EP 122: Striking the right chord: Balancing quality and speed in startup hiring.

In this episode, you'll gain invaluable knowledge on startup hiring, retention, and salary strategies. Listen as industry experts, including Doug Camplejohn, CEO and Founder of Airspeed, and host James Mackey, share their expertise on cultivating a successful startup ecosystem. 

Learn why hiring slowly and firing quickly can be the key to building a high-quality team and discover the "awesome test" that helps you identify top talent instantly.

Efficiency is crucial for startups, learn how to streamline your hiring processes for maximum effectiveness and find out how documenting processes can be an asset that evolves with your business.

    0:33 Doug Camplejohn's background
   1:13 Hiring strategies and efficient processes
16:18 Remote work culture and onboarding
24:26 Employee retention and compensation strategies

Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!

Our host James Mackey

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Thanks for listening!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:27

Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough hiring show. I'm your host, James Mackey, and today we are joined by Doug Campbell-John. Doug, thanks for joining us.

Speaker 2: 0:34

Thanks, great to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:36

Great to have you, and let's start with a quick background. Can you tell us about yourself?

Speaker 2: 0:40

Sure, I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Airspeed. We're an early stage company that's focused on helping employees feel more connected and celebrated through a family of Slack apps that we just rolled out earlier this year, and that's off to a great start. This is actually my fourth startup. Previous ones were all acquired. The last one was acquired by LinkedIn, where I ran the sales navigator team for about four years and then got recruited over to Salesforce to be the general manager of Sales Cloud and started a few weeks before COVID, which is where the whole idea from Airspeed came from.

Speaker 1: 1:10

That's great and I'm very excited to talk to you about all things town acquisition, hiring and employee engagement. It's going to be a fun conversation. So you know, given your experience building successful startups that have been acquired, I would love to just learn at a high level just to start with, like what are some of the core things that you've learned when it comes to hiring talent when you're building teams from the ground up? Like what are some of the things that you focus on?

Speaker 2: 1:33

Yeah, I think hiring is the number one job for any CEO. I think that you want to hire slowly and fire quickly, and it's hard discipline to keep that. I've gone through a bunch of ways over the years of trying to figure out how to, how to weed out the, the B and C players, and the one I finally came to is what we call the awesome test, cause I found like if you say thumbs up or thumbs down on a candidate or a radio on a scale of one to five or one to 10, you know people tend to be nice. If you say, basically, was this person just incredibly awesome? People like have a hard time lying about that. It's either like an enthusiastic hell, yes, we got to get this person on board. Or yeah, I think they'd be fine. And second answer keep looking right. As painful as that might be to have an empty seat, you want to wait for somebody who is incredibly awesome, and so we've done that in a number of our positions.

Speaker 2: 2:29

I also believe having a really tight hiring process is really important, especially for startups if you're competing against the bigger companies. So what we do, for example, is I'll do a phone screen. We'll schedule a single day of interviews for the candidate and at each process I tell that candidate by that evening like they're moving on or they're not. And then we finally, in our case we have everybody go through, either for engineering a coding exercise or for a customer facing employee a presentation, and everybody in the company is invited to that and we kind of see how people think on their feet. Some people get kicked out of that process even at the last stage. But we try to keep that entire thing if we can within a week so that we can basically after the presentation come back to somebody and say you know here's your offer or you know you're not going to move forward with us. I love that.

Speaker 1: 3:18

I think the speed aspect is really important, I think it's solving For quality first and I think, as what you've said, you know, having worked for several successful startups and starting them, you know you've gotten down a formula where you understand how to do hires in a quality way and then you can accelerate and do things within a couple of weeks and there really is a way to get quality and speed, which I don't think a lot of startups and scale ups have really figured out. Yeah, and I get it, it's hard, so I think we can slow down and talk about some more things. When it comes to hiring quality, that could be helpful. I do want to say that speed with quality is definitely possible. You know my company, securevision, that sponsors the show.

Speaker 1: 3:59

We do contract recruiting and better recruiting and RPO for the tech industry, and we've worked with over 200 customers in the past 10 years. We've learned a few things, but you know, when it comes to hiring recruiters, for instance, we were hiring a ton of recruiters, just like everybody else in 2021, when the market was scaling like crazy. Right, and despite how competitive the market was for hiring recruiters, our time to fill was under three weeks for our own internal positions and we were getting like the best people, the best recruiters on the market, to come join our teams. Of course, it's challenging when it's in demand roles, but there is a way to hire amazing people really fast and even the most competitive market, so I think that that's something we can even slow down on more for folks. Thank you.

