Debugging Recruiting with Dan Portillo | Greyscale

Recruiting great people is a priority for any company at any stage of growth, especially in the early stages. Hiring your initial team is core to instilling the right company culture. In this talk from Grayscale, an event hosted by Greylock Partners, our talent partner, Dan Portillo outlines what a strong recruiting process should look like, from sourcing to conversion. For more podcasts, please visit news.greylock.com so thanks, Reed.

Thanks, John. Thanks, Chris. What I want to do now is bring up my partner, Dan Portillo. And Dan is a partner. He runs our core talent team. So his team's responsible for sourcing engineers, product managers, designers, and it's probably the secret weapon we have. His team actually sources a candidate that, on average, inside the portfolio, they had one offer extended each day to a candidate his team sources. So you think about competition, the value for talent, competition and technology for talent. Dan's team is winning the talent war, period. Right. I mean, he's figured it out. So if you want, like, kind of the special forces for building recruiting teams, think about recruiting. There's no better person to teach you than Dan Partillo. Thank you.

Reed. John, thanks for warming him up. I appreciate it. And I want to thank Michael, who made the slides. Otherwise, you'd be getting a napkin with some squiggly lines on it. So now you have some beautiful things to look at. Who here, by show of hands, has had the joy of delivering an offer to someone? All right, keep them up. If you've also had the joy of having that person say no. Wonderful. So this is a good time to get out your notebooks, because it's going to be. It's going to help quite a bit. So the talk's on debugging, recruiting. So basically, how do you look at recruiting from a process perspective, looking at it all the way through and where it's going to break and then how in the future, you can help resolve some of those issues. A little bit about me. I've been at Greylock for five years. I run the core talent function. The metrics from Jerry were close, but not all the way there. So maybe every other day we help with an offer, every day would be pretty amazing. I was early at mozilla with John, one of the first 20 people, and I do some philanthropy work. I spent a summer last year working for the White House with the US Digital service. Now, recruiting breaks down into three fundamental pieces. One I would call sourcing, which is the identification of people at the top of the funnel who would actually want to work at your company. Then you Take those people and you run them through a set of questions, interviews that focus on their abilities, their work history, maybe a coding practical, and then some sort of culture fit. And then last is the conversion piece of making them an offer and getting them to accept. I always start with conversion because if that doesn't work, nothing else really matters. And so conversion means the delivery of the offer and actually getting acceptance. And I think of a conversion, a healthy rate is about a 70% acceptance rate. It's impossible to get 100% or very difficult to get 100%, but anything below that, there's some issues that you need to address. So some of the basic mistakes that people make from a conversion perspective is the person was just not fundamentally ready to receive the offer. So you didn't do all the setup work to make sure that they were mentally prepared to get and accept that offer. There was unclear expectations about the role. You didn't understand when they were looking to make a decision and either made the offer too late or too early. Compensation was off. So didn't understand what the person was either expecting what they're currently making, and you were just off from. From a cash perspective. And then the last, if there were specifically unaddressed organizational issues, and I'll get into a few specifics, or if the process was just busted. And so being able to analyze those and understand them. So I introduced a principal engineer to one of our companies. They'd gone through the process, delivered an offer, called the candidate to see kind of how they stood. And the person said, well, I don't know what the company does, I don't know what I'm going to be doing, and I don't understand my role within the organization. So there is no way that person was in a position to accept that offer. So we went through, gave them a bit more rundown on what the company was doing, went back to the expectations for the role, what they were going to be doing, and how they fit into the organization from a broader perspective. So we're able to kind of get that person back from I have no idea if I want to work here to joining the company and being a very successful contributor. Last night I was talking to a VP of engineering at one of our companies who was looking to hire a head of talent. They're both ready to make an offer. So I went to talk to the person that was going to receive an offer and said, okay, what are all the issues that you have? Well, the role seems funky that they're creating a role for me that seems like A hodgepodge of different things, and it's not exactly what I expected in the beginning. So I called the VP of Engineering and said, here's what I'm hearing from the candidate. And he said, well, that's not exactly it at all. We want him to run this entire part of an organization. It's pretty broad. So I went back to the candidate and translated what the VP of Engineering was saying, and we'll find out today if he accepted the offer. But I gave it a 0% chance yesterday. I give it a good 80% chance today. An offer checklist. So I developed this for one of our young CEOs. So basically the set of things that you need to run through before you actually deliver an offer to someone. So fundamentally, do you know how they're making the decision and what they value? So is it the role? Is it location? Is it? And compensation, is it the people that they'll be working with? So being able to understand what an individual values so you can push on that during the interview process and fundamentally understanding how they decide, do they decide by themselves? If they're graduating from college, are they talking to their parents? Are they talking to their peers? If they're married, is their spouse involved in it? Because no one makes decisions in a vacuum, do they have a clear understanding of the role? Do they know what they're going to be doing, why, how it fits into the organization, not just in the next three months, but the next year and three years, and what it's going to look like to be part of that company for a long time? Digging into the company, have you answered all of their company the questions from a company perspective, do they understand why it's a valuable place to work and do they believe in the mission? And then lastly, before you deliver the offer and you talk to them, are you actually ready to accept it if we can get to terms that you want? I didn't think I needed an offer delivery checklist, but I found out that I actually needed that earlier this week. So. So what are the set of things you actually cover when you deliver the offer for someone? One, we love you, you should work here. Two, this is what the job is and this is what we'd like you to do. And this is what it's going to be like now, and this is what it's going to be like in the future. This is what the offer is. Here's what the equity is, and here's how you can