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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

Jonathan Basker is a NYC tech community mainstay--having worked in recruiting and people functions at Etsy and Betaworks among others since 2011.  We spoke about how his role has developed and what he sees at companies that have made it to 75 or more people and what he works on to help people happier and more productive.  

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...

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...

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.  

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

There aren't many areas of cutting edge tech more competitive than computer vision and artificial intelligence.  Companies like Google, Snap, and Facebook among others are all vying for the kinds of engineers and PhDs that will change the way you and machines see the world, literally.  Not only is the actual tech difficult, but recruiting for it against these companies with nearly unlimited warchests is even harder.  Clarifai's founder Matt Zeiler shares with us how he convinces talent to...

Hagos Mehreteab has been a founder, a CTO, a recruiter, and now he combines all those skills into one as "Head of Organizational Engineering" at Codecademy.  Basically, as it relates to the people side of the business, he turns all of the whack-a-mole type things that come up at a startup into measurable, repeatable processes.  When you think of it that way, it makes sense that you'd put someone technical in that role.  Even when it comes to people development and soft skills, if you're going...

Employee evaluations can be useful tools for both employees and employers alike--but they can also be an administrative time suck.  How do you make them work for everyone so that they help startups make sure they have the best people performing at their best--and making improvements when necessary?  Matt Hoffman from DigitalOcean will share what he's learned and you can evaluate him in the comments.