The People Playbook Behind Multi-Billion Dollar Companies with Mandy Sebel, Radian Capital

Companies that are most successful have just such a high linkage between their employee impact, their customer impact, and then ultimately their rate of return. I think at the end of the day, what's most important is that you create just a tremendous amount of clarity for team members. Help them understand your strategy. What are we doing? Why do we exist?

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I'm super passionate about this topic. I feel my superpower in life has been building relationships. I also feel that the job of a leader is to build, inspire and motivate a team to deliver. And deliver is the lagging indicator in that equation. And if you have amazing employees and amazing culture, they'll create an amazing customer experience that'll lead to a great financial outcome. But oftentimes people focus on the financial outcome first and ignore people. You can't build a great business without people and culture, and I couldn't find a better speaker on the topic than Mandy Siebel. Mandy is a talent partner at our lead investor at Boast AI Radian Capital, and prior to that she has decades of experience in people and culture, most recently at UiPath as Chief People Officer helping grow the team to 3,000 people in two years. And if you noticed, UiPath recently IPO'd at a 38 billion market cap. Prior to that, Mandy has had experience at Dun and Bandstreet and a fintech company amongst many others. Mandy, welcome to Traction. Thanks for making the time.

Thanks for having me, Lloyd. I'm excited to be here.

Awesome. And you've had HR leadership roles at a number of hyperscale companies including Scient during the dot com rise and then Dun and Bradstreet during a transformation. Give us your background. How did you get into hr? Walk us through your journey and people more importantly.

Yeah, I don't think I knew I was in an HR career for quite some time, but I got recruited right out of college by a tech recruiting firm and we'll talk about values and culture and hiring people. In hindsight, they did that. Amazing. They really knew how to target individuals that were in college who would thrive at their company. And they were just fantastic at building, building their own team. Not to mention the customers that we recruited for. And then I spent a number of years there, tremendous opportunity. And then I went to a client. So one of my clients was a company called Science. And this goes back a long time, but during that e business.com craze it was one of the fastest growing companies at the time. Very similar sort of ride in rocket ship. We used a lot of those words back then. We had an amazing IPO. It grew to be about 3,000 in the blink of an eye on a global scale. And then like many companies at the time, we suffered the dot com bust or our customers didn't impact us. And then I really, during that time started to understand and learn not just the recruitment side of building a company, although that was a huge focus, but really nurturing, taking care of people, how to take care of people during a downturn to put that first ahead of so much. And to this day when I see people from Science and we are so connected, people comment on how well we were treated during such a challenging. But then I spent what I call like my formative years at a company called Dun and Bradstreet. And D and B couldn't have been any different than a hybrid startup. It was 168 years old when I joined. Four American presidents, including Abe Lincoln had worked at that company. But. But it was going through a really significant turnaround and business transformation. And the CEO who drove that change put the culture as a focus of our strategy and drove all of our corporate change around, evolving our culture into what he called a winning culture. So I learned a lot in my time at that company that I've taken along with me in other places. And and then I'd say there I had a business role for a few years and I had an opportunity to pivot back into the HR function in a broader base to HR leadership role, not just the recruitment end of things. So that was a fantastic opportunity. And then you just summed up the end where over here I just joined which is a growth equity firm as a talent partner. So I have an opportunity to help us assess companies when we're looking at investing and then work with them on talent and people. Strat and I just came off of a really fantastic ride at UiPath which was career matrix company for so many people.

Definitely. I'm curious, why go to a VC firm from a massive UiPath that's on a rocket ship? Was it to impact multiple companies or just wanted to do something different?

That's a great question. I had an opportunity a number of years ago to consult at a private equity firm and I at the firm was more focused on the in house aspect of the private equity firm. But I got to spend a little bit of time with a portfolio company and it was really there that I started to understand what this role could mean. And then as a sitting operator in whether it was the fintech I was with or UiPath, you build relationships with the talent people at the investors. And I just thought it was a great career transition for me to be able to not just only impact one company, but to really work across a broad spectrum of companies and help them grow and hopefully overcome some of the pitfalls and assembling blocks that other companies have along that journey.

So I'm excited to hear Mandy, a couple of things here right before we go into values and culture and hiring and all kinds of things. You've spent a lot of your career as head of people, Chief People Officer. Define what that means for us. What does that title mean and when is a right time to bring on ahead of people?

That's a great question. Chief People Officer, VP of People Chro. I'm not picky about what you call the role. You are the executive most responsible for the talent strategies of the employee space and from hiring and bringing people into the company through their onboarding and their talent development and life cycle all the way through to when they potentially move on. And it is, you know, such an important and strategic role. You asked when it makes most sense to bring that person into an early stage company. I have a strong Bias that as soon as you can. The better talent is one of the biggest drivers of unlocking value creation in the company. And I think as soon as you have really strong product market fit and you understand where you're taking your company, why wouldn't you want a strong partner to helm helping you think through these strategies and bringing people into the company and then taking care of them over that time? So I'm heavily biased towards as soon as you can afford it and if not getting advisory support or leadership support that can help framework the team can.

