How to hire and scale in web3 | Mehdi Hasan & Craig Naylor

Transcript

[Music] thank you thank you very much very excited to have the opportunity to discuss Talent with you all today we know you guys have had some incredible programming throughout CSS we're a bit biased but we'd argue the people you hire is going to have as big of an impact on whether or not you guys are successful as anything else so um Talent is a broad topic we understand you guys are all at different points along the journey and with that said you know we do still want to try to give some tangible advice and some key things that you guys should all be thinking about at this early stage um quick intros on our site as Jeff just mentioned I'm Craig Naylor I'm the head of talent for a16c crypto and also be joined by Maddie Hassan who leads

executive Talent here for a16z crypto uh quickly look at our agenda what we're going to be covering uh throughout the session today we've broken this up into three different areas first being around defining your needs uh the pre-work you know what needs to happen before you actually start recruiting uh establishing your talent brand creating a hiring plan developing an interview framework uh next we'll dive into building a pipeline so once you define your needs and what you're trying to build how do you actually go about recruiting and building a pipeline and then lastly focusing on closing the candidate you know all this means nothing if you don't actually get the candidate to accept an offer at the end of the process so you've identified someone great how do we actually get them across the finish line so we'll spend some time on that then lastly

we'll leave some time for Q a again understanding you guys are all at different points along the journey so happy to answer any particular questions you might have um cool so first in terms of defining your needs and your overall Talent philosophy you know there's a lot of things when thinking about what makes a business successful am I going after the right Market do I have do I have the right product do I have the right Vision ultimately do I have the right people and team to execute on these things a great idea is going to fail if you don't have the right people working on it and with that said it's that much more critical that you really Define what your needs are what it is that you're looking for and how these all of these puzzle pieces should fit together so let's dive in you know before we really

get into defining what your needs are let's first start with defining your talent brand as part of your overall Talent philosophy so let's think back a couple weeks ago again Maddie and I were supposed to be here a few weeks ago but I think back to uh the sessions we had on culture um from Jeannie Daisy and key um you know as Jeannie mentioned a few weeks back uh culture can be a major competitive Advantage for you when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent you know think of of companies you've worked at before or even just other interviews you've done how did the culture show itself throughout that process how did it influence your decision as to whether or not you're going to join the company or just your overall impression that was left afterwards people want to be inspired by their place of work and you as the

founder are critical in establishing that from the very beginning from day one it's something you're going to be asked about by every single candidate along the process and you know again as we touched on a few weeks ago it's so important that you really lean into your culture you own it you have it living and breathing throughout your organization and the cert and the same should be said for the hiring process culture is definitely something you want to uh to have be part of the interview process and again this is going to be something you need to convey as part of your talent brand as well Matty will touch on that in a little bit in terms of how we can actually weave culture into the interview process but more on that in a little bit but like we said a few weeks back if you're not intentional

about culture it's likely not going to be conveyed well and certainly applies throughout your interview processes as well uh then with regards to your pitch so again this is a pretty basic part of recruiting but uh how are you getting people excited about what it is that you're doing and the product that you're building uh you know some people think of this as an elevator pitch but really all we're looking for is just a clear crisp concise way uh of describing what you're building and why people should be excited about it um it can be as simple as just putting together a quick blurb um and again having some sort of a way to articulate this both written as well as verbal and training folks on your team to follow something uh similar there and again creating materials on this like share these Resources with

your team you want to make sure that there's a consistent message being conveyed across everyone you don't want candidates to be confused because they had three or four different conversations where the vision wasn't aligned in terms of what they were describing and what you guys are trying to achieve everyone that is on the founding team is part of your recruiting team as well and should be able to articulate the division just as well as you can uh then lastly we'll focus on external content here you know when somebody Googles your company what do they see what are the things that you want them to know about you when you don't really have a conversation or a chance to explain uh your website your careers page your social media presence uh these are all opportunities to let prospective candidates know what you guys are all about you know we started to see uh lots

of companies put together notion Pages several of our CSS cohort has done that as well uh and with this you know you can highlight things like your benefits the roles that are open the company culture your mission statement the vision explain more about the product again just things that you want the external world to know about you when you don't have a chance to explain it via conversation this is going to set the foundation for everything that you do externally as you start to build your team and start to tap the market and try to tell your story more effectively than really any DM or email that you could write to somebody this external content is going to be what gives people the most context so with that said I'm going to bring media up on the stage now to talk through creating an actual hiring plan

and you know once you it is actually time to set out to hire how do you craft that proper plan how do you craft an org chart uh interview framework all while maintaining a high Talent bar so again Medi will come up to talk through that thank you so much Craig good to be here with all of you so creating a hiring plan I think one of the first things to consider in creating a hiring plan is figuring out your org design to Genie's analogy a few weeks back you have your foundation set your company culture think of this as like the layout of the house how many bedrooms am I going to have where's the kitchen going to be how many bathrooms how am I going to set up this thing and in terms of actually building your company I would look at this as like my product team my

