Join host James Mackey and his guest, Andrew Blevins - Head of Talent Acquisition at Cyberhaven, for an insightful discussion on talent acquisition strategies in today's volatile job market. Gain valuable insights into hiring plans, budgeting, and agency support during uncertain times, and learn how to tackle talent acquisition challenges as your organization scales.
Additionally, find out why data hygiene is a crucial factor in making efficient hiring decisions, and how prioritizing people can lead to success during periods of rapid growth.
0:50 Andrew Blevins's background
2:24 Managing talent acquisition in a volatile market
10:03 Leveraging technology in recruiting during a downturn
24:23 Talent acquisition phases and challenges at scale
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, Andrew Blevins - Head of Talent Acquisition at Cyberhaven, for an insightful discussion on talent acquisition strategies in today's volatile job market. Gain valuable insights into hiring plans, budgeting, and agency support during uncertain times, and learn how to tackle talent acquisition challenges as your organization scales.
Additionally, find out why data hygiene is a crucial factor in making efficient hiring decisions, and how prioritizing people can lead to success during periods of rapid growth.
0:50 Andrew Blevins's background
2:24 Managing talent acquisition in a volatile market
10:03 Leveraging technology in recruiting during a downturn
24:23 Talent acquisition phases and challenges at scale
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're joined by Andrew Blevins. Andrew, thanks for joining me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me, James.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course. So for everybody tuning in, I've known Andrew for quite a while. At this point in time, our companies have partnered up over the past year to two years, maybe a year and a half to about a year, so know each other for a minute since you've taken over town acquisition over at Cyberhaven. So before we jump into the topics we have outlined today, could you please provide a background on yourself for everybody?
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. Hi everyone, Andrew here. I've been in the tech space for almost a decade now. First two companies were massive hits and actually got to experience two IPOs early on, all doing recruiting and worked my way up to management roles and then stepped into head of talent roles. Cyberhaven is now my second early stage startup. I joined both around Series B and we're on the, so we're in between our Series B and Series C about 115, 120 people at the moment, and so I am currently running talent acquisition. I have a small but very small but mighty team, and then I've also stepped outside of that a little bit and have helped with other HR programs, people, ops, stuff and it's been super fun so far.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm sure it's an interesting time, too, to take over in your current role as Cyberhaven, just given the fact that working in startup and growth stage over the past year or two is, then volatile, to say the least.
Speaker 1:Right, we're all in it, and we've seen a lot of pretty significant swings in terms of hiring plans and going from hiring for a lot of roles to maybe fewer strategic roles, to having a hiring plan mapped out several quarters, to then scratching that and saying, okay, in fact, we're gonna pivot and the products going this way, or our strategy is going this way, or we're putting more focus on customer success, or changing the product in order to appeal to more customers as they're cutting back on their SaaS product stack. There's just a lot of things happening right now. I think what I would love to start off with is speaking to all the town acquisition leaders out there, the people leaders out there, executives that are accountable for hiring what are some of the best tips and experiences or things that you've learned through experience when it comes to managing and leading town acquisition through a highly volatile market like we've seen, for I was gonna say the last year honestly, like the last few, right? What have you learned throughout the years? Yeah, it almost feels like COVID.
Speaker 2:The beginning of COVID was ushered in a new era of volatility around what we do, and it's definitely hit me specifically when I was laid off. So back in earlier this year from my previous head of talent role, myself and most of the team that I built all got laid off, and that was a really big awakening for me because I dodged it up until then and then it really, it finally hit me. And of course, in hindsight now I look back and I'm like actually that was probably the best thing that could have happened, because you don't wanna be on a train that isn't moving as fast anymore, but it really does make you rethink what your goals are as a professional, as an individual, and what you wanna be building. And so for me, I've had to really look at what I thought a talent function should look like at a company that was doubling in size, and to me that's you've got a couple full-time recruiters, you've got a sorcerer too, you've got a coordinator.
