years, you could argue recruiters were the least important people in 2020, the most important people in 2021, pretty important in 2022, and yet to be determined in 2023.”

For more insights from talent leaders and HR heroes, hop over to our Scaling Stories podcast page.

We were delighted to speak with Ernie Owusu, Senior Director of Sales Development at 6sense, for this week’s Scaling Stories podcast.

Ernie took a team of five sales development reps and built the team to 50 or so. Such was the positivity of the environment Ernie nurtured, there were years where the attrition rate of people they didn’t want to leave was just 2%.

Ernie highly recommends the book Leading Sales Development (by Alea Homison and Jeremey Donovan) for anyone building a team of sales development reps. The book examines data from the likes of Salesforce and Salesloft on the characteristics of their top performers from their sales development programs.

“And essentially what they notice is these four core traits,” explains Ernie. “Curiosity, conscientiousness, business acumen, and grit.”

Ernie goes on to explain what he believes each of these characteristics mean:

• Conscientiousness. “Someone who is constantly trying to find ways to improve themselves day in, day out.”
• Business acumen. “It’s not in the sense of ‘do they understand how an org works or how revenue is generated’...It's more about, specifically with SDRs, can they connect the dots? Can they take a piece of information they’ve seen online about a persona, tie it back to their product and explain in a concise way why they should buy your product?”
• Curiosity. “The SDRs that I’ve hired have [often] done research before they get on the call, like on a thought leader or influencer on specific tactics that can make them effective as SDRs. They’ve read books or they’ve read podcasts on the specific tactics to be effective in the role. They tend to be phenomenal sales development reps.”
• Grit. “Someone working towards a long-term goal and having experienced many plateaus or setbacks, but still being just as passionate and achieving that goal over a period of time.”

It’s one thing to possess these qualities, but how does Ernie codify the talent identification process into a meaningful framework?

Some of the technical tasks for SDR candidates include “mock calls where we're not expecting them to be perfect”, and “writing assignments where we ask them to take one of our customer personas and write them an email on [why] that person should buy our product”.

Ernie goes on to explain the wisdom of this written task in separating the brilliant candidates from the bluffers. “Does this person actually know what our company does and why this person should buy our product?”

It was great to catch up with Ernie – check out the pod, then head over to our Scaling Stories page for more expert insights from the Recruitment Kingdom.

For our Scaling Stories podcast, Paul shared his philosophy on what human first leadership really means.

“Let’s say you have 10 people on a team. They’re 10 different human beings – they’re hardwired differently. They have different upbringings, they come from different places, they may be married or not married, straight or gay. It’s like a microcosm of the world, these 10 people that you have. Not everything has to be customised, but you have to get to understand those people a little bit to be able to lead them effectively.”

In a week where we’ve covered artificial intelligence in depth, our chat with Paul was timely. You only have to look at some of the clumsier spambot emails from robo-recruiters to remind yourself that there’s no substitute for human-first hiring. 

And who’s to say that candidates won’t become wise to the more implausible emails and ads? According to research by Clarify Capital, we are now in a world where many job listings are fake, as some employers advertise roles they have no intention of filling “to give the impression the company [is] growing”.

Similarly, we covered the topic of transparency in our chat with Paul. On pay transparency, Paul says: “Involve your employees. Explain the process to them so it’s not this secret-something where HR folks go behind a dark curtain in a dark room and make all these arbitrary decisions.”

Meanwhile, Paul offers a brilliant take-down of leaders who think that forcing everyone back to the office is the only game in town.

“If your culture is the four walls of an office, you’ve got bigger problems than running a business. You need to solve the culture. ‘Problem culture’ is not the four walls of an office or the foosball table or the ping pong table or the lunch or the fancy chairs… Your company’s mission and the values and how you treat each other and how you treat your clients and what it means to work at that company [is the culture]. Four walls don’t make culture.”

Finally, in a world of shrinking headcounts, Paul gave us his perceptive and entertaining take on how to navigate a nimble organisation.

“The smaller the company, the easier it is to impact change and influence change. And maybe not even change, but influence, before it needs to be changed. Influence how things happen, how a culture is, how a culture’s established, how values are established and things like that. It’s easier to turn a motorboat than a cruise ship… Clearly, I’m not a sailor, but you get the concept.”

We highly recommend Paul’s aptly-titled book, Human Beings First. And for more insights from hiring and HR leaders, we’ve got an ever-growing library of Scaling Stories podcasts and blogs to chew on, like this piece on how Dashlane took a sledgehammer to traditional HR processes.

In this week's Hiring Highlights, we pit recruiters against investors in a battle royale to determine who talks the most sense. Plus we share some essential podcast insights from DEI leader Joahanna G. Thomas.

There is no better person to explore these issues than Joahanna G. Thomas, the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Epidemics Sound, and we were delighted to catch up with Joahanna for latest Scaling Stories podcast.

The good news is that according to LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting report: “Three out of four [recruiters] say that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring is not being deprioritized – in fact, nearly 20% say it’s a higher priority now.”

