January 05, 2022

#171: Guide to hiring an executive leadership team for first-time founders and pitfalls to avoid while hiring executive talent, with Shailaja Pittie

30 minutes

‘Focus your assessment on the passion for the mission’

In this episode of The Shape of Work podcast, we welcome Shailaja Pittie, Senior Executive Recruiter and Talent Advisory at Google. She is responsible for identifying, attracting and engaging & hiring the best leaders to build the future of Google Cloud.

Some of her more notable Google roles include: Global Staffing Lead Geo, Head of Talent, and Engineering recruiter. She started off her career as an entrepreneur but found her love for the HR space along the way.

Shailaja is extremely passionate about building teams, functions, and organizations.

Episode highlights:

Common mistakes made by recruiters while hiring executives
Recruitment and hiring process to get the desired candidates
How to manage candidate relationships
Guide to hire an executive leadership team for first-time founders
Pitfalls to avoid while hiring executive talent

Common mistakes made by recruiters while hiring executives

Talent management is involved in the development of succession plans. They have insights into critical talent gaps that are in the company. They know about the bench strength and what is the up and coming internal talent. On the other hand, executive recruiting has an external approach. They are the experts on market intelligence, and they have the best competitor knowledge. When there is good synergy and knowledge sharing, companies can hire better where internal talent and external talent is taken into account when hiring.

Advice for young people

One is not to be afraid of taking risks. Invest in getting different experiences, even if it is laterally. If someone aspires to be an executive recruiter, it is important they have the ability to interact with senior leaders, the ability to influence without authority, the ability to engage talent in the market and to have good business acumen.

Follow Shailaja on LinkedIn

Produced by: Priya Bhatt
Podcast host: Abhash Kumar

About Springworks:
Springworks is a fully-distributed HR technology organization that is building tools and products to simplify recruitment, on-boarding, employee engagement, and retention. The product stack from Springworks includes:
SpringVerify — B2B verification platform
EngageWith — employee recognition and rewards platform that enriches company culture
Trivia — a suite of real-time, fun, and interactive games platforms for remote/hybrid team-building
SpringRole — verified professional-profile platform backed by blockchain, and
SpringRecruit — a forever-free applicant tracking systemSpringworks prides itself on being an organization focused on employee well-being and workplace culture leading to a 4.8 rating on Glassdoor for the 200+ employee strength company.