Whispered Hiring with Wade Foster, CEO @ Zapier

I'm not just hiring an executive role. I'm building executive team.

Yes.

And on a team, I need to be able to assemble a mix of pieces that help us go achieve our mission.

It's easy to build a company with a fully remote culture or a fully in-office one, but that hybrid where you've got some people one way and some people the other, I think is really hard to lead.

I think this is one area where like, if I'm going to micromanage, this is probably the best place to do it.

How do you use Zapier in your interview process?

I tend to use it pre and post interview to help me research candidates. You know, you're going to inevitably just get one tiny little piece of the puzzle about this person and then you're going to go make a hiring decision on them. And so if there's anything you can do to increase the surface area of knowledge you have over this person to collect more puzzle pieces, you should collect them because you're going to make a better decision at the end of the day.

Welcome to How I Hire, the podcast where we talk with senior leaders about how they find, vet, attract, and grow go-to-market talent. I'm Andy Mowat, founder of Whisperd. Today I'm joined by Wade Foster, founder and CEO of Zapier. Welcome, Wade. Great to see you.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Andy.

Oh, you bet. I learned early that it's Zapier like happier, I think, rather than Zapier. There you go. Most people make that mistake.

I think I've heard every pronunciation under the sun.

What should we say if we had to say it right?

Uh, Zapier makes you happier. That's the trick.

Uh, that's perfect. Um, awesome. Well, um, you know, Wade is, uh, I'll just kind of do the bio because I love to, I think most people know you, but it's still fun to do it. Um, Zapier is the automation platform. It's helped millions of people connect their work and reclaim their time. I have built my last two startups, so Gated and now Whispered on top of Zapier. It's amazing. It's the platform to connect all the different tools, make it all work behind the scenes. So every time people say, wow, you built this amazing platform. Zapier's behind a lot of those tools. So Wade, you bootstrapped Zapier along with little rounds here and there, but it's amazing to see you here, have you, and also really you thought about building companies a little differently than other people, including building it remote from the start, which I've really been impressed with. So welcome.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Andy.

Yeah. Given the remote nature of Zapier, I'm curious, how do you think differently about building out your overall team and then in particular your leadership team?

You know, if the emphasis is on like what's different about a remote leadership team versus, you know, a non-remote leadership team, I, I don't know that the differences are that big. What I suspect though is that the bar for excellence is higher inside of a remote environment and specifically on a key, a few key dimensions. I think one. Your communication skills have to be excellent. Uh, if you're not communicating crisply, often, um, directive, you're probably gonna find that people feel out of the loop, they feel confused, and you're not gonna get the execution that you want at the end of the day.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and so I do think that the standard on that dimension is pretty high. Um, I think the second thing is, as a leader, the bar for excellence on your team has to get reset. You know, you are used to maybe competing for talent with folks who are local to you. Mm-hmm. And so, you know what great looks like in your local market, but does that mean you know what great looks like in your global market? And there are, you know, you could maybe argue that there, you know, like if you're an SF, you probably have seen you know, great because of the concentration of tech there. But even still, the Bay Area's small compared to globally. And so there is excellence outside those regions. And so it is different to just calibrate on like, what does truly great look like, um, for, for roles you're hiring on. Um, those are the, the two that probably come to mind for me on like where there are key differences. I think most everything else is pretty similar. Like you gotta have a vision, you gotta know the skills, you gotta, like, there's all this other stuff that's like good in an office, good remote, and like you, you have to be good on those dimensions.

Do you ever see, I mean, I think some execs will flourish a little bit more when they can walk around, pat the backs, they can build the relationships. And so it does seem it's a little bit different. Is there anything you're looking for in interviews to try to understand? Will people thrive in this type of culture? And then how do you, what are some of the traditions Zapier runs to make sure those people are successful in a remote?

Well, you're, you know, the, the point around like some folks can just sort of walk the floor. To me, I call that like management by serendipity. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, if, if that's what you're good at, you'll find that remote can be challenging because you have to orchestrate serendipity. You have to find ways to create that. inside your company. And that can be tricky, uh, in a remote environment because you actually have to be a lot more disciplined and intentional about how you go make stuff happen. Now, there's ways that we try and help these folks when they onboard into the company where, you know, we're, we've been around long enough now where we have a lot of playbooks and, uh, documentation that sort of helps coach people on how to get up to speed inside this like weird quirky environment that is Zapier. Um, we're fortunate in that you know, we have a small group of EAs that can help onboard people to like some of the rituals. And so they can kind of help with that, you know, serendipity orchestration bits. And, you know, these, these are folks are, you know, EAs is probably like the wrong title for them. They're like, you know, I would put our EA team against anyone's EAs any day of the week. And so I do think some of those mechanisms can sort of help accelerate the onboarding period, can help them get up to speed quickly. Uh, but at the end of the day, you gotta stand on your own two feet and, uh, in an executive role, like these jobs are here to, to lead. And if you're having to, you know, be taught on the job, like it kind of defeats the purpose of like going to market to hire somebody. Um, not that we all don't have something to learn, but there's a certain just like core set of skills that you need to kind of walk in the door ready to go deliver on.