marketing team my operations teams engineering going to be in product is product going to be in engineering and to Ryan's talk yesterday this will be fluid you are going to make changes you may remodel every now and then but I think starting off with this is a good way to set yourself up for success in beginning to craft do these things another thing to Think Through in terms of your org design is ratios of hiring getting a plan up front like if I hire five to seven Engineers do I need an engineering manager or a product person to complement them or a marketing person or a designer all these things up front having a blueprint that you can go off of just helps you move in the right direction as you begin to scale your company next is head count planning this would be a double click on your org design so

like you have your product organization your engineering organization but how many people do I actually need in order to deliver on some of these Milestones that I'm going to be executing on as I scale my company hopefully at this point you have your product roadmap and the timelines and the features and all these things outlined for the next three six nine 12 months but a common mistake I think early stage Founders make is knowing exactly what I need to hire to execute on this so like three back-end Engineers two front-end Engineers if you look back at like 2021 2022 I think people didn't have that discipline or a plan that they stuck to and we're just hiring like crazy bringing in all these different people and you can see a lot of changes had to be made and I think it's because they got stuck in fomo or

comparing themselves with other competitors when you have a head count plan in place I think it helps you stay disciplined and stick into what you actually need to build your company and then try to plan for different scenarios that may come up if I get this many users for my product or where I get this much Market revenue or if the market conditions change you can have different scenarios that you can reference and look at just so you're not caught off guard and emotionally making changes again based on things that are out of your control role prioritization is really trying to figure out exactly um which order you should be hiring you're not always going to be able to do this you may find a really strong candidate that you just need to get now and timing just doesn't work out in the way you want to but to the best that you

can in terms of discipline on this I think it's important to try and structure the timing of each hire an example from a former company I used to work at we were building out our sales organization we had head count for four people ahead of sales and then three sdrs specific to each vertical we ended up hiring the three sdrs first and that seemed great at the moment but they were building in the wrong direction when the head of sales had come on quickly found out that this wasn't the right type of people that they wanted for their organization and it just wasn't the right Market that they should be looking at so we had to unwind let them go and rebuild again and as Ryan mentioned yesterday it's really hard to do this when you move in the direction so if you can try to stay disciplined and hire in

the right order and prioritize as much as you as possible um something that we built here internally at a16z is called the mock framework this is really an internal job description that you can reference in helping put together and thinking about what it is you're building it's Mission outcomes and competencies think of the mission as the qualification of the requisition why am I hiring this person do I actually need them and you may find you may not need them and so it's a good exercise to do in determining should I hire this person can I get a part-time person a contractor Etc I would look at the outcomes as the specific accomplishments that you want this person to do being specific trying to articulate what you expect this person to do in three months six months nine months also helps you begin to think about your interviewer assessment

and then competencies is the last thing how you expect the person to operate against the outcomes what is their background what is their skill set and specific experience and again another good thing to use when you put together your interview framework and focus areas and then taking the mock framework and putting together an external job description that you would put on your careers page or share externally with candidates as you begin to do Outreach so let's go over a sample job description we picked a software engineering role that we used to hire here at a16z on the crypto team as you can see one of the first things is a company summary this should Engage The Audience they should be able to explain clearly what it is your company's building what is your product idea and within 10 seconds or less get them

captivated to want to read further um next is your your roll overview this is really the mission from the mock framework in story form exactly what you expect the person should be doing in this role the responsibilities these are the outcomes so what you expect the person to do in list form things that they should be looking at in terms of evaluating themselves and if they're interested in this type of work and then last of the qualifications this would be the competencies the specific things in their background and skill set and experience these should be fairly measurable and objective and then culture either putting this in your job description or somewhere on your page I think is really important to Jeannie and Craig's points on culture and even Ryan yesterday something really

important can help candidates either self-select in or even self-select out depending on whether they align with what you're building and I know this may seem frustrating or something that could be on the downside of getting candidates engaged in the early stages but in the long run of building your company I think finding people that align with your culture will go a long way and then jumping into interviewer framework so you have your mock set up your job descriptions and now you're ready to start assessing candidates this is something really important that you want to really take your time in putting together this is how you maintain and establish a really high bar for assessing candidates and so one of the first things to think about is your assessment criteria this is really like the focus areas that you're going to be

