Join host James Mackey and his guest, Parker Barrile, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners as they explore career progression, market dynamics, and the trials and triumphs of building thriving tech companies.
Learn how market conditions and tech developments impact the HR landscape and gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by founders and investors. They open up about surviving economic downturns and the resilience required to succeed.
0:34 Parker Barrile's background
1:59 Market conditions and HR tech developments
9:07 Surviving and thriving in business
20:39 Leadership and hiring during a crisis
30:24 Effective strategies for hiring and recruiting
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
#1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
Join host James Mackey and his guest, Parker Barrile, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners as they explore career progression, market dynamics, and the trials and triumphs of building thriving tech companies.
Learn how market conditions and tech developments impact the HR landscape and gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by founders and investors. They open up about surviving economic downturns and the resilience required to succeed.
0:34 Parker Barrile's background
1:59 Market conditions and HR tech developments
9:07 Surviving and thriving in business
20:39 Leadership and hiring during a crisis
30:24 Effective strategies for hiring and recruiting
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Our host James Mackey
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
#1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
Hello, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, James Mackey. Today, we are joined by Parker Burrell Parker. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you, James. Glad to be here.
Speaker 1:Yes, very happy to have you. Before we jump into it, could you share a little bit about your background with everyone?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a classic Silicon Valley story.
Speaker 2:I landed in the Bay Area back in the 90s and spent about 15 years in product, and probably my greatest claim to fame back then was that I was VP of product for the recruiting business at LinkedIn, which some of your listeners may be familiar with. So LinkedIn Jobs and LinkedIn Recruiter was there in the early days helping build out those products and then after that career transitioned into venture and so for the past seven years I've been a partner at Northwest Venture Partners, which is one of the top VC funds in the Bay Area, and at Northwest I invest in early stage tech startups, typically in consumer apps and B2B SaaS companies, and because of my background in recruiting, I've over-indexed on HR tech companies which we talk a little bit about, and obviously as an investor, I'm on the board of I think eight companies today and have been previously was on the board of a couple that went public. So tons of experience helping founders build companies, hiring execs, coaching and mentoring execs across a bunch of different contexts. So just really excited to be here and have conversation with you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm really excited about this just to get your insight on a lot of things related to hiring, HR. Hr technology Would be great just to dive into that. But I think before we jump into anything, let's just talk about the market. I think in general, it would be great if we could just talk about market conditions and what we're seeing out there, and then maybe we could actually get a little bit more nuanced and dialed into HR tech, even Like what we're seeing is possible developments in HR tech over the next few years. That'd actually be cool and I don't think we had actually outlined that. But before we do all that, just high level, what are you seeing right now in the tech economy, if you will?
Speaker 2:Yeah, frankly, there's been a lot of whiplash. I'm sure everybody who's listening has felt it in their brokerage accounts and probably in their day jobs. And when you're an investor, you're really on the front end of it. You live it. You live the market every day, and it's been pretty tumultuous. We went through COVID and then the post-COVID boom and then a quick pullback in 2022.
Speaker 2:I think what happens in the market is, ultimately, the decisions that the Fed makes have a really big impact on the stock market, and then what's going on in the stock market impacts the private markets, where I invest, and everything is just there's just a lag there. So we saw this pretty significant pullback in the public market starting in I don't know early to mid 2022. And suddenly everyone in the private markets, where I invest, really put on the brakes and said wow, if valuations in public markets have gone down a lot, then we need to be more careful about the investments we're making in private companies, and so that's taken a while to play out. I think you've seen companies wait longer to raise capital. I think you've seen investments happen at lower valuations. But I think what's happening is this slightly painful reset over the past 12 to 18 months on valuations and the start of economy broadly, but I think it's healthy in the long run because I think things got crazy.