Speaker 2: 4:42

Yeah, I think, I think it's. It's also just treating the, the candidates, with respect, right? I think that you know, doing things quickly and being frankly as honest as you can and not like punting it off for somebody else to Give them the bad news if they're not a fit is super important. Like, well, you know, we every we have the kind of equivalent of the Japanese Production manufacturing line where anybody in the interview process can hit the red button and was like no way like this person, like there's no way I'd work with this person, and it's it's actually a measure of respect for our time and their time and Just doing it in a quick, quick time. I mean, like you know, I was at LinkedIn and you would think that they would obviously great company, great employees, but their hiring process was really extended and dragged out because people sometimes would their schedules wouldn't work and would take weeks and weeks and weeks to get somebody through an interview panel, and that's just a disadvantage that large companies have and startups can can overcome that if they move quickly.

Speaker 1: 5:38

And you have to, I think, as a startup, because there's things that you're not going to be able to compete effectively with big tech and, of course, there's a different profile a lot of the times between the folks the big tech's gonna hire and startups are gonna hire. But many of that weird in between scale-up phase where maybe you're competing for some of the same talent the bigger companies and you need to Focus on the things you can control right, and one of which is having an inefficient process as well. I think there's there's a few aspects that I think really helps my company as we're growing. And then, of course, like all the customers we worked with is I'm really huge on process documentation, so it's not only like it starts like literally and for us, like Google Docs right, and we document every single part of actually every process on ours Our company is documented within Google Docs. I'd consider it like one of our like it's an asset right that we've developed and we're constantly Optimizing and changing as the business evolves. But I think it starts there, like mapping out every single part of the process for talent acquisition Everything from like how you're sourcing, engaging talent, how you're hiring in-house, leveraging your network, leveraging your advisors, networks, potentially leveraging agencies, if it makes sense, leveraging the board, investors, everything and to doing so in a consistent motion that's repeatable all the way down to top of funnel interviews, screening calls, all the way down to offer process onboarding and then, of course, it goes into, you know, the employee lifecycle.

Speaker 1: 6:56

But I think that's critical and I think sometimes companies don't actually take the time to do that. But building that foundation, maybe it takes you a week or two to do all of that, but then you can start to implement tech a lot more effectively. So it's like when you onboard, like greenhouse, for instance, an applicant tracking system, they're a partner to the show actually, and you know, then you actually have a process doc of, like how you're gonna actually implement things. Yeah right, and you know, one of the biggest processes that I think companies just miss out on completely Is what are the requirements and the steps you're going through before a role is opened. In the early days of secure vision, and particularly when things got really, really tough for us during COVID because, like, our revenue fell off a cliff.

Speaker 1: 7:33

Right, it's a hiring company, so I was building myself out to four different companies and running, secure vision, and so what at first, things I would do is like when I was as a talent leader for these companies is I would build out a checklist of things that needed to be done For prior for a role being opened, and it would include everything from okay, taking a job description and say, well, this is just a bunch of tasks. What are the one to three outcomes that the role is actually needs to produce, and do we actually have a clear Understanding of the cause-effect relationship between the output they're creating and the impact that has on North Star metrics? So I would do a lot of work on how well are we cascading down from North Star into the role of the individual contributor and how clear we are on the impact that they're going to create. We would do a lot of work with hiring managers on are you prioritizing properly?

Speaker 1: 8:20

Are the projects that you're focusing on for your department really aligned with moving the company forward? Are there any projects that we can push to the side? Do you really need five people? Could you do it with two? Right, we'd look at. Okay, you need to hire 20 people this year. Do you actually have enough time to interview? So there was like a lot of stuff we were doing behind the scenes to make sure that when a role was opened, we were actually able to execute on that effectively, and so, like, one of the things I would just say is spend a lot more time up front Getting clear on what you need, the role, making sure there's alignment across the leadership before, actually, because then it gets a lot easier To recruit when you know exactly what you're looking for and everybody's aligned. Yeah, and I think most.