giving to each person that will be interviewing for you making sure that everybody is encompassing all the things that matter in hiring for this role so that you're I think it's common for you know early stages or not thinking through too much about this or having a plan in place for everybody to ask the same question to the candidate you end up hiring them because everyone asked that one question they were fantastic at that he's fine quickly within 30 days no one asks them about the other four parts of the job and so now you have this big gap so making sure you're disciplined and sticking to this and in the spirit of maintaining a high bar I think it's really important to stick to this you're going to find yourself talking to candidates and getting really excited about something that they've done but then missing all these other things

having your assessment criteria put in place that you can reference is really important to maintaining a really high bar along the way um interview calibration and training taking time to make sure everybody understands that's helping USS candidates what it is exactly you're looking for what is the borrower what's important to you culturally as a company so that there's no questions left unanswered no one's going into this blind not really sure what it is exactly that you're looking for now you may find that there's people on your team or even yourselves have never actually interviewed people before and you don't know how do I assess candidates there are third party firms that you can work with bring on board to help you with this they can go over interviewer best practices how to even write feedback

etiquette for conducting a positive experience for candidates because you know you want to make sure that they're all feeling like you know what you're doing and you're set up for success to do that and how to deep dive into a candidate and Probe on specific areas whether concerns or things that are really critical for the role or another option would be to bring on an advisor into your company someone who's done this at scale like if you're hiring Engineers bringing on a former CTO or a current CTO that has a lot of experience in doing this and helping you set that up within your company at all points of your interview process you should be meeting every candidate whether it's in person via or via Zoom but I think there may be situations where it's better to do a take-home assignment or some sort of project like

a coding assessment whatever it is depending on the role um up here we have two examples one is a standard hiring flow another one is one with a take-home assignment just quickly a couple trade-offs on each one um with the standard hiring flow you do spend a little bit more time assessing candidates your own but could be a more positive candidate experience with a take-home assignment you really want to make sure you're setting them up to continue the whole process a lot of candidates might drop off and not do this it's just making sure you're spending that your initial call really getting them into that process and making sure they're going to follow through I think something important through all this is thinking through the candid experience and being really thoughtful on like if I was going

through this process myself would I actually stick with this and so asking advisors mentors third-party people to evaluate your process and even during the interview process like don't hesitate to make changes if you need to if you're finding the data or feedback from candidates as this process was bad or you know what not making sure you're tracking all that and making adjustments as needed cool so you're probably wondering I have all this stuff put together I have my Frameworks I have my interview criteria I have my job descriptions how do I actually go and find candidates Craig is going to jump into that a little bit here thank you um so building a pipeline before we dive into the true recruiting and sourcing side of talent acquisition uh you know

tying back to the building a house for example let's first focus on the foundation Underneath It All which is recruiting operation so on the recruiting app side there's really just two things I want to convey around this you know it's really important that there's that you develop some sort of a method for tracking and documenting all of your hiring activity the purpose of this is somewhat twofold you know first just to ensure that you're holding yourself in the hiring team accountable to the assessment framework and the uh all the things that many just talked through if you're not documenting feedback if you're not documenting your hiring processes it's going to be really hard to enforce that amongst your your interviewing team things like having detailed scorecards organized interview questions it's also going to ensure a fair consistent evaluation is done and really help you when it's it's time to

make those difficult hiring decisions and when it's actually time to pull the trigger the second part of this is to ensure basically just that you're not dropping the ball on any candidates you guys are all founders you have 10 000 things you could be doing at any given moment and as a result if you're not diligent about tracking and following up with candidates you're going to have things slip through the cracks inevitably um somebody that that reached or that you reached out to responded said now's not a good time hit me up again in three or four months if you don't have some sort of a documented way and process of following up with these things you're going to forget about folks and um you know as many just alluded to candidate experience is such a critical part of the overall hiring process you'd hate to

lose out on a great candidate because you took two weeks to get back to them and they lost interest in the meantime it's also going to be critical on ensuring that you have all the data that you need for future hires you know your organization is going to change over time maybe you meet somebody today that's not the right fit now but six months from now 12 months from now is your organization matures or maybe new roles open they could be the right fit then be very very helpful to have all these things to look back on later down the road so again build the infrastructure for this sooner rather than later you'll certainly thank yourself down the road now as far as what the tools and resources are around this you know like likely you won't need to expand invest too much in this area

until you have a little bit more volume with the level of hiring that you're doing or once you've hired an internal Talent team and we've got applicant tracking systems listed here but again likely this isn't going to be needed until you have internal Talent support in the meantime you guys can get by on G Suite you know have a simple Google sheet tracking all of your candidates you know some sort of a scorecard template that you build into a Google doc and of course leverage a calendar tool as well having some sort of a call to action where people can book in time on your calendar avoiding that back and forth again it's just going to make the entire process more efficient but from a tooling perspective there's really not much else that you need Beyond these things there's a lot of public channels that we can source and find talent in