Speaker 2:Everybody felt that things got crazy for a bunch of years and fundamentally I'm a believer in innovation. Fundamentally, there are still great founders out there starting and building great businesses and what I want to do is cut through the noise and the folks who are not in it for the right reasons and find those hidden gems, and that's always been my style when I was joining companies back in the day. That's what led me to LinkedIn before. It was cool and I think that's been my style. Investor is just focus on the fundamentals of the business and is this a great founder? Does it have product market fit and is it solving a real problem?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a wild market. My company, securevision, that sponsors the show. We do contract recruiting and better recruiting, rpo. Basically tech companies borrow recruiters from us and they act like internal recruiters on demand. Ok, essentially our business model. So yeah, the last 18 to 12 months have been freaking insane Like I founded the company almost a decade ago, but it was essentially like a lifestyle, small business around probably 800K revenue type of thing, just a very small shop.
Speaker 1:And then, post COVID, we started to scale and we saw just significant growth. It went from a handful of people to where we were quickly approaching 40 employees in a matter of 12 to 18 months. It was nuts and that, by the way, is a bootstrapped company and so it was so much fun, but it wasn't, of course, sustainable is what we all learned. I feel like a lot of founders. We probably felt like geniuses for a shorter time in your project. Down to reality. It's funny. It's like in these markets sometimes you feel like an idiot and then in the growth market sometimes you feel like a genius. It's neither probably accurate. It's just funny, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I'll tell you, I think I'm more impressed these days with founders who bootstrap a business like you. I think it's really hard to do, it's really impressive, and I think a lot of times you end up with a better business because you're forced to make trade-offs along the way. You don't just have this pile of cash that you can draw down, and so what's interesting is, as funding pulled back in the private markets, my portfolio companies have had to become more disciplined about how they operate and they've had to think and act more like bootstrap founders like you. Congrats to you on building what sounds like a phenomenal company.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's a bootstrapped experience at this point, like running a company for almost a decade Definitely has helped us survive Right now. Right, because I have so many competitors that have gone out of business. It's almost every month of hearing about two more competitors that are going out of business almost. And one of my advisors who's built and sold a company in my industry he talks about this. He was like, wow, okay, he'll bring up a competitor. I'm like, oh, that was a pretty well-known one. They were a big shop, they were still niche to the tech industry, they were like 100, 150 employees and they're just gone.
Speaker 1:And, like some of these founders, ceos, they're just like I'm never doing this again. They're just totally beat down to the point where they've just decided to make a new decision. I'm not going to say given up, because you evolve in life, you grow and sometimes what was once a dream now becomes a nightmare and it's okay to walk away and there's power and change in your mind. I get it, but it's crazy to see these companies that had built up a reputation in the space over a period of years basically just throwing the towel. By the way, the reason I'm diving into this is because it's reflective of the hiring environment in tech. That's right. That's right.
Speaker 2:One of the pieces of advice that I deeply believe in and have talked to my portfolio companies about is don't die. Yeah, it's really obvious, it's actually.
Speaker 1:It's great advice, it's so simplistic but it's like just concrete you got to survive to thrive, type of thing, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and because the economy moves in cycles and we are going through a cycle of rising interest rates, compressing valuations and, understandably, companies are not hiring as much as they were. In fact, many companies are laying people off and reducing headcount, but you're already starting to see that tip back toward growth. I think it was. I think I saw an announcement from Salesforce recently. They'd done layoffs early in the year and now they've been very public about building back some of the teams and they're hiring into different business units and they're hiring slightly different positions than the ones they laid off, but they're already back to building because that, I think, will pass the peak pessimism and if you don't die which sounds very simplistic then you're going to be around to move. Grow back with the economy. We saw. I saw that at LinkedIn back when I joined in 2009, a long time ago, but it was a pretty dark economic time and LinkedIn's growth slowed you can see it in the S1 filing but then it re-accelerated as we were coming out of the 0809 recession.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we could slow down on that and there's a lot to unpack there from like business psychology and, honestly, just general success psychology. In life, we should have our values in such a way that maybe business it's not the most important thing. I think morally. My worldview morally and otherwise, is that it shouldn't be. Even if you're an obsessive entrepreneur, there's things in life that are more important. Our health, our family these things, our relationships in general, are more important. I don't think I would have said that in my early twenties. Honestly, I was willing to sacrifice a whole lot. Yeah, you live and learn, right, you guys can have life experiences, but anyhow, I just think the whole you have to survive thing it's a choice in business. It's not always a choice in our personal lives. Sometimes people grow terminally ill or things of this nature, and at some point it happens to all of us, hopefully not for a long time. Business is different. I genuinely believe I heard this and I wish I could give credit to who said it, but I can't remember, unfortunately. What she said was businesses don't fail, people quit. I really believe in that 100%. The reality is that, no matter how bad things get, if you just stick in there. There's really nothing that can stop you.
