EP 132: Best of innovation and culture chats, with three leading experts.

In this episode we wanted to put together for our listeners some of the best of our innovations in talent and culture chats. 

Shauna Geraghty, SVP & Global Head of People & Talent at Talkdesk, will share invaluable insights on optimizing the quality of hire. Debbie Shotwell, CPO at Stack Overflow, will delve into the secrets of developing a strong and vibrant company culture. Gianna Driver, CHRO at Exabeam, will challenge traditional notions of 'culture fit' and explore how embracing 'culture add' can ignite innovation within your organization. 

1:15 Shauna Geraghty, SVP & Global Head of People & Talent at Talkdesk 
- Optimizing the quality of hire

9:18 Debbie Shotwell, CPO at Stack Overflow 
- Employee well-being and onboarding process

15:03 Gianna Driver, CHRO at Exabeam 
- Shifting culture fit to culture add

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: 0:28

Hey everyone, welcome to the Breakthrough Hiring Show. This is your host, James Mackie. We have Shana Garrity with us today. Shana, thanks for joining us.

Speaker 2: 0:36

Thanks so much, James, for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:39

Yeah, I'm really pumped. Do you give us a quick overview on your background and what you're up to?

Speaker 2: 0:42

Yeah, sure. So I am currently the SPP of People and Talent at TalkDesk, and TalkDesk is a $10 billion private SaaS company. We have about 1,500 employees in 20 countries across the globe and I was the first US employee at TalkDesk. I joined in 2012. We were founded in 2011. And I initially started within the marketing organization, transitioned to the talent team in 2016. And I've been running the People and Talent organization through Hyper Growth Sense.

Speaker 1: 1:17

It's really cool, so we could jump into a quality of hire, which I know is something that you've been thinking about a lot lately At your time at TalkDesk and I guess even at a higher level. Philosophically, I would love to learn how you think about the topic and how that cascades down into execution for your people organization.

Speaker 2: 1:40

Yeah, absolutely, and quality of hire has always been important to us, but I like to create a little bit of context, because it's more important now than ever, and I'll talk a little bit about why. So the past two years were really easy to raise money and, by extension, I call it the wild wild west of spending as well as hiring and recruiting, so a lot of startups had the money to spend. Because of that, we saw growth, inflation across the board, and more and more companies were benefiting from that cash infusion. We're seeing now is it's incredibly difficult to raise money and there's a complete market correction. That's happening.

Speaker 2: 2:23

Companies are really focusing a lot more on building a sustainable business and really efficient growth, and so what that means for us in the recruiting role is that a lot of recruiters and recruiting leaders are now switching. They're pivoting from quantity of hire to quality of hire. Whereas before it seems like we could never hire fast enough, we're always in a period of catch up. Now we have the opportunity to find that right, perfect fit, and it matters more than ever because we only have a few racks and we might not be able to get to backfill folks when they transition from the business, and so we have to be laser focused on that quality piece above all else, and companies are valuing that because they're more focused on efficient growth and they're actually forcing that mechanism and asking recruiting leaders to focus on quality of hire a lot more than quantity of hire and hitting their number.

Speaker 1: 3:19

Yeah, and so as companies are making that shift, let's get into what are some of the changes. Or how can people go about optimizing for quality of hire?

Speaker 2: 3:29

Yeah. So for me it all starts with defining what great looks like within your organization. So like what does quality look like within your organization? And there's a number of ways you can do it. I can talk through kind of the easy, quick and dirty ways to do it. The first thing that you can do is just gather two cohorts of people who are your top-level performers in your organization and who are your bottom performers or your low performers. And it's important to have those two groups. If you just look at top performers, then some of the constructs might not differ between those two groups. But if you look at those two groups distinctly and you say what is different between my high-performing group and my low-performing group? So what do our high performers have that our low performers do not have? And that's important because if you can identify that, then those constructs are more predictive of joining that high-performing group, so they're more predictive of success. When you're interviewing candidates in the interview process, for example, you might see that the high performers have a growth mindset and the low performers have a fixed mindset. That's really important and so you can use growth mindset as a differentiator. When you're interviewing talent, conversely, you might see that both cohorts are really good at operating in ambiguity and if you notice that low performers are just as good as high performers, you wouldn't want to use that as a construct to select talent because they can end up in either group.