I agree. I agree. Were you ever tempted to changed the culture of remote? Was there a time, you know, when maybe it was booming in 2020, 2021, or post-COVID or something like that? Or was this just something you put down at the beginning of the company and said, this is important to me from the—

Yeah, we started building the company this way in 2012. And so like, we are pretty committed to this approach to building. Uh, and I've never sort of once crossed my mind that we might do it another way. Um, even if I thought we would, like, it's just that not really practical based on how the company is set up at this point in time.

I love it. At, at ColdStramp, we always said it's easy to build a company with a fully remote culture or a fully in-office one, but that hybrid where you've got some people one way and some people the other, I think is really hard to lead and also to engage people in that different way. So I like, you're always the company that comes to mind when I think of like truly remote from the beginning now, which is nice. You've hired some great executives over the years. I've got a chance to, to kind of, um, interact with some of 'em and, and meet some of 'em as well too. How do you go about designing and thinking about like that next executive role when you need it, Wade?

Well, I, this is an area where I've changed my mind, um, over the years. You know, I think the first experience I had hiring executives is pretty similar to think what a lot of founder CEOs go through. Which is, you know, you hire early team, your early team is full of like scrappy, figure it out, up-and-comers, like, you know, sort of, we're gonna, we're gonna run up the mountain by golly. Uh, we'll, we'll figure out any which way you can. And you start to, you know, one of those early people starts managing bits and parts of the team. Yeah. You know, whether they have management experience or not, that's kind of not really the point. They know the company, they know the product, they know things. And by nature of that, they sort of are the right person to lead the early stuff. But they may be just lacking a lot of like core leadership skills, management skills, things like that. And for a while that's kind of okay, but eventually you kind of reach a point and you're like, oh, it actually starts to hold the company back. And so at that point in time, this is my first foray into hiring executives and it was like, okay, let's just go find like someone who's kind of been there, done that, seen this movie before, um, and can come help translate it inside of, uh, Zapier's environment. And so that was sort of like V1 version. And you know, I think there, there's just like, you make a lot of mistakes on V1 the first time you're doing it. And, um, and it's because you just don't really know what good looks like. You don't understand yourself very well. Like when I reflect back on it, one of the biggest gaps I think is I didn't actually know what kind of CEO I wanted to be. I didn't know what I wanted out of the executive team. And so I might've hired individually good people, but I didn't know how to like turn it into a team very effectively. and so that kind of ends up holding, uh, the, the company back. You know, there's all like, there's just tons of canonical advice in here. Like, uh, you know, are you hiring somebody for like the job that you have or are you hiring because you like their, their, their resume? The resume looks nice, they've got good logos on it and stuff like that. Yeah, made that mistake. Uh, you know, you sort of subconsciously tell you yourself you're not making that mistake, but then you, you kind of look back in hindsight, you're like, ah, I think I maybe fell for it. Uh, and so you run into that issue. Um, but I think ultimately what really started to crystallize for me on what it means to hire a great exec team was a couple things. One, I started to realize, okay, I'm not just hiring an executive role, I'm building executive team.

Yes.

And on a team, I need to be able to assemble a mix of pieces that help us go achieve our mission. And yes, part of assembling a great team is having the functions at the table. So if you're in, you know, a tech company, it's like, yeah, I need engineering represented, I need marketing represented, I need sales rep. So you need these functions represented, but as much as you need those functions res represented, you also need other certain behavioral traits at the table. Uh, you know, you probably want somebody who is bold and risk-taking. You probably want somebody who is operationally sound. You know, you want somebody who's thinking about, you know, strong communication and storytelling for the company. And, you know, it's rare that like one individual embodies all of these traits. Yeah. And so you start to realize like, oh, on the team we need these traits well represented as much as we need the disciplines represented. And once you do that, you start to think about the assembly of the team a little differently. The next thing I think that also you start to realize is there are characteristics that make people particularly strong inside your company, and that is a learning curve because there are many successful executives out there who might not do well inside of different contexts. And so, you have to assess, okay, well, if they were plopped in my context, Is that gonna set them up for success or is that gonna set them up for failure? And in order to know that, you actually have to know enough about your own context. And so that means you have to learn what makes your team tick. Like, what does excellence for you look like? And that probably means you have to look in the mirror a little bit and say, okay, well, what makes me tick? What am I good at? But also like, where do I have weaknesses? Where do I have gaps? That I need help. And I, I firmly believe in the theory of leadership where you want to double down on your strengths. And so it took me a minute to realize, okay, here are the things that I am good at and I'm gonna be unashamed about being good at those things. And also here are the things that I'm not so good at and I'm just gonna ask for help. Like you, hey team, you should not expect me to be good at these things. You should not expect me to work on being better at these things. Like, I'm going to make sure that it is not holding us back, but we are not gonna win because I just learned to get better at these 2 or 3 others. I am bringing you in because you are here to help me cover my backside on these places.

I couldn't agree more. I, how do you communicate that to people? Like, I've always done the user manual concept of I know what I am and what I'm not. And I think the sooner and faster you understand that, You will, uh, understand like, do you fit in my world and do I fit with you or vice versa? But I'm curious, like, I love the idea of like understanding yourself. Like what was your journey to understanding yourself as a leader? And then how do you, how do you embed that in the company, the culture, the hiring?

