AppNexus has over 1,000 employees and has probably hired almost that many more on top of that over its 10 years as a NYC startup--so, obviously, they've had to get pretty good at sourcing top candidates.

Lorraine Buhannic has been on their recruiting team for six+ years and has seen every app, every channel, and measured every pipeline ROI you can think of.  She takes us through the recruiting process, what they're using and what they're not and what the inside of a recruiting team looks like that got AppNexus up to being a 1,000 person company.

Lindsay Grenawalt is the Head of People Operations at Cockroach Labs. Previously, she was the Vice President of People Operations at Yext where she served on the management team since 2013. During her time at Yext, the company grew from 168 to over 440 employees.  Prior to Yext, she was the founding recruiter at Google Ventures (GV) where she led the East Coast recruiting practice for the $1.5 billion dollar fund, placing executives in engineering and product management at the 150+ portfolio companies. During her time at Google, Lindsay was a recruiter for the Google New York Engineering office.  So, if you don't like this episode, it's not the guest.

Sloane Barbour of Jobspring comes on this week to talk about the realities of hiring a recruiter--when it makes sense and when it doesn't, and what you can reasonably expect from them.  He spoke about what makes a good recruiter, how you can spot them, and some best practices around how to get the most impact for your money.

At the time of Trello's acquisition by Atlassian, over two-thirds of its staff worked remotely.  If you think recruiting and engaging workers is hard enough when they're all coming out of the same city and working in the same office, imagine what an added layer of complexity must come with Trello's setup.  However, not only have they made it work, they used it to their advantage on their way to a multi-hundred million dollar exit.  Michael talks about what they do and why it works in this episode.

Tech and VC has not had a good year HR-wise, because so many employees and founders have had bad years for so long.  Things have reached a breaking point recently, and those who are trying to fix the problems are scrambling for answers. 

I reached out to Beth Steinberg, former SVP of People at Brightroll, to ask what could be done to prevent situations like Uber and what we've seen out of the VC world.  It was a thoughtful discussion and a good start down the path to learning more.  I'll be dedicating a lot of time over the next few months to more conversations about creating cultures of respect, dealing with employee issues, and improving behavior in the tech community.  

Daniela Perdomo covers a lot of bases when it comes to bring a diverse perspective to the CEO position--she's female and she grew up in another country.  That doesn't necessarily mean she doesn't have to work hard to be intentional about creating a diverse workforce--particularly when she's hiring for her engineering heavy staff at goTenna, a telecom hardware startup in Brooklyn.  It was exciting to hear her discuss this issue as her lead seed round investor over four years ago and especially as she has now become one of the few female CEOs to break through to a Series B investment.  

Daniel Chait was consulting for banks when he first realized how broken the recruiting process was.  The information about what kind of people the bank needed never found its way to interviewers, and the front lines of the recruiting process found themselves ill-prepared to evaluate candidates.  In this interview, he talks about his view of the recruiting process from the perspective of someone who has built software to solve a lot of the problems that he saw when it came to getting organizations on the same page around hiring.

Vivek Sharma has been running Movable Ink, a 150+ person company in NYC for almost seven years, but in many ways, he's just getting started.  The company is always hiring and each day, he's perfecting and learning new ways of not only identifying talent, but maintaining and developing it.  They say the best new customer is the one you already have--and the same can be said for employees.  In this podcast, Vivek talks about identifying the kind of talent who can stick with you over the long term and how to provide them new challenges and opportunities to grow.

Liz Wessel co-founded Wayup to make hiring interns and entry level employees easier.  It's an area of recruiting that has traditionally been dominated by big companies that can afford to have a physical presence on college campuses across the country.  These days, not only do startups not have the budget for that, but larger companies don't find it the most efficient way of targeting either.  Based on this experience, Liz shares her tips for managing new employees in their first job or internship and how startups can make that onboarding successful.

Before this interview, I might have said that Brad Hargreaves is an expert in starting companies--that is until he told me that his current startup, Common, is the first time he intentionally tried to start a big company.  So how does an entrepreneur who "accidentally" stumbled into General Assembly, the hugely impactful education business, wind up winning in businesses where he isn't the category expert going in?  He recruits help, obviously, but how can he figure out if the help knows more than he does or if it's right?  That's what we discussed in this enlightening episode.