Speaker 2:This is a five, six, seven person operation, including yourself, and I just think for right now, at least the stage of company that I'm interested in, that model doesn't really apply anymore, because it's just too costly and you're not guaranteed to have that steady growth up into the right that can justify such a large team. So it's been really interesting in this role. I have one person on my team and she's become a total recruiting generalist and we really support and enable hiring and business units to do a lot of the recruiting themselves and then we act as this kind of center of excellence like best practice advisors and that almost feels it's more enduring and it's more feasible during this time where the money and the certainty just isn't there the way that it maybe was five to 10 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, honestly, I think for an early stage too, I just don't know if I really see the point of having like coordination sources, recruiters. I don't know if we need that level of segmentation at an early stage. I think it's when you start to get into significant scale of a growth stage we're talking about the fastest growing SaaS companies, like the crazy growth that we were seeing a couple of years ago. Okay, at that point, when you're building out that type of organization, then it can make sense to have that level of segmentation and even further segmentation across departments like tech, recruiting, revenue, gna and all these types of things. But certainly in this market, as you put it, it's like a luxury if you will. And quite honestly, like even a couple of years ago, I don't know if the efficiency gains are necessarily as big as we might think they are by having like large coordination and sourcing teams. And I do also think that when you're scaling really rapidly and process really can't keep up with the headcount that you're growing in terms of internal recruiting teams, it can get a little bit messy and, honestly, having one person managing more of the process end to end potentially mean that fewer things are slipping through the cracks. The counterbalance to that is that if you have one person managing more and they step out of the organization, so there is some benefit there to segmentation as well. But I also like I feel like in a lean market, it's all about having one person. If you can have one person managing more of the funnel, that's really important, focusing on process documentation, optimizing your tech and so that there's less of a knowledge gap should somebody step out so you can plug somebody else in.
Speaker 1:I agree with all of that. I think like we have to run lean. It's as, like my company, we do contract recruiting and better recruiting RPO for the tech industry. And what's really interesting is I'm sending out proposals now and that it should be something we have. The conversation is so much different than it was a couple of years ago. Like I'll say, okay, what's your hiring plan? Right, like I need to know how many hires need to occur, what roles they are, what quarter you need to hire for, and let's figure out how many recruiters you're going to need in order to deliver on this. And what seems to be happening it's I'll say, okay, you're going to need two recruiters in order to realistically hit this headcount, and they're like we have the budget for one, okay, so you try to get creative and get as lean as possible, but companies even like we got a proposal out recently to a series B company that raised over 40 million for a series B this year, which is pretty cool Like considering the market.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I was like, okay, like there seems okay, they have a pretty aggressive like growth plan based on their head, their existing headcount, like it's pretty significant growth, like they're going to be growing like close to 30% over the next couple quarters. And so we put together a proposal with X amount of recruiters that were going to be needed and even still, even though they just received a huge funding round, they're still like okay, like we need, we can do like half of this. Of course, it's like everybody, even the companies that are flying, everybody's just being really tight right now, and for good reason, right, we don't know exactly when this is we're going to start to really hit like a market rebound. Honestly, I've seen like some people in the recruiting industry put some pretty sketchy stuff out there, like we're hitting kind of a rebound and I'm like what are you talking about? I'm seeing some movement. It's better than August, but Q4 is always better than August. Just because we're seeing an uptick from the summer doesn't mean we're in a rebound. I just feel like that's misleading, honestly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think people are always looking for a reason to believe that it's going to be back to the way it was, because it was fun. It was fun having these big teams where we felt like there was like a clear career ladder and folks in leadership like us we had. We spent a lot of time in one-on-ones, a lot of time coaching, a lot of time developing. Absolutely those are some of the favorite parts of my role, but I think you can still do those things in different ways, right? I find myself spending more time with leadership now and really being their coach, their advisor, and while I miss having that large team of people that I could really develop, you do spend that time in other ways and it can be really valuable and maybe it's more outside of your comfort zone, but there's always, there's always an upside to that.
Speaker 1:I think so. I think it's like such a great opportunity, honestly, for talent acquisition executives to truly earn a seat at the leadership table. This is where you become more analytical, you become more comfortable in spreadsheets, you get better at showing an ROI, you understand budgeting at a deeper level. Like this is when you do those things, when you have the time, when you're not putting out a million freaking fires and you're not hiring for a hundred roles. Like this is the time you do it. This is when the best executives and leaders are going to be molded is during this type of market.
Speaker 1:Well, I just, I feel like that's like a huge opportunity for talent acquisition executives that are moving up at the moment. You're giving me chills.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a firing, yeah, yeah for sure.
Speaker 1:So we talked about from a headcount perspective, right, like we're doing more with less. Let's talk about. How do you think about leveraging technology? I want to talk about, like, other things you can do when, if you have less full time headcount, how do you think about leveraging technology in order to do more with less? Do you feel like, okay, we're also cutting down on our tech stack? Do you feel like, okay, we got to keep some of the core in place to keep some of our process in order? What other things do you leverage in order to keep your company and budget lean during a downturn? But keep a core kind of a core in place so that you're able to make the hires you have and you can be somewhat prepared for upcoming hires that might be coming up in the next few months?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the first thing I think of, I think there's a little bit more experimentation, right, and we're constantly seeing these kind of young up and coming talent related tech tools pop up, and these are companies that are really eager to get clients on board, even in some sort of like demo trial.