Uh, I mean, uh, I wish I had like some short shortcut here, but I think it's a lot of trial and error. You know, you, um, you know, at Zapier we run a lot of engagement surveys, so you get feedback that way. Yeah, we've done like 360s, like real deep 360s before, and that tells you a lot. You know, at every exec offsite we do some version of like Pits and Peach. And, you know, Peach is like, here's what you're great at. Pits is like, here's where you're not. And so we're giving each other feedback and just, you know, over the course of a decade doing this, you know, you start to piece together a picture of you're like, oh, okay, yeah, these are the things I'm good at. Like people tell me over and over again. That these are some things I stand out, um, with. And then there's some things that stand out as things I'm not so good at. And you also start to hear repeated themes in and around that. You know, I think the first time you hear it, especially on the, like, the negative side, it can be like pretty soul-crushing, you know, especially if you thought you might be good at that. And so like, you really do have to like wrestle with that. But over time, I have found, um, you know, I don't let it get to me as much because I have some I have incredible strengths and I'm gonna go play to those things. And I, I have a superpower, which is that I can hire an executive team and that team can help me with these other things that I just, hey, I know I'm not that good at. People have told me over and over again and like, let's just work on creating an environment where those weaknesses are not magnified, but instead minimized.

I, I couldn't agree more. I think there's this maturity that we all go through. It's like in our twenties, we're trying to fit more things in tool belt, try more things, make ourselves good at things. At some point we reach this point where like, you know, I'm just never gonna be good at X and I'm okay with that. I think we can still, we can still learn. So I think it's a—

Well, and it's like, I do think people can get better. Like I do think that I could improve those weaknesses. Like if I put a lot of time and effort and energy into it, I do believe I could get better at those things. But when I just look at the company, I'm like, it's gonna be way more value for the company if I put all my time and energy putting effort into things I'm already good at. Like what happens if I put the effort there? We're gonna get way better returns than if I tried to just shore up this thing where, you know, my ceiling on those areas, it's just not that high. Whereas my ceiling on these others, like there's a chance I might be world-class at these things. And so it's just better to put that investment there.

What's an example of where you hired a senior leader and they well complemented something where you needed them to complement you?

You know, our, our CPO, chief people officer, Brandon, he and I are someone, we've worked together for a long time now. I mean, I have this in a lot of places. I, I, he was just the first name that come to, come to mind. But, you know, I care a lot about the culture and the people and the teams that we're assembling here at Zapier. And so I generally can think through like, okay, here is how I want a program to work. Here's how I think about the ideal recruiting process. Here's how I think about how compensation and this, that, or the other should work. What, whatever the topic is, I have strong opinions on those. I don't want to totally delegate that to a chief people officer. I wanna go partner with them. But one thing I know about myself is I also don't necessarily have the time or the energy to go stress test a bunch of these policies internally, roll out the change management, help 'em land perfectly across all these organizations. I got other stuff to work on. And he's great at that. Like, he loves doing that stuff. And so he can take these nuggets of an idea and he can push back, he can riff, we can partner on building the thing, but then I can just trust like he's gonna go make this stuff happen without me having to, uh, you know, get into the weeds and ensure that we're executing on every little last, uh, element of it perfectly.

I'm fascinated. The— I always love the drink your own dog food conversation at companies, right? Like I'm imagining when I've seen you write, when, when I've interacted with some of your team, I'm always impressed at how you're always using Zapier for everything. Like you talk about taking an idea and putting it into a process. I will dive a little deeper into like the interview process either here or in a couple minutes, but I'm curious, like when you have one of these ideas and you put into practice, like how often does Zapier eat your own dog food, use your own tooling versus like look at external tools to, to put a process into place?

Yeah, we have a whole Zapier on Zapier like program now internally. You know, in the early days it was just pretty informal, like everyone, you know, just kind of did it by default, and that still existed. But I think we found as we got larger, um, there were areas where, uh, Zapier wasn't like well suited for that job.

Yeah.

And the default would be, okay, we're gonna go look for something off the shelf. But when we went and looked at those use cases more closely, we realized actually Zapier's not far away from being able to Uh, solve that use case as well. And so by putting in place the Zapier on Zapier program, it created an, a specific feedback loop where when someone is going to procurement saying, I wanna go buy X, you know, the default answer is like, well, have you tried to do it on Zapier? If the answer is no, it's like, well, you need to go back and try. Uh, and if the answer is yes, we're like, okay, well what feedback do you have for like why it was not possible? and then that creates like a nice feedback loop back into the product org where we can say, okay, well, should we go do something about that? And look, there are some use, there's some things like we would never build into the product. Like we are never gonna be payroll processing. So of course, like there's a vendor that, you know, if you're like, hey, I need to go buy a new payroll processor, which we don't really do anymore. But like, of course the answer's like, yes, go, go get a payroll processor. But there's lots of other like tiny little point solutions here and there that people might look at and we're like, that's a Zap. Go build a Zap for that, build an agent for that.

I love the fact that you've been so thoughtful about when you use it and when you don't. To me, the embedding procurement is like that route to, it's like the workflow check off of that is so awesome. I remember at Box, I think we tried to build CPQ on Box and it just would never work no matter how hard we tried. And so I think that delayed our CPQ rollout by a couple of years on that side. So that's neat to see. Are there ever things where you're like, no, no, Abby, how do you draw that line? Do they bubble up to you or the product team to figure out like, no, we're not gonna build that, or yes, we are gonna build that, or, or do you just encourage people to push the bounds a little bit, or where do you draw?

