From A People Perspective

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (00:05.272)
So I am graced with Mike Bentley's presence today, who has volunteered willingly to do the first People People podcast. And I am so glad to have you here today, Mike. Yeah, it's good to connect and it should be an interesting conversation. Absolutely. So I mean, if I'm

If I'm being fully transparent, which I always want to be, I'm definitely a little intimidated by you as an individual. Not from like, this guy's gonna beat me up, but like maybe a little bit. But from a, this guy runs a really good recruiting practice. And it's, your reputation precedes you.

And filling in the folks, the four people I assume that are going to be listening to this, you've got the quintessential Google history and Google background. So you spent some time there and jumped over. You flipped over to flip, spent some time over there. And then the last two years you've been working with OpenCare. And I don't want to...

tell your story. I definitely want to hear your story because I'm sure it's more than just a few icons on a LinkedIn profile. But that's that's typically where I want to begin the conversation is really learn learn more about your how you got to where you are and why you're doing what you're doing basically. Yeah, well, I appreciate kind words. It's always good to to butter up the guest before you get stuck into the hard question. I think like everyone I fell into recruitment.

Nobody, I don't think ever ever sets out to be in recruitment. I graduated back in the UK in like 2012. And we were still kind of recovering from the financial crisis. So your options were basically sales or recruitment. That was all the people that were hiring. So I joined a recruitment agency that was just opening a new office. So I did full 360 desk, all the sales stuff, you know, you have to stand up and cold call until you get a deal. And then you can sit down in the morning like

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (02:29.034)
real boiler room stuff and like physically stand up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you could see who was making deals and who was like, was, it was horrible and I was terrible at sales. So, I thought that's what recruitment was. I was like, this is, this is awful. I want to get out of it. Do think that would stand today? I mean, a lot of people asking for standing desks. Do you think that? I'm not sure it was for the ergonomics of it. was more for the shaming of it. Put pressure on folks, but.

Like that's what I thought recruitment was everywhere. And I just thought, is awful. I don't want to do this. So I was kind of looking to make a career pivot. was more, you we talk about the concept of running towards something or running away from something. I was definitely running away from recruitment, but I just didn't know where I was going. was kind of trying to suss all that out at the same time. then fortuitously or serendipitously, someone from Google reached out to me and said, Hey, do you want to move to Ireland?

for 10 months on a contract and being 23 and having never visited Ireland, I immediately said yes and just packed up my car, drove across on the ferry to Ireland and I was like, cool, I live here now, let's figure this out. how long a drive is that? It's honestly, I think the ferry is like two hours. It was maybe like an hour and a half to there. So maybe it took me like four or five hours to move across to a new country.

with literally everything. Like I had this old BMW that was literally packed and it had like all my dresses, like every piece of furniture I could pack. was, it was not necessarily my most well thought through plan. And I later realized that like I never told the British government I was leaving. I know I just left one day and that was the joy of the European union, less so nowadays, but this was back in, I guess, 2013. And I thought I'd be back in like six to 10 months. I was like,

Cool, this will be a cool experience. That kind of turned into about three and a half years. I did very, very technical recruitment. So I staffed the data centers across Europe. So whilst everyone thinks about Google having these cool offices and being here paying people lots of money, and you get to work in like, know, work in Paris, Munich, Warsaw, London, these data centers are enormous. They're,

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (04:55.028)
multiple multiple football fields in a big factory and they have to be near the water so they were all in like these very rural places so I was I was trying to find like obviously very high caliber engineers and convince them that they wanted to move to Belgium or the north of the Netherlands just before it falls into the sea or Finland and I don't know if you ever been to Finland but in rural Finland like for the whole of winter you don't see the sun it's just black

Right. like Finnish people are not super good at integrating with English speaking people. So if you have a family, like it's very isolating. So like these were big, big challenges that sort of big systemic challenges that I had to overcome. And it was, it was really hard, but it was so, so interesting. I got, I got to travel a lot. got to, to see a bunch of places. got to go real deep technically on, sort of the data center and networking space.