Be quick thing here on the title. What is the day to day of a cheap people officer? You were at UiPath and then previously at Can Capital do in similar capacities. Right. What does this role do day to day?

I think particularly in early stage or high growth companies I would say I've always said you fly very high and you fly very low. What does that mean? I can think of a day where I'm sitting in a board meeting all the way down to hosting a session, welcoming new employees to the company and it really does expand that. So what does the day to day look like? So first of all you're the leader of a team or a building team within a company. So you're really doing all the things that you need to do to keep your team successful, connecting them to your goals and objectives and your strategy, driving their focus, moving programs and projects along. You are usually the most senior business partner to the executive team. I also say that you're the most senior recruiter in the company and next to the CEO often so really the face of the company to really key hires. And I think that's a very important part of the role, particularly when you're in a growth stage. The people space. Think about every one of those call works somewhere. Hear about a company, you get recruited to a company, you evaluate their benefits and compensation. When you're making a decision to come to the company, you interview, you get onboarded, you get welcomed all the way through your career development and your coaching and maybe helping you grow your own team and thinking through those strategies. M and A leadership. It is really such a broad and deep role which is I think why it's so exciting but also really challenging. Right. So it's a wide function. There's also a lot of depending on the company you're with a lot of external impact that you can make when it comes to your CSR initiatives. University inclusion strategies. It might have a customer facing role. Helping companies think about their automation strategies was very important at UiPath. So those are some examples of what we do day in and day out.

Definitely. And what most people think about is it's all about hiring. And like I started the conversation with, your job as a leader is to build, inspire and motivate people to deliver. And deliver is a lagging indicator. And if you're just focused on hiring people to deliver, then you may as well start a sweatshop. But a lot of what you said, right? Coaching people, helping them build their careers, helping them grow. Because if you help your people grow, they'll help your business grow and you'll become successful. So before we dive into hiring, there's a lot of questions here around hiring. What is the interview process, how do you hire, how do you find talent in a competitive market, all of that stuff. But it all starts with values and culture, right? And the term core values get thrown out a lot. But if you really want to see a company, if they embody their values, don't read about it in their about page, but watch their actions. What are your recommendations and how to define your values? And then how have you seen companies use their values as a North Star to run their business?

That's a great question. So I think tactically, companies go about this a couple of different ways. I think when you're an early stage company or a founder led company, very often your values become what you aspire to have your company be. And very often it's maybe something you admire or maybe something you didn't admire somewhere else that you want to make sure you're moving away from. And I've seen that in a lot of anchors to value systems. But I think at the end of the day, value are really what is intrinsically true in your operating environment. And that is really very important. But at the highest level, you're really asking yourself as a company, why do we exist? Who are we? Why do we exist? What do we value in how we behave? So that ultimately becomes your value system. Like really, what do we reward? What do we recognize? What do we encourage? You'll often hear companies talk about these as guiding principles or operating principles. But it's really the framework that gives employees in the company the ability to make decisions, to know what you're going to get thanked for or what you're going to get in some ways punished for. Incredibly important, I think you said also at the beginning of this conversation, companies that are most successful have just such a high linkage between their employee impact, their customer impact, and then ultimately their rate of return. And so these things are so Intrinsically linked. And I think at the end of the day, what's most important is that you create just a tremendous amount of clarity, clarity for team members, help them understand your strategy. What are we doing? Why do we exist again? What do we value? What do we not value? It helps you make decisions, right? It's really core to your decision making framework and your strategy. And then what does that mean? What does that translate to? What does that mean? Our products, our customers that we target what we don't target and make that really clear for people. And then you create the ecosystems where they can then go off and replicate that in their teams and make great decisions on behalf of the company at large. Which is why I think so much of this is important. It really is a guidepost to decision making, to strategy, to behavior, and connects people to your purpose.

From all the companies you've worked at and maybe not, let's not look at the companies you've worked at, the company that you've not worked at, what is the one company that where you really love their values and their culture, something to aspire to be?

You know, I think you really feel a company when you walk into their experience sometimes. So I think it's maybe easy to connect to a consumer brand in that regard. We can all talk about what's the first brand you really experience as a kid? Disney. Or everyone talks about the Nordstrom way, you know, or you've experienced going to a Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons and the caliber of care that they put into taking care of the customer. So I think whether those companies are all true today or there's other extensions that are more interesting, I think really the companies where you have a real connection, you feel the impact as a customer, you feel like you're an extension of their brand, are probably places that have pretty strong sense of core values internally.

And one of the quotes I had learned a long while ago is good brand is about creating a consistently pleasurable experience across all channels, both internally and externally. So you said it well here. Let's switch to hiring. There's a number of questions here around that did you keep the hiring process internal or did you outsource? And why or why not did you make that decision?