Speaker 2: 8:57

Most job descriptions are way too long, right, you know, most I'm just like the real keeping is, you know, figuring out what some must have versus a nice to have and keeping it Really crisp. You know we we have. You know our three values are passion, learning and results. Hmm, and so if somebody comes in and they're just looking for a job and they're not deeply passionate about the space we're working in, it's immediate disqualification. If somebody is not that kind of like has this growth mindset, like you know, and like Doesn't know what they want to learn next, where they want to grow, it's immediate disqualification. If they just talk about like I, you know, I basically Participated in a lot of things, but you know, art didn't really own the results. It's not somebody we want to talk to. So I think you know, in some ways it's like you know dating criteria. You can have a long list of your perfect match, right, but the reality is like there's a few core things that really matter and everything else is flexible.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Yeah, you really just got to be able to dial in on a couple of things. I agree with that. Honestly, if a role is taking on so like too many things, maybe we need to reconsider yeah, the role itself. I mean, I think it is a early stage start up. That can be a little tricky, right, because you Things are changing so rapidly. Sometimes you do need like that strong generalist that's adaptable and could just do a bunch of different things, and I've worked with particularly one person, or who's now our VP of operation has literally done, I think, every job in the company in the early days while we were getting off the ground, and occasionally she still does fill in in certain places for us. But generally speaking, you really want to make the role as clear-cut, simple as possible and limit the amount of responsibilities, yeah, so I'm a big believer in trusting your gut.

Speaker 2: 10:37

You know, the most extreme example of speed hiring I can give you is in my last startup. We were trying to fill out a sales team pretty quickly and we were working with a recruiting firm and it was just taking too long and I said here's a deal. This wasn't actually my idea. It was my head of product management, but we had a sales consultant who was working with us and we said you know, we're going to block Doug's day off. You know, I was the CEO and we want you to give us your best 10, 12 candidates and we're just going to do these back to back half an hour interviews. And it would be these two guys would be in the room interviewing the candidates and they basically say up front here's how we're going to run the interview. We're going to ask you some questions for 15 minutes and then we're going to talk as if you're not in the room anymore. We're going to turn to each other and talk about what we thought about you in front of you.

Speaker 2: 11:23

And I first heard this I was like, oh shit, like we're going to get sued for this and it sounds crazy. But the reality was we hired who, the person who became our head of sales and he's still a close friend incredibly successful VP of sales at companies like G2. We hired our first sales rep in a day. It was literally we knew and the deal would be if they had a candidate that they like, they would bring me in. But the fun hack was, for every sales person, they basically told them no and like three quarters of salespeople accepted that and the ones we hired were ones who were like let me tell you why you're wrong, like why you're making a mistake by not hiring me because they're salespeople. So it was just an incredibly effective process and kind of an extreme version of speed, because we wanted to start growing a sales team quickly. But I think there's also things where too much process can get in the way, so you have to have a balance between those things.

Speaker 1: 12:16

We have to know what process is effective. Yeah, like over to the actual levers you can use to get great results. Like, yeah, I mean like we still have some customers today that don't use assessments properly. You know, in most cases I'm actually not a huge fan of assessments personally. Some of them can be all right, but I think, particularly for startups, if they put it like too close to the top of the funnel the interview process then a lot of great people are going to drop out and sometimes they end up passing on people that you know, given our experience, having worked with a lot of companies and tech for, like you're, that's the wrong decision. This person could have been great for you, so I think they're not always used properly.

Speaker 1: 12:56

So there's. There's examples of process where companies kind of screw up and it's like they're trying to have a quality control in place. Yep and other might be like having too many leaders, maybe not so much for like a startup, but like a scale up a later stage. Having way too many people involved in the interview process. Or there's interviews that have redundant season it where two different leaders are asking different perspectives from different perspectives, like on the same kind of questions, like or or. Like an interview where you have three leaders that have to show up, like mid funnel, but then it's hard to coordinate schedules. Well, it's like maybe for a fine around, fine, but there's a lot of examples of that.

Speaker 2: 13:29

Yeah, and I think you make a great point, which is also like breaking up the interviews, and one of the things we do is we make sure, in addition to this tight process that we have at airspeed, is we make sure that you know you're going to go focus on culture, you're going to go focus on results, you're going to go focus on on, you know, past experience, like, whatever, like how will you decide to break it up so that the people are not overlapping in their questions as well? That's key.