um so that's what we're going to touch on next so again you guys are all founders I realize you're busy and you have a million things to be doing but you're also recruiters at this early stage and so we'll touch on some of the basics here around sourcing uh and actually building a pipeline um you know first and foremost I think the the fastest way and really the easiest way to get going in terms of building out your team is is to leverage your existing Network and the network of those folks who are working for you um you know there's all kinds of Statistics you can point to around how much more likely it is for a referred candidate to land a job versus a cold one again you want to lean on your founding team investors mentors advisors friends people who who you know

typically great talent knows other great talent you want to make sure that you're doing what you can to expand your message and again tying it back to the pitch materials and some of the external content we talked about earlier make it easy for these people you know again if you're asking folks to refer people to you or you're trying to pick apart their networks give them the ammunition that they need to describe your opportunity uh give them that quick elevator pitch and a way that they can really talk through things I would also say frequently Asked people don't be afraid to ask the same person twice you know as a couple of months have gone by you'd be surprised how many times I've seen candidates get referred in and you just want to say to the person why didn't you give this to me six months ago the

reality is things just change people you know they go through different parts maybe somebody wasn't available then so they weren't top of mind and now they are it's never too often to be asking for these types of things and really making sure that hiring is staying top of mind for everybody that's involved with your organization and then I'd encourage you to think outside the box on this too it's not just your network but how do you tap into your networks Network you know is there a professor that you're really close with in college that might know other people in a similar area that you could could get to know further there or kind of build off of their Network are there other people uh you know within other clubs or you know blockchain clubs that you were a part of before can you now take a more

active role as a company you know being more vocal in these types of settings and other things you're going to get to a point you know where you have captured Network or you have tapped all of the resources that are available to you and you'll actually want to do some some external sourcing as well and again I know a lot of you guys are starting to post jobs and you have careers pages and things and likely you will get some candidates flowing through this way but the reality is conversion rates tend to be very low for inbound applications now you can do things to help with that make sure again that these are posted in areas where your talent is living but you are going to have to find some time where you actually need to go hunt and find the right talent for you and so

just to briefly touch on the sourcing and candidate Outreach side I think you first want to start with with mapping the market again I don't think many of you will be spending you know hours upon hours sending thousands of LinkedIn and males but there is going to be a time where it makes sense for you guys to roll up your sleeves and do some strategic sourcing um again getting into the market mapping side of this like what are your competitors doing where's the talent that you're at where are people that are are currently working on the things that you're working on where are they living where are they active you know LinkedIn is certainly still our most common channel in terms of finding talent but increasingly we're seeing more Uncommon ways of finding folks or at least in comparison to a lot of web 2 recruiting

it's very common to Source people from Twitter from telegram groups from Discord groups and I think there's a very heavy heavy IRL component to web3 as well a lot of events and conferences which are really good recruiting opportunities for you as well so when you go to these events be active at them you know attend happy hours be social have conversations and again always be asking folks for referrals if you have a good conversation with somebody even if it's not the right fit for them uh so just to briefly touch on messaging for a quick second uh to reference Piers chat from yesterday uh we're now at that dreaded Outreach part of talent acquisition and um you know you found a candidate that looks perfect how do we actually go about engaging them uh and how do we craft the message

um yeah I've broken this up into a couple of different areas you know first we'll touch on content and you know there's not a perfect science to this but generally speaking I found a few things to be uh more fruitful than others uh first just don't overthink it you know a simple concise message with just enough detail to get them wanting to know more is really all you're looking to do here um you don't have to write an essay about why this is the greatest opportunity that's ever going to present itself to that person nobody wants to read that again it's just enough to get them hooked and then you'll take it from there I'd encourage you to show some personalization as well show them you're not a robot uh if there's something in their background that is really exciting to you and is the primary reason that

you're engaging them and reaching out mention that it'll get them excited and again feel a little bit more personalized to them you know including hyper let the opportunity sell itself again you don't want to have this big 510 paragraph long email give them the opportunity to self-service and find out information on their own again tying it back to a lot of the talent brand and external content that we talked about earlier this is where this is going to be playing a key role throughout the entire process and then lastly experiment especially when you're recruiting at bulk or at higher numbers a b tests different messages the same message isn't going to land the same with every single candidate make some about the product make some about the the industry or the problem that you're trying to solve maybe some more

about the team that you build or the funding that you've received there's all kinds of different areas that you could craft a message around and all these things can be measured so again making sure that you're experimenting throughout the process with the content that you're writing and then as far as Cadence goes I think the key thing I wanted to to note here is it's okay to hit up the same person twice or three times over a scheduled period of time we all know we all received the emails at times where we were very busy or heads down a project and we just don't get back to it and then you think about it you know a month or two later a lot of times just sending that follow-up email of hey not sure if you saw my first note just wanted to bump this back to the top

