Annie Lin (Chief People Officer at Swiftly, ex VP of People at Lever)

Hey everyone, this is Erik Torenberg and you're listening to Execs by On Deck. Execs is a show for founders, operators, and leaders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. Our guests are tech execs in key roles at top tech companies who share their hard-won, earned secrets on how to scale faster. Annie is the incoming Chief People Officer at Swiftly after a successful stint as VP of People at Lever. Prior to working at Lever, Annie spent time at Apple, Uber, General Assembly, Hotel Tonight, and the Wikimedia Foundation. In this episode, Annie shares her thoughts on how the people function has evolved. She provides tips on how to align HR and recruiting so they operate as one, how to make sure employees feel a sense of purpose, and how to pull the secret levers of the Lever product to attract top percentile employees. I hope you enjoy the episode. So Annie, you've been in the people space for quite some time. We're going to get into the mechanics. But first, I want to zoom out and ask, how have you seen the space evolve? What have we kind of, you know, learned as an ecosystem about how to build amazing teams and people organizations in the years that you've been involved?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, this probably predates me getting involved in the people space. So I can't say that this necessarily is, you know, something that's happened, you know, a while since I've been in this space. But I think certainly over the past recent period, we've seen the quote unquote HR, many companies now call it people or people operations, or some variety of that, go from being seen as much more of just an administrative, pure service, pure customer service focused function, to much more of a strategic function that still has a very strong customer service and admin component that's always going to be But that's also taken on a bigger role in actually being proactive and pushing the company forward and really being strategically aligned to where the business is going. And having the people team being at the forefront of that and not only behind the scenes, if you will, making it happen. So, that's been a really big shift. And I think over the last 2 years, what that means has changed quite a bit as well in the middle of COVID remote working, global pandemic. Right, situation. And obviously more recently, the quote unquote great resignation trends as well.

Yeah. So maybe we can start by your experience at Lever. I mean, one thing you really thought about was how to change culture, you know, using data, a data approach. Why don't you talk about what that meant and what you did and what you learned?

Yeah, for sure. Data absolutely is one of those things that's become a really big focus of the people function. You asked earlier about what have been some of those changes at Lever and just me personally, I think To make the right decisions, the best decisions possible, you look at data, you look at insights. And I mean both qualitative and quantitative data. I think a lot of times when people talk about data, they're referring to numbers. And that is important. But let's not forget that qualitative insights are data as well, right? And so the way that we've used it at Lever is across the board. We use it to identify where things are going well from an employee retention perspective. We look at it to see what are some of the key levers, no pun intended, that we you may want to pull to improve things like engagement, performance, organizational health, retention, hiring, etc. And there's, of course, a lot of topics underneath each of those bullet points, whether it's diversity, equity, inclusion, or compensation, or just how strong a team is from a performance and morale perspective.

Yeah. What were your perspectives on how to keep teams feeling connected through, you know, everything the last 2 years, COVID, remote, You know, layoffs, etc. What advice do you have in terms of how to deal with that?

Yeah, I think for me, there's, there's 3 layers of this concept of purpose that really jumps out at me. And I think purpose is a concept that is starting to get a little bit more traction in the people space as well as adjacent spaces. But I actually think it is a concept that is more powerful than even how people have been talking about it more recently. And I think about it as As I think about it on 3 layers. The first layer is what is the company doing that's impactful, that's meaningful to people at the company? And I think being able to build that and make that very clear to employees is often very, very helpful to people wanting to stick around, right? And so that could mean helping to connect people a little bit more closely to impact on customers, right? Are we telling stories? Are we really demonstrating what everyone's day-to-day, sometimes grind, right, is ultimately for? So that's the first layer of purpose. The second layer I think of as each other. So this is where the sense of belonging and a sense of community really comes in, the importance of relationships. And I think a lot of companies actually do not emphasize this enough. I think fundamentally, people work at a job and go through all that that entails for a variety of reasons. But I think a lot of studies have shown that one of the biggest reasons people, people do the work that they do and put in the hard work they put in is for each other.

Right?