Speaker 1:I remember we went through a really hard time in 2017 or 18, and not because of the economy, it's just we were a very young startup and we didn't have funding and we just went through this random stretch where we didn't close any deals for a few months. At the time we weren't embedded, recruiting what we do now. We were doing contingent fee-based stuff. We had people decline offers, we didn't collect fees and it got really bad. I was missing bills and I was getting threatening letters and my credit cards were maxed out. I was even late on paying taxes.
Speaker 1:But I just remember thinking what if I just don't quit? Okay, what if I can't pay the bills? What if I am late on the taxes? All the vendors hate me. What if employees I lose out of value? They leave? What if they don't like? What if all of that happens? And as long as I literally can have a roof over my head and it hadn't feed myself what if I just keep going? That's always been, at least for my mindset. At this point it's expanded as long as I can keep a roof over my family's head and my daughter the roof gets a little bigger as you get older. But I really believe that If you just don't stop, it'll work itself out. If you got sick, it's not like you're going to throw in the towel or your kid gets sick. It's not like you're just like oh, that's a good analogy.
Speaker 2:First of all, I just want to say a ton of respect for what you've gone through to build this business, this company, because I've said it before, but bootstrapping a company is just a whole different ballgame. But I think that companies it is like getting sick the economy got sick, some companies got sick and most of the time you get well. It's about not giving up, and I see that across my portfolio. I had the opportunity to join some really successful companies as an operator and, honestly, I took for granted how well things worked at those companies. I thought, oh, this is just inevitably what happens. When you bring a group of folks together, you end up building this incredible company. First it was Google, then it was LinkedIn and it was a small part of both of those, but those were incredible career experiences.
Speaker 2:Now, as an investor, I'm a board member, often investing at the seed stage or the Series A stage in these companies, and it is incredibly hard to build a company. It takes a long time, it is never just consistently up and to the right. There's all kinds of setbacks. Some of them are macro setbacks, like we went through with COVID and this market correction that we're still coming out of. Some of them are bad decisions, self-imposed setbacks, sometimes it's competition.
Speaker 2:Bad hires are a big one, which is probably something we can talk a little bit about and you just think about wow, it is brutally hard, and I think the media and even podcasts included. There's this kind of selection bias where you only want to talk about the successes and because failures aren't that much fun to talk about. But man, it's hard. And so even for those success stories, it's easy to just gloss over all the near death experiences. And you see it, at the board level, everything ends up trickling up to the board issues, pr crises, whatever. It's hard. Just a ton of respect for folks who found and lead businesses. Because I'm simply an investor, I have the easy drive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just operating in general, operating scale-up organizations, it's really damn hard and for so many reasons, these types of market conditions too there's just a lot to navigate and, yeah, there's going to be several near death experiences, and I think it's one thing that I've learned, honestly in life. I think it applies to business, I think it applies to our personal life too. It's actually okay to talk about all that stuff. We don't want to complain. That's not what I'm saying. We talk to candidates that are thinking about coming to work for us. You want people that are passionate about solving the problems that you have. We don't want to just focus on the wins. We should be focusing on hey, we got some really cool strategic things going on. This is the future we believe in. We think we're going to get there.
