Intrro: Scaling Stories

For this week’s Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to speak with Alex Seiler, the Chief People Officer at GHJ, an accounting, tax, and advisory firm that partners with clients to help grow their businesses.”

Alex is a savvy people and talent leader who has developed countless approaches that connect organizations’ business strategy with their people strategy.

Alex has cut his teeth at what he calls “declining industries”, namely publishing, and learnt a great deal about scaling up (and down) from working in a resource-challenged environment.

A long-term strategic thinker, Alex describes accounting as “not the sexiest profession out there”, but invites his team on retreats where they can discuss how they can “defy convention” and change how people perceive the industry. “How do we attract more early career professionals to actually want to have a career in public accounting?”

A recent Wall Street Journal article, ‘Why are so many accountants quitting?’, touched on some of the industry’s challenges. As the author stated: “The field still suffers from a stigma that it is unappealing, with tedious work and daunting hours… The huge gap between companies that need accountants and trained professionals has led to salary bumps and more temporary workers joining the sector.”

Part of the solution, Alex suggests, is to be “purely focused on our staff and getting brilliant at the basics”, or in other words, “how do we refine and do things even better for them”.

This includes everything from pay transparency to resisting the temptation to force everyone back to the office. 

“All the data that’s out there says that people at the end of the day want a hybrid working structure,” Alex says.

Alex’s experiences have taught him the value of picking your battles and understanding the intricacies of each sector. Time-starved accountants and auditors, for example, don’t have time to absorb information about new strategies and concepts when they’ve got a hard accounting deadline coming up.

“That’s what I talk about when I say not taking a cookie cutter approach,” says Alex. “If you don’t understand the business you’re in and you try to roll things, you’re gonna get pushback if it’s got an adverse impact on the employee.”

Moreover, at a time of layoffs and market uncertainty, Alex says it’s crucial to ask, “how are you continuing to upskill your people?”

For example, GHJ have introduced “high performance teams training that can scale across the organisation”, plus a “durable skills curriculum”, where staff can upskill on things like leadership or critical thinking as an alternative to “traditional manager training”.

Finally, Alex is a skilled operator who knows how to keep the C-suite sweet. He dismisses the idea that “all roads lead to the CEO”, adding that recruiters should develop “one-on-one relationships with each member of the C-Suite. And even before you’ve presented a strategy, start socialising your ideas”.

It goes to show that talent and people teams are more than just nice-to-haves, but rather, a strategic partner at the heart of a successful business. Similarly, when we spoke to Mafalda Garcês, the Country Leader and Senior People Director at Dashlane, she remarked how HR should be viewed as “a central piece of solving business problems”.

It was great chatting with Alex, and if you’d like to check out more of our Scaling Stories podcasts, you know what to do.

In this week’s Scaling Stories we spoke to James Ellis, a self-confessed “employer brand nerd” who’s developed countless brands on their journey from small startup to Fortune 1000 giant.

The words ‘performance’ and ‘profitability’ are on many leaders’ lips, and given that employer branding is one of the lowest cost, highest return investments that a business can make for their TA operations, who better to speak to than James – an employer branding expert. 

James lives and breathes all things brand, and was influenced by his mixed experiences at different firms – some with “great bosses, lots of freedom, lots of agency, opportunity and good benefits”, and others with “atrocious, micromanaging bosses”.

“From the outside they were the exact same movie. It’s like, are you walking into Star Wars or are you walking into the last Star Wars?”

James says part of his mission is to encourage companies to be “crystal clear about what they offer, what they reward”, meaning there is less chance of disappointment on both sides.

James has an instinctive understanding of the differences between traditional marketing and talent marketing. And it all comes down to choosing quality over quantity.

“What you want is two people to fall in love with this job. That’s all. You don’t need a million applicants. You don’t need a hundred applicants. You need two. So long as they’re great candidates and you pick two, ‘cos the hiring manager can make a choice and feel good about that. Otherwise, you really only need the one. That’s the difference.”

Equally, James believes that recruiters can learn lessons from consumer marketing, and in particular, connecting with the things that an audience really cares about.