It's for the people who are next to them, who they really care about and don't want to let down. And so companies focusing on building that sense of community is super important. And finally, the third layer of purpose is on the individual level, right? Do I feel like the work that I'm doing is meaningful to me? Do I feel like it's helping me to grow personally and professionally in a way that I find impactful? So I think one of our secret weapons at Lever has been really thinking about those 3 layers in our employee retention strategies.

On each, how do you act against them? Like, how are you instilling a sense of community or evaluating whether they have a community or they feel connected to their career growth? What are the ways that you're evaluating and building that in?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I have some maybe more controversial views, or at least not super conventional views when it comes to what success looks like in the people space. And I think fundamentally, if we want to be very, very simplistic. I think there's really only a couple metrics that really, really matter, right? And I'll come back to your question in a second from this. One is, honestly, on a very high level, is the company doing well? And I mean business performance, right? If the business is not doing well, every team, including the people team, is doing something wrong. And I think that is something that sometimes people teams forget, right, in the day to day, is how important their role fundamentally is to the business success. So that's number one. And then the 2 other metrics that I think are really ultimately important for a people function are one, employee retention, right? Are we retaining particularly really good talent? I don't think we're aiming for zero attrition, because sometimes there are people who don't work out. And that's okay, right? But are we retaining high-quality talent as much as we can? And then the other big metric is, are we also filling critical roles quickly with the right people? So to me, those 3 things are the metrics to look at. And everything else, obviously, there's a lot of other metrics that are really important signals that a team also needs to look at to get at those as well. So to your— to coming back to the question of how do I know, you know, what are some of the things you can do to build community? Those 3 metrics, I think, are really important to look at. We're not doing it well if those 3 things are not going well. And then on a more day-to-day basis, We try to stay really close to the pulse of the org. And we do that through a couple of ways. One is being really close to our leaders. So at Lever, the people team has biweekly to monthly what we call org check-ins. So really regular touchpoints with executives, leaders of each org, just to check in on how things are going. And then the team also does something called listening tours, which is on a regular basis having one-on-ones with a select Group, sort of a representative sample, if you will, of employees. Historically, we've done that over, let's say, a survey, which might be more common at a lot of companies, because we believe one-on-ones allow you to ask follow-up questions and get a little bit deeper into what might actually be happening and what you can do about it.

I want to build off this thread of what are your other contrarian ideas about how people team or what success looks like, or what misconceptions do you think others Yeah.

So, the survey versus listening tour one is definitely one of those. I think, quote unquote, engagement surveys have become almost like a given that companies and people teams are supposed to do, just supposed to do that. And I think absolutely, sometimes that is absolutely the thing to do. And I think there's some contexts where it's not the best format. And so, I think the one thing that I really believe in is whatever you do, you have to design it for that company and for that context. Context, right? And that might mean it's best practice, quote unquote, for other companies, or it might mean that you have to do something a little different than what other companies might be doing. The other sort of contrarian views, if you will, that come to mind, I think one for me is, I think in this, you know, war for talent that honestly has been going on for kind of a while, right? COVID has— we talked about the ways great resignation and how COVID has really made the competition for talent really fierce. But I actually think it's a continuation of a trend that's been going on for kind of a while, with a very temporary reversal at the very beginning of the pandemic when there was higher than normal unemployment. And I think as part of that, a lot of companies and a lot of people teams, I think, have gone too far in the other direction of trying to appease every single thing their employee wants. And absolutely, companies and people teams have to listen and have to respond and have to address concerns employees have. Right. That is 100% what companies should be doing. But I think taking it too far is forgetting that 2 things. One, like I said earlier, I think ultimately what's important is finding things that are a win-win solution for your employees and for the business. Right. If you're being really wasteful, for example, in the way you're investing your money such that the business is not successful, maybe even the business is in such trouble that they have to lay a bunch of people off or go out of business. Ultimately, that's actually really bad for the people who work there, right? And so understanding that, yes, you have to listen to employees, but you also have to at the same time balance that with what's good for the business, right? It's both of those things, what's best for the humans you have, absolutely, and what's best for the business. Those things combined is ultimately what's actually best for both your humans and your business, right? So that's a really important thing.