Which was interesting. I during that time met my now wife who's Canadian and eventually she said she wanted to come home. So that's how I made that decision to kind of come across to Canada. And it was basically either stay with Google and go out to Waterloo and do some program management for their intern program or go to a smaller company and try and see if I could cut it at a smaller organization. So I joined FLIP when they were just post

Series C. So they're like 320 people, which to like you and I now with this context is like, wow, that's a really big company, but coming from 120 ,000 down to 300 was such a massive jump. So I joined them and led technical recruiting for them for just over a year or so. Wasn't really looking to leave, but I had this opportunity to speak to

to the then CEO of OpenCare, Nikolai, who's the founder and now our executive chairman. And we were meant to meet for coffee because he was trying to pick my brain on like talent acquisition and stuff. We just ended up chatting for like three and a half hours and just kind of really had this connection around how I thought about talent acquisition at that point. really the whole thesis I went into building the team at OpenCare for was that

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (07:23.178)
recruitment shouldn't be about hiring people. It should be about solving business problems. And when you shift that lens away from the output, which is the hire, to what's the fundamental thing that's driving you to this point, it opens up a lot of options. So the talent team at OpenGear has been a lot more focused on taking much of the work away from hiring managers.

We write all the job descriptions, we define the roles, we help balance the teams, we decide if it's a full -time, if it's a contractor, if it's based here in Toronto or if it's based remotely. We make those decisions because we have the expertise and the space. Now, it's obviously not just the recruitment team sat in a room making these decisions independently. There's lots of input both from the hiring manager but also from other members of the leadership team to get different perspectives.

But the ownership really rests with us because this is what we do. This is our craft. And I'm sure like, I hear it so often when recruiters are like, well, you know, the hiring manager doesn't want to pay enough. Or they have unrealistic expectations. Well, they will because they don't spend anywhere near the time that you do in the market talking to people, understanding what the trends in, in salaries are. like,

That to me points to the fact that you're not having enough conversations with your hiring manager and you're not being transparent enough with them to get them to sort of respect the craft and the unique thing that you do. You like you could take your most brilliant engineer, but if you put them into a sales team, they look very, very average because it's not their craft, right? So that's what I've been That's optimistic really. So that's what I've been, I've spent the last sort of two years doing and

I why I have committed so much time to trying to like speak to more and more people and sort of share this way of thinking about things is I think in general, like a lot of recruiters don't really see the path forward and they see the actions that they have to do on a regular basis, but they don't necessarily connect it to directly to the success of the company. Right? Like

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (09:40.622)
for a vast majority of people listening to this, their company is a knowledge working company, right? Like they're not manufacturing, it's not just about X number of headcount equals revenue. It's about like, what's the caliber of the people that you bring in? How do they think through the problems that you're trying to tackle as a business? And that's what determines your success. So when you think about it from that perspective, the most important thing you can do is recruitment. So like,

when you actually sort of extract yourself away from sending LinkedIn messages and interviewing folks, like this is the most critical activity that any small to medium sized business can take part in. And I think that's a really exciting place for anyone to be from a recruitment background. Yeah, no, I mean, it reminds me of a video of Steve Jobs, where he's like the most important thing you do is hiring and

He talked about that when Apple was, you know, X number of employees and he's far surpassed sort of that startup scale level. And the most important thing on his mind is the people that he brings into the business to solve the problem. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it tells it, it speaks, it sort of teaches you that truth of time and time again, in the sense that you have a great team. You end up going that much further.

And yet I find that businesses typically fall into this, let's just do things the way they've always been done. Right. And it's easy to fall into that, that habit. And, and what I think is interesting right now, and I definitely want to spend, you know, some more time kind of digging into some insights, just given your career and where you've come from. but I think, you know,

There's a lot of people right now sort of scratching their heads saying, look, you know, we're having this conversation. It's, you know, eight 30 Eastern on Tuesday, May 26th. So we're two, two months into two and a half months into living in this work from home world, which we'll talk about because of the implications and impact that COVID has had. And a lot of companies that are fortunate enough to, be digitally forward are saying,

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (12:00.654)
You know, why are we, why are we paying for office space? Why are we capitalizing on global talent as opposed to just local talent, right? What other creative opportunities? And we talked a bit about that as well in the sense that like, maybe this is a contractor position. Maybe this is not every, not every position or problem needs to be solved with, you know, a local person that works full time for 40 hours a week. And it's just so easy to just.

have three things in your cookie cutter and be like, I'm never going to go on Amazon and look at different cookie cutters to see if there's some other solutions out there. It's just kind of ridiculous. I like, you know, I really appreciate this, this insight. I guess the one thing before we move on is, know, myself personally, you know, I've never worked at a Google and Amazon or one of the big players with, you know, a hundred thousand employees and

