How Hiring is Different Now and How to Get Better Talent out of That with Greenhouse

Okay, let's begin. Like most of us, I'm dialed in remotely working from home, so I hope all the tech setup works really well, but let's get after it. This will be my first virtual remote work from home SASter Summit presentation, but I've been a part of SASter since the beginning. I'm really excited to be here today. My name is Daniel Chait. I'm the founder and CEO at Greenhouse. Greenhouse is a hiring software company. Our mission is to help every company to become great at hiring. And as an entrepreneur and as a founder, I've had to learn very personally through my own experiences how critical talent is, especially in a new organization. And now we only have about 20 minutes or so together today. I'm planning to share with you our Talent Maker Framework for how being great at hiring will set you apart as a leader. I'll leave time for some questions, so please be ready. Go ahead and type them into the Q&A. And we'll get to those towards the end. Now, as an early-stage startup, you're trying to build something that's gonna survive the cradle and actually grow big and strong one day, ultimately have the ability to change the world in however you're imagining it. And that all starts here. In the early days of a company, you're building the foundation with each new hire. And we all know the numbers. The— fewer than half of seed-stage companies will ever make it to a Series A. And so that's a very challenging and very daunting statistic. Um, and, and, and so every hire matters all the, all the much more. But given the face of those daunting statistics, um, can we just throw up our hands? Are we doomed? Should we all just hang up and curl up in a ball? Uh, no. It turns out that as an early-stage startup, you have certain advantages that bigger, more established companies don't have. You care more. You can be more creative, you can take more risks, and you can also offer people more interesting opportunities, more growth, more, more potential to set their own course than they can in a big company where they kind of have to come in and, and sit in a box and sort of do their job. And so you aren't only at a disadvantage, you just have a different set of advantages to offer as compared to bigger and more established companies. I've been in those shoes before when I started My last company, Lab 49 in New York City, I ran recruiting there. We were trying to hire high-end technical talent on Wall Street. And of course, every big investment bank and Wall Street firm was trying to hire people that could, that could succeed in that environment. And so we really had to think outside the box and do things very differently and consider the fact that we also had a very different set of things to offer. And so rather than do what Goldman Sachs did and try to go to Harvard and hire all the top grads there, We wanted to try to look in places that the big banks weren't looking. We wanted to try to look for people that the big banks just weren't looking at. People that maybe didn't graduate from the right schools, according to their formula, or people that didn't look like they belonged on Wall Street. And then we thought if we could make better decisions about people and do it faster, we could give ourselves a big advantage. And so these are all the kinds of things as a startup that you can do that a big company can't, or for frankly just won't. And so let's talk about how to get there, what that really looks like. The thing is, is people think hiring is kind of a black box, you know, some specific set of actions or, or, you know, a checklist that you do by the recruiting person and magically your new hire comes out. What I've learned and what I've seen working with thousands of organizations and leaders around the world is that recruiting works best when everyone is involved and especially when the leaders are highly engaged. Now, there's a specific set of behaviors that I've seen in leaders whose companies are great at hiring talent, and it's really not a black box or some secret process that they have that you don't. There's just people who prioritize hiring and they know the value of bringing great people into their teams. And so understanding that formula and unpacking what they do That's what we've been trying to do at Greenhouse, and we call those people talent makers. Now, talent makers have a certain mindset, and they see themselves in 3 specific roles that relate to everyone in the organization and outside who will be impacted by hiring. And so I'll talk you through each of those 3 roles right now and share just a few tips about how you can also become more of a talent maker. And so the first way that a talent maker works differently than others is as a leader. And we define a talent leader as a person who builds and leads a culture of hiring. Right now, you might be preparing to make your first hire, ramping up to do a big hiring push, uh, or, or hire your next set of people. And the leadership role may feel obvious to you as a founder because you're just a small team now. So of course you're going to engage in hiring directly. The critical part is that you're laying the foundation for a culture of hiring throughout your company. When leaders are engaged, everyone they work with starts to see hiring as really a privilege and as a top priority. When they do that, then everybody in the company starts to focus on winning for great talent. And so an example of that would be an operations leader that, um, I met with, and this person, um, told me that they hold a weekly meeting with their recruiting partner and anyone on their recruiting team hiring for an open role. and the meeting is so that every hiring manager can report on their progress and their roadblocks, and they can address it immediately, not delay in hiring. And