So I think the approach that you all take to hiring and using and recruiting probably multi pronged and really depends on your scale, the investment strategies you can have. So I would start by saying first and foremost, everyone at your company as a recruiter and really getting into that mindset is just so important in your interactions. You're an extension of the brand. You never know who you're going to see in me. So just really connecting everybody in the company to the mindset that we are all recruiting is just. And secondly, it's incredibly important that you have a team that represents your recruitment effort. Giving a differentiated employee experience or candidate experience is incredibly important. And that takes work and that takes architecture and that takes effort and process and systems and design and focus on employee brand. And anyone who does a great job with that puts a tremendous amount of work into it. So I do think it's very important and that could be a very small team in a small company. And if you're Walmart or Google, I imagine there are thousands of people that are focused on this around the globe in some way, shape or form. Then I think there's just a tremendous amount of technology that you can use today to widen the aperture and attract people to your company, which is really important. And I am very much a fan of having multi channel strategy for recruiting. So really key executive search partners who really understand how you work and are an extension of your organization and can help you attract passive executive talent to help you build a leadership team, maybe recruitment efforts and support. I think it's really important and you can really never get away from it. It's great to have good partnerships in that space. We can deploy a lot of talent technologies right now. As an example, I'll give a nod to a firm that we used quite a bit, Eightfold AI, which really helped us to unlock the top of the funnel talent aperture and bring candidates in and help us identify and match them using AI technologies that brought forward people that we wouldn't have necessarily looked at or uncovered before. It just really speeds up that pipeline creation for your in house recruiters and it gives your in house recruiters a chance to really focus on great conversations, evaluating talent, making sure the right people are coming into your company for the right reasons, which really impacts the impact that people can have over time.

And then how does Eightfold work? That sounds really interesting. I was just looking it up.

There are probably others out there along the lines of that. But Eightfold has gets smarter with you as an example. So you really train the AI of the tool at the top of the funnel to help you match the candidates in the marketplace. And you could, by the way, you can use it on your internal employee base too. So you've heard a lot about talent marketplaces really especially for larger enterprise companies that have that recruiting externally is not the only path to bring people in the Door. Early stage companies often need to get people in for the first time. But if you're a large enterprise company, you have thousands of people to tap into. So it really helps you unlock the potential of the candidate pipeline or even your internal employee base to see who has the capabilities and qualities and would have the success rate for certain types of jobs. So it's a pretty fantastic style of tool. And there are, there are others out.

There on the market, definitely. So because everything starts with the pipeline, right? Like filling a large pipeline, especially for smaller companies that don't have massive budgets, is very hard. And you talked about multichannel. You talked about finding talent partners externally, you talked about using Eightfold. What else have you seen that's worked in terms of filling the top of the funnel?

So it's a great question and I'm always curious. I'm watching the chat here too. I'm curious to hear what other people are doing because there's so much recruiting technology out there to keep up with. It's almost overwhelming these days. Top of funnel, you draft off of your corporate event strategy, your corporate brand. So I have no question that anyone who's sitting here on this webinar today is probably looking up what boast AI is up to in the market place. So that's fantastic. So speaking of that, I have an incredibly close relationship in any company I'm with with our cmo. We together own brand and one incredible audience of brand is the future employee. So having an incredible employment brand and not just the words in the marketplace, but having it be true, giving people a great experience internally. So your employees are activating and like I said, everyone's a recruiter. They're talking about the company, they're referring people to the company. They're keeping all this social schools active and available in the marketplace. I think that's really important and it draws people into your company. Not every organization has the brand awareness that some others do. And yet we all have something to say about when we're. You might deploy a early career pipeline. Intern programs are fantastic. You might have a campus strategy, an MBA strategy, an experienced hire strategy. You might welcome pack people to the workforce. You might welcome people into your aperture from military career. And so you might cast a net for particularly today with everybody working in such a distributed way. You might open your aperture across locations that you might not have thought about in the past. So I think there's just a tremendous opportunity to go out and get the talent in the market that we all need and want to go after and particularly now, as companies are relaxing their constraints on location strategies, that's becoming a little bit easier. Competitive still, but easier.

Definitely. No, that's good advice here because I hadn't thought of it that way, but the people organization working with the marketing organization to activate the top of the funnel and being deliberate at it and I didn't realize, but if you look at traction, it's now 100 plus thousand subscribers. And I look at our exec team, about half our exec team came in some way through this Traction community. Our CMO starting in a few weeks, our CTO was recommended by somebody from the community, those sorts of things. And we've not been deliberate in using the community or events as a strategy to recruit people. But what I'm hearing is that's a great strategy. Hosting events to activate people.

Maybe just think about that. You said you weren't deliberate or intentional about it, but what you're really showing people is just another creative way of thinking. You're exposing people to different talent. I watched some of the YouTube videos these past few weeks. I've learned a tremendous amount. And if you're creating that draw into your ecosystem, you're probably attracting future employees, future customers. And the potential is endless. And there's a lot of creative ways to do that right now. It used to have to be all in person events or going to campus. There's much more creative ways to go at talent audiences to die in talent pools.

Yeah, definitely. I really hadn't thought about using it to be deliberate, but I think that's great advice given some of our execs and usually recruiter fees chew up a lot of your budget, especially around execs. But we were able to leverage the community to get a few exec hires without spending on recruiters. Now, shifting over to the interview process, what is the ideal or delightful interview process?

