In this week’s Hiring Highlights we were delighted to speak with Lisa McGill, an advisory board member and former Chief Human Resources Officer at CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity giant.

Lisa has spent much of her career in “high tech” at the likes of Silver Peak, and more recently, has advised VC firm SemperVirens, whose portfolio includes workforce tech companies like Karat and ChartHop.

Lisa arrived at CrowdStrike before its eventual IPO in 2019, so she understands the delicacies of stewarding a people team at a time of high growth.

Early on, Lisa identified that “50% of our new hires within the sales organisation were leaving”, which of course, would pose a problem for any company that was planning to go public. In fact, CrowdStrike would often lose talented staff members just one year into the job, just when they were reaching their “high optimal productivity”.

One solution was to really nail down a talent acquisition strategy. And according to Lisa, that meant answering some key questions: 

• “What kind of jobs do you need?”
• “What kind of skills do you need people to have?
• “Are skills changing?”
• “Do you already have those skills?”
• “Do you know how to recruit for those skills?”
• “And where are those skills?”
• “Are you going to be hiring in new geographies?”

By thinking about these details more deeply, CrowdStrike often hired in emerging engineering markets like Romania. But as Lisa adds, “In some cases, you might have to do some re-skilling as part of your talent strategy.”

Lisa also highlighted “salary compression” as a key watchout, where the higher salaries offered to new hires could leave the original staff members feeling out of pocket. “Yes, that person might have more equity, but until you go public, it’s meaningless to them.”

In our discussion, Lisa shared details of some helpful tools that helped CrowdStrike secure the right talent. For example, in order to identify the top sales candidates, CrowdStrike used an “AI based behavioral based assessment tool” called PerceptionPredict, which led them to conclude that the key qualities for a salesperson at CrowdStrike included communication, collaboration and grit.

Of course, there is no silver bullet when it comes to securing top talent, and as we covered recently, there’s a time and a place for internal hiring too. Everyone has a part to play in an organisation’s success, or as Lisa says: “No matter what your role – you can impact revenue, you can impact profitability.”

It was great to catch up with Lisa, and if you’d like to check out more Scaling Stories podcasts, you know where to clickety-click.