understand the equity based upon where we are as a company and what it's potentially worth at various outcomes. And then lastly, basic benefit questions. And finish with, are there any other questions that you have about the offer? And I shouldn't. I didn't think I'd have to say this, but I'm surprised at how often that you have to have a list of those things to walk through. So from a evaluation perspective, So a great candidate experience will fix leaky bucket. And the leaky bucket is losing people at various stages in the interview process. And honestly, if you have a consistent process, you're better than most of the companies out there. So the biggest mistakes from an evaluation perspective are time and process. The clock starts from the first time you have a conversation with that person. So even if they weren't active, they're active now. And so they will start to engage other people as soon as you start that. The second is lumpy communication, meaning you talk to someone, then you don't talk to them for four days, and then you talk to them and you go hot and cold. You miss interviews, that goes into sloppiness. But basically not really having a clear defined process, not showing up for interviews, not showing up for phone screens. And it's generally looking sloppy. A sloppy process is a reflection of a sloppy company and candidates will recognize that. One of the other big things that I've seen is inconsistent expectations. So the company did not set up a meeting before the role, and people were not on the same page. So different interviewers had a different take on the role and what that meant. I just had a specific candidate going to and speaking to a company that had every person on the team viewed the role differently. It was a marketing role. One thought it was a product marketing position, one thought it was a brand marketing position, one thought it was a PR position. So the person left, not understanding what the job actually was, ended up not taking that, that offer. And then last is just poor interviewers that ask bad questions and just have techniques that don't make sense. So we had one company that gave a test to someone, it was a pretty long writing assignment, and then they never talked about it again with the person. So if you're going to give someone a homework assignment, make sure you sit down and talk them through with it for a half an hour or an hour so it doesn't feel like you completely wasted their time doing an assignment. So the basics of an evaluation. So with each company, you should diagram your experience, understand every step that people go through, and understand the metrics that are associated with that funnel. So at each step, where do you lose People either because you disqualified them or because they decided to opt out of the process and then beginning the selling process early. So going back to understanding people's decision criteria very early so that you can address those decisions throughout the entire process. This is a diagram of what we had at Mozilla. Everything from the recruiter screen to the offer delivery. So if you have a lot of people that you're interviewing and you don't make any offers, that means something is wrong with your evaluation process. So either no one is good enough to make it through. If you have a lot of offers, something else is broken with your evaluation process, which means you have no filter to disqualify people. So if you look at the numbers that are associated with each of them, you can then dig in to figure out what is the problem at each of the levels, to figure out where you need to dial to make things more efficient or better. In the beginning part, so I'm ending with sourcing or the top of the funnel. So to me, this is really about targeting. So understanding who should be working at your company and having a good sense of where is that person in their life, what do they care about, and who is our story going to resonate through. So the mistakes here are really just having a really terrible story or not being able to articulate what you're doing from an organizational perspective. So really being able to articulate the why, not having a good sense for the type of people that would actually want to work at your organization. So you email everyone that has Java in their resume versus people that are working on something that may look relevant to what you're doing. And impersonal outreach mostly doesn't work. So the more targeted the message, the more specific, the higher the response rate. I put mostly in starred because if you actually do a bunch of high output. So say we were to automate a campaign targeted at hundreds of people, conversion would be low, but it would be enough that you could still get it done. But that's a more advanced recruiting. So storytelling. I usually say that focusing on a couple different things. So one is the why of the company? So why do we exist? What are we trying to do? Why does this company actually need to be around what is unique about us and what is the story of relevance to the individual? So you, as a person that we're interviewing, have a place in this story. And this is the place in the story where you're gonna help us be very successful. And the more you can make it relevant to the individual, the more they're Gonna feel attached to the company in the interview process and helping them understand why they should care about the company, about you and about how it could be great for them and how great they can contribute. So Daniel Pink's book drive is great to being able to help people with autonomy and purpose. And the more that you can show that in the interview process, the better chance you have at conversion. And getting everyone on the company able to tell the story is incredibly important because every touch point that a candidate has is someone else that's talking about your company and if they don't know how to do that then that is a problem. Sourcing, making sure you have the right target set. And that goes back to understanding the right profile, driving internal referrals. If your number is small, you need to figure out why people are not willing to refer people. Is it if it's a small network or there's something organizationally that they're not comfortable with? I'm a big believer that hiring managers have to source. You just can't have a mythical recruiter that's doing all your work both internally or externally. You have to take the time to go and find people that are, that are going to work and people. The response rate for managers is actually much higher than it is for recruiters. I believe in bringing in an in house recruiter early. I've interviewed as early as in the founders living room before they had any employees. And it just shows a commitment to being very, very good at recruiting. And you know there's a lot of things about being in market, the more people hear about you, the easier it is to get them to respond. So doing events, meetups, blog posts, I think especially engineering blogs work very well. How do you know when to break your career if you are hiring? I think if you're hiring one person a month and you don't have the network to do that yourself, it's probably not too early. I mean I've been the first employee a number of different times. With companies it doesn't mean they have to be full time. They could be a contractor and there are people that specialize in it, but the earlier the better. And now you're all better at recruiting. Congratulations. Any questions?