new managers were often surprised at the accountability that they were being held to for hiring and not the recruiter. Um, but that level of accountability and that level of hands-on involvement by leaders in bringing in talent keeps hiring moving and makes sure that the company overall focuses on bringing in high-quality talents as one of its true high-priority initiatives at all times. So there's a bunch of different ways that you can lead the charge on hiring and set it as a priority for your entire organization from the get-go. And so you have to continue to be able to signal that to your team, that talent is always going to be a key focus. Okay, now being a leader within your own team, that's not enough. You also need to think about the candidates and the prospects that are going to be coming in contact with your organization, the talent itself. And so the second role of a talent maker is to act like a magnet for talent, attracting the right people into the organization. And for an organization to become great at hiring, the leaders need to become talent magnets. So a few quick stories of what that looks like. Our CTO, Jason M. Lemkin, has a standing meeting at a restaurant near our office, uh, where he keeps touch— in touch with promising engineers. And as we move to an online world, he's similarly available online to meet with candidates and prospects of all types. Um, I researched an organization who was really doing great at sales hiring, and the head of sales told me that she had started a blog, wrote weekly about sales topics and things that were going on within their department, and within just a few months of starting that blog She made 3 awesome hires just from people reading her blog, getting excited about their work and about the company's culture. Um, and so in short, a talent magnet is a leader who personally and very actively is involved with candidates and with prospects. Okay. So if you're a talent leader building and leading a culture of hiring, and if you're acting as a talent magnet, spending your own time trying to land talent, There's still one missing piece. Think about your partners in the process. If you have an in-house recruiter or people leader, what is your relationship to them? Now, that brings me to the third and maybe the most critical thing to do when you're becoming a talent maker, which is to act as a talent partner, a talent partner who empowers those driving the recruiting progress— process to do their best work. And so it can be easy not to think of recruiting as a separate function when you're just starting out, and that approach actually can work pretty well in the early days. At Greenhouse, when we first founded the company, you know, I was the first recruiter. And so, you know, I didn't have a typical HR background, but I prioritized finding great people. I knew we would find folks that were attracted to our great mission, and I could make sure they had a great experience with us. But then we started bringing in leaders in the people department who were themselves entrepreneurial and visionary. They had backgrounds in, in starting businesses and in, uh, and in management consulting, not necessarily in just in recruiting or HR. And so we didn't have people that had traditional backgrounds in recruiting, but rather we thought they can learn those skills. What our recruiting leaders all shared was a commitment to running recruiting well as a business function and is a great partner in the hiring process. And so for recruiting to run optimally, the business needs to be focused on ensuring that everyone involved has the right tools, they have the right resources, they have the right information to make a great hire. And that means things like interviewers being briefed on the roles that they're interviewing for, having a set of clear questions that they need to ask, having clarity throughout the company on the process process that we're running and the measures that we're using to tell if we're succeeding or not. And so that way, when it comes time to make hiring decisions, everyone has the necessary information right there. Leads to a better candidate experience and better hiring outcomes. One great story that I always love to tell is of our internal recruiting partner, Arianna, who came to an all-hands, attended meetings within our engineering team, talked to interviewers, checked on metrics, and sit with the team that they're hiring for, um, so that they really know exactly what's going on within the organization and the business that they're hiring for, so they can tell the story and really communicate well with candidates and prospects. And so you can see that in order to be really great at hiring, you also need to be a great talent partner. You need to invite that partnership from the recruiting professionals so they can do their best work. Okay, so maybe to sum it all up, I've given away the secret formula here. Um, it's not a black box. It's just some specific things that you can think about as a leader in order to become real talent maker. And talent making means making recruiting your priority. As a leader, it's your role to hire great talent. You can't just be hands-off with it. You can't put it on someone else. You need to own it. And then you need to build a team where everyone else, your recruiters, your business department, your functional departments and leaders throughout the organization everywhere also need to feel the same ownership. It's really exciting to see that, you know, you all are doing it here. There's almost 400 people in this webinar, and that commitment, uh, it's a talent-making, to being proactive, to taking time to upskill yourself on this critical topic is incredibly exciting to me and really heartening because I don't know about the rest of you, but I didn't go to HR school, and maybe you didn't either, but