of your inbox you'd be surprised at how much success recruiting teams find in that and very often your hires are being made from not the first message that you sent to folks but after persistent follow-up I would also say experiment on that side as well again the time of day that you're sending messages the number of messages that you're sending the time in between each of these messages all these things can matter again they're all able to be measured as well so again if you're recruiting at bulk these are things that typically what will happen as you have an internal recruiting team as you start going at a higher scale but all of these things can be measured and if there's difference in conversion rates of even just a few percentage points it can send you a tremendous amount of time throughout the hiring process and then re-engaging you know

timing is not always going to work out for folks if somebody gets back to you and says I want to finish the project that I'm on hit me up again in six months that's totally fine but keep that person engaged along the way in the meantime you guys have had a new feature launch or you've launched the product or closed another round of fundraising or brought on a key team member you can shoot this person just quick little notes to keep them informed and make sure that you're staying top of mind again the timeline that they gave you of six months maybe that goes down to three maybe it goes down to four but again you're just wanting to make sure that you're staying top of mind for all these folks um then just a quick look at a sample message here again I'm not going to read

through this but you know I really just want to highlight uh again a quick introduction my name is Craig I'm the founder of this company linking in to our notion page linking into a call to action at the end here for feel free to grab some time on my calendar if you're down for a chat we've got our white paper linked at the bottom we've got our blog linked at the bottom these all little things but again it's a relatively short note a relatively short note and then look at the follow-up again just wanted to bump this to the top of your inbox let me know if you're open for a quick chat we really don't have to overthink it um then again I mentioned you guys are all founders you guys can't be spending all of your time uh recruiting and sourcing and trying to build pipelines

so there is going to come a point where you want to leverage external resources whether it's agencies or other methods of a building pipeline I'm going to hand it back to Maddie here to talk through some of the options for additional resources so I want to talk about a couple options in the form of agencies that you all can consider and dive a little deep on each one so you have understanding of how they work one is called an RPO recruiting process Outsourcing this is essentially where you bring a whole Talent team in on a temporary basis it's an embedded Talent team the lab email aliases within your company pretty much a full-on talent organization from recruiting coordination interviewing offers all that but you can turn them on and off as needed so you don't have to commit to hiring a full Talent organization but

could be good for like a Sprint of hires that you need to make in a short period of time next is retain search this you'd probably want to use when you're hiring an executive or someone really like rare or a high season person most exact search firms operate in this type of model the thing about this is you're paying the fee up front you're basically retaining the agency and the fees can be anywhere from 75 000 upwards to 130 000. minus the difference of the third year one third of a Year's cash compensation so again it's really expensive be thoughtful when interviewing retain search firms just because you want to make sure you're finding the one that has the network for the type of candidate that you're hiring and also work can compatibly work well with you because again you're spending a lot of

money it's a big investment and most exact search firms will operate in this manner contingent search probably the option that's going to work best for early stage Founders this is where you only pay if you get the hire the ranges for these fees are anywhere between 15 to 30 percent of the first year cash compensation you can always negotiate on this but keep in mind just because the rate is lower doesn't mean you're getting a good deal a lot of these agencies do work on commission purely and so in their mind if the fee is lower they may not spend as much time on that one versus another client that does have a higher fee so again Case by case basis you want to look into this and then if you're doing volume hiring you could probably negotiate with them

so like the first you know one through five hires might be at this percentage the highest five through ten would be at a lower percentage so again always ask and see if you can negotiate this down and then you're probably wondering at what point do I get a full-time resource to bring in-house to run my talent function for me I think a general rule of thumb is if you're hiring 10 or more for more than two years in a row or more than a year in a row it's probably more cost effective to bring someone on full time into your team and another benefit of doing that is you actually start to invest in your talent brand long term when you're using some of these agencies or short-term resources you're going to get a different perspective and different approach every time and no one's actually investing in building

this out so hiring a full-time person when you're ready could be good for that long-term Vision now none of this matters if you can't close the candidate so Craig's going to jump into some best practices there uh you know all this work really means nothing uh if you don't close the candidate there's a lot of work that goes into this but every interaction that you have with the candidate is ultimately going to influence whether or not they accept or decline your offer and ultimately join the company so to touch on closing strategy uh I think the first thing we want to touch on is really just understanding your candidate's motivations and concerns uh closing starts in the first conversation that you have with the candidate uh and is really you know the best strategy the best closing strategy is one that is somewhat customized and evolves with