You know, there's not like a hard and fast rule in place for how this is designed. Um, you know, a lot of it does come back to just a judgment call where, you know, this gets pushed to the product org. You know, the person requesting the software, the, you know, the product team is kind of just taking a look at it and just having an honest conversation about it. And there are times where it's like, we can do this, we should build this on Zapier, let's go. And there's other times where it's like, okay, like maybe we could get this for you, but like, you know, we're gonna have to, you know, it might be a year, it might be like, you know, now these days it's probably not likely that long, but you know, you just have that honest conversation and it helps, uh, you know, like, okay, yeah, we're gonna go buy this versus, you know, build it on our stuff.

I love it. Um, that may— it's well thought through for sure. I, I think a lot of companies aren't conscious about it and it ends up like causing weird decisions. Um, I'm excited to dive into the interview process. Like before we kind of ask some of my questions, I just love to hear like, how do you use Zapier in your interview process, Wade?

How do we use Zapier in the interview process? Okay, so we use it. Um, in a bunch of different areas. But my specific use case, I tend to use it pre- and post-interview, um, to help me, uh, research candidates. So, you know, in the same way you might do, uh, research on like a sales prospect, um, we try and do that on candidates as well. So, uh, you know, I— it, it pulls both from like application, prior interviews, and creates a brief for me. But it also goes and looks out on the internet and pulls things together based on what have they shared on the internet. So, I get a, like, you know, full perspective on who this person is. Uh, and so, that all gets, like, assembled for me in an automated way. So, when I sort of, quote unquote, step into the interview, I've got that ready for myself. Then, post-interview, you know, we have, um, a bunch of automation that's sort of helping I write the scorecard at the end of the day.

Mm-hmm.

So you're taking, you know, generally this starts with the transcript. So there's the interviews recorded, the transcript gets fed through the rubric, the rubric sort of spits out like, here's, here's what the AI saw. And then there's a place for me. I generally try and write my, my assessment separate from that. And then I go look at what the output of the transcript plus the AI prompt is, and then I add mine to it. And I usually just like to compare and contrast just to see like, hey, you know, you've got this other like entity that's in the call now that you can sort of use as a rubber duck to sort of compare and contrast notes. And I think that's really effective to strengthen my scorecard as well too. And then ultimately I go in and just submit the scorecard directly. To the ATS. And so that's sort of like, you know, my personal automation in and around this. Now we also use automation a lot at the set, the initial intake for when we're designing the role. So, you know, if we approve a new, like the whole rec approval list runs through a suite of automations that like, you know, pings a Slack channel and I'm not exactly sure all the steps that it takes at this point in time, someone else built it, But eventually, like myself and our CFO, we approve every rec internally. And so there's a like little Slack bot that pops up and says yes or no to this. And we go click the yes or no button to say we approve it or not. Then once it's approved, there's a bunch of automation that goes and generates the job description, generates the rubric, and then ultimately generates a draft in our CMS for like publishing this to the site as an open job rec. Of course, each step of the way we try it, we're inserting humans in the loop to review a lot of this to say, okay, yes, we do agree that that is the job description. Yes, we do agree that that is the rubric. You know, these are often discussions amongst the hiring manager and the hiring panel to say, yes, this is what we're actually looking for. But every step of the way, there's just like little bits of places you can automate, you know, pieces that will save you. Yeah, I mean, it's just like saves you an hour of time here, saves you a couple of days there, saves you a meeting there, and just helps overall end-to-end process move that much quicker. Which I think is really important in hiring. Like, it's, it's a competitive environment and you want to be able to move quickly but not sacrifice your diligence. And so automation is like a necessary ingredient, I found, to be able to do this well.

I love it. Um, it's so well thought through and, uh, there's like approval of rec. You're probably doing a lot of these things a lot faster because you're seeing them. One I'd love to, before we dive into references, which I think we're gonna have a lot of fun on, I, what do you think about the CEO approving every offer? A lot of CEOs use that as a way to raise the bar, keep the culture high, and do that. I think I also see that slow down a lot of offers. And I'm curious, like your personal philosophy, and then I'm betting you probably have a Zap workflow if you do approve them.

Yeah, so I approve every offer at Zapier. There was a time when I stopped doing that.

Hmm.

And I think initially when I stopped doing that, Uh, it was fine because a lot of the folks that were now hiring were kind of trained up under me and sort of knew the Zapier way of hiring. When I felt it slipping, it was when that next group of people started hiring, and that's when I felt like, ooh, like we haven't codified our like talent standards as, as well as we need to. Uh, and so that's when I inter— uh, inserted myself back into the improvement loop. And said, hey, I want to go approve every offer that goes out. Now I have an SLA for the team where I say, hey, I will approve in under 24 hours. And personally, I try and approve much faster than that. Um, because I recognize this, like, I don't want to be the person that causes us to lose out on a great candidate. So I will be responsive to this, uh, at, at the end of the day. But that mechanism allows me to audit what happened in the recruiting pipeline. And you know, it might seem, you know, I, I'm sure there's folks out there that say, hey, this is micromanaging. But you know, I think this is one area where like, if I'm gonna micromanage it, this is probably the best place to do it because this is literally, you're bringing in the people that are gonna build the future of your company. Yeah. These are the folks that you're entrusting to go solve the most important problems for you. And if there's one place I'm gonna micromanage, that's the one where I'm like, I, I feel like I gotta go do that, uh, to ensure that the standards are really high. Now, there's a fine line too that you have to balance, which is you want your team to feel ownership of the process as well at the same time. And if you do this process poorly, what happens is they'll just say like, Wade Foster, you make the hiring decision. And I'm like, ooh, I don't wanna make the hiring decision because in a lot of places I actually am not well equipped to say yes or no. So what I'm really trying to do is audit, did we, were we thorough in our interviews? Did we ask good questions? Did we probe in the places that we probed, um, like, or needed to probe, that kind of stuff. And if those things are present, I will assume the candidate, yes, is a great hire at the end of the day. I'm not trying to look at it and say, oh, I think this person's great by only reading scorecards and, you know, a LinkedIn profile or things like that. That's, The interview is there to, to go do that. And then I'm auditing the, the, you know, the evaluation process on our side.

