Mission-Driven Hiring - Maria Barrera (Clayful)

One of the, I think, hardest lessons that we've learned over the last couple years is we're in this very worthy cause. We have an incredible mission. We're working and doing some incredible work, as you all just saw. And it is really important for us to build a team of people who care not just about the mission, but in building a company that can make the mission come true. Those are not always the same, especially when you think about mental health. Right. I joke that being a startup in mental health can be a little bit of an oxymoron where startup required a lot of hard work and a lot of tenacity and not a lot of work life balance. And now I feel like as a society, especially post Covid, we have a very different point of view on what healthy work life balance means. And it's not working 80 hours at a startup. So. So how do we find the people that are really excited about the mission, that are willing to work really hard for it because that fuels them and because it gives to their mental health? Because at the end of the day, when I see the really sad things on the platform that happen or the deep feelings that students are feeling, the thing that gives me fuel is that we're doing something about it and that we're working hard to change that. So, yeah, building a team, I think has been one of the most challenging pieces.

And can we click into that more? Because I think you guys are 12 full time, 12 employees and about 140 contractors right now. And I do think that's a really interesting nuanced insight that we haven't heard before of the difficulty of hiring for somebody who's not just aligned with your mission, but can actually execute with what the business needs to build, especially when you're doing something so aspirational. So can we get tactical? Are there any tactical insights or tips that you have discovered that you wish you knew earlier when it came to hiring that could have accelerated your either saved you time or money or accelerated your development?

Yeah, I mean, initially we were very excited about people who are excited about our mission. Right. When you have a baby and they're like, you have a cute baby. Everyone's like, great, cool, come take care of it, come hang out with us. So the fact that people were excited about this mission that we were on was really exciting for us and like, great, let's do this together. And I don't think we were having the hard conversations up front about what does it mean to be at a startup and what does this require of Yale So now in our interview process we always have that conversation, if not in the very first conversation, definitely throughout the process. So what does it mean to work at a startup? This isn't your typical 9 to 5 job. This isn't a. It's probably not what you think it is unless you've been at a 10 person company before. So here's what it actually means. Here's the amount of time you're going to work, here are the challenges that we're working through. And what we've been doing lately is actually having people go through a project that's a problem solving challenge with our team. So they're not just meeting in an interview and saying, okay, here's where I worked, here's my experience, blah, blah, blah, but really using those 30, 45 minutes to get to know our team member while at the same time working through a project together so they can actually see what the work is like.

And is that a 30 to 40 minute project that you're working on or do you give them actually like a two week experience of a project before you make a decision?

More of a week and a half. Yeah.

A week and a half.

Ish. So they'll meet with two or three people on our team, ask questions around the project and then present it to us in a whole group meeting. So that provides a pretty, I would say, authentic experience into. Okay, these are the real challenges that we're working through and these are the real people you'd be working with and these are the real questions we would ask. And of course you don't have all the context right, so we're not going to judge you on is this the perfect solution to this problem, but we will judge you on your process and how effectively you use the time with our team members.