Speaker 1:Right now, we're in this essentially economic pandemic whatever you want to call it and so we're just in survival mode and if we can deliver on this part of the business, we're going to get back on track. We're looking for somebody to lead that or contribute to that. There's a lot of people that are going to be inspired by that. You don't necessarily want people that are just inspired by only your success. You want people that are aligned from a value perspective. See the belief in the future that you're building, and I feel like that's also again the parallel to personal relationships. If we run our businesses in a sense, how we would think about things that are just really important to us. The parallels are there Got to be honest, transparent, to make sure you're attracting the right people that are going to help you get where you want to go.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right, and I think, as I look longitudinally across my portfolio and more broadly across Norwest's entire portfolio of a couple hundred active portfolio companies, it's hard to draw a ton of conclusions. But one thing that really stands out is that the companies that succeed are typically the companies that are able to attract great talent, especially at the executive level, and it starts with the founder and the CEO and their ability to identify and attract that talent, to screen for the right attributes and then to bring that talent on board and make them productive and successful in those roles. That is the difference, maker right, because when you're in venture, you're making these investments in the hopes that you're going to have a really big outcome. So it's a little different mindset from a bootstrap company, where a bootstrap founder can build a company with a million dollars in revenue and have a great lifestyle business on their hands. With Venture, you're trying to build a billion dollar company or a $10 billion company, and you can't do it by yourself, and you can't do it if your ego won't let you hire great lieutenants onto your team, and so that is the most consistent theme for me across the entire portfolio is how important hiring is to success and, in particular, exact hiring, and then how hard it is right.
Speaker 2:I think it's like this completely unsolved problem and we can talk about approaches and techniques. I don't have anything super profound to say because there is no easy answer. I wish there were. But that's the key and for anyone listening who is in a position of running a business, or even if they're leading a team within a company, the path to success for that person is to surround themselves with the most talented folks they possibly can. And if someone's in the business of hiring, I think they should feel good about the fact that they're involved in the thing that is the most impactful in determining the success of a company full stop, and that comes from someone who's lived it as an operator and someone who is now living it as an investor and board member. It's just so clear to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. That's why I always say that recruiting it's not a segment of your business, it's the core of your business. It's fundamentally understanding that nothing, literally in the history of humanity, nothing great has ever been built without recruiting and empowering an incredible group of people Like that's literally how. That's true, that's a fact. It's not a belief. We've never built anything, ever as a species, without recruiting a great team. That's how important it is.
Speaker 2:One example that's cool is this movie Oppenheimer. I actually haven't seen the movie, but I've read the book that the movie's based on. And the Manhattan Project was this monumental undertaking and this guy, j Robert Oppenheimer, got appointed to lead it. But there was so much work to do across a bunch of different areas of development and he was able to pull together the best, literally the brightest minds, the best physicists in the country and get them motivated and get them to collaborate with each other. These guys had huge egos, they had strange working styles and he somehow found a way to make it happen and then they accomplished their goal and what they accomplished had a strange impact on the world. But it's really a study in leadership again, and a study, frankly, in hiring Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and honestly, what's crazy about that is, I guess the stakes were so high in World War II where I guess maybe more scientists felt compelled to, physicists felt compelled to join. But it's interesting because there's usually almost like a clear separation almost between science and politics. To an extent, maybe there's a couple of social cases like maybe like climate change and something where you might see more so an alignment between a political party, but typically it's like they're completely different motions. You see politicians just saying shit without ever backing it up. They're not using scientific method or anything to develop any sort of foundational, like actually logical premises that lead to a logical conclusion.
Speaker 1:And then you have scientists, like on the other end of the spectrum, where it's if you say something, then it's on you to prove it. It's not for other people to disprove it. You have to prove it if you're going to say it Right, like you can't just say there's fairies in the sky. It's not up to other people to prove you wrong. It's up to you to actually show the evidence to that thing, and so I think that's another thing that's really impressive specifically about Manhattan Project was literally the fact that they were able to pull together a bunch of scientists for something that was like a little bit more, almost like a massive political.