That is the best spoken version of that thought process that I've ever seen. I, I thank you for that. It's, um, I think, um, that fine line is so important, right? Like, I love the concept of licking the cookie. Um, if you lick the cookie on the candidate, like, hey, I'm gonna dig a little deeper. All of a sudden people start to back off and let Wade Foster take the cookie and make the decision. But I love. Why it's there. I've also, the other reason I've heard that people do do it is there's what you're basically saying, which is the process needs to work well. I need to know that you've been incredibly thorough in it and that you've written it up and you've asked all the questions we need to ask. And if that's happened, I'm generally going to say yes, unless there's something that I, I don't see there.

Yeah. Well, and I think the other thing that's like really important to recognize is for most hiring managers, they just don't hire that many people.

Mm-hmm.

You know, like if you're a frontline manager on a team, you might hire one person a year. And so you just don't have that many reps at this. And so the fact that you're like not that good at hiring, that's not your fault. Like how many of us are good at something that we only do one time a year? Like not, not that many of us. Like you, if you really wanna be great at hiring, you need to do a lot of reps. And so where do you get a lot of reps? Well, it's kind of not until you get into these senior roles where you're doing a lot of hiring, where you start to actually have some like real battle scars where you're like, ugh, like, ah, I wish I would've done this differently. I wish I would've done that differently. And you can, you know, you can tell the tales of like all the mistakes you've made. And so once you get to that place, like part of being involved in the process to me is I'm like, I just don't want for my, that hiring manager who's making one hire a year, I'm just like, Gosh, if I could just impart any amount of wisdom on you so you don't have to go through that same thing, I would like to try and do that. So like, it comes from that perspective.

And what you said at some point was, I haven't yet put into place all the hiring rubric or, or strategies. Mm-hmm. But if you can give them that, I think it's valuable. And then you're right, like pattern recognition exists in hiring. Like if you've done it once or twice, you don't know what a good answer or a bad answer is, or what a good reference is, or how to ask those questions.

Totally. And there's little like, you know, until you've done it enough, there's little like just threads that are sort of like easy to overlook. But you do enough hiring and you start to realize like one of those little, like tiny little yellow flags that sort of pops up and that easily earlier in my career I'd have just glossed right over. But now further in, you'd be like, ooh, I'm gonna pull that thread and I wanna see what unravels from it. And so, you know, let's go pull it. Let's go see. And oftentimes that's where you can make or break a candidate where if you pull that thread, that yellow can turn into a screaming green. Or you might go, ooh, yeah, that's, that was, that's not great. But if you don't pull it, you won't know.

That is the, yeah, if you just sit there and read it, questions off of a list, I'm a, I'm much more of, I'm gonna find that thread and I'm gonna go as deep as I possibly can on that thread. But if you don't know which thread to pull, you won't pull it. I like that.

Yeah. And there's a lot of times that I see that where candidates are like, oh, I didn't, like, I don't know, it seemed fine to me. And I was like, well, that's why we go pull the thread and find out, like, is it actually fine? Or are you just assuming it's going to be fine? And I find a lot of hiring managers fall into that trap. It's like they, they want the candidate to be good. They want to make the hire. And so they'll, they'll kind of just pull up shy and not look as closely at the warts. Whereas my opinion is like, I want to look at the warts. I want to look at the good stuff. I want to see it all. Because it exists, and then I wanna make an informed decision.

So that leads us right to the, one of the topics I think we're excited to talk about, which is references. Yeah, you had that great post around, I do, I think it was 20 references and, and I, I've been spending a lot of time just diving deep into references. I do have a Zap Hack for you at the end.

Nice.

Which I'll tell you, but I'd love to hear like your philosophy. And I think we're talking about executive references.

Yeah.

You don't have to be funny on junior people, but I'd love to understand like how your philosophy on references came about, how you think about it, and, uh, we'll push in a little bit on this one.

Yeah. So how it came about, I didn't used to think this way. Like I, I used to be like, ah, you know, references, like they're not that impactful. I didn't learn, oh, the references I was doing was not that impactful. Like the way I was going about it was not actually leading to, um, me thinking that they were all that valuable. What changed my mind? Yeah, I think, you know, multiply, mostly it was just frustration with my own hit rate. Like, it's not common for you to go into any sort of like growth stage company and hear the team say, hey, our exec hiring is 50/50. It's a coin flip if we get it right or not. I just looked at that stat and was like, you know, I couldn't say with confidence that like, oh, we are much better than that. And so I was like, well shoot, like I gotta try something. Uh, like let's see if we can get better. And you know, I came across some folks who just sort of like raved at doing these deeper references and said, okay, I'm gonna go try that approach and see if this actually improves the, um, process quite a bit.