“The problem is recruiters aren’t good marketers. They’re great salespeople, but they're not marketers.”

“What branding is trying to say is it’s not just about money. Money’s great, everybody likes money, but if you’re being paid fairly, wouldn’t you rather be in a place where you get more of whatever that thing is you care about?”

So, how do you know if your employer brand strategy is working? James has a simple mantra: “Everything you say must be specific, attractive, different and real.” 

Here are some examples of what that means:

• Specific. Rather than say “we care about women”, James says it’s more powerful to cite actual specifics like 26 days paid parental leave, for example, or a dedicated mother’s room.
• Attractive. James underlines the importance of “understanding your audience and giving them something they care about because it’s attractive”. For example, pro-parent policies are attractive to some candidates, but pretty irrelevant to others.
• Different. “Be crystal clear about what you’re about.”
• Real. What you say about your brand “has to be real. It has to be something true”.

It was great to catch up with James. On our blog page you can read more on the topic of employer branding, or you can check out our Scaling Stories podcasts in full.

In this week’s Scaling Stories podcast we chewed the fat with Adrian Obeso, Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at Superhuman – the awesome email app that aims to save people precious time.

Adrian is a smart and pragmatic technical recruiter and manager with a wealth of experience in engineering-focused recruiting. He has a track record of ‘systems building’, and helped to scale Honey (the shopping platform) to around 600 employees.

For Adrian, a crucial part of talent acquisition is maintaining the ‘culture bar’, based on a simple proposition: ‘Recruiting is the last line of defence.’

“Hiring is maintenance,” Adrian says. “One of the roadblocks that a lot of recruiting professionals face is convincing the people they’re partnering with that they’re truly there to protect the culture and bring people in who are going to add to the company. And they’re not just trying to hit numbers.”

Adrian is as far as you can get from a ‘spammy’ recruiter, and he says part of his remit is to get colleagues to think about “who we’re messaging; why we’re messaging them; what we are”.

“For me, it’s not just about assessing someone’s actual hard skills, but trying as best as you can to dig into their character”.

For example, how do they take feedback? Are they good at collaborating?

At Honey, Adrian learnt the importance of “using data whenever it’s appropriate and as often as possible”, and has since taken these lessons to Superhuman. “People respond when you can actually show tangible facts – numbers that relate to how work is being done at your company.”

For example, Adrian has looked to tackle “super bloated” interview formats, which have sometimes been too long. He noticed that some interviews resulted in excessively high pass rates of around 96%, which “wasn’t a very high signal as far as a candidate’s full ability”.

“I think that oftentimes hiring managers can treat recruiting as service providers. The way that you flip that relationship is by being a partner first, and again, using data, being thoughtful, checking in, showing that this is much more to you than hitting a number.”

In terms of using engineering time effectively, we cover some of these themes in our cost-per-hire guide. 

Influenced by his years working agency-side with numerous clients, Adrian takes a listening-driven approach to recruiting, which he explains:

“I mean try to do more listening than you are talking. Try to actually sit down and gather someone’s desires and again, try to communicate how your company might be able to meet them.”

But even with the best will in the world, we clearly live in turbulent times. Given the fluidity of the current market conditions, how does Adrian think recruiters should adapt?

“I think recruiters need to be flexible and need to develop skills across all of recruiting and not just focus on ‘the specific’ and specialised, like talent acquisition, but you know, pick up recruiting, pick up sourcing. I don’t think right now we’re in a place where recruiting can just focus on closing candidates.”

“If recruiters right now become more well-rounded, they’re going to be able to just be more successful.”

How are talent acquisition specialists getting stuck into different tasks at Superhuman? Adrian gives a few examples:

• Sourcing candidates
• Talking to candidates 
• Looking at recruiting metrics

We also discussed some of the ‘red flags’ that should make any recruiter run away faster than Kylian Mbappé. Watch out for hyperbole, says Adrian, where “everything they’re saying sounds large and vague, like I am now speaking to someone who either does not have intimate knowledge of the work that was being done at their last organisation, or really can’t speak to it because of a l

In this week’s Scaling Stories we were pleased to catch up with Stela Lupushor, a renowned HR leader and author whose books include Humans at Work and Humanazing Human Capital.