But that doesn’t always ring true, and for any businesses that don’t instinctively value diversity, Joahanna explains how DEI principles are not simply just – but common sense.

“If they can only understand numbers and profitability, diversity is great for the bottom line. Inclusion is great for the bottom line.” 

Joahanna urges businesses to “find that untapped market of your industry that you’re losing on if you don't make diversity as part of your business strategy”.

Indeed, it’s notable that the LinkedIn report predicted that “Gen Z will reward employers who value development and diversity”.

And at a time of cost-cutting, Joahanna makes a persuasive case for how inclusion is not some added extra, but “tangible”, citing factors like “brand awareness, attrition and recruitment savings, [and] legal fee savings. We’ve heard of companies paying millions of dollars because of harassment and pay inequality”.

It was great to catch up with Joahanna, and you can watch more video interviews with hiring legends over at our Scaling Stories page.

It was a great pleasure to speak with Michelle Randall-Berry for our latest Scaling Stories podcast. Michelle is the Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Teradyne, the designer and manufacturer of automatic test equipment (ATE) and robotics solutions.

With more than 20 years’ talent acquisition experience, Michelle is well placed to comment on how employers can navigate the ‘war for talent’ at a time when headcounts are getting leaner.

In our chat, we discussed how employers can adopt a skills-based approach to hiring, including objective hiring processes that mitigate the human biases around us.

Michelle discussed the importance of “creating places for pools of talent”, such as re-skilling opportunities or building internal pathways. “I truly believe that the most successful employers in the market are going to be the ones who are willing to make that investment.”

In this week’s Hiring Highlights we were delighted to speak with Lisa McGill, an advisory board member and former Chief Human Resources Officer at CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity giant.

Lisa has spent much of her career in “high tech” at the likes of Silver Peak, and more recently, has advised VC firm SemperVirens, whose portfolio includes workforce tech companies like Karat and ChartHop.

Lisa arrived at CrowdStrike before its eventual IPO in 2019, so she understands the delicacies of stewarding a people team at a time of high growth.

Early on, Lisa identified that “50% of our new hires within the sales organisation were leaving”, which of course, would pose a problem for any company that was planning to go public. In fact, CrowdStrike would often lose talented staff members just one year into the job, just when they were reaching their “high optimal productivity”.

One solution was to really nail down a talent acquisition strategy. And according to Lisa, that meant answering some key questions: 

• “What kind of jobs do you need?”
• “What kind of skills do you need people to have?
• “Are skills changing?”
• “Do you already have those skills?”
• “Do you know how to recruit for those skills?”
• “And where are those skills?”
• “Are you going to be hiring in new geographies?”

By thinking about these details more deeply, CrowdStrike often hired in emerging engineering markets like Romania. But as Lisa adds, “In some cases, you might have to do some re-skilling as part of your talent strategy.”

Lisa also highlighted “salary compression” as a key watchout, where the higher salaries offered to new hires could leave the original staff members feeling out of pocket. “Yes, that person might have more equity, but until you go public, it’s meaningless to them.”

In our discussion, Lisa shared details of some helpful tools that helped CrowdStrike secure the right talent. For example, in order to identify the top sales candidates, CrowdStrike used an “AI based behavioral based assessment tool” called PerceptionPredict, which led them to conclude that the key qualities for a salesperson at CrowdStrike included communication, collaboration and grit.

Of course, there is no silver bullet when it comes to securing top talent, and as we covered recently, there’s a time and a place for internal hiring too. Everyone has a part to play in an organisation’s success, or as Lisa says: “No matter what your role – you can impact revenue, you can impact profitability.”

It was great to catch up with Lisa, and if you’d like to check out more Scaling Stories podcasts, you know where to clickety-click.

In this week’s Scaling Stories podcast we spoke to Jody Atkins, the Vice President of Talent Acquisition at NextRoll, the marketing technology company whose machine learning platform helps companies target their ideal customers.

In order to create an equitable experience for candidates, Jody has been an advocate for “competency based interviewing”. Before even looking at a CV, Jody will sit down with the hiring manager and ask: “What are the top competencies that this person needs to be successful in their position?”

Rather than simply choosing which names should be on the interview panel, Jody and team will first and foremost reflect on the skill-set required to properly assess each candidate – from stakeholder management to conflict resolution.

Then they decide on “the most unbiased and even way that we can ask questions”, and produce a prep sheet for each interviewer with examples of what a “great answer looks like…so that everyone who is walking through the door has the same experience and the same chance”.

Jody also extols the virtues of using data in order to build trust with senior leaders and find the right people. That means using tools like LinkedIn Talent Insights to identify a small pool of A-listers, then “really look at the competencies” of successful past hires. “What do we interview for? And are those really the traits that make those people successful?”

Jody adds: “What we were able to do is find consistencies of those soft [skills]. You know – tenacity, resilience, ability to learn initiative. Those are all things that were important that aren’t on a resume.”

Moving forward, a priority for Jody and her team is to focus on internal mobility, with the rollout of a new “role shadowing” program where employees can experience a day in the life of a skilled colleague.