as an entrepreneur, you can get those skills in sessions like this and through your own commitment and dedication to taking ownership over hiring yourself. What I've seen over and over and over again throughout my career and in running Greenhouse is hiring is a core activity of leadership. Getting hiring right creates the difference between those companies who win and everyone else. If there's one thing I want to leave you with, it's that you never say recruiting is someone else's job. It's your job. Okay, so I've given you the basics. There's a ton to dive into. This is a really rich topic, so I'd love to open up the floor now with the minutes we have left to take a few questions. If you go into the Q&A, I'll be able to see them, and I can take questions for about the next 5 minutes or so. Okay, I'm just gonna see the first question here from— not gonna try to pronounce the name— SaaS startup here, seed stage, 8 people on board. When should a company consider hiring their first specialized recruiter? Any common practices or advice? It's a fantastic question. I think most companies, they, they can get away with making a handful of hires without having a dedicated recruiter. At the point where hiring becomes sort of a regular activity that you're expecting to do continuously, it often makes the most sense then to start hiring a specialized recruiter. So if you're going to hire maybe 1 or 2 people a month, month in and month out, that's probably about the minimum period of time where you know that it'll be worth your time to have a dedicated recruiter. If you're going to hire 2 or 3 people and then stop, or a handful of people and then stop, it may not be worth bringing on a full-time person. But if you can foresee that, you know, this month you're hiring a couple engineers, next month a marketing person, salespeople after that, and it's going to become a regular part of the business, that's about the time when having a dedicated recruiter can really pay off, leveraging your time as a founder to free up on doing the business stuff and then coming in contact with candidates where you can have the most impact in the talent maker way that we talked about. Next question from Alex: What channels did you use in your early stages to learn about the buyer persona for an HR-focused B2B offering? Okay. So that's about Greenhouse, the company. I think for any entrepreneur, this is, you know, good advice is you've gotta be in direct contact with customers. So we found the communities where our customers were gonna be and we worked with them. We asked questions, we showed them prototypes, we involved them in design sessions, and then ultimately after like a lot of, you know, that type of involvement, where the rubber hits the road is are they gonna buy the thing? And so I took the product on the road myself personally. I sat with customers and I said, hey, like, what would you pay for this? And what are the real obstacles getting you to buy it? Until you really try to sell something, it's hard to know what the market is really gonna think. Great question here. How do you get buy-in from leaders to become advocates of hiring and care more to help? It's a great— it's a great question. I think often we see, you know, there's pockets of kind of leadership here. I think there's a few things you can do. One, as I mentioned, you can set the example. I mean, leading by example is a great way to set the agenda. So as a founder, what do you talk about at all hands? What goes in your board deck? What are the company OKRs? If those things start to include talent and you start to hold other people accountable to those things, then you can bring people along. So it's not just what you say, but following up with what you do. The other is, you know, your company may consist of many leaders. And if some are buying in more than others, you can start to draw the examples out of the others who are buying in and the ones who aren't. You know, you can sort of highlight and say, hey, you know, I see that this group is not as involved in hiring as that group. What's going on? And you can sort of talk them through that. Maybe one last story that I'll share on that topic is Patty McCord, who ran people at Netflix famously through their period of hypergrowth or early days. Told a story that I'll summarize that one of their business units had been sort of not doing their part, not being a talent maker, as it were, by sort of trying to offload all the work onto the recruiting team and saying, hey, I told you I need a salesperson, send me candidates. What's your problem? If you're not going to do your part, then you're on your own. I can't help you. So you can use our recruiting capability. And you can use a recruiting team, but you need to do your part if you're going to take advantage of that. If you don't need to take advantage of recruiters, you're on your own to fill your own jobs. And so you can sort of lend them your internal resources with the explicit understanding or agreement that they need to— that they need to pull their weight and act like a talent maker themselves. Okay, I think we probably have time for one more question. And they're scrolling by really quickly, which I'm loving this, and we'll definitely try to get to some of these offline later. Um, what considerations, if any, do you find that the shift to remote work has or will have on hiring? What a great question, so timely. Um, I was talking about this the other day. I think, um, number one is recruiting is inherently a very collaborative process. If you think about all the work that has to go into defining what are the needs for this role and, uh, where are we going to look for these candidates and Hey, what did you think about this candidate or that? What are our criteria? All those things often happen in groups of people, and in the online world, those