Totally. You know, one challenge, of course, in org is getting recruiting and HR to operate as one team, as opposed to, you know, 2 teams that are butting heads often. How do you do that well?

Yeah, that's a great question. This is a topic that's really close to my heart. I would say that I personally made a lot of mistakes in this area, you know, like earlier in my career in the people space. I probably did not help with this. But I think over time, I've come to realize that it is so much more helpful for the work the people team has to do and for what the people team wants to accomplish for the rest of the company, for HR and recruiting to really operate as one team and see themselves as being on one team. And there's some natural tension, right? Very healthy and sort of natural tensions between the two teams. Recruiting wants to get great talent in, and it's quickly as possible. And HR wants to make sure that while we're doing that, we're still looking out for things like, for example, compensation fairness, diversity, equity, and inclusion, that we're on the right side of the law, compliance, etc., right, that we're setting them up for a success onboarding. So all of these things are excellent and very, very healthy factors for the teams to consider. They have a little bit of a different set of incentives, right? And that's designed on purpose. And I think a very good thing ultimately. Well, what the team did at Lever that I think has been really, really helpful for this is bringing, quite frankly, to start, just bringing the 2 teams, recruiting and HR, into the same conversations a lot more. I think oftentimes, a lot of companies, they end up having like some sets of meetings with just HR, because they think it's about HR topics, and then a separate set of meetings with recruiting that they think are about recruiting topics. But if you look at it, sure, those 2 sets of conversations are different, but there's significant overlap, right? things like potential attrition on the team, possibly even some performance problems, or other types of org challenges that someone might think is more on the HR side, it can have very direct implications for recruiting and their ability to, let's say, start hiring for backfills or building a pipeline earlier so that if someone were to leave the company, we can fill that role a bit more quickly, right? That's just one example. Or we might be seeing challenges on the hiring side that have direct implications on what HR should think about. For example, compensation, you know, broader total rewards, our employer value, etc. And so honestly, as a starting point, just making sure the 2 teams and the leaders of the 2 teams are in the same conversations, are working together more directly. And ultimately, that builds empathy for each other, right, making sure that everyone's solving sort of similar sets of challenges together.

What are your best practices on building a recruiting org more broadly? Let's say you're, you know, a seed company just raised a Series A, just hiring your friends, and now you need to bring in your first kind of senior recruiter? Walk through that process of some of the best practices around just building a strong recruiting org. What's really important to get right and what do you see companies not spending enough time on?

Yeah. The question is about recruiting in particular, just to clarify.

Recruiting and then we'll do HR after.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, honestly, as I said earlier, I think a lot of what a company should do is, has to be dependent on the context, right? So I'll share some of what I've seen, but I think ultimately this may need to be different for different types of companies. of environments. I think when a company is relatively small, I think what you see is a lot of companies bring on 1 to some small number of generalist recruiters, right? Somebody who wears a lot of different types of hats and can work with and partner with a lot of different types of leaders on different types of roles. As a company gets a little bit bigger, it may make sense to start to specialize the types of roles that they work on. So maybe somebody is more focused on technical roles, someone's more focused on business roles, Because the profiles and the types of skill sets that someone might need to have can be very, very different, right across those 2 categories. As you grow and you have more recruiters, it may make sense to specialize further. I found that folks on the team who have, who essentially support the rest of the recruiting team more horizontally. So these might be folks who are focused on ops, who are focused on candidate experience, focused on sourcing, for example, those roles start having a lot of force multiplication impact, right? Because they help the rest of the team be a lot more efficient, a lot more effective. And you end up being able to essentially fill more roles with a relatively smaller number of recruiting team members. Obviously, at a certain size, you're going to need to start thinking about leadership management directly for that team as well.

What do you think are the things to make sure you get right in like a VP of recruiting? Would you hire a VP of recruiting that didn't have VP of recruiting experience before? Presumably, yes, of course, they have to start somewhere. But like, how do you think about what to look for?