That's a great question. I think that looks a little bit differently in a lot of different styles of companies. Right. So if you are a potential driver with Uber, a lot of your selection process is done with their. You might not meet anybody based on the volume and pace that they bring people in the door. There are many companies that have are using technology to speed up processes and make decisions. So I think that's one way to do it. But more traditionally, I think it's really important that your interview team, let's say you're a marketing team and you have three really important roles in the group. I think it's really important that to the extent that you can create a lot of Role, clarity, what you're looking for, that the team at large understands what that is, that you're using your posting mechanisms or your recruitment mechanisms or your networks. Whatever you're doing to bring people in, the next piece of what you're looking to do is give people a great experience. So that often will start with somebody on the recruiting team. You might use some sort of vetting technology at the top of the process, so you're not wasting people's time, either yours or a candidate. You want to get someone on the. You want to get that pipeline narrowed pretty quickly, so you're really having conversations with people. So might start with a recruiter, might start with maybe even your hiring manager, depending on how much investment you have in your team in that time. I've been directly recruited by CEOs on LinkedIn, but I think you really have to use all your tools to go at that. And then I think the other thing that's really important is, you know, understanding who's talking to a candidate about what. Are you trying to give somebody an opportunity to understand the company? Are you asking them questions around, making sure that their interests align with what you're looking for? Is somebody really leaning in and talking about their technical skills and capabilities or attributes? Are you looking for somebody that has 80% of the experience? Because you need someone yesterday to build and lead a team and you can't take the risk that they're going to learn on the job. So I think that depends on who you involve. I think it's incredible, particularly in growth stage companies, when CEOs and executive team members, if they're there, help in interviewing and selling candidates, especially when you don't have a lot to point to. We're not all Disney. We don't have these assets. And that really helps connect people to the company, to the mission that they're on, to that value system that you're creating together and ultimately make great decisions, decisions. But I've also, just to be clear, I've done a lot of executive recruitment in my career. You might leverage board members, customers. I interviewed as I was joining Radian. I spoke to portfolio companies. I wanted to really understand who we were investing in and what I could do to help them when I got here. So I think you have to think about the experience you're giving the future employee to.

Definitely. We focus so much on delighting customers through our products, but we're not as deliberate. Companies are not as deliberate of thinking. Like, how do you delight people as they go through their journeys with your company? And little moments of delight compounds into something great. And little moments of frustration also compound into people leaving now, Jan asks here. We're a startup in the middle of growth stage to scale up. I'm looking to learn strategies around recruiting a strong leadership team. Something we've done in the last little while. In 45 days, we recruited a independent board member, CMO, CTO, CFO and head of data. But your advice on how to find the best leadership talent out there.

Yeah, no. And I do think you have great perspective, blown away by the caliber of talent that you've been able to attract and in such a short amount of time. Let's break it apart. How did you do that? As a founding leadership team, you and your co founder were very clear and got advice and input in terms of what leadership roles were important and in what priority order. Because it's a huge talent investment of time to interview and we can't all afford everything at once often. So you do make some trade offs. So I think having that clarity on what's important in what order first, what are the capabilities and attributes and competencies that are necessary. And I think because you and Alex were very clear about, you were then able to leverage your network. So we just talked about the network effect of your brand building and this community that you're supporting. So people were motivated to come to you. Your investors and advisors brought talent to you. Obviously there's executive search firms that you could put in motion for key hires. And I do think that's something that can be really valuable and is often critical for some of these roles. And then you put the time and effort into creating that experience that was attractive to the right people. I'm sure you didn't meet one person, you were done, you've added a few people, you were focused on what you needed and you were able to move very quickly from what I saw. And I think I've met some of the team and I've met your newest board member. I think you've done a fantastic job.

Yeah, I think the key thing there was as founders, we want to eat the elephant sometimes on its whole, but you got to eat it one bite at a time. And what is the most important thing is identifying what's the biggest risk to your business that you want to de risk right now in order of priority is the technology, is it operations, is it marketing? That's the thing. Now we felt like we raised enough money, so we went and said, well, top level everything. I used to run product and marketing and we said it's not sustainable as a founder because I'm not a trained. I'm an engineer by background. I'm not a trained marketer. I'm not a trained product person either. So we said, we'll do this all at once, but really, you gotta de risk the most important thing. And if we didn't even hire any of these other folks, like the CMO or independent board members, our biggest focus was in finding a CTO who could own the product organization. The second learning there was leverage your network in a big way. We leveraged our community. We reached out to our best clients and friends. And then the third thing is time kills all deals. And I see this sales. Go to your CRO or head of sales and ask them, what were the steps to win your best client? What was the sales process you used? Because you got to treat it like that. And it's like conversation one, line up the next conversation. When you're. When you have a good vibe that this person is the right fit, line up the second conversation. That's what we did, right? Like on the call, we'd book another call. Like with our cmo, for example. Starting in a couple of weeks, he's been through five exits, most recently coming from a 250 million ARR company and based in Utah. I had a standing call with him every Friday. And it's funny because we started the conversation in December. I sent an E blast to the Traction network and he reached out from there, but he wasn't looking for a job. He's, let's just connect and just had a conversation with him every Friday. Not for me, but like one Friday was with Alex. One Friday it was with rcro. One Friday it was with the board members. And through that process, they didn't feel like they were being recruited, but they felt like they were part of the family and the story. And then the decision just happened. So if you treat people like a relationship, if you value the relationship, it works out. If you treat people like a transaction on the way in, that's how they're going to treat you on the way out. But I think that combination of what is the big thing you wanted to de risk as founders, don't be a single point of failure. And for me, it was like marketing and engineering and then leverage your network and really make sure you have the path laid out. And that's why I like a lot of the most experienced recruiters and people. Folks know this, but founders don't know this, that, hey, talk to your salespeople and lay out a Path, right. Like step one through step whatever, 50, 20. Because the other thing is, and I know what your opinion here is, people have a conversation with you, like them, but you don't get back to them in time. And likely senior people don't even follow up.