Mm-hmm.

And it turns out like, I think it has. Um, and you know, I do a couple things in my reference process. So first I wanna talk to as many people as I can spend time with, but specifically I wanna talk to multiple managers in the past, multiple peers in the past, multiple direct reports in the past, and ideally get founder CEOs in the mix there as well. And across a wide mix of companies you've been at. Uh, and that's important too. Like, I don't wanna just get, you know, one slice of life and I'm fine going back, you know, a decade plus to like collect all these folks, you know, the folks. And so, and so that's kind of the cohort of folks I wanna go talk to. Then I wanna ask 'em roughly the same buckets of questions. I want to hear, tell me about when you worked with them. Tell me what you think the highest impact thing that, that they did was. Uh, tell me where you felt like they could be better. Uh, I want you to tell me when I go talk to all these other peoples, tell me who you think their, what their biggest fans are gonna say about them and tell me what your, their biggest critics are gonna say about them. This is a good one because now you start to get, if interesting information that you can use in subsequent reference checks, you can say, hey, I heard that, you know, someone said they wouldn't be good at this. Do you agree with that or not? Uh, and you can start to get, have more provocative questions to ask the reference checks to see if they go, oh, I guess that's true. Or like, wait, what? Someone said that about them? That doesn't sound at all like the person I've talked to. So you have these provocative questions that the, the reference feels obligated to speak to, and especially if it's wrong, they feel obligated to clear it up where they're like, no, that's just not right. You also wanna ask this question around, I want you to compare this person to the best person you've ever worked with. The best person's a 10 outta 10. And you know, I want you to tell me, you know, how they stack up. Are they a 7 outta 10, 8 outta 10, 9 outta 10, et cetera. And then more importantly, I want to, to hear what would they have to do differently to be a 10 outta 10. Like what, what closes the gap? And so that helps you understand what skills they're maybe not as solid at where they're working at. The last thing I, I wanna hear is I wanna hear more about how the company they were at worked. Like tell me about the culture there. What, what types of people thrived? What types of people didn't thrive? And that's really useful information as well too, because now you can start to hold that company up to your own company and say, hey, are we like that environment or we not like that environment? And if they thrived at the company and your company is quite like that, you'll go like, oh, this might be like a match made in heaven. Or if they didn't thrive and the company is exactly like yours, you'd be like, ooh, um, this might be tough, uh, because I think we kind of are that way. Uh, and so you just start to build this like richer mosaic of this person across multiple companies across, you know, a decade plus, and you really can understand them well. Now I'm only doing this for finalists, right? This is kind of like the last 1 or 2 people you're talking to. Then you can go back to that person and say, okay, here's what I heard. You know, I, here's the things I thought, like, people rave about you. Here's the places where you have some growth improvements. Here's how I think that plays at Zapier. Like, I think these things are gonna cause you to be excellent in this role. And here's some places where I'm like, I don't know, like we, I think we'd be taking a chance together. Like this might, this might make or break us if, if we're good at this. And then I just wanna see how they respond to it. Yeah. You know, do they, do they take ownership? Do they say, yep, um, here's what I've learned. Uh, here's, here's how I think that plays out. Um, and just have like a real honest conversation about that. And I, I encourage everyone to do the same for me where I'm like, hey, you should go talk to people about me too. Like, I'm not a perfect CEO. And so you should, you should call around and see what, see what you have to hear and bring it back to me. And I'll, I'll tell you the honest truth because I think the reality is for these types of roles, you know, these candidates are gonna parachute into your company and they're gonna see the good, the bad, the ugly right away. And so I would rather just do all that work before we make the hire or not and just say like, hey, are we both, are we both signed up for each other or not? Like, do you wanna, Do you wanna come into my beautiful mess and like say, yep, I, I want that. And do I wanna come into your beautiful mess and say, yep, I want that. Or are, do we look at it and say, you know what, actually I think there's a, a better place for you and a better person for us at the end of the day. That's what this is all about is just trying to have that like honest conversation versus hoping that it is gonna work out. And I think a lot of folks just sort of say, I've been great everywhere, or this person's been great everywhere. Of course they're gonna be great for me. but rarely have I seen that work out. There's so, like, you go talk to any executive in a tech and you'll, you can hear them say there was companies that I just kicked butt at and there's others where it was like, I just, I just wasn't very good there. Like, you'll hear that time and time again.

I think this also helps people understand it. It's a little bit of selling as well too, right? Because the, my manager, what it's gonna get back to you is those 20 that you do, it's gonna get back to the candidate. Wade Foster really cares. Mm-hmm. And he's asking these questions. I always use the statement of, They're in the finalists. I'm just evaluating how they'd be a fit rather than I'm trying to figure out yay or nay. And I think people are a lot more giving of that and they're like, wow, Wade's pretty excited about you. He's spending a lot of time asking deep questions because he cares about the cultural fit, which is really nice. Okay, so I've got two Zap Hacks for you that I've learned from other companies, Wade. I'll be curious if you got 'em. So the first one is every resume from everybody that ever passes through your ATS gets hired into your company. You put it into a database and then you can look and see, did anybody backchannel with that? Did anybody overlap with that person at all? Right? So you can even go to the junior person at the company and be like, hey, I heard for, you know, like 2 jobs ago you overlapped with Bob, um, in this job. Would love to get your take. So I, I heard that on a podcast recently where Bercel's running that, right? So they're basically dumping resumes and using them for overlap. That seems like a totally logical thing just to do.