Speaker 2:Usually it's like super discounted, and so if I think through our tech stack right now, I have more that fit that profile on there than I've ever had previously, and I think there's something to that.
Speaker 2:It's more open-mindedness toward these newer up and coming and maybe less toward these like incumbent players that are more proven and more expensive. With that said, we just rolled over into our official LinkedIn recruiter license, which is great, and honestly, I don't see a way around that, especially if you want to have a strong sourcing element to your recruiting function, which my current team member that's probably her specialty is sourcing in the executive team is really hungry for help. On that front, I think you become really selective. I'm also a really big fan of Ashby, which is one of the newer up-and-coming ATSs that are trying to bump out some of these incumbent players like Greenhouse and Lever, and they have a really cool AI angle that they're approaching it from and very data driven. That's another one that I may not have experimented with before if it weren't for, okay, how can I maybe do things a little bit cheaper, but still stay using disruptive technologies?
Speaker 1:Our question about that. Just to slow down there, have you worked directly with Greenhouse?
Speaker 2:It's been a while so that would have been three roles ago, but yes.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm just curious are there any notable differences from your experience when it comes from Greenhouse to Ashby? I know again, this was three roles ago, but I'm just curious to know if anything comes to mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the kind of thing that I haven't used Greenhouse. I can't compare them side by side. At the same time, ashby's story is really interesting. They actually initially came onto the market as a data, as a recruiting analytics tool. That was their foundation and then they almost backed themselves into becoming this ATS. It's very data-centric and their reporting is bar none. I can't imagine that Greenhouse or Lever could compete with Ashby in terms of reporting, which for me, that has always been an area of talent that made me nervous and that I want as much support as I can get.
Speaker 2:In Ashby it just instantly clicked Very user-friendly, very logical data dashboards and data interface. I think my intuition with it is that there's some element there where they've woven a bunch of other elements of the tool into this data perspective. Things like you can map job plans to the data and everything is connected and woven together. It just is very logical and very sensible on how you create job plans and how you pull data from those job plans and you map different stages from the job plan to overall hiring stages and get this broader workflow. Things like that are very intuitive Interview briefing and scorecards and things like that. They're all. You can build them out and set them up to just flow together, which is really nice. I found it a little bit harder to learn because there are some complicated features, but once you do, it's really user-friendly and powerful.
Speaker 1:That's cool. They got some big logos on their website and I also see they got a shout-out from VP of talent acquisition at Sequoia. Yeah, they're really cool. I'm hearing from executives of recruiting technology companies that their customer base is scrutinizing, spend, of course, a lot more, and, of course, these companies are seeing more churn companies that I feel like recruiting tech was just getting to the point where we were adding to our SaaS stack, if you will, and that's again being consolidated.
Speaker 1:Even looking at Ashby's branding, all in one, these companies, all of them are basically trying to do everything now, which is weird because I felt like in a growth market, we were starting to see more segmentation and now you have all these big brands that are building out. Okay, they focused on one part of the funnel and now they're like okay, we need to be the core, because if we're only doing this one part, we're more likely to lose this customer base. It's interesting, right, I have mixed thoughts on this concept of all in one providers, but I think, just in this economy and market, it's not only SMBs, like small companies, that are looking for all the one out-of-the-box solutions. We're seeing companies with a lot of funding that are more growth stage gravitating toward desiring that type of product. It's interesting. I know companies are literally changing their business plans to build these all-in-one products and they're not just going thank you, one thing's are going to turn. They're like we don't know how long this is going to last. So we want to be able to do all of this.