Yeah, no, I think that's. It's true. Listen, I've obviously changed roles a few times in my career, but I've been a candidate more often than that. And you can really set yourself apart in this experience that you give people. Maybe the timing isn't exactly right for any number of reasons on both sides. And I do think you can have some of these more person to person engagement strategies, particularly with more senior roles. Right, where you may only have a couple of open every once in a while, but there's community, you know, efforts that you can create. No different than this. Keep people engaged with your product. It's interesting. Key people, and not every company can do this. Maybe there's training you can offer, maybe there's premium versions of your software, depending on who you are, that you can build a community of people around your product and keep them interested in you over time. And then when the opportunity might present itself or, or the stage is more appropriate for some people, they come back to you. But it's funny you said that. So in the interview process, how often you've been left in the cold with no feedback and weeks have gone by and then you get a phone call and a company expects you to have the same enthusiasm that they have for you, but you haven't heard anything from them. So keeping that going is that momentum going is really important. There's technology to help you do that today. Keep a candidate warm, send them some tickles along the way, send them some information about your company. You can program that into a lot of your ATS systems right now. So if you're hiring at scale, you can have a broader network effect, but I think it's really critical.

Yeah, I want to give a shout out. I see Brad Goldur here, co founder of Phenom. They recently raised money at a 1.4 billion valuation. And Phenom, basically, Brad, correct me if I'm framing it wrong, Phenom is a platform that helps you find the best talent when they're not looking and build relationships with them. I was probably advising the founders in the early days when there were two or three people in 2011 when I was in Philly. And of course they've come a long way. I haven't stayed in touch with the founders. They've Raised a lot of money and doing phenomenally well. So Phenom is a great product to look at. P-E-N O M.com up there that Brad posted there's amazing.

I think back to when I started in recruiting and we used to have to call into companies and and literally draw on whiteboards like the organizational chart and then go cold call in. And this is dating myself here. But this is pre LinkedIn and then LinkedIn came in and gave you all this ability to network and to organize and to target candidates and have a mutual exchange with them and so forth. But now there is just tremendous amount of innovation in the HR tech space.

It's great, definitely because people drive companies. Without people you have nothing. Question from Oscar. Do you believe in the use of aptitude tests for identifying a candidate's strengths and weaknesses? And maybe we differentiate the recruiting process for sort of individual contributors versus leaders is do we do aptitude tests? Do you do case studies? What do you recommend?

So I don't have a pedestal answer for this. I have absolutely worked in companies, taken some sort of assessment on the front end which has been, you know, helpful. It sometimes it stops you from being interested in a company and that is one, one goal to have people select in and select out. I do know that in the technology in the engineering space there are many tools that you can use to engage the candidate audience and really start to see their thinking and their viability. And in some ways it creates bias. You might be evaluating people over time who you wouldn't naturally look at if their resume just passed through. So there's a lot of innovation in that space. I think if it's right for you and you, you really leverage it effectively and it helps you reach candidates that you might not have reached before. I think it's fantastic. The consultancies, you know, have for years relied on case studies and so on and so forth. So again I think if you're leveraging these tools in a way to really unlock people's potential to more consistently look at the pools of people, I think this can be interesting and effective. And then you mentioned more like leadership assessments. So leadership assessment tools I find valuable also in select places, but more to confirm decisions you've already made. And this is my perspective to help people that you may have decided to have join your company, assimilate or to able easily and create that bridge so that they can be successful. And maybe this is a little bit of a transition into an onboarding conversation. Finding the people is half the battle. Setting them up for success is even harder. And creating an environment where and you learn a lot in the recruiting phase and sometimes that that information is lost. But I think there's a really close bridge between the recruiting cycle and ultimately the hook into your talent management philosophy and cycle and then growing people within your organization. If you're learning about an employee at the interview stage, how do you take what you learn and say, okay, Great, they had 70% of what we were looking for. We need to show them the rest or teach them the rest or augment their team with this resource or get them a coach or whatever it might be so that you're setting people up, up for success when they join this critical.