100%. Great use case.

The other one that I heard from folks at Fathom was, you know, ask when you're interviewing the person, like, which people would say, you know, how would people talk about you, right? And so you'd say that and then you, and they would say that and they're, you're never going to say I was a 10 out of 10 everywhere. So then you can turn around and ask those people, you can use it as prep for your, um, your reference calls where you can effectively say, hey, Bob said, you know, that You would say he is a 7 out of 10 on this. And now all of a sudden that gives permission for somebody to start to go like, yeah, he kind of was like, rather than just say he's always the most awesome or always the best.

Well, you're spot on. And I, uh, on that last one, I do this with candidates too. So like, you know, if you were to interview with me, I, I, if you do enough of these reference, you start to kind of know a lot of people. And so, you know, I could say, hey, like I know this person, this person, this person. When I give them a call, what do you think I'm going to hear from them? And you can also, I, I would ask you, I'd say, hey, I'm gonna go call some people. I set the expectation, I am gonna do some references. What do you think I'm gonna hear from your biggest fans and your toughest critics? And so I give them a chance to tell me ahead of time, this is what I think you're gonna hear. And that's a great test for like their self-awareness as well. Like how, how, like, yeah, just do, do they understand how they come off with, with others? And you know, it's a, a great green flag to me when they can sort of pretty much nail those things and say, Yep. Here's, you know, they're gonna say, I'm great at this, this, and this. And I think you're probably gonna hear, I, I kind of wasn't so good at these things.

I love that. Okay, now let's, I'll ask you another question. How do you figure out who to ask for, for back channels? Like I talked to tons of recruiters in the last couple months on this one. They're gonna line up like the LinkedIn's, like, who do I know and who's lined up? But do you have anything more technical that you're doing that we're building the infrastructure right now to basically take in a LinkedIn use the Swarm and ScaleStack, uh, and a company, and probably a little bit of Zapier to figure out who should we ask for so we don't miss anybody. But it seems like everyone just kind of lines them up and, and just looks. But I'm curious how you—

Yeah, this is one area where it's pretty manual for me still. So, you know, generally I'm just asking them for like, hey, who should I go talk to? I want to have this bank of people. When I go talk to those folks, I ask them, who else should I be talking to? And usually there'll be like a consistent set of names that pop up where it's like, they worked with this person a lot, they will have something to say about them. And so then you go reach out to them and say, hey, what's, what's up with this? Uh, and so, you know, you kind of do that enough and you're probably gonna find, you know, who was the circle around this person at their job that's gonna have the best insights. And that's the most important thing. You don't wanna get stuck with a reference who is more like, like personal references are nice where it's like, oh, you know, I worked with, You know, Bob, Bob was great, you know, he was da da da. But it's like, did you, what projects did you work with him on? It's like, well, you know, we didn't, we didn't actually overlap that much on many projects, but I always had a good time with him. You know, and it's like, okay, well that's, that's nice to hear, but that doesn't really tell me much. Like I wanna, I wanna talk to the person who was in the trenches with Bob and you know, has seen Bob at his best and Bob at his worst. And I wanna know what that person has to say.

I like that a lot. One thing I've, the, my favorite answer is the, I would hire them again. I, I had one person that literally like 5 people at the same company were like, is this person looking? Can I hire them? And you just, you go scribble that down and do this.

I mean, you would be surprised how rare you come across that person, but it is, it does happen where you'll be talking to someone, they're like, just hire them. Like, why are you, like, why are you asking me more questions? Like this, you know, it's like, I'm happy to answer these questions. Like I can tell you, but like you should just hire this person. Like you sometimes get those where you're like, okay, like I get it. I get it. I still want to know. I still want to know. I still want to know why. You're, you're getting after that, but that, that does happen, but it's rarer than you would think. Yeah. I think all of us just have, we have some strengths, we have some weaknesses. Is that kind of just the, the truth of it?

So when you do 20, if you did it on me, you're gonna find that person that I just did not mesh with. Yeah. How do you, I guess when you're doing 20, you're getting enough data points, but how do you, how do you adjust or calibrate for that bad reference on maybe a good person?

Yeah. I mean, ultimately. You know, I think at the executive level, you're not looking for 100%.

Mm-hmm.

Um, in fact, in, gosh, in some ways, like, all green is a little fishy too.

Yeah.

And you gotta be careful, like, this is worth a judgment call, and this is where you, you really have to understand it well. But, you know, if you are a successful leader, That means you probably are some mix of like demanding and supportive, and that demanding side of the house probably is gonna show up in those references. And not everybody's gonna love that all the time. You're probably gonna have a place where you're like, yeah, you know, I probably, yeah, I was, I was demanding of this person, but like, it probably didn't land the way I wanted it to. I probably didn't, I probably, if I could do it again, I'd probably do it a little different. And you know, mostly what you're trying to hear in those situations is like, I'm not gonna shy away from being demanding, but there's an approach I could have taken that was a little different. Like, that's kind of what I'm trying to get a sense for. Um, 'cause the most common complaint you have is generally like, yeah, they had high standards, high demanding, and like that, that kind of rubbed the wrong way, uh, inside the organization at times. That's the most common one you run, run up against. Every now and then you get it, you, you run up against like a super red flag where it was like unethical behavior, like low integrity things. But that's, I find that's generally not that common. Yeah. Which I think speaks to, you know, just the, the quality of the industry we're in.