Speaker 2:It is really interesting, right, you're right. It seemed like it was trending one direction and this is almost the reversal of that trend. It makes me think you're going to have to do If you're going to do one thing, if you're going to be a niche player, you better do it really well, right, and it's going to be really hard. And that's where Cyber Haven we're approaching the data security problem from a really interesting angle. What's unique about what we do is really data tracing, so tracing any file or any data point that a company has from its origin all the way through to a potential exit from that environment, and being able to tell security teams what that data point is and give it all that context that its journey provides. And that's my hope is that companies like us, who approach things from a new angle, are able to dislodge some of those like all-in-one players that are popping up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really interesting. So it sounds like that's happening pretty much in every industry, right? This kind of consolidation of tech, which, honestly, the only part I'm really excited about is, like on the revenue side. Like, for God's sakes, like how many freaking like sales enablement and revenue tool there's just so many, or at least there was Do we need 500 tools that basically do the same thing? It's like it became such a commodity. It almost became like services businesses, like you know how there's 10,000 recruiting companies out there. I felt like that's how, like revenue, saas products, that direction that they were going in, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I blame Salesforce. They started so much of this. And now, yeah, you're always going to have folks that kind of jump on a train that they think is moving really fast, but it's harder to jump on a different kind of vehicle or jump on a train that's moving in the opposite direction or something like that. But I think now, again, it really takes that entrepreneurial mindset and risk taking is what's going to make you successful, or maybe not, yeah for sure.
Speaker 1:Taking risks, doing the work and just seeking out the best advisement, customer feedback Stuff's not rocket science, but I think it's also just like the entrepreneurial side of product. It's like the amount of just sheer grit like this market requires. It's sometimes it really is just can you eat more glass than the next guy? Okay, it's really just how much can you put up with. But yeah, anyways, just to focus too, I thought it would actually be interesting to talk about leveraging agencies, which I actually believe or not, even though I own agency. We don't really talk about this a whole lot, but I just given like that concept. So like market volatility, fixed cost budgets, internal headcount, hiring plans, how you're leveraging tech in the downturn, consolidation, all the one products.
Speaker 1:I think that it is an important aspect to cover and I'm curious to get your thoughts on how you think about leveraging agency support with volatility when it comes to hiring plans.
Speaker 1:So, for instance, in our specific case, right like we were doing a lot of work together, embedded recruiting then hiring plan dipped, we paused our engagement. As a result, you have still, I believe, one internal recruiter source, or if that's right, okay, okay, and then I'm just like, I'm curious to like that's the path. And then, how do you think about leveraging an agency? Do you feel like, okay, hiring plan picks back up? Does it make sense to expand the internal team? When does it make sense to plug in an agency partner? Because I see it as again similar to tech right, like we're trying to cut costs but we need to keep bare bones in place, same with, like, internal recruiters. A lot of cases, unfortunately, we've had to cut down on the size of the team, but we need to keep something in place, and then we're trying to augment this stuff with, like, flexible cost structures. So, like, what are your thoughts when it comes to volatility and agency support?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a great question and definitely something top of mind, especially given our previous relationship up until now. But I think it's such a great tool because it really does allow you to almost protect your internal team, because you can more easily scale up and scale down on this external support. So I think we've used it in the right way where I came in and actually this relationship already exists. So I came into this relationship and fortunately, natalie was great and such a good partner and actually helped me on board in a lot of ways. When I entered I had that and I realized, hey, I could probably afford to bring in one resource. I can at least see through the end of the year and I'm at least going to need that person.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I thought I would need Natalie through the end of the year, but that was the buffer that I gave myself or gave us. I think that's what I would continue to do. Is I actually don't? Yeah, I don't. It's hard for me to imagine a world where I have the confidence in a hiring plan to grow my internal team beyond just myself and my team member that I have currently Meaning. I would look to you guys probably for any extra support in terms of being able to plug in a recruiter or coordinator or sorcerer and scale the function up and down that way.
Speaker 1:So that's interesting because you brought up budget and you brought up timeline in terms of, okay, I know at least I would need a recruiter for X amount of time. So it almost sounds like there's almost like a timeline aspect to it's like certainty of hiring plan and knowing in terms of long-term needs. So maybe it also depends on the size of the organization. But one of the things you're looking at is okay, if I know that on an ongoing basis, for at least a period of two quarters, I'm going to need somebody full-time, okay, then it makes sense to bring a recruiter in house. And the more uncertainty, possibly more you're going to leverage agencies, which makes sense to me and I agree with you. I think some folks are doing that. But what's also been interesting that I have seen is that there hasn't been this large uptick in agency support that we're seeing on our side. When this correction started, folks are like, oh, this is going to be really good for you because people are going to cut in house teams too deep, but there's still going to be attrition within the organizations, there's still going to be some hiring that's popping up, and so they're going to bring you in on an augmented basis and of course, we have several use cases where that's the case, but the reality is, when you look at recruiting agencies and better recruiting RPO, I would say well over half the competitors that I had are completely out of business, even big companies like Rocket Power, which is probably the biggest RPO and embedded recruiting firm.