Our discussion centered on what it means to work in HR in 2023. So much has changed since BC, or “Before Covid”, as Stela puts it. Whether it’s the adoption of remote working, the emergence of new technologies, or questions about how diversity and inclusion programs are deployed, running an HR team has not exactly been straightforward lately.

Some changes have been profound. Remote working has caused a rupture in how HR interacts with staff, and in fact changed the make-up of a typical workforce.

Meanwhile, salary expectations have rocketed in the past couple of years, albeit there are now signs that wage growth is slowing.

And as the chair of the US Federal Reserve noted, one reason the labour market remains tight is because many workers sadly passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But while this rapid pace of change can take some getting used to, Stela offers some invaluable insights on how to forge a successful HR function in unpredictable times.

Rather than just mindlessly adopting technology and tools, Stela advocates “human-centric design”, or in other words, to understand “what it’s like to be a worker and how we might reimagine that journey and use technology to transform that experience so people can be productive – they can enjoy and be delighted by their experience”.

Stela suggests that HR leaders should proactively work to improve the workplace experience before a “contagion” effect takes hold. 

“I think the reward structure is what shapes behaviour,” Stela says. “And we as humans are gonna react to the context…So HR really has an opportunity to think or rethink what that reward structure looks like and how certain behaviours can be rewarded – not only for the purposes of maximising the shareholder value, but also rethinking the entire stakeholder system and designing it for all the stakeholders in mind”.

Stela’s words are echoed in a recent Fast Company article by Lars Schmidt, who writes: “The shift toward pay transparency requires HR to think more broadly about compensation, equity, and how we define total rewards”. Lars also predicts a “shift towards skill-based hiring” rather than “role-based hiring”.

In our chat, Stela touched on a range of fascinating topics: the nature of value creation; the erosion of trust in institutions; and the importance of autonomy in the workplace. Stela was even kind enough to share with us three podcast recommendations:

• The Ezra Klein Show for its exploration of topics like economics, politics and culture
• Quorum for its Web3 and crypto insights
• Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View for its analysis of exponential technologies and their impact on society.

It was great catching up with Stela, and once you’ve had a listen, hop on over to our Scaling Stories hub and check out our latest interviews with HR’s finest.

We were delighted to chat with the wonderful Melanie Naranjo for our Scaling Stories podcast. NYC-based Melanie is the VP of People at compliance training platform Ethena. Our conversation covered some fascinating HR terrain – from bias to burnout – at a time when companies are having to work harder to win the hearts and minds of workers.

Ethena’s mission, according to Melanie, is to “create more inclusive and ethical workplaces”, which inspires its innovative approach to harassment prevention training. Ethena embrace a human-centred approach, using everything from jokes to comic strips – not videos that “look like it was recorded in the 80s” – to ultimately deliver “compliance trainings that actually work”.

“I literally joined my company because of our harassment prevention training, which just so happens to be the product we put out,” Melanie explains.

Melanie is a smart and progressive people leader, and one theme we touched on was the scourge of credentialism in making hiring decisions.

“Bias leads to bias,” Melanie says, and described how too many company leaders undervalue the diverse experiences of non-graduates, including workers with experience in sectors like retail. Melanie says she has “all the empathy in the world” for candidates who feel embarrassed about putting their retail experience on LinkedIn, and thinks some recruiters may be missing a trick.

“The reality is, if you’re applying for a sales role, if you’re applying for a customer service role, even if you’re applying for an HR role, there are absolutely transferable skills that come from years in the retail world, right?”

Perhaps it underlines the importance of writing clear and inclusive job descriptions that don’t turn off promising candidates from non-corporate working backgrounds. Afterall, why should a promising candidate be dissuaded from applying because they’ve got four years’ experience rather than five? “We’re very clear about what's a requirement and what is not,” Melanie says regarding job descriptions.