Definitely. I want to take one last question around the interview process and then we'll dive into onboarding because in product and I draw parallels because we spend a lot of effort around customer facing. I think the internal sometimes ends up being a stepchild. In product there's this huge phrase that goes around to build to get to a retained customer, you need to focus on onboarding. If somebody signs up and they're not onboarded, well, then chances of them churning are very high. And I think probably the same applies internally as well. But on the interview side, the last question I wanted to take was how much of that is the sort of the department head's decision versus a democratic process and what do you recommend? Because sometimes some companies advise that hey, if everybody likes this person, then hire them. Some other folks I've talked to is like use others as an input, not an approver. Ultimately the hiring manager is the dm. What do you advise there and who all should be meeting with a particular candidate, like how many touch points.

So it's interesting. So I worked in professional services for a long time and in a professional services environment you don't often have a manager. You're essentially getting hired to the, to a department or a company or like a style of role, but then you're going to get deployed over time to different customers. And I think what that really teaches you is to have an interview process, a vetting process and a decision making process that people are weighing in and evaluating for the good of the company or for the department or vertical, whatever you want to call it and trust in the people who you have leveraging in this interview cycle to make great decisions for you. So I think if a little bit of that goes a long way in putting people in your interview cycle who you think are highly capable people and talent of themselves, they really are capable and they know what they're looking for and where they're trained to understand how to evaluate and they can apply that broadly. I think it's really important in a company where you do have a department head or a manager for that person to play an important role. My opinion that in that case they are ultimately a decision maker for their direct reports. But you also want to create, this is an opportunity to motivate your team. Right. You want to create the opportunity for people to really then understand how to build and grow their own teams. I'll give you an example. I had a team member in my group who was like an on the rise columnization, had a total reward and he'd really never worked in a company where he had to build a team from scratch. He'd either gone into a company with a team that was a very effective team, but he really didn't ever have to build like every single role. And I just helped him. I partnered with him, I interviewed on his behalf, I gave feedback to him. Obviously I had maybe a little bit of a broader view of what might be successful, but I wanted him to really form opinions, structure the interview team. You're balancing your own capabilities often when you're building a team. So what I need in a role is a little bit different than what someone in my team reporting into them. And so I think it's a real opportunity to use the interview cycle to really teach interview capability for people. So you're building a great team. So I don't know that there's a one size fits all answer to who evaluates talent, but it is one of the most important decisions you're making. So I also deal clinic of used.

A combination here because we recruited a lot of people. And for context, in December, we're not a massive company. In December boast was 30 people, we're 75. So we've recruited since our fundraise announcement In December, about 45 people in the last quarter here or something close to that and some great execs. So what we've leveraged is a combination of speaking to multiple people on the team to get a sense of the culture. And you are so selling the person on your company and culture as much as they're selling them themselves. And so it's a two way street. The other thing we've used is I don't think we've used like the aptitude tests like the standard ones, I forget Myers, Briggs and whatnot. But we use a lot of case study type things do this that you would do in your job like A slice of your job. And that's worked out extremely well for us. Now, tactics for onboarding this is a great topic. Like I mentioned, onboarding is this sort of of in between a retained customer or a retained employee and them assigning your job offer. What are some tactics to ensure new hires feel part of the process welcomed and they're set up for success?

Your recruiting funnel is really not vastly different than your marketing funnel or your sales prospect funnel. And once you get someone in the door, isn't it a shame if you don't convert them? And in that first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, there's a few dynamics that are psychologically going on, right? Depending on where your candidate has come from or maybe their stage of career, they're mourning what they quit and left behind because they don't necessarily feel as connected yet to the company that they're joining. That's one perspective. They're incredibly excited and they can't wait to contribute, but they don't know how if they don't have those conversations in place. They want to hit it out of the gate as fast as possible, but they don't know your speak or your lingo or your tools or your technology. They want to set their family up with benefits. Their spouse is pregnant, they're adopting a child, they don't want a break in anything and they want to be able to focus. And so your onboarding process, tools experience is one just an opportunity to get the tactics extremely well. Nobody wants to wonder where their laptop is. Nobody wants to question when their benefits enrollment is. So whatever the foundational things are that you need to do to get people set up for success. And by the way, there is tremendous automation to do this today and there's great tools to communicate and engage with somebody. Between the offer letter and the acceptance is a huge window of time for folks, particularly in European countries. If there are people on the phone in other places, can take 90 days to six months to exit a company in some countries versus in the US where it might take two or three weeks, right? So you have a real opportunity to keep people connected and to create connections into your organization before they come on board. Then you want to make sure they have all the foundational things in place so they really don't have to worry. You want to swag them up. They are an extension of your brand and they're excited to come. But those are tactical things. I think the most important thing you want to do is connect people immediately to who you are. So we started this conversation with values and vision and your company strategy, the metrics you're driving for this is the opportunity to really connect the dots between what they read or heard and were going to integrate against to what it means when they're in the company and to keep that connection going. And you should leverage your executives, you should leverage other team members, you should help to really bring this alive. And then I think the most important thing you want to do, depending on what team they're going into, is create the connections. Maybe it's to the sales enablement and sales training phase or the customer support team that needs to understand all the tools that they need to be successful. So you start to create the onboarding feed into individual departments and sometimes it's just showing up at your desk and meeting with your manager and understanding one to one. But usually in like a sales organization there's a pretty significant, significant sales onboarding that's really important. So you have all these moments between the interview stage offer acceptance to create connection to the company and then you have a real opportunity to reduce the ramp time which ultimately has tremendous business effects. So think about ramped reps. If you can ramp a sales rep in 60 days or 90 days so that they can contribute to a sale inside of six months or nine months, that is incredible value.