If the role is somebody who is a VP of recruiting, right, like their role is directly focused on talent acquisition, I think for that role, it is really important there's somebody who has done it before. I'm personally a really big fan of hiring people who have untraditional backgrounds, right, who may have not done that exact thing their entire career, because I think a depth— or sorry, I think a diversity of experiences tend to make them stronger and more adaptable in a lot of different ways. But I think if somebody is being hired to lead exclusively talent, it is probably important that they've done that at least a little bit before. I do think that for especially slightly bigger companies where they're a player coach, but maybe they get to be the coach part more than 50% of the time, I think for roles like that, it becomes over time actually more important that they're able to hire and develop and manage other really great talent professionals really, really well, more than them being an excellent talent professional themselves, right? Because at a certain point and at a certain size, their role honestly becomes much more about enabling and supporting and developing other people under them than what they might do themselves.

The VP of People role is one of the hardest roles to hire for, it seems, nowadays. Talk a little bit about how you advise founders How to hire for that role, when to hire for that role, what to think about when trying to, you know, what to look for in that role and how to close people in that role?

There's a couple of things that come to mind. I think the first thing that comes to mind for me, which hopefully is a bit of a no-brainer, right, is are they a good leader themselves for their own teams? And in some ways, your people, capital P, leader, you want them to be able to role model what you want to see out of all of your people, lower KSP leaders across the whole company, right? That's the person people are going to look to given their role. And so I think hopefully as a given to start, they have a great track record of being a good manager and a good leader themselves. The second thing is a little bit of what I alluded to earlier. I think it is so critical for the success of the team and the company that this is somebody who understands the business and can be very close to the business. One way that this can, I think a role like this could end up being less impactful is if they become really divorced from what is actually important to the rest of the business, right? And that actually is very easy to happen. And it takes a person and a team and a set of structure. And quite frankly, the rest of the exec team also being really on board the role that that person needs to play. So that's really important. And then the third thing, which I think is related to the second point, I'm a really big fan of this idea of the first team, a concept that you're probably quite familiar with, that especially for someone like an exec, their number one team should actually be their fellow execs, right? Their exec team that they're on. Really big fan of this idea, because I think what it does is that it forces everyone in this example on the exec team to really operate and show up every day with the company in mind first and foremost as their priority. And especially on the higher up of a leadership layer we're talking about, I think it becomes even more important that people essentially always think about what's best for the company, what's best for the business. And sometimes there's a little bit of friction, right, between that and what might be immediately best for like a person on their own team. And that's where really, that's where the sort of power and also challenges of leadership comes in, right, as like being able to keep those different audiences in mind.

Totally. Let's talk about measuring engagement and performance. At GA, you had an employee NPS that was twice as high as the company average. What do you think of NPS as a metric?

I think employee NPS is a great metric. I think I'll allude a little bit to what I said earlier about fundamentally, I think there's those 3 metrics or types of metrics that really matter. And I think employee NPS is a signal and non-outcome metric. That might be a bit of a contrarian opinion that I have as well. Because I think the real outcome metric for employee engagement is actually retention. What I mean by that is, you think that those 2 things are usually lined up, right? NPS and retention, and they probably usually are. But if you have a case where employee NPS is really high, and retention is not great, you have a problem. But if your retention is really high, and your NPS is not great, I think you also have a little bit of a problem, but it becomes a little bit more of a nuanced situation. Yeah.

What are the norms you have around, or you like to set around sort of the contract between employee and employer in terms of what you expect from people if they're thinking about leaving or want to leave?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think for things like this, it is much more impactful to try to get ahead of the situation. As soon as somebody is already telling you or sending you signals that they really want to leave, It's not always too late, but you probably are a little late to the game, right? And so I'm a big fan of putting in place frameworks and structures like regular development conversations between managers and their teams, regular feedback and performance conversations, etc., like putting in place lightweight frameworks to make sure those types of conversations are happening fairly regularly, so that you're not constantly being extremely reactive and trying to save people. A lot of times, if you're there, you're either going to end up doing things that you may not— you may regret a little bit later, especially in relation to your other employees who aren't threatening to leave.