Speaker 2: 4:59

But you can actually do it in a much more kind of quantitative way. You can do a qualitative analysis. You can look at a quantitative analysis as well. You can look specifically at the experience, the competencies, the personality traits, core values that separate those two groups and then, once you've done that, you want to make sure that you concretize that into what we call our ICP, barret it from Sales Ideal Candidate Profile, and my suggestion is to have one ideal candidate profile for your entire company, if you can and if you have to kind of segment that into two groups. So let's say, your ICP for engineering is very distinct, then one for the entire company, one for engineering, or one for the entire company and a separate for sales and engineering.

Speaker 2: 5:45

But don't go beyond that, because a lot of that's your foundational work that you're going to build upon and the more kind of like variances of that or variability within that, the harder it gets to kind of like build out your scorecard, constructs, your training and things like that.

Speaker 2: 6:00

So keep it simple. But it's super easy to do, you don't have to have anyone quantitative on your team to do it, and but if you want to scale it, then you can use products like Searchlight. Searchlight has an amazing quality of higher platform that they're using and they're actually getting to the point where they can predict, within a certain degree of confidence, goodness of fit within the organization in the interview process, and they're doing that by analyzing top performers and middle performers within the organization and then looking at what differentiates those two groups and then feeding that information back into the selection process, interview process. So really interesting stuff that you can do at scale with products. But if you don't have the budget to invest in those products and you don't have anyone quantitative on the team, you can do a really quick and dirty approach to that and it's just as effective. It can be just as a right.

Speaker 1: 6:55

I think that's like that whole growth mindset thing too. It's like you know, sometimes you would love to have this robust like data and reporting to you know, to make decisions, but the reality is that you can still use data, even if you're just kind of hands on digging. You should always be making decisions off data, always, and I think that that's I really love that. That method of looking at contrast between high performers and low performers and I actually never thought about that. If both groups groups share a certain trait, then that should not, that's not going to be indicative of success.

Speaker 1: 7:30

And so that shouldn't be measured in the interview process, despite it possibly being very important aspect of what top performers bring to the table. Well, debbie, thanks for joining me, thank you, James.

Speaker 3: 7:43

It's great to be here today.

Speaker 1: 7:45

I want to talk to you a little bit about when you think about developing culture at a category leading company such as Stack Overflow. I would love to get your thoughts on what you prioritize in terms of developing a great culture to attract top talent and to empower your employees to make the most of the experience and to guide them toward growth and helping the company achieve North Star metrics. Let's start high level philosophy. How do you think about running people organizations in 2023?

Speaker 3: 8:16

You have to be really careful and you have to really plan and communicate and have great leadership and management that works for the company. So really ensuring that you listen to your employees, engage them in the process, ensuring that the values you have in the company are true and that you're able to measure success through your values, and making sure that you ask your people is really important. So we use something called the open forum system at Stack Overflow to help us with our culture and continues to help us make changes and modify what's going on in the organization. So we ask things like what's working really well very basic here. That isn't working really well and what can we do to make your life at Stack Overflow better.

Speaker 3: 9:19

Employees' well-being is extremely important to our culture here, and workforce flexibility and learn, share, grow is one of our core values. We want to make sure that every employee has an opportunity to grow within their careers and that's part of our culture. The other thing that's part of our culture that's super important and people really value is our employees receive 100% health care. That means they don't pay anything out of pocket, and I'll give Joel, our founder, the credit for that. It was really important to him that employees not worry about their health care expense or their employee benefits package. Ours is probably one of the best in the entire world.

Speaker 3: 10:05

I can't say enough about our benefits program. If you read anything on Glassdoor, we have excellent benefits. There's no question by far, and I feel very lucky that we have those benefits. Our overall benefits package is pretty rich as well, along with personal development plans and things that make people feel connected to the culture. The other thing about culture that we've found to be a tradition here is that we have a meetup. The annual meetup is once a year. Everybody gets an opportunity to travel to one location and spend time together, and so that's a pretty amazing experience and it's a week, so there's learning opportunities, it's school setting, there's events, there's fun time, there's downtime and silly time, as I like to say.