each candidate you're going to want to tailor how you're pitching your opportunity based on this this individual's motivations and the concerns that they have when considering your opportunity you should be very inquisitive about these things not just once you've decided to make an offer but all throughout the entire process you know things such as how they feel about your company and culture how do they feel about the role they're interviewing for how that compares to what they do today the seniority of the position versus where they're at now how compensation fits into this uh what what is the competitive landscape for this particular candidate too to they have competing offers are they actively looking to leave the situation they're in or are they in love with their current gig and you're really trying hard to pull them out of that all of these things are going to influence how

you actually want to present the opportunity but ideally none of these things are coming as a surprise to you at the very end of the process again you should be having these conversations all the way throughout and try to get out in front of potential issues you know compensation is obviously a big part we all work for a reason and you know there's certain points in people's lives or certain compensation philosophies that aren't going to work for every single person if in your first chat with somebody you realize they're working at Fang you know a Fang company where you know they have a much higher base salary that you than what you can offer I'd be upfront about that and again if you see this as something that could be of concern you'd rather have those conversations earlier in the process as opposed to just learning this after both

sides have wasted a bunch of time so again as you understand what the concerns are and what the proper motivations are these are things that you should be adapting and evolving your strategy to throughout the process the other thing I would say is is educate your your audience as well if you find yourself getting the same concerns over and over again from candidates build materials around it again going back to the talent and Pitch materials from earlier um if you you're getting the same questions from candidates there's likely something wrong with how you're presenting it uh or there could be a better way of doing it or a more compelling way of doing it and so taking notes on that throughout the time and don't be afraid to really change your strategy uh when you feel like there's a theme happening you know examples of

this we see this a lot with with web 3 companies of you know a lot of trying to recruit people from web 2 to web 3 if you keep finding candidates are asking the same questions they're they don't understand how web3 is more than just the cost of bitcoin or the price of ethereum um you know build a page build something that expresses what web3 is what it's all about and how your your product fits into the ecosystem the overall nature of what we're trying to do um and then lastly getting to yes so once the motivations and concerns are well established it's really time to sell you know emphasize the parts that excite them uh make sure you're talking through their concerns and details uh and mitigating those where possible um you know some of the things that can help with this are setting up proper

cell calls and really just showing the love throughout the entire interviewing process so when it comes to sell calls these can be a very very effective tool in terms of actually getting folks across the line at the end you know if they've only been hearing the pitch from you over and over again it might just be helpful to have a second perspective and a fresh lens on it I think where these can go wrong is where you don't prep the people doing the cell calls very well if you have somebody and again who can do these cell calls it's it's other members of the team it's investors it's advisors it's mentors the same people you're trying to tap into their networks but basically somebody that you think will represent the company well and speak to this individual candidate so again where these these don't go well is where you

you don't prep them the person just goes in and gives the same cell that they give to every other candidate right rather than customizing it to this individual candidate's motivations and concerns so again prior to that call do everything you can do to bring that person fully up to speed on the situation with this particular candidate you know another thing we have here is showing the love you know after that you made a a decision to move forward with an offer have everybody on the team that interviewed them send a quick note hey very excited that we're moving forward let me know if you have any questions or if you want to set up some time to chat just a little note like that again can really separate you from other opportunities other offers they may be considering and really make you stand out and also learn what are the concerns

and what are the motivations for this person um you know Canada gifts and swag is another way of doing this too and after an on-site interview maybe you're just doing something as simple as giving them one of your stickers or you know crazy branded stock with your company logo on it or a onesie for their baby I mean there's a lot of really inexpensive things that you can do here that really do make a difference and kind of give that Personal Touch and can give some exposure as to what it's like to work for your company and the call sure you're trying to build and everything else you know an example that came to mind for this is I don't know if anybody has seen the movie air that the new Michael Jordan going to Nike movie but you know at the time going back to that

uh Nike shouldn't have gotten Jordan right like Nike was not Nike in 1983 Adidas and Converse were the folks that were primarily driving a lot of this traffic and a lot of the attention from the basketball Community um Nike really crafted a unique pitch here where they very much customized it to what MJ wanted whereas Converse and Adidas their pitches were you can be like Larry Bird you can be like Magic Johnson and have a shoe with us MJ wanted to be MJ he didn't want to be Larry Bird he didn't want to be Mike Magic Johnson and so as a result of that their pitch was extremely custom to him whereas the other two pitches were very much you know kind of standardized in what they do for everyone so I think we all know how the story ended there Jordan goes to Nike I think Nike ended

up acquiring Converse some years later so I think they worked out for him but again the the overall message of the example here is really customizing your pitch to that particular individual what does this person want what are they trying to achieve by you know taking on their next job what are the things they're looking for in a next role on the things they want to prioritize um and and really crafting your pitch around that I do feel like I need to throw in a caveat here at the end of being mindful to not oversell you don't want to paint a picture that's not real you don't want to set up the wrong expectations for a candidate coming in that leads them to being unhappy three months after they take the job or six months down the road so again be reasonable be realistic about what the