sort of interactions aren't going to necessarily happen in the hallway or over the lunch table. So you need to build in space and time in a process to do that in a much more structured way. You need to collaborate around a document or spreadsheet or some template that actually outlines what are the specific criteria and let people kind of interact that way. I think the other is, you know, you need to understand that, you know, I'm sitting here in the house of my in-laws in a bedroom with an iffy internet connection. I think most candidates are going to come across in this world are going to have similar type of circumstance that they're under. And so you have to get really smart about what are the things that you may be biased towards when you look at a candidate. Oh, they're unprofessional, their hair isn't brushed, they have bad internet connection versus what really matters. And what are the things that you're going to do to test the skills and criteria that you really care about versus things that may just be bias? So, that would be some things that I can foresee being different. This is all so new that I'm as interested as everyone in how those things are going to be changing in the days and weeks ahead. Um, 2:19. I'm going to try to get to one more question. Um, What else is there? What's the hardest part of hiring process to scale? Um, you know, in today's world, candidates have so many opportunities to meet with so many different companies that giving them a great experience is really, really critical. And getting that right is really hard because that experience is often done one-to-one in either a physical room or on a phone call or on a Zoom. And usually most interviewers aren't that motivated. They don't have a lot of training. They don't really know how to do a great interview. And so HR tends to sort of throw that over the wall and say, meet this candidate, tell me what you think. And that gets really hard. People may ask illegal questions, they may insult the candidate, they may be distracted. Um, giving a great candidate experience in a scaled way is a real challenge. And I think bringing a lot more structure and planning to the process is the best way I know of to try to overcome that and really help to scale giving a great experience. But it's certainly, um, something that's critical and helps your company stand out. Some great questions. I'm going to just keep answering them until they shut me off, I guess. I'll check out one here on the topic of talent magnets. What are other examples of good way to do that? So I had mentioned the idea of having, you know, a standing spot where you're meeting with people, you know, a great— or blogging. I think a great talent magnet activity is for senior people to have a hands-on role in the closing or pre-closing conversation with, with top talent. So if you get a call from a recruiter, or if you get a call from a CEO or a CTO, it's a very different type of conversation. Um, by the way, that goes for outreach as well. We often have our senior leaders reach out initially to candidates, and, you know, most people are much more likely to open an email from me as a CEO versus they are from my head of recruiting or from one of my recruiters. And so a talent magnet can play a role in every step of the funnel, both reaching out to candidates, helping to close them, giving great experience along the way as well.

Daniel, you have time for like one last question, and we'll send you the other questions that you didn't get to today as well.

Fantastic. Thank you so much. I'll take a last question, um, and then as you can see, we've got a Talent Makers community on LinkedIn. If you search Greenhouse Talent Makers, join our community, we'll have lots of opportunity to interact and lots of great content on these topics. I'm scrolling down on hiring right. What would you say to an HR manager who says that they have a time to fill KPI to meet? You know, the topic of KPIs is a challenging one in any recruiting conversation. And I think it's important not to mistake some KPIs or health metrics from the actual goal. And so it's good to have time to hire KPIs. It's good to know how long things take to do and to measure those things and talk about trends. But the goal is to build the right winning company. The goal is not to have a short time between an applicant and a person in a chair. Anyone can do that. Um, so I think the conversation is really around, great, you've got that KPI. What does that KPI mean? What can it do for us and what can't it do for us? And therefore, how do we have a more holistic conversation about what actually we're trying to do at all. And I think often HR can kind of get crammed down into this being on the back foot and say, you've got these numbers, that's how you measure, that's how you're paid at these numbers. I don't care about anything else. And so they can react by saying, like, look, it's not my job to hire great people or build a winning company or doing these other things. I'm just trying to make this number in the spreadsheet look like it's supposed to so I get paid. I think that's a really dangerous dynamic. So moving it more into the concept of What's the purpose of that KPI and how does it fit into the overall business is sort of where I would take it.

Yeah, that's a good point to end on. Thank you so much for sharing your insights. I know hiring has been like a question that's come up in all of our webinars today and all of our sessions. So thank you for taking the time to do a deep dive. Um, we will definitely send everybody the recording. We'll send Daniel's team the questions so that his team can follow up with you. Thanks again for watching. Um, we're going to go to our next session. With Chargebee. So we're going to go from hiring to growth. Thanks again, Daniel. Stay safe to you and your team.

Thanks, bye.