Meanwhile, on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Melanie says it should “never be looked at in a silo”. Instead, DEI should be “woven into every piece of everything you do from recruiting to performance reviews, to core philosophy and growth structure”.

Finally, Melanie has some refreshing takes on resisting the “pressure to force your employees to have fun”. So, if you’re planning on booking the next team-building away day on an inflatable golf course – think again.

There were lots of great insights from Melanie, so head over to Scaling Stories and have a listen!

For this week’s Scaling Stories we were delighted to speak with Dawn Sharifan, a people leader who’s helped scale businesses such as Lookout, and most recently Slack, where she led the people function through the $27.7 BN acquisition and integration into Salesforce.

With an enviable track record as a coach, leader and board member – and a former professor to boot – Dawn is well placed to speak about how to develop the careers of HR professionals and instill an effective (and inspiring) working culture.

Dawn has a “passion for building” – not just replicating the same HR processes from one company to the next – and she’s particularly adept in early-stage environments, or as she puts it, when “the cement is wet”.

The beauty of working for a nascent startup, says Dawn, is that “you can put your fingerprints and still sculpt and change things because you can take a product driven approach to HR and people functions… Your customers are your employees. They’ll give you feedback and then you just iterate on it.”

While some board members can be detached from the realities on the ground, Dawn’s journey has given her an acute sense of what employees really think, rather than working behind closed doors and “coming down with these stone tablets of ‘this is how we will do a review process’, and then the employees are expected to clap and share and be happy about it”.

These lessons ring true when Dawn thinks back to her time as a candidate. When the chance to work at Slack came along, Dawn believed it was “a great product at a great time”, but there was more to it than that. “I just knew I wanted to work with [Slack CEO] Stewart [Butterfield]. I knew I wanted to work for the team.”

Dawn describes her former colleagues at Slack as “the best group of humans I’ve ever had a chance to work with, and I’ve had the chance to work with a lot of really great humans”.

In the latest Scaling Stories podcast, we caught up with Robbie Simpson, Global Head of Country Operations (Talent Acquisition) at Wolt, the food and merch delivery platform.

Robbie previously led a globally distributed recruitment team at HelloFresh, and as someone who’s made the transition from a recruiting specialist to an impressive all-rounder, Robbie instinctively understands the changing landscape of the hiring market. And boy, how the times are a-changin’...

It’s a sad fact that in today’s challenging environment, recruiters have been some of the first to lose their jobs. Or as this Wall Street Journal article points out: “Tech companies that have cut jobs have, on average, slashed about 50% of their recruiting staff, compared with, for instance, 10% of software engineers and 12% of product and design staff.” In some cases, these layoffs have been unceremonious to say the least. Moreover, the recruiters who’ve kept their jobs may find themselves busier than ever.

In this context, Robbie has some words of advice for how hiring teams can revamp their processes and adapt. 

“When we think about recruitment as a product, we should think about pain and gain”, Robbie says. On the employer side, that means asking, “what’s the pain someone’s willing to go through to get the gain.

The pain might involve filling in a hiring request sheet, or previously time-stretched candidates finding time to complete assignments; as the market has changed, some candidates are willing and able to take the time to complete these. 

From the candidate’s perspective, the ‘gain’ may have changed too. Previously, people were looking to move job for more responsibility or money, for example, but now “the gain might just be having a job which is stable, which means that the pain you’re willing to go through might be slightly higher”.

Therefore, as Robbie suggests, because the market environment has changed so dramatically, the recruitment product may need to adapt dramatically too. While your customers are the same people, their needs and desires are now different.

In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we picked the brains of Anthony Rotoli, a senior people leader who’s successfully scaled the HR and talent teams at companies like Karat, Assurance IQ and Quora.

Among his many successes, Anthony scaled Assurance IQ’s headcount ten times over – the insurance/fintech startup was eventually acquired for $2.3bn. He also made the transition from Microsoft to Karat – at the time, the interview tech company was a small startup, but is now valued at more than $1bn. All things considered, there are few experts better placed than Anthony to advise on how HR leaders can assess candidates, build a successful team and retain the best people.