Definitely I want to switch gears to and this is tied. How can leaders inspire employees to do their best work? Or rather what do people care about?

That's a great question. I think we're building on it here. So people have connected to your company in some way because they like your product or they like your team or they like your vision and your mission and your values. They're connecting in their onboarding process. And then within companies and within teams and the opportunity for leaders of teams is to really build on those connections to connect people to your with a sense of purpose to what you're doing. And I think to give them enough tools and direction or large scale okrs or objectives so they have the right autonomy to be effective in their day to day. And I think some combination people need different levels of support at different stages of their career or at different stages of their time horizon with a company. But to the extent that you can put the processes in place and the ecosystem so people know what decisions they can make, how far they can go, how they need to get alignment, whatever those frameworks are so that they can really then activate that and contribute. And I think that is really ultimately a leader responsibility. And then you said it, it shows up in the results. Right. So right now so many companies are struggling who especially companies that people worked in offices they are just mentally struggling with. How do I know who's going to be productive? Well, you're going to. I have no interest in monitoring day to day activities of the teams that report to me at all. I don't think it's effective. I don't think they would like me, they would feel micromanaged. I do want to iterate and I want to have voice and I want to co create sometimes whatever you want to call that, but I want to give people the opportunity to do what they've been hired to do and then put it to action. So I think you have to create the eco leaders, have to create the ecosystems to give team members the freedom to do that within reason. And that looks different in different teams at different project cases. That's why teams that really iterate quickly in an agile environment make a lot of progress very quickly. And I think you can apply a lot of those principles, but I think that's what people need. And then ultimately you have to know your team. You have to, you know, know what makes them tick. Right? So does somebody need a morning check in on a Monday and an afternoon check in on a Friday? Would they rather send you an email? Do they want to have a in person feedback session or are they okay on? Do they need a lot of direction? Do they need whatever? You have to really get inside people's heads and have a framework that enables them to be successful.

Awesome. And as I try to put words to this, what I heard was purpose, autonomy, mastery and recognition is people want to align to a purpose. They don't want to feel micromanaged, they want to feel that they're mastering things and growing and then the last thing is being recognized through verbal end and physical hard things could be from bonuses to praises. And if you design that within their experience along the way, that would make for a winning outcome here. Now a lot of this is communication though, right? And clearly articulating and communicating your vision to excite, inspire and motivate people is probably one of the key things to do as a leader. A few weeks ago I had Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson and he's a phenomenal speaker and communicator and he talks a lot about if you want to just inform people, then just send an email memo. The job of a leader is to excite and inspire people. And this is not a one and done activity. A leader's job is to do this day in, day out because excited, inspired and motivated People can move mountains here. How do the best leaders you've seen communicate? And is there a recommended framework for those who are new to this or more introverted?

You have to create a lot of clarity and clarity comes through repetition. And I think you'll see that if you ever watch a CEO at a large known company speak, they have a cadence of meeting with people. They have key messages that they're connecting people on. They're passionate about those key messages. They're constantly reconnecting people to what that is, be it their quarterly outlook or their customer orientation or the metric that they're trying to achieve. And it's just repeated. And I think as an executive, you sound like you can't listen to yourself say it again. And that's probably the point where other people hear it and it sinks. Create clarity through a tremendous amount of repetition, keeping things very simple and finding the ways to your point. If it can be said in an email, say it in an email if you want to bring community and connection to people. Particularly this past year when I was leading HR for the four companies, we increased our communication tenfold. Not a quarterly touch point with the CEO. We were doing monthly leadership, team led, all hands. Come if you want, we'll record it, we'll make it available to you. But we wanted to make sure we were there for people. This was an uncomfortable time. And then I had the great fortune of having just so many great leaders in the company. But we did the top 100 because those folks are carriers of communications and messages. I'm not on the ground in Japan. I can't communicate effectively or even bring you a solution that's effective in your market. So you really have to create the ability for people to take key messages, to really understand them and then to have them permeate the organization. But we used so many different mechanisms and we really enabled, empowered, begged our people leaders and team leaders or even project teams to tackle and communicate so that everyone felt a lot of connection. And I think I hope that all stays in place in companies as we go back to a more perceived normal.

I always bring it back to sales. I don't know why. Although I'm an engineer, I did spend a lot of my career in sales and partnerships. And I find that if you want to build long term relationships in sales, at least you constantly communicate and keep on top and stay on top and you're top of mind. And if you just, if you don't do that, time kills all deals. Like time lulls all relationships there. So I think constant Communication is key. Jeff Keen asks here, what's a great example of when you had to exit an exec and it went well? Because that could be really hard depending on how much influence the exec has had.