Speaker 1: 10:58

What do you look for in onboarding? What are you evaluating? What areas of improvement are you looking for? What are you seeing?

Speaker 3: 11:05

I don't know if you have ever done this before but, james, when I've worked for some startup companies, they've given me a computer and they said, okay, figure it out. And I'm like what, what do you mean? Figure it out. And then when you work for some world-class companies, they have an onboarding experience and that experience really engages you in work, and so it was super important that we made sure, as a remote first company, is that our onboarding experience is pretty stellar, because we have a video with each one of our leaders and we have an opportunity for each one of our employees to meet with all the departments so they could talk about the department and what they do and what their metrics are and what their KPIs are and how they're accountable to the organization. And our CEO meets with every single new hire as part of the group. So on a monthly basis he gets all the new hires together, he meets them, he knows them.

Speaker 3: 12:13

He asks them questions silly questions, crazy questions but he gets to know them as human beings, which I think is extremely important and rare when you're the size of Stack Overflow. And I do the same thing once a month. I, at the end of the month, I think I'm doing it tomorrow actually I'm meeting with Stackers and what I'm trying to do is find out what we did well in the hiring process, what we could have improved on and any ideas they have and they'd like to see changes. So, as we're going through our process improvements of any of our processes or policies or procedures we take that feedback, that important feedback they provide, and we make changes to our program.

Speaker 3: 13:03

One of the things we were struggling with in 2021 is getting computers to people on time being on their day of hire, and so we went from 85% getting them on time to now we're at 100%. Everyone gets their computer on time, because we really make an effort to make sure that happens, because it's disruptive when people can't go to work when you hire them. They wanna work. They don't wanna use their personal computers, they wanna use a computer that they're gonna be able to work with. That's just one idea, but one of the things that we really, I think, have seen with our employees through our values, cause we're really, it's really important that our values, we live and breathe them Transparency transparency is one of our values.

Speaker 3: 13:50

Another one is providing manager meetings once a month, so all the managers get an update after the month is over. And then we have an employee meeting once a month and it's ask me anything, ask any employee, any executive, anybody. We do it, it's highlighted, it's hosted and it really does make an improvement because this is an ongoing basis. Our CEO writes a letter to every staffer, to all of us, every Friday. So every Friday when you wake up, you get into your inbox. The CEO letter is there and it's super important. There's recognition in that letter for the number of people that are using Stack Overflow the highest numbers. Also what's happened during the week product development. This is a new benefit we offer. This is our manager training programs and how many people have attended, and there's lots of recognition in those letters. So I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 1: 14:53

Yeah, we're very excited to host you, and before, we jump into it.

Speaker 4: 14:55

Could you share a?

Speaker 1: 14:56

little bit about your background with everyone.

Speaker 4: 14:58

Yeah, so I am based in the San Francisco Bay Area and I've been in the HR tech space for about 20 years which is kind of crazy to think and I've worked in organizations that are everything from small startup companies with 10, 20 people all the way to many multiple companies. My sweet spot, and where I get really excited, is that 500 to 1,000 person size organization and at Exabeam, where I am currently, we're a cybersecurity company and roughly 700 global FTEs.

Speaker 1: 15:38

That's really great, and so I love the fact that you have experienced at different stages at scale and running different size organizations and specifically your sweet spot, talking about scale ups, category leading companies. When you talk about performance, you really, when you get to that level of success and to sustain that level of success performance and how we think about critically building teams, everything when it comes to performance, to diversity and everything else, becomes increasingly more important and some could say even challenging, right, making sure that the entire organization is on board and aligned and whatnot. So one of the things that we discussed on the prep call was getting into kind of the mindset shift from culture fit to culture ad. I've heard of that before. I don't think everybody has. Like you know it's something that's coming up more and more, but would you mind explaining to us what that means and how you think about that?