state of the world is but that doesn't mean that you can't sell the things that really matter and help mitigate the concerns that they might have with your opportunity so in summary we talked through again the three different components here three key areas that we think you guys should all be thinking about as you're starting to build your teams first and foremost all the pre-work the things you need to be worried about prior to actually setting out to hire investing the time here will make sure you don't waste the T your time the team's time candidates times down the road and also ensure that that clear High hiring bar then building a pipeline again what what are some of the external resources you can Leverage What are the things you need to be thinking about from an organizational perspective as you're starting to craft that Pipeline

and then lastly closing the candidate again this is something that that starts all the way back in the defining your needs section what is your talent brand how are you treating candidates how are you working you know your pitch into every single part of this process so that's all we have happened happy to open up the questions one thing you guys brought up was documenting processes how do you do that what are you documenting like they're onboarding code like what does that mean to document like the onboarding flow or I mean a document processes what does that look like so I think there's different stages that you're probably going to be doing this at the earliest stage using G Suite keep it simple like either Google Docs or Google Sheets but try to track as many things as possible and be as organized as you can it could be as

simple as you know one sheet that's your whole interview process from the beginning like creating your hiring plan thinking through the focus areas and being able to share that with each person that's going to be interviewing and then on the other end of like your Google sheet would be like your interview feedback and all the tracking of that like I've talked to this candidate here's our scorecard for each one summarizing all of it it's important to do at the earliest stage because one this does set the foundation for future you know upgrade that you're going to do as you begin to scale your org but even from like you know Candy experience and reputationally like you talk to a candidate like in your first year four years later you're too early for them you talk to them again four years later you don't remember that you talk to them

like those little things will go a long way in helping you bring that person in but if you have that in your records and you can reference that it'll help you a lot and on the opposite end you may have had like the worst candidate ever in your first year you forget about it five years later that candidate comes back around reapplies you completely don't remember they join you're like oh my God this was that same person super toxic I should have never brought them on if you don't keep records and you don't have these processes in place and all that data you could make a lot of mistakes yeah and just to add to that too and write things down uh you know it's one of those like you'll have have a lot of post interview conversations where you think everybody's on the same page

leaving it but the key takeaways you need to make sure that you write them down which will help you scale that hiring process as well right like as you onboard new team members you don't want to have to go through the full-on interview training and calibration every single time somebody new joins your team so being you know again diligent about writing these things down and editing them as you go too like you guys should read about your high re-evaluate your hiring processes frequently every month every two months like just to make sure there's no major gaps in any one part of the funnel if you're seeing really really low conversion and we can help you guys with what standard conversion rates are at you know technical phone screen to on-site on-site to offer like what things you should be striving for here but the overall kind of message

here is like you just want to be mindful of where our potential breaks within our funnel what are things that we need to try to optimize for and if you're not tracking these things if you're not really organized about it it's just going to be you know finger in the wind like how does it feel today um but yeah one thing with the working remote is you always try to you assume that people are on the same page oftentimes in terms of what we're building towards who we're building for and when I think about like documenting processes I try to think about how can we consistently remind people like why we're here why are we on slack right now like why are you shipping this feature how do you recommend sort of like documenting that process and reiterating that stuff so for example for crypto I

used to work in restaurants and the guy the boss would always plaster the mission when we'd enter the kitchen when we leave the kitchen it'd be on the walls like he'd always remind us like why we're doing this why we're here it'd be these subliminal things I'm trying to think how can I incorporate more of that yeah I mean I think a good way to do this is to really tie it to your cultural values and again if we've talked so much about the importance of really having that culture be prevalent and something you're talking about all the time you can build that into interview processes you know I've seen companies um you know as part of their scorecards they'll make sure that they tie cultural you know cultural missions or things that they're trying to achieve within the scorecards and actually set up the

feedback framework based around these types of things now depending on what your values are it may or may not be possible to do that but I think where you can weave in kind of the overall Vision into your internal hiring team it keeps people aligned on what it is that you're trying to build and why you need to hire these people it's like that's the other thing that you know as you're starting to scale the organization a lot of folks won't be able to to see around corners in the way that you guys will as Founders and they might be asking themselves why are we even doing this why do we need this person and it really is your job as a Founder to make sure people are aligned on this and uh that you're keeping them aligned for what the vision is and where you guys are trying