What's an example of that?

I know that, you know, this is very, very natural. If you— there's someone that is really strong who has given you notice and told you that they're planning to leave, sometimes people will scramble to give them a huge raise, or scramble to suddenly give them a promotion. And one, I think the data shows that that rarely works. People who accept their company's counteroffers, most of them leave anyway within 6 months, even if they accept it, because there's usually other things going on, right? Besides just that specific thing you gave them. Secondly, it quite frankly might create problems for your other employees who have now, if they find out somehow, and sometimes these things get out, right? They have now, everybody has learned the lesson that the way for them to get promoted and a raise is for them to threaten to leave, which is not really a healthy situation that you necessarily want. And thirdly, for that person themselves, it might feel good, but it might honestly not feel very good, right? That they had to take this step for you to recognize them in the way that maybe they felt you should have recognized them all along. So much, much more of a fan of being proactive, although that's not always possible. Yeah.

In general, in terms of like employee-employer, how do you sort of How do you sort of thread the needle between wanting to be responsive to employees, but also challenging employees to be adaptable and step up when needed?

Yeah, I think that to me is one of the biggest challenges and responsibilities of a people team. And I don't know if I figured out the perfect way to do this, right? I think I've learned the hard way what not to do in this space. And I've also had some successes in this area that I'm really proud of. But it is very much a balance. And I think there, I guess, you know, I would say that there's some topics, there's some basics that if your employees are complaining about them, you should probably ask yourself, why haven't we fixed this problem already? And how do we fix this ASAP? So those are probably things like if they feel treated unfairly in one way or another, if they feel like if you're getting sort of constant feedback that their managers or managers at your company in general are not being effective managers, right? There are, I think, certain things that I would consider foundations of an effective organization. If those are the things that your employees are giving you negative feedback about, I think you should listen to them extremely carefully and take action literally as quickly as you can to fix those things. And then there are some other things that are a little bit more of a gray area, right? Like organizations have to change and have to adapt. And change is hard. And a lot of times in moments of crises and moments of constant change, which includes really positive things for the company, like things like times of rapid growth, which comes with a lot of changes, it's going to require everybody in the company to change too. And there will be some people who can, who can change and adapt with that a lot more quickly and easily than others. And in those moments, you're going to get a lot of people who will complain about things too, right? And you have to, as leaders, make a decision of what are some of those things that we believe has a lot of merit that we really want to take action on? And what are some things that we're going to need to help people understand that that's just what change is, and why it's actually ultimately really healthy for them, even if it's really hard now, and push people and help them be adaptable and resilient. And so this is the opposite of coddling people, right? And it's not always easy to know which scenario you're in. But I think that's Yeah.

How about when you have a company that's growing and you have a lot of first-time managers, how do you train first-time managers on how to be managers or even managers of managers?

Oh yeah, that is a— that's a big question. I think what you do for new managers is pretty different than what you would do for a little bit more experienced leaders, right? I think for new managers, there is a set of foundations and fundamental skills that you need to have. Tools that you want them to have. That's new information. Sometimes that type of content you can do through like a training/workshop classroom format. But I think the category of things that you can successfully and sustainably accomplish through the classroom model is actually very small. I think most other leadership and management skills are learned through practice and through feedback and through a constant loop of practice and feedback. And so it becomes about designing a program, quote unquote, that is much more embedded in the fabric of the organization and how the company actually operates. And that becomes more challenging, right? Because it's not about let's just roll out these 3 trainings and be done with it. You can do that for, like I said, a small number of usually new management skills. But everything else, I think it's about how do you attach that to your processes, whether that's your performance review processes, or maybe it's your quarterly business review processes, or maybe it's your monthly leadership team meeting processes. Basically, how do you build it into into a very regular cadence that you have with the company and use those as opportunities to have them practice and give feedback.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I want to dive deeper into performance reviews and comp reviews and how to make those work really well. What mistakes do you see others make, or what do you think is the non-obvious approach to making them work great?