Speaker 2:Totally, I think don't never let a good crisis go to waste. I think that at Facebook, it's famous that Zuckerberg realized that the world was shifting to mobile and that Facebook didn't really have a co-here in plan for how to shift its business to mobile, and rallied the troops and said this is the only thing that matters. And they did a masterful job of shifting all the app engagement to mobile and making the ad format. That's what I think led to the ads in the news feed, because that's the only way that ads would really work effectively on mobile. And so I'm curious for you as a business leader. We've been through a lot of crises over the past couple of years. How do you think about channeling the pandemic, or channeling the market correction into decisions you've had to make about your business?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think one as a bootstrap founder one of the things like just getting back to recruiting an incredible team and getting other experts in the room hopefully that no more than you do as a leader and I think this is important as converse CEOs, but I also think it's important for every executive role. I feel like every executive should have mentors that don't work within the business. Right, whether you're a COO or a CPO or chief revenue officer like you, should have mentors who have several successful exits, even if you happen to as well. You think about the most successful people in the world. They all have the most advisors. President of the United States has more advisors than anyone else. Professional athletes have several coaches. Right, I think there's this policy mindset of you get to a certain point and you don't need advisors, when actually, when you look at the most successful people in the world, the more successful they are, almost like the more and the better advisors they have.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah, so that's just something that, like. One of the things that I've done is I actually haven't hired a ton of internal leaders. I got a couple of VPs that we've promoted internally, and so I'm actually really excited to learn from you here on executive hiring in a moment. But what I did do is I established a board of advisors.
Speaker 1:I don't have a board of directors because I don't have, you see, investors, but basically I heard from two CEOs that were further along than me and my career to my mentors that I really need to establish a board. Right, because they said when they were scaling companies in the early days of their career, there were experts that were guiding them and keeping them in check, and it's not just accountability, but it's OK. By the next board meeting, we want you to have done this and this and really working at that level and doing, and so I've established the board over the past year and we've had only one official board meeting and then we have the next one coming up soon, but I meet with each of them once a month as well. And actually our chairman I meet with it every week, like he's really generous with his time, which is really cool. I wasn't expecting it exactly, but he is anyway and it's been a huge game changer, like just helping guide me, like all these people have built, scaled, sold businesses, and so that's I think it's as an executive.
Speaker 1:Remember, you never stop recruiting. You don't care what position you're in, you never stop. It's just, even if you're not recruiting for the people that are going to report into you, you should constantly be seeking out advisors, people that are going to help you take your game to the next level and see stuff from angles that maybe you don't see, or, at a minimum, they might validate what you're doing. How cool is that? It's like peer reviewed stuff right, like you get the best people to say, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I admire the fact that you were proactive about seeking out coaching and advice. I think that assertion you made about how some of the most successful people in the world do have coaches and advisors is really profound in a way that I heard it before but it never really sunk in. I think you gave great examples about the president pro athletes, because I think it's hard. As a founder, I see it within my portfolio. Some of them ask for coach, ask to hire a coach and do hire a coach, some of them don't. It's pretty lonely.
Speaker 2:I think if you're not working with because I don't think if you're a venture backed founder, you don't necessarily want to go to your board in a way that's vulnerable, because I'm fine with it. As a board member, I love to coach and advise founders and I try not to get anxious or be judgy about it. But at the same time, your board is typically has capital at stake, their reputation at stake. Maybe you don't want to go to them and be vulnerable and share bad news. I think venture backed founders are probably under supported the way that it but it but kudos to you for taking initiative to do it. It's not going to fall into your lap.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you have to. You really have to seek it out. It's just like a general principle. It's success is calculus, not statistics. You can't look at statistics and business and if you look at, 96% of businesses fail and I can't remember the stats, but it's most companies fail and it's like dialing into an exact strategy.