Speaker 1:I think they were 400 plus employees. I'm pretty sure they're down to 30 US employees, which is nuts. It's just interesting. It's still less costly, in a sense, to have an internal person, but you risk this idea of layoff. But it's like cash is tight. Also, if it was just volatility without a cash crunch, maybe that's where you would see companies leverage more so agencies. But I feel like there's volatility plus cash is really expensive right now, and so you're still saying, okay, let's just figure out this core team or what I was saying earlier. A company needs two or three recruiters from us. They're like we'll do one, we'll just have to change the hiring plan or make it work because we're not going to do more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that means other people are learning how to recruit Exactly. It's like role-swapping than there's ever been before. I'm seeing it even myself stepping over the fence into some of these HRM people stuff. I don't know that opportunity would have been available to me three, four years ago, not having a formal background doing it. And so it does again. It forces people to become generalists, with a lot of different definitions of what that means, and experiment it's experimentation. It's how much can we do with less. But it's such an interesting environment there is opportunity to learn, but it's just a different framework and a different structure than before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's definitely pretty wild, and I think one other topic that I wanted to dive into that's more structurally related in terms of process and scale and these types of things along the lines of what we're discussing now. I guess we're talking about the opposite of scale.
Speaker 1:So related right how do you dismantle everything you built over the last three years?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a little dark humor, but I guess my question is as we get back to scale, I would love to talk to you a little bit about the evolution of what talent acquisition goes through, because, again, I know you've gone through a couple of companies that have been very successful IPO'd. I think Cyber Haven has a pretty good chance of having a similar level of success, just from everything I've heard from you, the whole team, vertex Ventures, your VC investors. So I've heard lots of really good things and I'm curious to know, just based on what you're doing now, which you've done in the past, what would you say the biggest transition phases are for talent acquisition. So maybe you could provide some clarity in terms of, okay, at 50 employees, we start to see this, or at 100 employees, we start to see this, or maybe it's a revenue number that you typically see Like, usually, whatever it is, I would love to know if you have a way of breaking it into phases and then what those transitions look like. That would be, I think, really valuable for everybody. Tuning in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that'll be interesting and you'll have to support me because I know you have a lot of knowledge yourself. I'm thinking Based on my knowledge. I think companies usually start really thinking about a talent acquisition function Series A, series B, maybe between 30 and 70 people is when they're looking for their first full-time recruiter. They probably have had, maybe have had agency support up until then and they're really thinking, okay, do we bring this function in-house? And how? That might be in the form of a leader who can do it all. It might be in the form of a senior recruiter At least that's what I would think and then I think that person comes in. You either see that traction appear or not, and if you don't, you might rethink what your strategy is. But I would think around 100 people, then that's when the team is probably more than one person at least.
Speaker 2:If you have certainty that there's going to be continued growth year over year and that hopefully you have a customer base, you have revenue, you're starting to see the signals. There's the what is it? Triple, triple, double in SaaS in terms of revenue. So if you're on one of those tracks, then I would think you're thinking more seriously, but I don't know what the new phases are.
Speaker 2:Beyond this small centralized team that you have, I would imagine maybe you grow, you add one or two people incrementally each year and you end up with still a relatively small team. If you think about a 500-person company, maybe that's a five-person recruiting function. If you're hiring I would say less, a maximum of maybe like 100 people a year, and if you do a really good job of enabling your business units to run more of the day-to-day of the recruiting and you really again act as this hub of excellence, I think that's possible and, again, I think leaders who adopt that mentality will look like they're really cost-savvy and understand the ways of today's market and how to be really lean and really thoughtful about spend into the army.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, when I start to see later stages of scale, a lot of things just starting to fall apart in terms of the applicant tracking system, reporting, role distinction in terms of who's doing what when it comes to hiring, not enough visibility into how much time the hiring managers, the hiring team, is really spinning in the interview process, how much they're switching up the process, how interviews are going, the time and stages start to collapse. All these different things. You start to see it become a mess and I don't think people actually have a clear, any type of understanding on a cost per hire, how many hours of interviewing time, sourcing time any of these things are going into making a hire successful. These hiring plans are just blasted out, hiring managers are scrambling. They really don't have clear distinctions on what roles should be worked on in-house, what agency usage to look like and so for. I think, getting back to what we were talking about with applicant tracking systems and this idea of keeping data very clean and reporting, I feel like that's something that needs to be top of mind throughout growth and something that needs to be done proactively, because if you get to the point where you're a global organization and your ATS is a total mess, it starts to get a little harder.