I agree. I agree. I, uh, I, I like how all of your different reinforcing loops work together, right? Like you can't take, you can't do the 20 without also getting the feedback back. You can't do just reportees, but not people that directly reported to you. It's, it's really well thought through and, uh, I'm sure it created a little buzz when you posted it, but I love how deeply thoughtful you are about it.

Well, yeah, and I think that's where, like, it's easy to sort of, I think for people to take one of these tactics and sort of poke holes in it. But I, I think at the end of the day, the way I think about hiring is, you know, you're gonna inevitably just get one tiny little piece of the puzzle about this person, and then you're gonna go make a hiring decision on them. And so if there's anything you can do to increase the surface area of knowledge you have over this person to collect more puzzle pieces, you should collect them because you're going to make a better decision at the end of the day. Uh, and each one of those puzzle pieces is going to come with some bias and come with some, you know, weird factual inaccuracies, et cetera. And that's okay because you're going to collect as many as you can. And by having more of them, you're probably going to have a better answer than having less of them. And I think some people would argue, well, this thing is biased or wrong, so I'm not gonna look at it. And I take the opposite approach where I'm like, actually, just the more data you have, the better you're gonna be. Even if like all of, all data is biased in one way or the other, but in aggregate you're gonna sort of try and wash the bias out. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. One more big question and, and then, then we'll, um, and I've got my final closing at the end. Um, AI fluency. I mean, I think you've written a little bit on it. Um, increasingly if you are not, There's, everyone should be using ChatGPT at this point. But I'm curious if you're not doing that, you should just stop with the job market. But, um, I, I'm curious how you folks evaluate AI fluency in the hires that you do.

We're getting better at this. You know, I think when we first started it was a little bit of self-reporting. So I'd be like, hey, just, hey Andy, tell me what, you know, what tools are you using? What do you like? What do you don't like? And so you just sort of self-report back to me and I would just make a judgment call. I'd be like, okay, like that sounds pretty good. Or like, You know, actually sounds like Andy's just barely dabbled around with it. So that's kind of where the first version of this was, was just, hey, why don't you just tell me and I'll just make an assertion of if I think that's good or not. More recently, we're doing more like skills assessments and trying to bake that into the process. You know, here, like, I don't know that I've got like any sort of magic bullet for folks, but Yeah, you kind of do some of the things where you'll say like, hey, here's a, I don't know, if I was hiring someone for a marketing job, I might be like, here's an Excel file that's got a bunch of data in it. In an hour, can you come back with like some marketing campaigns to like see, tell me what you're doing? You can use any tool you wanna use. And so you just might go see like, well, how far did they get? Like, do they spend the whole time like just trying to like do Excel stuff? And you're like, well, that's probably not the best way about it versus like, Do they upload it to Excel and say like, hey, you know, can you segment the data in one particular way or not and come up with like different audience types I can go after? And then, oh, okay, great. Based on these audience types, do I go to like Lovable or Replet and like try and build some landing pages? Or do I go to, you know, Canva and try and build some ad stuff and just, you know, just kind of see like how far do they get, how creative do they use, like what's the breadth of tools they're using at the end of the process? Like again, that's not a silver bullet, but like it helps you just get a feel for like What's— where do they reach for? What's their like natural inclination? And again, it's, it's just about trying to collect more information, uh, and better understand like where, where is this person as it relates to other people we might go consider for this role?

Are there any roles in your company that you would not hire, that you would not care about, care about AI fluency at this point?

No.

Um, good answer.

Yeah, I mean, I'm open-minded that the answer might be yes, but you got to prove it to me. Like, I, I just, my bias is just like so strongly that like this is the future. So yeah, I, I don't know what, I don't know. I honestly don't know what job that would be.

I agree with you. Well, Wade, I, I, I could probably ask you questions for another hour, but, um, our traditional closing question, which is, uh, who was the best hire you ever made and why?

Best hire I ever made and why?

Um, by the way, you're the first person ever to get our traditional closing questions. So, uh, Who of it?

Gosh, there's a lot. Uh, well, I mean, one person that comes to mind is someone who came in the door as like a freelancer, ended up then what was like writing content about Zapier, kind of like working on the marketing side, joined us in customer service, quickly like was leading big customer service teams, then started running our platform team, then by the end was like running all of product. And you know, it was just, um, someone who just like took extreme ownership, like extremely scrappy, like dove into the data, really tried to understand, you know, what's most impactful for customers and then showed up every single day to try and go make it better for 'em. Uh, and, uh, yeah, I just don't find that many people with that kind of flexibility to sort of like work across like functional lines, work across all these different areas and sort of no matter what domain you put them in, they kind of find a way to walk out and be successful. And I think that's just pretty impressive when you find someone like that.

Couldn't agree more. And those people are rare. Well, thank you for your time. If people are building workflows on top of AI and you're not using Zapier, you should be. I'm using them all over the place. Wade's given you a couple good examples and he's also deeply thoughtful about hiring. So thank you, Wade.

Thanks, Andy.