Thank you. So my company is satisfied with the conversion we have from the initial conversation to offers. But we're not at all satisfied about the conversion we have from sending someone an intro to getting them to have a conversation with us. Partly because we're still a little bit stealthy. But I'm curious if you don't have A brand behind you. What tactics? Specific tactics other than the founder sending the email rather than recruiter, et cetera. Can you think of that would help improve that specific part of the funnel?

When I joined Mozilla, no one knew that you could work there. They thought they had to work for free. So we had to do a lot of market education. It goes back to relevance. And why are you reaching out to them and why it's them and not some other random person. So the more that the recruiter or whoever you're working with is able to tell that story, the higher your response rate will be. I've always found that it's not. When it's not generic, it just works much better. That makes sense. Do you think like, two to three sentences are like, no, so not long. You don't want an opus to someone. And it really could be three or four sentences like, look, I saw that you were working like you're a contributor to WebGL and you worked on this thing that we're now using internally that I think is awesome. Can we please just talk to you? And so it doesn't necessarily have to be that you're pinging them about a job. You're beginning a dialogue. And then once you begin a dialogue, then you can kind of move that into potentially hiring.

Question over here.

Can you talk about how much time to allocate towards recruiting? When thinking about what John said earlier around keeping a tight team of six to seven, then you're feeling growing pain. So when you're in that product mix, market fit phase, the downside is you. You spend a bunch of time recruiting and ramping those people up, and it slows you down in the short term.

That goes to roadmap. So what do you need to build? And do you have enough people to build it? And if you do, then you don't need to spend a lot of time on recruiting. If you need the team, and it's a fundamentally important part of the organization, which it usually is, someone's got to own it. So if it's not you as a CEO, it's your cto, whoever it may be, the person who's feeling the pain probably needs to drive it the most. And figuring out what does the external resource look like? I mean, my view at Mozilla was how do we have the organization spend the least amount of time possible and still drive a very effective process? So all of the sourcing and identification happened on my end. We knew what we were looking for. We identified them. Our filter on the phone screens was tight, and so therefore, it didn't require as much time from an engineering perspective. But if you don't have that filter, someone on your team is going to be giving up that time. And I would recommend again the person that has the pain. Thanks, Steve.

Thank you.