So I don't think it is different for an executive than it is for an sdr if you have consistent communication and feedback with people and a regular cadence. People, individuals are not stupid. They know how they're doing. And I think some of that can lead to very smooth mutual exit strategies. And particularly for executives, most of the time you're really leading up to a change because it can have significant impacts on the company, your investors, your teams, and so forth. So I think you can really lead through very smooth exits with individuals. And the most important part of that, and this goes for anybody at any level, is to just treat people with respect. Right? Unless someone has done something just tragic to your organization and they need to be taken out the door, you can still do that, by the way, and not make a scene or embarrass people or parade them through the office. I just think there's just a lot to be said for how you treat people when they're coming in the door and when they're leaving a company. And the rest of the company will judge you for it. And I think that's incredibly important. People want to know that you're going to how you treat someone else is how you will treat them.

Definitely. And relationships transcend companies. And the people who leave should be your best champion. So after the fact, they're recommending people to you versus leaving disgruntled. And you should do your best to have that relationship because who knows, you might need them in the future or you might do another company together. Last question I want to take here. We're at the top of the hour, but this has been super interesting and even a great learning experience for me. What are typical problems founders run into when they scale quickly? You must have seen hundreds of these.

Yeah, there's the old you're the last to fire the team member. Everyone else has fired someone before you have. So I think a lot of founders, but not just founders, but many founders, have a lot of loyalty to people who were with the company in their earliest days but maybe have been outgrown for whatever reason. I don't have a negative connotation to this and they hold on to people or even sometimes make people feel guilty or so on. So I think that is a fairly common experience that I have seen when I've been in companies or even I'VE coached early stage founders and helping them through that process, also educating on the tools. If someone's created value for a company, you can do things to let them leave on really good terms. You can accelerate their equity investing, you can have a transition. There's just great ways to treat them. You can help them in their next opportunity with that is a pretty common trade or obstacle. I think the other thing you'll see is people get overloaded with titles early on and response. And for some reason, rather than this being like a natural part of a conversation, your hope for your company is that it grows, whether that's in headcount or customers revenue, whatever it might be. So obviously the way things are at the beginning are not the way they're going to end up. There were early day people at SAP. These are huge companies. Creating an environment where people can find other opportunities or not and creating those paths and setting people up for success within or externally I think is another opportunity for founders that they often struggle with.

And that is a very difficult thing. Right? Like titles are cheap when you're starting out and so you give them out and then you realize, wow, I need to scale to X million. Like I want to get to a hundred million. Let's give you both examples. Our next big check post Is get to 100 million in revenue in the next few years. And I know as a founder I'm not the right person for this title. That's why I went and found a CMO and I found a cto. It's my company, so I can internalize that. But how do you tell them to tell that to people who've had. You've given inflated titles to. And I think what you laid out is perfect is that reward them, recognize them, create other opportunities for them and reason with data, not with analogy.

I think part of that is also you create a lot of unnecessary friction. You make conversations that actually aren't that hard, harder by avoiding them or not making them a natural part of your ecosystem. And I think the more comfortable you can get as a leader with having open, direct, meaningful conversations with people about any topic, the tough ones become the easiest ones. Sometimes it's, you know, college, my hardest class I did the best in because I worked the hardest at it. So I think there's just. And I'd say the other another thing is some of the best people I work with and I'm a founder, would be too limiting. You'd be shocked at how many people they have in their ecosystem who really do help coach them and advise them and take them through different it might be a technical advisor, it might be a leadership advisor coach to give you feedback on how you give feedback. Really be growth minded around how you think about yourself and I think that helps founders grow as well.

Awesome. Thank you so much Mandy. I had a lot more questions, but we're at the top of the hour and then some. I'm actually super lucky and Boast is super lucky to have you on our side as an advisor and an extended part of our team. So thank you so much. Before you go, any books, podcasts or anything that that you recommend, any resources like I personally don't like reading so I interview smart people like yourself twice a week. But what resources do you recommend on people and culture?

That's funny because you might have sent me a book over the weekend that I'll that I'll read that. I believe the title is called Hook so I'm looking forward to that. I are so many great podcasts and clubhouse and sessions like this out there. I think people should plug into ones that matter. I think there's also an overwhelming amount of frameworks out there distill the best of what you read. Usually the concepts are fairly similar and then they just have to apply to your to your own judgment and values and company and so forth. And then for those on the phone that are listening in today who are in the HR community, I can't say enough about about the ecosystems that amplify HR or Enrique Rubio's ecosystem or following Dave Ulrich, although a lot of what he sounds, you know, will feel like it fits a bigger company. But there's just so many ways to keep yourself educated and fresh and always learning. And I must be a part of 10 different Slack channels and I learn something new every day. Like I said in technology you can't keep up. I'm looking forward to seeing the feed here what people suggest we use so I can adjust up some of it myself.

Awesome. Thank you so much Mandy. And this was great. I enjoyed it a ton and look forward to continued conversations. Have a wonderful rest of the week. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. Really nice to meet everybody.

I need some traction.

Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the Traction podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star review and you can find more information and all the reasons resources mentioned in today's episode at Boast AI that's B O a S T a I forward slash blog.