Speaker 1:Like sometimes the difference between success and failure is like just a very tiny, small adjustment that needs to be made that over time, creates a big, a big difference. I actually like that. I don't know why this example comes out of mind, but like for your retirement account management fees, right, like expense ratios, right, like you had to actively manage fun where they're taking two, three percent or something incredibly high, and then you take an unactive, an active managed fund. That's like a Vanguard SMP index or something at less than 1%. When that compounds over a long period of time, it's a substantial difference in your earnings. And I think it's like the same that the correlation that I'm trying to make is that tiny pivots that you make in the early days by having the right advisors that help you execute, tell you how you can execute on a strategy. Okay, do this, do that or change this, and it might seem like a small tactical shift, but it adds up in the long run that can make a huge difference, right, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think that ties back to the hiring obviously, because the quality of those hires that you make and there's some luck in it too but the quality dramatically affects the trajectory of the business over time and small differences in trajectory become big gaps over time. And I think that, on the converse of bad hires, just incredibly destructive and that happens all the time too right, it's impossible to prevent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, and I think anyways, just to dial more into executive hiring, maybe we can start with talent attraction. So when it comes to attracting really incredible leaders, it's one thing if you're like a category leading company, right Like at that point when you've established that trajectory, let's say that you're earlier stage than that Maybe you have success, maybe you're scaling, but you don't necessarily have that brand. How do you go about getting the absolute best? Because the difference between the best and pretty good is a huge difference, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me answer that a couple of ways. First of all, I think you have to calibrate your expectations appropriately, and I think I would liken it to my job as an investor looking for exciting companies to invest in. If I just chase the companies that everybody already knows about and have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and have super high valuations, then that's not the exercise. And similarly, in exact hiring, I think that if you're an up-and-coming company, you've got to look for the hidden gems. You've got to look for talent that hasn't yet fully proven but has enormous potential, and my specific recommendation there is I think leaders have a Johnny Appleseed effect. When they come into new organizations. They take the culture that they know, the processes that they know, and they bring it with them from their prior employer, and so, for me, the biggest driver in sourcing is to start by thinking about organizations that I admire or that the portfolio company I'm helping and advising admires, not simply what the company does, but how it operates and, ideally, how the function operates within that company. For example, I think LinkedIn is known for being a very product driven company, having a very strong culture within the product management organization, so I'm always excited to try to hire people out of the product team at LinkedIn. There are other Googles known for being an engineering driven company. There are others that are known for being sales driven. But the idea is that you would focus on folks in companies you admire, and these searches that we run, we typically start by listing eight or 10 companies where we say, hey, that's who we want to be when we grow up, not necessarily in the business outcome, but in the way the company operates, the way it works, the culture, the values, the efficacy. And let's go find someone. If we're hiring a VP, let's maybe go find someone who's a group product manager or director of product at that company, who has come of age in that culture and will Johnny Apple seed it over to us? Right, because they may not have done all the things that we are going to ask them to do, but they've seen it, They've lived it, learned it, and that was true for me in my operating career and it's absolutely true. And so that's the theoretical approach.
Speaker 2:The pragmatic approach is recruiting is still very people driven, it's very hard work and I think that you can't outsource it. So if you're a CEO or a founder, or if you're a C level exec trying to hire a VP underneath you, if it's an important hire and if you're a CEO, every C level hire is important, right? If it's an important hire, you can't outsource it. So I remember when I was chief product officer at this company called Prosper, this Vintech company, I was building out a couple of, or filling a couple of, key VP roles.
Speaker 2:I sent all the LinkedIn messages myself, the initial outreach to these candidates, because I was reaching out to relatively senior candidates. These were important hires. I wasn't going to outsource that, even to my recruiting partner. Now, once I connected with someone, then I could hand off the logistics to a recruiting partner that I was working with. But I think that hands on approach, that authenticity, is really powerful to break through with candidates. That probably hear from a lot of people. Those are some ideas I have about how to make it happen. And then there's a question of okay, you've got a dozen candidates, you're excited about which one you choose. We can get to that if you're interested, but that's how I think about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you ever stop recruiting. Your point of impact might be different, or the folks that you are recruiting for might be different, but again, it's just the core of your business. So you always have to be hands on, and so that's great. In terms of sourcing mindset and how you're engaging from an attraction standpoint, of how to actually make them interested, that's also so. That's like the other side of it. How do you, when you're not, maybe you have a great, maybe you have a good brand, but the best of the best are going to have several options from other category leading companies and SaaS, for instance. That being able to lock down the best person I think is so critical and I have a story I could share related to that too. But I know you have overseeing leadership searches for more companies that you have like equity involvement in, or that you've been a direct operator, and so like, how do you really sell that? Like vision and like help stand out so you can get the best of the best instead of the B plus.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, how do you get the A plus person? I think it's scope, impact and outcome. That's how I think about it. So scope is to explain the mandate, to explain what someone will be responsible for and to characterize it as something broad and exciting. I think impact number two is about explaining why this role really matters and how this person in this role can make a dent in the company, make a dent beyond the company. And then outcome at the end of the day, it's a job, it's not a volunteer organization.