to go with everyone that you're interviewing so I would also encourage you to you know really advocate for recruiting within your organization um you know I I I've seen Founders tell their founding teams you guys are founders first and the engineers I'm sorry recruiters first and Engineers second or whatever like you just want to have this culture where people are excited to recruit and they're excited to help scale the company you don't want to have a situation where you know it's 10 minutes before their interview and they're like I gotta go do this for an hour this is a waste of time I have to stop coding I have to break my you know context switch all of these things like they should should know that that's as important as the code they're writing because of of what you guys are trying to achieve by hiring these people

last thing promise how do we during the interview process communicate that this is more than just like a nine to five and do it in a very like empathetic but very I guess uh diplomatic aggressive manner yeah um I mean I I tie it back to it again like the cultural like what are you putting out there externally I think the way that that you describe your culture I don't know if you want to go as far as saying this could be the hardest job you've ever had and this is a sweatshop it's a tough place to work but you can also say things like you know along the lines of you know we're really trying to you know we're aggressively trying to build or we have you know people who are really really passionate about what we're building there's different ways to kind of describe that environment

um without you know bluntly stating like we want you to be online all the time um but you know I think that's something you also should be assessing for throughout the interview process again that cultural fit um you know is this person more of the the missionary versus the mercenary are they more concerned with themselves and what they're doing versus the mission of the company and what we're all trying to achieve when everyone's unified behind a vision they're not counting the hours on you know how how long have I worked today and um you know just trying to to get off of work for the for that particular day or that particular week they're focused on the the problem they're trying to solve and that makes time go by so much quicker and also you know takes a lot of the emotion and some of those other

things that can get people kind of upset uh while they're working for you anything to add money we did this actually at chain link Labs it was really important the company I was at prior to coming here and just being very genuine and intentional on the why behind that I think that will come across like why are you actually having everybody operate in this way and you know for the founder there Sergey he was very very driven to be successful like he was really clear like he was personally passionate behind it so people rallied behind that just knowing that he wasn't just saying these things for the sake of saying it but he actually lived it out and he would clearly explain this like we would do quarterly um hiring manager trainings of going through the key operating principles that were really important to the values

there so now you have all the managers who understand it they breed that we talked through real examples on a quarterly basis of people that embody these values so you actually saw like these were things that were important they weren't just posters on the wall that you walked by and no one can recall and remember them but these were embedded into the DNA of the company and it showed in how they were delivering on a regular basis by tying it back to here's why we're winning because we do this this and this and we stay disciplined on it makes sense thank you yeah thanks guys really awesome talk um wanted to ask if either both of you have any examples of kind of going above and beyond to tailoring closing a candidate around things that you learned about them in the process I can think of one example from when I

was at Uber um and again this kind of goes back to understanding a particular candidate's personal situation what are their concerns and also what gets them excited and um the the story that comes to mind here is um there was a candidate we were trying to interview I think he was working at a startup that had been acquired by LinkedIn he was very much a startup guy that didn't want to work at LinkedIn and we were really trying to sell them on the vision of we were still building Uber even though there's a couple thousand people here like it is still a startup we are still trying to build um and this person was just a really really strong cultural fit I mean they checked all the boxes for us but they had a lot of concerns I mean there was you know some some press happenings at

Uber um you know there's a lot of concerns that people had at that particular time and we really wanted to make this person again feel the love and kind of see what it's like with the people that we have and less about what you read in the tabloids and um you know for this particular individual we found out he was a big skateboarder and you know I don't know how common that is within our community there was nobody else on our team that was also a big skateboarder but we did a little bit of research into this and you know found a shop that made very high-end skateboards we basically got one for him that had Uber branding all over it and then like our head of engineering actually drove to this individual's house gave them this gift the guy signed the offer the next day

and like I think this candidate had six or seven competing offers no one else did anything like that right and so I think we were very much you know it was between us and two or three other companies at the time but that extra level of of going above and beyond doing something very custom physical tangible uh was a major difference from it was something that he referenced after he joined that if it weren't for this I wouldn't be here and it was something so basic it's just giving them a skateboard but again just those little things can mean a lot for some people yeah another example that I have is um here at a16z we had an exact hired that we were trying to help a portfolio company land and we knew that this person was really impressed by the general partner behind it and so not

just having the general partner jump on the call and sell them but prepping on the little detail that went a long way for this person that we knew and gathered from the portfolio company to have them focus and jump in on their personal experience of those concerns that the individual had and so again to like what Craig was saying earlier in the presentation on closing strategy like really being thoughtful through the interview process and taking notes of the things that you know are important and documenting those things can be the biggest difference between one company Landing someone versus the other to the Nike Air example like they really honed in on these are the things that are top of mind when you come at the end of the process weeks later and like wow that person remembered they actually care about like me and why I'm joining here

versus just another being another candidate I think those are the things that can really win someone over awesome thanks so much you're welcome any other questions anything else awesome well thanks so much Craig and Maddie that was great [Music]