I think there's a lot of different models that's possible here. What we've been doing at Lever is a biannual, twice a year, 360 performance review processes— performance review process. And the compensation process historically has been directly tied to the performance review process, basically immediately follows the performance review so that it is directly informed by the performance review process. So those 2 things are directly tied so that the comp decisions are based on Somewhat objective, you know, performance is always going to have a bit of a subjective element, but as objective as possible, at least.

Yeah, totally. Onboarding. What's your philosophy on how to make a really amazing onboarding experience at scale for an org?

I think about onboarding as having 3 different layers. And some of those layers, I think, make sense for— to be tackled centrally, right? So for the people team, for example, to drive and design, etc., in partnership with other leaders. And some layers makes sense to be driven by the teams themselves. So those 3 layers are, one, what are the information or the skills, the knowledge that we want every single person who works at this company to have? So that might be knowledge of the business, high level of the company and its mission and its product, etc. That layer, I think, makes a lot of sense to be very heavily driven by central teams. The second layer is cross-functional knowledge, right? So what are key information about other teams than your own that are important for every single new hire employee to have. And that might make sense to be facilitated by central teams. But that layer is a great opportunity to invite subject matter experts from each team to come in and share as well, right? It also becomes a really great opportunity for people to meet key leaders and members of different teams. Those 2 layers, I think the people team, the central team plays a really heavy role in partnership with the rest of the business. Then there's the third layer, which in a lot of cases is actually the heaviest part of onboarding. And that is onboarding that is specific to your team and your role. And that almost by definition has to be different from person to person. And I think there, the people team's role is to support and provide any kind of relevant frameworks or guidance to each department to design And so there might be a sales-specific onboarding. I mean, quite frankly, there might be within sales multiple different onboardings depending on someone's role, the types of customers and segments they might be focused on, etc. I think that layer each team actually needs to drive with support from the people org.

Yeah. What were the things that you did, whether it was at Lever or elsewhere, did to optimize the recruiting process over time? In terms of what were things that you— what were examples of things that you were learning that said, oh, we should now go do this? Or like, and where exactly did you learn those lessons? What are some examples of things that founders should be thinking about that they might learn over time?

For recruiting?

Yeah.

I think especially for younger companies, companies that just started, Series A companies, etc., I think one of the most important things is actually figuring out your employer brand. What is it that sets you apart from the many, many, many, many other companies that will claim to be better than you, or at least just as good as you, right, as an employer? And like, you know, we are living in a time right now where candidates have, especially, or at least in tech, have a lot of power, and are likely to have a lot of options. And so getting really crisp on your employer brand, I think, is actually one of the first things to figure out there. I think, I think one mistake I see companies do is they try to compete with other companies on every They start being like, oh my God, we lost a candidate because this other company gave them this thing. So should we start also doing that thing? And it is just very difficult to do everything well. And so I think my recommendation for companies figuring out their employer brand is to get really crisp and also focused on the couple of things, the small number of things that really, really sets you apart. And I think that's a great point. And really lean into those things. Now, there are some basics, like making sure people feel like they're paid fairly, et cetera, that I think are across the board important. But I think beyond that baseline, it is, every company really does have to figure out what is it that makes them unique. And hopefully that list is short, and they can really hone in on them.

And what are examples of what that could look like, or what that should look like? Like, what did it look like at Lever? Or how do you think about that for—

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a couple of ways that that could take shape, right? One might be, for some companies, they might make the decision And that we're going to pay at the top of the market, right? So one of our differentiating factors is going to be compensation. We're going to give you extremely high amounts, extremely large amounts of money. And that's, that's the thing we're going to do. And they're obviously going to have to, you know, organize and plan the rest of their business strategy with that in mind, right? So that's one way that companies can go. It's definitely not an option that every company has, right? And other things might be, hey, we're a company that really values community. This is a company where if you work here, if you talk to people who already work here, you're going to hear that people love their colleagues, absolutely think that they work with phenomenal people that they love and just have so much fun with the people that they work with. That's a very, very different angle, right? And you hopefully as a company are being true to that. And when you build your employee brand and also organizing your processes to make that happen. So that's another thing. Or it might be we have really unique benefits that's based on a particular philosophy. For example, it might be like during COVID especially, we know that mental health is really, really top of mind and really important. And so we have these 3 stipends or these 3 benefits and perks that are all meant to support employees' mental health because that's a philosophical area that we've chosen to emphasize. Or professional development, right? Something that we really invest in at the company. So it It could be a variety of things. I think it fundamentally comes down to the philosophy of the company, what makes sense for the business, et cetera.