Speaker 2:You're working for compensation and I think if you, if they're able to deliver the impact, then here's what sort of outcome they can expect and we can collectively expect to have, because people want to feel like they matter, they want to feel causal and great talent wants, they want sufficient scope, and then they want to know that the things they're doing are going to have an impact and they want to know that they'll be rewarded for it. So I think about it that way. Yeah, I'm sure that's the thing about it. I used to with Prosper. I used to say, hey, listen, this company reminds me why. I would explain the mission of the company, which is always important, but I would say this company reminds me of LinkedIn, when I joined.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:I love that. Yeah, and it did actually. And then things went haywire and unfortunately there were a lot of challenges and it did not become that successful. But that was just kind of punchy way to break through because it talked about the scope and impact that was available if you came and joined the company.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah, I think the example that I could really share is for SecureVision, for my own company. I haven't hired external leaders to operate my business. Both of the VP's that I have are homegrown, but then I have the reason it works is that I have like very senior level board members that help guide the strategy that they're executing. So I think that's probably why it works, and also I think for my industry it works better than probably for a SaaS company. Honestly, how we operate is just a little bit different.
Speaker 2:I think you're. First of all, it sounds like you hired when you first brought these folks on, and then, secondly, the hardest part of hiring, which we haven't even gotten to yet, is just how do you know that people are actually good, how do you know they're actually going to have the impact that you think they will, and if you can promote someone internally. You have real data, you have primary data on that, and so I think that's an amazing way to fill a role. It's hard to do right. You must have invested in career development with these folks, but again, it starts with hiring well in the first place, creating opportunities for them. So congrats to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think, when it comes to promoting within, I think that there's a couple of key lessons that I've learned, just having sometimes it's worked out and sometimes it hasn't. I'll just start when it hasn't worked out. It's been for two reasons. One, somebody is like a really dominant, like type A person that's crushed it in an individual contributor role in my case for a recruiter but they're so laser focused on their work that they don't, they're not sometimes able to step back and understand that people have different worldviews or perspectives or ways of operating or different types of motivations or different types of communication skills. And so there's like this they'll get on a management call like you need to do boom, and it's like very one type of communication style, without really diving into the issues, just jumping into a conclusion. And then sometimes people don't respond well to somebody that can't really adjust their leadership or management style to be more situational to the individual that they're working with. And I think as a leader, as a executive, we should be aware are there certain personality types or whatever that maybe we're not as good at leading, and we should be aware of that, by the way, like we should be aware of our weaknesses and be realistic on it, and I think that's something that's helped me too. It's like getting better and then also knowing like all right, I'm just not as good at this, I need somebody else to do it, or I need to make sure that I were able to avoid it in such a way that it's not going to hurt us. But anyways, I think if a manager is inflexible and can't be situational on how they lead people, that's a big part of it.
Speaker 1:By the way, this is going from IC individual contributor it's to like management director level. So I'm just starting there. The other thing is just stress, like ability to just eat more glass than individual contributor. Can you just deal with it? And sometimes you have a great individual contributor that is perfectly capable of taking on some type of manager director role, but they just can't take it. They just can't take the stress, they burn out. I've seen that happen too. The harder part is promoting from director to VP. That one's a little trickier to get right in my opinion, because you go from just execution to somebody that should be driving strategic change, and I feel like that's very hard for a lot of people to be able to make that shift and I'm curious if you have any advice there, because I feel more confident talking about what doesn't work for ICs to go into management director, but I'm like, I feel like I still have lessons to be learned when it comes to promoting directors into executives.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good question. I agree that it's challenging. I think the nature of the job changes quite a bit because I think it changes from manager to leader, and that's a big change in mindset and a big change in the way that someone operates. I think there's this saying that you typically want to see someone do the job that you're going to promote them into for a while before you actually give them the title and the role officially. And so I think that ideally, when someone's in a director type role, after they've been in that role a while and they've mastered the management side of things, that you start to see evidence that they're capable of more. And that's the same when you're hiring someone from the outside. I think part of the art of interviewing is really understanding what they've done, what they've accomplished, what they've been causal in rather than just been around for, and so I think you really look for that, but it's hard, it's really hard to make that leap. I think the other thing is I've seen it as an operator and I even see it in venture.