Speaker 1: 13:53

Yeah, we had Dan Shade on who's the founder and CEO of Greenhouse, and again, greenhouse was a partner of the show and we talked about. I was like, hey, so when you started your company this was a decade ago, I think at this point like what was like the initial product roadmap, like what was the first thing that you did, that you were like this is going to be a game changer for companies and it all was pretty straightforward stuff. He's a scorecard right, like just a basic handful of things. That would be the difference between somebody you could do their own couldn't, and custom questions like just being clear on what's discussed, like the scorecard was a big part of that, because that leads to the custom questions like what's the focus? And then you can ask questions behind that, putting together essentially a structured hiring process structure.

Speaker 1: 14:38

He wrote a book called Tom, because it was basically how to go from chaotic to strategic hiring and there was like four steps right, and most of us, like a lot of tech companies, are kind of chaotic, and so it was really just like. You know, just the first thing is, if you don't have a process, just build a process right. The second thing is be clear on what's happening at each step and don't repeat it. It's like basic stuff like that will take you from. It'll just take a lot of risk out of it. It doesn't mean you're going to hire A players at a high rate yet, but it'll make you a lot better and a lot more consistent.

Speaker 1: 15:09

It's not like. You can do a little and stand out from a lot of companies.

Speaker 2: 15:14

Yeah, we're a greenhouse customer as well. It's a great platform.

Speaker 1: 15:17

Yeah. Yeah, that's cool, we're actually so we're bringing on Steve who's the CEO of Gem. I don't know if you've heard of Gem, but they do like more top of funnel sourcing campaigns outbound. Have you heard of them?

Speaker 2: 15:27

I have.

Speaker 1: 15:27

Yeah, okay cool. So yeah, steve's actually coming on the show too and it looks like fingers crossed I'm working they're interested in a partnership as well, so hopefully Steve will be coming on on a quarterly episode too. But yeah, I mean between Dan and Steve, like when it comes to structured hiring process, like these two guys, they know what they're talking about, so it's going to be a lot of fun talking with them too.

Speaker 2: 15:48

That's great.

Speaker 1: 15:49

But yeah, look, I want to move on to our next topics. We wanted to talk about culture and hybrid and remote environments. Yep, I think that there's a lot of mixed feelings here. There have been studies that say people feel more disengaged from culture and values and remote settings. You know, I'm hesitant to agree with a lot of the studies that have been put out because I feel like there's so much opportunity for bias when it comes to, like, for instance, productivity what's better, productivity in office or remote.

Speaker 1: 16:22

You can find data to argue both ways and I feel like, from what I'm hearing from a lot of executives, it's more beliefs that have been presented as facts. So, for instance, I might have like a conversation with the CEO that it says people aren't meant to live and work from the same room, like okay, and that's fine as a belief, but we can't present that as a fact, and I don't think we really have, you know, double blind studies, tests from psychologists to really determine this, and I don't know if we really have the data from corporations in order to know this either. So I'm kind of curious, like, just based on, I think the best we have is experience like folks that have been through it built and started and scaled startups, in your case several times, so you know, when it comes to incorporating a great culture in today's world with remote and hybrid like, what is your experience, talchie? What have you seen out there?

Speaker 2: 17:17

Yeah, and it's important. Listen, I think what COVID did was it was the first and hopefully only worldwide experiment in remote work, right, and I think that what it did for most of us was made us aware of issues that had existed before, whether you were in the office five days a week or zero days a week or anywhere in between. And I often said, you know, we always had either remote sales team or remote development team or different offices. Or, frankly, if I moved from you know, linkedin floor five to floor four, I might as well be a remote employee because I was not bumping into all my colleagues in the same way, so all this stuff has already existed. I think that one of the things that was interesting to me when my last company, flip Top, was acquired by LinkedIn was watching what a good job the executive team did there in cascading communications. So to go from a 30 person startup to a 10,000 plus person organization like there was so much more care and feeding to. Here's our goals for the quarter, here's our mission, here's our values. And how do you repeat this from the executive team down to the leaders, to the entire company, and do it on a regular cadence, and that was the way that you got alignment. You're like okay, we all understand what we're working on, we all understand what the big vision is, and I think what COVID really brought up for a lot of folks is again, regardless of what your work configuration is.

