#QuotableMoment with Marc Diouane of Zuora

Name: #QuotableMoment with Marc Diouane of Zuora
Uploaded: 2019-02-28T06:59:22+00:00
Duration: 1 min 35 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this interview excerpt, Marc Diouane discusses the persistent difficulty of hiring, even as a company grows to a critical mass of 1,000 employees. He…

28 Feb 2019 · 2 min

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1:35

In this interview excerpt, Marc Diouane discusses the persistent difficulty of hiring, even as a company grows to a critical mass of 1,000 employees. He emphasizes that larger size or stronger brand does not make hiring fundamentally easier; instead, clear, consistent hiring processes are essential. Zuora learned from early hiring mistakes and adopted a structured "hiring profile" that aligns with core values and culture, creating a common language for recruitment and onboarding. Diouane also describes growth as occurring in cycles of rapid expansion followed by plateaus, which serve as periods to digest growth, reflect on mistakes, and prepare for the next phase. Implementing a consistent hiring profile helped streamline hiring and made the process more manageable.

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Does it ever get any easier hiring? Because hiring is so hard. Does it ever get easier?
It will never get easier. Never get easier? Despite the fact that we have a critical mass of 1,000 people. Never easier in the sense where you have probably a better brand recognition, more stable organization. You might be able to attract different type of people. The people that work for a startup are certainly different than the people that would work for large organizations. But the hiring is still a difficult exercise, and it's extensive human capital business. You have absolutely to be careful, regardless of the size of your organization, to have really clear processes in place to be able to hire the right people. What we have established— we've made a lot of mistakes as well, so we, you know, the growing pain of any company, making mistakes and learn from the mistakes. And I have the tendency to say that you grow in the form of plateaus. That means you have fast growth period followed with a plateau to digest back the growth and then learn from that and grow again. So what's helped us a lot, we really got all the organization and we have defined what we call a hiring profile. Let's make sure that's across all the company, regardless of what the person will do, we need to make sure that we have a consistent characteristic of the people that you want to bring in the company. In making sure that you can be consistent with your core values and the culture of the company. That's helped a lot. As soon as we put— we establish that profile, it's got at least much more easier. It's almost like a common language within the organization when it comes to hire the people and onboard the people.