Speaker 1:That being said, it's still. It's a doable project that you can make happen over a quarter or two and that you can put the right permissions and locks in place where people have to follow. And I think that would be probably the right thing to do because, again, without the proper structure, you end up having hiring managers spending the vast majority of their time hiring, which is fine. If they have other responsibilities and tasks too, then maybe that isn't how you want things to be structured. And I think there's this huge I don't want to say hidden cost. Yeah, I would say it's a blind spot it's probably a better term because people really just don't even realize how many hours and how much work is going into each hire. If you can optimize that, then that's a lot of budget that you can put in other places to be more effective.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think when I in both recent roles that I took on, when I first started, I probably said the term data hygiene way too much. It feels like one of those things that you really do have to educate people on at first, and I do think there is an expectation that you bring in a leader of a function okay, give me the data tomorrow, and it's you really have to push back on that and educate on. Okay. These are things that habits that take time for people to adopt. But you were actually right. I would say about a quarter in I was like, okay, now this is starting to come together. But I do think there is something to laying that foundation, that educational piece, and then the consistency of actually showing the product of that, getting the information in front of people that results from that data hygiene.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think when companies scaling very fast, they don't have a clear process, data hygiene, as you put it, they're not keeping reporting up to speed, they don't have the right structure in place, the right process in place, the right approvals in place that hiring managers and recruiting teams need to follow. One of the first symptoms you'll see of that is bandwidth start to collapse where hiring managers are totally overwhelmed in terms of their workload. They don't have enough hours in the day to interview based on the hiring plans that they have, because they don't even understand how many hours of interview and it takes to fill a role. It might be taking them 60 hours of total time for the hiring teams actually interviewed to fill a single role across all the different interviews, screening calls, all the way down funnel, and they may not have any idea of that. And so these hiring plans are put out. Hiring managers are overwhelmed. So first step they're overwhelmed, they lose bandwidth capacity. Second step is they get incredibly frustrated. They don't. Maybe they're going to the internal team, maybe they're working with an agency.
Speaker 1:Either way, quality starts to fall apart and then, within a growth of growth plan, you end up making a lot of hires and a lot of them could be mis-hires. And then mis-hires can lead to higher attrition, lower productivity, cultural shifts that can take a couple of years to bounce back from, and then you're in crisis mode where you have to lay off a bunch of the people that you hire that are no longer, that are actually not the right fit for the organization. You have to replace the leadership team for making those bad hires, which, who knows, maybe or maybe the leaders that were brought in weren't the right fit either, because everybody's so overwhelmed. And then you have to basically clear house and then you basically have to start from scratch again. You got to manage Glassdoor. Oh crap, our rating is plummeted Like. Leadership doesn't trust us. We hired the wrong people. They went through all these rifts, even though the company's growing, and then they have to rebuild from there and it takes so much emphasis and time because we didn't just slow down and get process right and data right.
Speaker 1:This is literally the reason I'm giving this much details. I've seen this. I've seen this with customers over the years and I've seen it with incredibly successful companies, but this stuff, literally, I think in the case of one customer, I think, held back an IPO for a couple of years. I think this is serious stuff. When you get to a stage of late stage growth where you're pushing for an IPO or an acquisition, this can really mess you up and throw you off course and then you don't get it done in time, then you enter a market correction Right and you're waiting for a while. Yeah, who knows how many years you gotta wait, because people are the core of all success in business. You can't ever forget that and I think sometimes we lose sight of that, even if we might intellectually know that if we slow down and think about it, we lose sight when we're scaling too fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100% agree.
Speaker 1:That's it, yeah, yeah, look, I think we're coming up on time here. So, andrew, I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining me today on the show. This was a lot of fun. It was a great episode. I know everybody's gonna love it. And, yeah, I appreciate you so much. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Let's do it again sometime.
Speaker 1:Let's do it. And for everybody tuning in, we have so many great episodes that recently been released that are coming up. Make sure to check out a few notable ones that I wanna make sure you watch is we brought on the chief people officer of DocuSign. She's brilliant. We have another episode that's gonna be released with Daniel Chait, co-founder CEO of Greenhouse. We had the CEO of Glassdoor on the show, so make sure to check out. The episode with Christian and a good friend of mine is coming on very soon, but meet your on is the CEO of a company called Tenable, which is a publicly traded cybersecurity company. So we have a lot of great folks that you can learn from. Anyways, thank you for being a fan of the show and I'm really looking forward to talking to you next time. Take care.