The Startup Recruiting Podcast

Nadia Danford convinces candidates in a very competitive labor market that working for a startup that sells insurance is going to be awesome--that's just how good she and her in-house recruiting team is.  We spent time talking about how they do that, and what it means to bring recruiting in-house, when the right time to do that is, and some best practices Policygenius uses to build their fast growing company.

Stephanie is responsible for all things people at Button, which was voted the #1 Place to Work in NYC by Crain's.  She handles recruiting, learning & development, performance management, compensation, and people happiness programs.

In the show, we talked about how her experience at larger tech companies like Square helped inform how she runs her People team and how that team thinks about ensuring employee success, making the recruiting function contribute lasting ROI for the company.

Tami Forman is the Executive Director of Path Forward, a nonprofit organization that creates mid-career internship programs to ease the transition back to work for women (and men) after taking a break for raising children or other caregiving responsibilities. Path Forward trains HR teams and hiring managers on how to support these programs successfully and provides support to participants to make the experience successful. Tami is building this organization from the ground up.  In this episode we talked about the structural barriers that prevent women from succeeding after they take time away from their careers and how to address them--and why these experienced professionals can make a great addition to your company in ways you might not realize.

"A strong software team is one that is good at coming up with ideas, not just typing code.

Software is written by teams.

Strong teams are teams that share ideas—that communicate ideas, that collaborate.

We need to find a way to involve [new developers] in the idea generation process so that as they’re providing their ideas, they’re also learning."

This is just a snippet of some of the really thoughtful discussion I had with Adam Milligan about how important it is to create a learning environment if you really do want to build the best technical teams.  We discuss what he believes leadership development is all about and how this all leads to diversifying the types of people that will make up great technical teams.

Bravely offers conflict and communication coaching for employees navigating issues in the workplace--and so its founders know a thing or two about getting out ahead of issues before they tank a company's culture and worse, bottom line.  Through Bravely’s application, employees can confidentially describe the issue they’re facing and schedule a phone consultation with a ‘Pro’, an expert coach or HR professional with deep experience in helping resolve conflict, structure effective communication plans, and develop skills for constructive work relationships.

We talk in the episode about how every single company has issues.  Hopefully not all of them are as serious as the ones that make headlines, but 65% of performance problems are linked to strained personal relationships, which happens everywhere.  Effective communication among colleagues, even for the small stuff that a lot of people let go, yields a significant impact on workplace wellbeing. 

Closing senior hires isn't something you can do easily with automation--which is why Vettery leverages its human talent to help companies connect with top candidates.  Their candidates accept the majority of interview requests they receive, which is why Vettery's Co-Founder, Adam Goldstein, has so much insight into the recruiting landscape and hire process.  I sat down with him live at the offices of Commonbond, along with Adrian Phillips, VP of Design at Spring, who was both a client of spring and is now a customer.  

Claude Silver is the Chief Heart Officer of VaynerMedia, and the first of our guests to quote poetry on the podcast.  She was tasked with making a fast growing company that has scaled to 100's of people feel close knit, supportive, and in touch with its employees--much the same way its eponymous founder did when he first started. She has, however, done it in her own unique way and helps us shed light on why her role is so important to create a space where people can do their best work all while maintaining their humanness in a community.  

The Lancaster Food Company bakes bread to hire people--and much of its staff companies from impoverished or incarcerated backgrounds.  It's not an easy task to recruit and manage a talent pool whose lives are so dramatically different from your typical software startup, but while Charlie Crystle is in it to win it ("There's no mission without margin.") it's clearly a labor of a lot of blood, sweat, tears and love.  The story of Lancaster should serve as a model for tech startups--that they should take no amount of stability in an employee's life for granted and that it creates a lot of loyalty to meet your talent where it is.  

Kristen Ablamsky is the Co-Founder and Head of Product at Wethos,  the first freelance platform built specifically for nonprofits and socially conscious businesses.  She was tasked with running point on hiring the company's first two full time technical hires who would take over the initial site built by a freelancer.  It's a position a lot of non-technical founders find themselves in.  I interviewed Kristen and the two hires she made, Steven and Margaret, about how the process went, what worked, and what didn't, as well as why they joined this seed stage startup.  

Meg Fitzgerald is the Co-Founder of Tinkergarten and its Chief Learning Officer.  She has overseen the company's growth from just four leaders of outdoor classes for kids to over 750, and soon to be 1,000.  She talks about building out a process to scale the acquisition and vetting of a distributed network of contract employees, as well as what it will take to get to 10,000 and beyond.