Speaker 4: 16:24

Yeah. So you know, I think probably 10 or so years ago, the the invoke thing to say was culture fit. It's really important as we build and scale teams, that we look for the right culture fit, and I think the more evolved way of looking at growth and scale is around culture ad, and what that means is we're not looking to hire people who are exactly as we are today right, because then you end up having more of the same. We actually want to focus on intentionally creating environments where we're hiring folks who are different than our existing workforce, because we want people to be innovative and to bring new ideas and different ways of thinking into our product mix. Our sales strategy you know all of our bottom line processes so being intentional about hiring people who don't just fit the mold but who are also not so far afield that they're going to be disruptive, right? So there's that happy medium.

Speaker 1: 17:16

So how do you go about doing that right, because you're leading quite a large organization and you know how much of it. Are you working directly with function leaders, vps of engineering, sales, or working with town acquisition? How do you ensure alignment and how do you think about like implementation of that? I mean, what does that process look like?

Speaker 4: 17:37

Yeah, great question. I think part of it begins with hiring manager training. So making sure that we're all speaking the same language and that we are grounded in our commitment that this is something we as an organization value. We are committed to looking at culture ad. We're committed to looking at candidates through the lens of potential, not only experience.

Speaker 4: 17:58

And then, I think, having a structured interview process where you've got different interviewers and hiring folks who are asking and screening on different parts of what we've just discussed. So I think there are probably many people who can relate to interviewing at companies and being asked the same question four different ways from four different people versus an environment where you've got someone who is primarily looking at the cultural attributes of a person how are they going to impact culture? What is it like to disagree with them? And then you've got someone who is looking at experiences and key achievements and things like that, and others who might be if it's an engineering position, as you were mentioning, they might be looking to make sure this person has the skills required to do the job. But I think it starts by, at the onset, being very structured and prepared as we go about growth and scale.

Speaker 1: 18:46

Yeah, I always think that it's. I think one of the biggest missed opportunities is that I feel like actually a lot more times should be spent upfront working with hiring managers and talent acquisition leaders prior to a role being opened.

Speaker 1: 18:58

Yes, I feel like we see so much inefficiency in terms of, once a role is open, refining, changing, closing, opening, making the wrong hires and really just tripping all over ourselves a lot of the time, versus being a little bit slower and the planning phase being intentional about everything from culture and otherwise around what we should be hiring for, because it just saves so much time. I think one of the analogies I actually was on a podcast yesterday, but I was like thinking about it is when you invest in a person, you invest in an employee. You believe that they're going to be great culture ad and value creator performer for the business. It's a large investment that you're making not only in their salary and total compensation package, but also in the hiring manager's time, the leadership's time, the recruiters' time the candidates' time it's a huge cost right, it's significantly larger than I think a lot of folks truly realize.

Speaker 1: 19:55

What's kind of funny about it is like if someone let's just say I'm going to pull out a ballpark number for an hire. Let's just say it's like when you include onboarding and ramp everything, your initial investment from hiring to onboarding, let's just say, costs $100,000, something like that. None of us would take $100,000 and invest it into a business with no business plan. We never take like, hey, here's 100 grand, let's just hope it's going to work out.

Speaker 1: 20:20

I feel like we don't necessarily. We aren't always consciously doing that, but sometimes I feel like in some organizations that's kind of the mindset we're going to hire the person and the rescue and kind of take care of itself. But there isn't enough clarity into are we making the right investment? Do we really know what we need to be investing in and how do we have a plan to ensure that investment has the right ROI that we're looking for, whether it be culture, performance, whatever else? I think that there also needs to be a mindset shift, not only from culture fit to culture ads, but also when we're thinking about investing in folks like are we really being as intentional as we should be?

Speaker 4: 20:58

I agree 100%. I think once we've got that clarity as a hiring manager, hr team, talent team, whatnot then I think it's also important to make sure others in the interview process are clear about that. I don't know how many times I've been in interview processes where there's not that alignment throughout all of the folks who are on the interview panel. What ends up happening is we have a very protracted interview cycle. One person is looking for this and someone who can do XYZ, someone else is looking for someone who is an absolutely different profile, and it ends up we end up wasting a lot of time. It ends up becoming very inefficient. The quote that comes to mind is that you've probably heard this measure twice cut once. Spending some time measuring and being really intentional and thoughtful about okay, here is who, the who, so that profile of skills and competency, here's what they're going to be doing at our organization and here's how we want them to be doing it. I think that alignment up front saves a lot of inefficiency down the road.