Speaker 2: 18:43

You have to do the same with culture. You can't just say, oh, we're going to bump into each other in the cafeteria and have a few ping pong tables and some beer bashes on Friday. You have to think about things like how do you make sure employees have the most awesome first day of onboarding, where they really get to know the team, and vice versa? How do you make sure that recognition is being given on a regular basis? How do you facilitate people to meet up when they are in the same location as other people?

Speaker 2: 19:12

How do you make sure that people who we typically in larger companies have a small set of people we're meeting with regularly, but a much larger set of people who are in our project or our team that we're not? How do you get to know those people? And so on? These are all really important things that the best managers do this intuitively, but in the same way that when Facebook started, it was like here's a toolkit to help you facilitate your personal friendships. I think what we're trying to build at airspeed is take the things that we've done in the physical world, or great managers do, and basically give you the kind of Ironman suit so that it's much easier for managers to do the right thing as well, and that's everything. That's all those things that I mentioned, and none of them require software, but software that we and others have built make it much easier and much better.

Speaker 1: 20:03

Oh yeah, for sure. I think honing in on experience is really important in terms of culture.

Speaker 1: 20:11

I think it's how you interact and treat people and, of course, how you work. I think that sometimes executives underestimate how much of an impact experience has on outcomes produced for customers and growth. And, for instance, like when we're looking at onboarding right, creating great experiences is going to decrease ramp time is going to improve productivity, engagement retention, referrals, right, optimizing talent acquisition for experience candidate experience is going to ensure that great candidates stay in funnel and you're able to convert them to top talent. I don't think that experience and outcomes are two separate conversations. I think that they're inextricably linked together and you have to get one right to get the other right. And when you're talking about onboarding experience that's just something that stood out to me it's like, yeah, we got to get that right. There's a ton of really important reasons we got to get stuff like that right.

Speaker 2: 21:08

Yeah, and I think you know in the same way, the way I think about the interview process is everybody who interviews with us Should leave wanting to work at airspeed, whether we offer them something or not, and feel like that's a great process. I think everybody who finishes their first day at airspeed should be more excited about the company. Even then, when they came in right, that means you've done it, you've done a good job and at the end of the first week they feel like I'm really prepared to do my job and obviously it will continue. But, like you should feel like you've got all the tools and all the mentors and all the things you have and that doesn't happen. My accent you said that that requires a very deliberate process, a lot of care and feeding to go make that happen.

Speaker 2: 21:47

So, for example, like at my last company we used to, a new employee would start we. We'd take everybody out who's in the office, out to lunch and we'd ask you know a standard set of questions like first concert most embarrassing moment. You know what do you do for fun stuff like that and it was great, it was a great bonding moment. The problem was, if you joined after that person, you never heard their answers. That person never heard the answers of everybody else that was already in the company, and if you miss that lunch, you missed it all right.

Speaker 2: 22:13

So, like you know, at airspeed we developed an app called intros which is like hey, here's a standard set of questions. It all happens in slack, you know, you get set that, set that set of questions, you answer it, everybody gets to see your answer or comment, you know react on it and you get to say oh, by the way, here's the team you're working with and you can see how everybody else answer that question. So, again, just a kind of great to get to know somebody up front. You can do it in the physical world and software makes it better. So I think there's a lot of these things that, Again, even if you're five days a week in the office, you have to be more deliberate about culture, and I think that's what coven and the whole hybrid work experiment taught us.

Speaker 1: 22:50

Yeah, I mean, I think honestly, working remote, it's given a lot of executives to really be thoughtful about process and Everything from measuring performance to thinking about culture, doing so in such a way that can be like measured inconsistent and where we don't really Overlook things or miss things right. I think that if you're in office and you haven't really slowed down to focus on process or implement Into technology, there's so many room for inconsistency In process and people having different experiences when it comes to onboarding or hiring or anything else. So that's a really good point. It's like this. Over the past couple years, we've been more so forced to think about Consistency and building things out into technology the right way.

Speaker 2: 23:37

Yeah, and I think, like you know, the genesis for me was, you know, I started at sales force six weeks before coven locked everybody down and you know, for me I loved the flexibility of remote work and everyone to go into an office five days a week again. But you know I miss people and you know we tried all the same stuff that real stood, you know zoom, happy hours and lots of different fun slack channels and stuff like that. And All of this stuff is just this information is scattered all over the place and systems where you're not, you know you somebody introduced himself and slack typically, and it just washes downstream and no one's ever gonna find that again. So the goal that we had is like how do we kind of create an operating system for culture around this stuff? And I think that you know, as a, it's something like a co-pilot for managers. So how do you think about what is the best way to hire, retain, and in some cases, you know, know when you have to let somebody go.