Talk about how companies can prioritize professional growth or professional development. Like, what are good ways? If someone says, oh, I want to do that at my company, what do you think are approaches that could be successful?

So, most professional growth fundamentally happens on the job through practice and feedback, right? Similar to the answer earlier about me and manager development. I think it's similar to almost all professional development. And so figuring out how to build that into your processes, your, your structures, I think is actually for most topics, the most impactful and sustainable way to help people grow. It's a little counterintuitive, though, I think, to what most people think of, right? When people think of professional growth, oftentimes what they think of is actually like being promoted, being sent to a training, having money, to spend on classes and all of these things. And so if you're a company that decides to take the build into your processes route, one, I think you'll have more success with actual development for your employees. But 2, you also have, you have to realize that you also have the challenge of doing a lot of PR, quite frankly, for yourself, and education for, hey, this is growth too. And this is why it matters, right? This is one of those areas where I feel like what actually works and what most people believe in, there's a bit of a delta between the 2. And if you decide to go that route, you just have to make sure you're communicating and educating about it. I do think that there is a time and a place and a set of topics where sending someone to a class or giving them a stipend they can use to spend on conferences or trainings or books, etc., could be really impactful. So at Lever, for example, besides having built professional development more into day-to-day processes and cadences, there is— we do offer a personal and professional development stipend that is a monthly stipend that people can use to spend on a variety of things of their own choosing for their own development. And in addition, we actually give each exec a budget as well within their department budget that they can, they can select what to use it for, for the development of folks on their team. So we tackle it in a few different ways.

That makes a lot of sense. Talk a little bit about the transition from IRL to remote internally. terms of whether it's onboarding or other things that are really important to get right for the employee experience to be good?

So, just to use an example at Lever, when Lever went remote at the beginning of the pandemic, it was a very significant change for the company. Because before that point, the vast majority of the company worked out of an office. There was an office in San Francisco, and there was an office in Toronto. And the vast, vast, vast majority of the company worked pretty much almost every day out of one of those 2 offices. There were very few people who were remote. So to go from that to 100% remote was a significant change. And there was a lot of effort that we put into making that successful. I think fundamentally, working through department leaders, we made sure that our managers were being very intentional about what that transition entailed. Because managing a remote team is very different. And I think in a lot always harder than managing a team that you saw in person every day. And so at the beginning of the pandemic, every manager actually created what we called a remote team plan. It was basically a plan that they put together to think through a couple of different elements of how they were going to set their team up for success in a remote environment. And honestly, I think the exact details of that plan almost matter less than just making sure managers were thinking about it and being very intentional about it. But some of the things that went into people's plans were, what were they going to do to make sure that they were able to continue to track progress on the team? So, from an accountability and outcomes perspective, do they have the right systems and cadences in place for that? What were they going to do to make sure that their teams continue to feel connected socially to each other and to the rest of the company? What were they going to do to make sure that information flow was still effective when you no longer have water cooler talks, or, you know, just bumping into people in the hallways and all of these things, you have to be more intentional. So there were just a couple of different areas and sort of cuts of the remote employee experience that we made sure that our leaders were being really thoughtful in developing, and obviously that they had to evolve over time as well.

Totally. And just to segue to your point before, how do you see individual department heads or recommend individual department heads, once they have a budget, how to best allocate those dollars to professional development?