Anthony has come a long way, but says that when he first moved from Microsoft to Karat it was a “massive culture shock”.

At the time, the idea of building a tech giant might have seemed fanciful. He thought: “Nobody has heard of this place. People are going to have to hear about it. How do I build a brand around this thing?”

A key part of the journey was about finessing an interview methodology that identified the right talent. Here are three keys to success that Anthony identifies.

In this week’s Scaling Stories, we caught up with senior talent brand strategist Matt Eyre.

Matt’s varied career has seen him work in marketing for the likes of Universal Pictures, EA Sports and Sega, and more recently, Silicon Valley Bank. When he joined Intercom, Matt made the leap from brand marketing to talent marketing, so he’s well-placed to explain how this crossover works.

“If you look for a definition of a brand strategy, you’re generally gonna see something like a plan to achieve a series of goals resulting in the preference of your brand by consumers,” Matt explains. “So if we think about how to apply that to talent… you’re thinking, how do I build a strategy that’s going to last and that’s going to enable us to build a brand that is meaningful to the people that we’re talking to.”

At its simplest, employer branding is “how you present your company to the world”, says Matt, and requires “very consistent messaging”.

But when most brands offer similar talking points, how do you stand out? Matt draws lessons from self-confessed ‘employer brand nerd’ James Ellis, who says that effective brand messaging is usually four things:

• Specific
• Attractive
• Differentiated
• Real.

In our discussion, Matt also gives fresh insights on those well-trodden topics of mission, culture and values. In a world where young candidates can simply “jump on TikTok and find out what a company is like”, employers have to think hard about how they meet a candidate’s expectations on culture, rather than simply “sticking 20 words up on your website”.

“They want to know what a company stands for. They want to know what the work experience is gonna be like when they get there,” Matt says, and says that many candidates are looking for “validated values”.

“What do these values mean to me and how am I gonna engage with them on a day-to-day basis? You know, it’s not just ‘how much am I gonna earn and what’s my title gonna be’ anymore? Those days are gone.”

Of course, companies can forge their own unique culture, and that’s going to look different at JP Morgan than a crypto startup making monkey j-pegs. But as Matt says, perhaps there is merit in simply “being true to the values you hold”.

In our latest Scaling Stories podcast, we were delighted to catch up with Ben Newsome, a portfolio partner at Octopus Ventures, a very active multi-stage European VC. Ben previously helped build some of Europe’s leading tech companies – from Monzo to Improbable – so who better to talk to about how VCs perceive the importance of talent within an organisation.

Octopus supports and invests in approximately 180 companies, covering everything from unicorn companies to more traditional ‘safer bets’ in industries as varied as health tech, fintech and ‘deep tech’. One of the things that differentiates Octopus is its close working relationships with founders, or what Ben calls a “robust end-to-end process” covering everything from an induction, a holistic look at the business and how capital is deployed.

“It’s very novel for VCs to be looking at driving performance through talent and people,” Ben observes.

When it comes to hiring talent, Octopus is there to support its portfolio in an advisory position, rather than taking a backseat and advising on the odd hire. The Octopus talent team are positioned as ‘coaches’, and they take a holistic approach to advising companies on their talent and people.

A good VC, says Ben, should have capacity to service and support their portfolio, as “there’s only an amount of companies that you can service at one time”, and essentially they should “operate as as an extension of that team”.

But what’s not always appreciated about VCs is that when it comes to getting the right talent, they’re not just tasked with advising founders and senior staff – but the investors too.

“The interesting part about the ‘deal flow’ in VC is that there’s a ton of research and due diligence and naturally, when you look at the success of businesses or the businesses that have achieved great things, it’s [because] they get the right people and scale the business efficiently.”

Ben explains that part of his role is to understand “red flags” and “potential areas of weaknesses” so he can have transparent conversations with investors and make sure they understand the importance of recruiting well – a “precursor to success”.

Regular readers of this hallowed digital scroll may recall the words of Jim Collins, business management guru and author of Good to Great, who wrote that successful executives know how to “get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus)”, and Ben’s keen understanding of why recruitment matters is a testament to this.