Speaker 2:I think sometimes senior leaders feel obligated to try to help everyone become more senior in their career. You have this group of directors and you can bring your hands and you're like I don't know if so-and-so has what it takes to be VP, maybe we should get them some coaching, maybe we should help them with this and that and the other. But the world is Darwinian and the whole premise here is that you're going to have fewer VPs than directors. Fundamentally right, it's a pyramid and it narrows, and it's okay. Not everyone who is a director will be a VP, at least not within your organization. It should mean something to get promoted, it should be hard, and so part of it is just that Darwinian aspect of for every 10 folks who are operating in your organization at the director level, maybe only one or two of them ever make it to VP. So make it hard and don't over promote and don't dilute the efficacy of the meaning of those titles.
Speaker 2:Right, that's part of it. Talent stands out. That's the other thing. You can sit there and ring your hands. You interview a couple of candidates in a row. Maybe no one got you excited, and you're wondering, man, am I just asking the wrong questions? And then a candidate will walk in and knock your socks off. Same with folks at a director level that you're thinking about making VP. It should only be the one who's just amazing. That makes it and that's okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think the other thing is, when you're looking maybe this, I'm sure you see the falls on this when you're looking at directors from one of the VPs, are they already trying to take on some of the VP responsibilities or provide value in that way or providing feedback? Are they seeking out their own mentors and coaches, advisors? Are they seeking out answers to questions? Are they looking at their role? Okay, how does that cascade up into what the VP is doing? How does the VP cascade up to North Star metrics? Are they asking about the calls or relationship of their work to the company's goals? How in tune are they with that and how excited and engaged are they in solving for those problems, not only for their team, but how that their team is part of the bigger picture?
Speaker 1:I think just having that general level of awareness and really trying to be part of any solution to any problem, regardless of where it is the organization, from VP and down or even VP and up, is probably something to look at. That's something I look for at everyone at the company. It's just be proactive in your own development. People help you and we'll have one-on-ones, but get better always. You should always be thinking about how can I get better? Am I doing the most direct things in order to help the company be successful? Is there room for improvement? Can we increase efficiency? Is there something we should be doubling down on? What's not working? Good managers and leaders are covering this stuff, but I also think the best employees are constantly seeking out opportunities to improve the department, improve the company and improve themselves too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I think fundamentally it's about impact and whether you can point to things that you've done that have been truly causal in some outcome. It's so funny because in product, back in my days as an operator, you'd see these folks who they kept moving balls down the field but they never scored touchdowns. There were other folks who were just very good at picking up one ball and putting it in the end zone and then going back and picking up the next ball and putting it in the end zone. There may have been the same amount of yardage gained by each of these folks, but there was a very different outcome.
Speaker 2:In one case you score in touchdowns and put in points on the board. In the other case, you're just moving the ball down the field. Totally different. That's what I mean by this impact, this causality. You have to be able to create it, you have to be able to explain it and, as someone who's making a hire, you have to be able to see clear evidence of it, or else you should not be hiring that person. It's not about being somewhere, it's about the impact that you had when you were there.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I really like how that analogy about moving the ball down the field versus touchdowns I'm going to think about that. I got to give that some more thought. But anyways, parker, this has been a lot of fun. We're actually coming up right to the end of our time that we've scheduled. I think we should take a break here, but I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your expertise with everyone. This has been a lot of fun and very valuable. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me. I enjoyed it had a blast. Thank you, james.
Speaker 1:For sharing. For everybody tuning in, make sure to check out upcoming episodes. We have some really cool guests coming on the show. We have the CEO of Glassdoor coming on in the next month or two, I don't know exactly. We have the founder and CEO of Gem, steve Bartell, coming on the show. We have a co-founder CEO of Greenhouse coming back on the show. We have the chief people officer of DocuSign coming on the show. We got a really awesome lineup for you. I'm Matt Caldwell, who built, scaled and sold Rocket Power and embedded recruiting firm to Kelly Services about a year ago. He was the first VP of HR for Instacart that just IPO'd. He's also coming on the show. Anyways, lots of good episodes coming up. Thank you so much for joining us today and we'll see you next time. Take care.