I think one of the reasons we decided, as part of our professional development strategy, to give it to each exec is that we believe that how the best way to do this may be different from department to department, and the exec of that department, the leaders of that department will have a— is closer to it, right? And may have the best idea of how best to use that money. But I think more broadly speaking, There's some cases where it makes sense to evenly distribute that to your team if you're aiming for— if you're optimizing for, let's say, fairness, right? But I think there are also other times when that might not be your goal. You may end up choosing to invest all or most of your money on a select group of people on your team who you think are particularly high potential or who are in roles that are particularly impactful or who you're trying to really groom into a really really critical role. And that latter is how I've seen more teams end up using that fund. I will say that that's why we also couple that strategy with having as part of our benefits and perks package, a stipend that all employees have access to, right, that they can decide to use themselves on professional and personal development. So those are 2 separate funds that people could potentially access. And that sort of allows us to balance the, on the one hand, the exec being able to make the best decision for themselves, which may be to invest the money in only a part of the team. And this other part of the strategy where everybody has access to some funding to use for their development.

Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe gearing towards closing here, I'm curious if you have pro tips on how to use Lever or just how did you, you know, get the top 1% candidates from using the product?

Yeah, I mean, I can talk for days about this. There are a lot of really great functionalities. Within the product. I mean, I think a lot of people who have experience with Lever may have had experience using our nurture functionality. But I think to me, that is one of our biggest differentiators as a product. Nurture essentially, in short, allows recruiting teams and hiring teams to go after more passive candidates, right? I think historically, recruiting sometimes is about quite frankly, waiting for candidates to send in applications and apply for your roles. And that just no longer works in really high-demand industries where there are a lot of jobs and candidates have a lot of power, right? If you want to get the best talent, you can't only rely on candidates who apply themselves to your jobs. And what Nurture allows you to do is, in addition to applications, actually for you to proactively go after candidates who may not be coming to you. If you find them on LinkedIn or other channels, it allows you to essentially set up like a drip campaign. And very easily, that automatically, once you set it up, follows up with that candidate. If they don't respond to you in X number of days, it even allows you to send emails on behalf of another person in the company if you want to. And so it creates this much more personal personal, effective set of touchpoints with a candidate that you really think could be a great fit for your role. And honestly, that's a lot of the best talent ends up being hired through that kind of method.

Maybe one last question I'll give you, which is, we've been talking about it from the founder side. How about from the talent side, or from the people leader side, trying to, you know, aspire— all the aspiring VPs of people out there, or chief people officers, what advice do you have for them in terms of how to grow in their careers and really master the craft?

I think I might come back to a little bit of what I said earlier, which is that in a space like people, there is a near infinite number of things that you can be doing or feel like you can be doing, or maybe other people are telling you you should be doing in order to make the employee experience better, right? Like, if you go onto LinkedIn, or a lot of other channels out there, every day you will see 5 or more suggestions on what else you can and should be doing. And you should be open to that and listen to that. I've gotten a lot of good ideas, quite frankly, from my peers in the space and channels like LinkedIn. It's really invaluable. But I think what's really important, like I mentioned earlier about employee branding, It's going to be really tempting to try to do everything. There's going to be a lot of pressure and a lot of— whether it's peer pressure or pressure from your own company— to try to do all of those things. And I actually think, as we know from goal-setting frameworks or any frameworks that advise not trying to focus on too many things, I think it's real. You can't do a large number of things super well. And what also ultimately usually be more impactful if you pick, if you pick a handful of things to do really in a really excellent way that really helps set you apart, right? Obviously, that's— I'm talking about something that's a little bit on top of some of the basics in the HR space that you just have to get right. You don't really have a choice in that. You just have to do those things and make sure that's really strong. But on top of that, there's millions of optional things that you could be doing and may feel pressure to do. And I would just say, try to, try to focus and try to really pick a small number of things that you think would really set you apart and be particularly impactful to your company.

Yeah, I think that's a great place to wrap. Andy, thanks so much for coming to the podcast. This has been a lot of wisdom.

Absolutely. Thanks so much, Erik. It's been great to be on this podcast.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. Execs is produced by On Deck, where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers. If you're looking to start a company, uplevel your career, or navigate a career transition, I encourage you to visit beyonddeck.com. See you next time.