Speaker 1: 24:30

Can we talk a little bit more about that side of it, right? Like I think that the Off-boarding process, particularly if there's a performance concern right, where it's not voluntary, right, it's a really important process to get right, of course, for the individual Impacted, right, but at least is equally important for the team that remains and that is, again, linked to hiring, because it's gonna go into a glass door reviews, it's gonna impact the amount of referrals, right, so it's tied together. So what, tell me, can we share a little bit more about your, your process? I mean, you know we talked about a little bit the philosophy of hire slowly, fire quickly, but of course you have to be very organized. Companies have to really understand the outcomes and the milestones that need to be achieved in a role in Order to move fast. With something like that we can start. High level is just curious to get your, curious to get your thoughts on this and I think there's a couple things.

Speaker 2: 25:26

One is you know when I think about retention. Right, the best test I've come up with is what I called the fun test, and I'll just randomly ask people, usually when, like when a one-on-one zoom call or preferably even in person and off-site hey, are you having fun? And I found that people are terrible at lying about that, so if their voice goes up an octave or they're kind of take too long to respond, I know there's an issue. I need to kind of double click and dig into that. And then it's kind of interesting in that we, for everyone we hire, we put a meeting on the calendar 90 days out and it's kind of a check-in and what I found is you kind of know whether it's working on both sides within 90 days. And so the worst case is that you've got somebody who's kind of doing okay but not great, and you let it drag on and that drags the whole culture of the company down, because they're like, well, that person is a beat player and they're getting away with it. Some of you, I don't have to work as hard or I can hire other beat players and suddenly the culture starts degrading or the quality of the people in the company. So we basically sit down and it's kind of I always feel weird saying on their first day like we're going to sit down 90 days and see if this is working for you and working for us, and if it's not we'll say goodbye. And so we have a very clear 90 day plan. We don't hold everybody to the strict letter of that, but within 90 days you should be showing that like hey, you're in the groove, you're being productive, we made the right hire and if not, we say goodbye. And the firing side is I just stole this directly from Netflix Netflix has something they call the Keeper Test, and the question there is if any person in your organization said to you tomorrow they were going to leave, would you fight to keep them?

Speaker 2: 27:12

If the answer is no, you should probably be managing them out now. And if the answer is yes, ask yourself what would you do to keep them on board. Would you give them more title, more responsibility, more stock, more salary? And do it now Right, don't let them get to that place, right? And so I think about that a lot in terms of the team, and then obviously, sometimes in startup you have constraints with what you're able to do. But I think that's super important as well, to just make sure you're always keeping that quality bar high, because what you're really trying to do is create a legendary sports team, kind of you're trying to create the Lakers, the Knicks, the Chicago Bulls, right?

Speaker 1: 27:54

Yeah, I mean it's like building championship teams, right. We actually were using that as a tagline for the company for a long time. Yeah, secure vision. It's funny what you're saying when you say exactly you were talking about what would you do to retain this person and go ahead and do that proactively. I actually give that same advice on the hiring side when you make an offer, like how much would you have offered if this person declines your offer? What would you pay?

Speaker 1: 28:20

in order to get them to accept. Start with that. Yeah, you know, like I mean again it's, you're going to miss out on a great person, particularly if it's under $15,000 a year. Yeah, because the amount of time and resources it takes to hire people and from everything from the sourcing to the hiring manager side and the dilution of focus, I mean it's such a huge cost associated with hiring and that's even really hard to quantify sometimes with the cost per hire when you're taking the opportunity cost and dilution of focus and these types of things. It's usually a lot cheaper to just pay somebody $5 to $10,000 more.

Speaker 1: 28:58

And of course, they're just going to be even happier and more engaged in the job. Honestly, I think a big part of what's helped us hire great people is one we give them space. Like we hire people that are really good at what they do and we have a lot of process documentation so they know exactly how to do it and we don't have to micromanage. We have clear KPIs, these types of things, and the process documentation really helps. But they like that and they also like the fact that when they come to work here, they're getting paid a lot more money than they were in their previous role.

Speaker 1: 29:22

You don't base salary based on, like how are they making less, how much, at their last role? And let's give them a little bit of a bump. It's like if our salary range has to be, it happens to be twice as much of what you were making. Damn good for you. Like that's great, because then they bring that energy into the job and they're like I'm going to crush it. I earned this, I'm here, I've made it. I mean all of that energy translates into great customer experiences.

Speaker 2: 29:45

Yeah, and I think you know the counterbalance to that is we use what we call the photocopier test, which I guess is an outdated metaphor now. But you know, the idea was like if you had left the entire Salary and stock chart, you know, for the organization on the photocopier, you know, and anybody picked that up, could you explain it right? So you never want to have somebody who's like super, you know, equivalent somebody's weight making way more. But it should be something where you go Like well, that person's got a lot more stock because they joined a lot earlier, they have a lot more experience. You know, they took bigger risks, they traded off a lot of their salary for stock or vice versa. So we have that.

Speaker 2: 30:18

We have kind of this notion of bands that people are in and so we'll start with you know, and, as you said, like with some people we've given them a huge salary boost and some people, you know, we know that we're early-stage startups so we generally tend to go more median on salary but we want to get to like 95% to 100% of the range on stock. So we're very generous in the stock side and we want people who are like leaning into that, like yeah, I'm not trying to maximize just my cash comp. I know that you know most of the wealth and silicon valley in the world from is coming from the stock side and not from the salary side.

Speaker 1: 30:51

Yeah, yeah, salary grounds are super important, like to clarify, but honestly, like I just offer somebody the top into the salary band, a qualified for, so like let's say that somebody's competing for a role or we have two roles open, right, somebody applies at five years experience, somebody applies with three years experience, a person with three years experience making less than the person with five. And then at the day I'm looking at outcomes produced, if I think that the person with three years of experience can do the job, great, I think the person with five years, I'm gonna pay him the same thing. I mean, that's how I do it at my company, because I'm paying For the output you're gonna produce and I Some. Sometimes I feel like somebody a few years kid experience. Sometimes I think you do it and then you know there might, I might interview with somebody with ten years of experience that I don't think can do it.

Speaker 1: 31:30

Yep, you know that that happens, but I don't have these like big salary bands. It's like what is the role and I'm gonna give you the top. The amount that we've forecasted out is you know that that makes sense for the business, that we can scale with and that's what you're getting like and I mean that way that's equitable. I don't really based on location. You know I haven't. I don't really adjust Salaries for that if somebody's located in the bay and somebody's located elsewhere.

Speaker 1: 31:59

We do it internationally, nationally if somebody's in India, india versus Nationally, no, yeah, and that actually helps us offer competitive salaries in the US market and allows us to play when we have a distributed team. So you know we're doing things right now and like LADAM in Eastern Europe, that give us a little more flexibility. Yeah, we're talking about the salary ranges for those markets.

Speaker 2: 32:25

Yep, yep, same thing. Yeah, you know we don't care where you are in the US and you know we're definitely looking at Role as opposed to. You know what you made and you know we try to get that information up front, because I also don't want to take waste some time or waste our time if somebody's like hey, listen, I'm coming from Google, I'm, you know, in a very cushy job and I really, you know, want to make sure I'm Keeping my base salary, not gonna happen and start yeah, and that's I think you know candidates to like.

Speaker 1: 32:54

They should be asking first round, for everybody should be trying as parent with Con because you know, if it's within 15,000 bucks to, depending on the salary, you know, maybe you can go down funnel and figure it out, but if there's a significant gap it just doesn't make sense. That should be cleared up. Yeah, from the start.

Speaker 2: 33:12

Yep, absolutely. And I often ask candidates like you know what their dream job is, in the beginning of an interview, and then I ask who they're interviewing with and if that's in this match. That's also a red flag for me. So somebody's like oh, I love early stage startups doing B2B. And then I'm like talking to Facebook and you know, and you know, and Google and Apple, and like, okay, you're just, you know, you're looking for a job, right.

Speaker 1: 33:33

Yeah, yeah for sure. Well, doug, look, this has been a great conversation. I really enjoyed talking shop with you and thank you for sharing your experience with our audience. That everyone's gonna really appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Speaker 2: 33:47

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 33:49

Of course, and for everybody tuning in. Thank you for joining us and we will see you next time. Take care.