And what's weird to me is people always like, that's such, you you came from such a big startup or a cool startup. like Google has surpassed the concept of startup years ago, decades ago, if not. what I'm really curious about is just, you know, maybe some of your musings on what you took from that experience specifically and how that

either helped or hindered your career moving forward. And maybe after that, not to load you up with all the questions at once, but you talked a bit about the transition of going from like hundred thousand person organization to like a 350 person organization. That would be super jarring, right? That would be as shocking as shaving your beard and having your kid wake up the next day and not recognize their dad, which the listeners won't understand.

we're doing a podcast and something we talked about and I'm going through a phased process of shaving my beard, which is completely irrelevant. But those are my questions. Sure. So I think working at one of those, the big sort of pioneering leaders in tech is definitely a great experience for anyone. I, I'm still undecided on when the best point in your career to do it is I think there's

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (14:21.902)
Pros and cons, like I did it early in my career and learned a lot of the formative skills necessary to be successful later on, right? Like very, very data -driven recruitment, very, very thorough interview processes, competency -based interviewing.

that said, you know, I don't know if I, I don't know if I would get more out of the experience now going back as someone who is who is sort of seven, eight years into their career, going back now into a different context. I lean more towards like earlier in your career, because I do think it gives you a lot of foundational skills and you get amazing training, coaching and development. I think the other reflection is like the

The scale and magnitude of the decisions that you make, especially when I was there as an individual contributor, so I was just, you reported to a manager or whatever. The scale of decision that you make is, is pretty minimal because there's so many layers of organizational hierarchy because it's necessary. 120 ,000 people that like the decisions that actually come to you are very sanitized, right? It's had a lot of eyes on it before it even gets to you to have any input.

Yeah. And so I think back on the decisions that I made that I thought were stressful or high impact and contrast that now with like where I'm at, OpenCare where, you know, we're 50 people. so like, especially during this time, like the decisions we make are very, very high stakes. So I think to kind of put a pin in it, I definitely would recommend it.

I'd recommend it for any folks who can get in earlier in their career. And by early, I don't mean like within the first year, but I mean within the sort of first, maybe like five to seven years of your career. If you can get that exposure, it'll teach you a lot of the core skills that then allow you to sort of step out and go and do something where the scope of influence is much bigger. And then I think your second question was around the world ending and everyone sort of

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (16:33.304)
talking about remote work and the flexibility around it.

I'm maybe a little bit more skeptical on the level of change that this is going to drive to the way people work. If anyone's not Toronto based, if you look up what happened in Trinity Bellwoods this weekend, right? Thousands of people all in a green space. And this is in the middle of a pandemic. What happens three months after this is over, right? If we don't have a second wave and we kind of put this behind us.

in three months time, everyone's just going to want to go back to their normal routine. And so I'm not sure that I am fully bought into this idea that everybody is going to just suddenly adopt this digital first world and just everyone's going to be like, yes, let's work from home. I think the arguments people put forward are somewhat

flawed in my perspective, right? Like, people just want to be able to go and work from anywhere. And it's like, but people build community, right? People have their routines, people choose to situate themselves in a place because they're near family, friends, like they build these communities. There's very few people that are just like itinerant wanderers who just like constantly will bumble around the world and that's their ideal setting. So I just, I think the flexibility is the big.

boon from this and the big positive to take from it. think realizing that people can be effective remotely and offering more flexibility and allowing people to work in ways that kind of suit them is definitely going to be the outcome. I just am not necessarily convinced that everyone should just like get rid of their office spaces and just be like, we're a remote first company because there's a fundamental redesigning of how your business operates in order to support that.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (18:35.438)
I listened to a great podcast with Matt Mullenweg from Automatic. Automatic is the company that's behind Tumblr and Pinterest. They've been a remote first company from the start. They built the entire company to be fully remote. He was talking about these five different levels that you have to transition through to be an effective company. It means devolving decision -making power. means

making decision by comments on a slide deck, right? Like these feel like very jarring concepts to people who are used to working face to face. And that's not an easy process. So when you see the Shopify, the Facebook, the Twitter, the Squares transitioning to being like work from home, it's a massively painful process to go through. And they are very lucky that they have the revenue in the war chest to go through that process. It could take them 12 or 18 months to make that transition.

And like, I know that OpenCare is not in a position to not be an effective organization that cannot make decisions for 12 to 18 months, in the hope that at the end of it, we reach this Nirvana state of being fully distributed. So I just think people are kind of bandwagoning pretty hard. We've only been at this for two months. And I think there are definitely positives. And I think trusting people and giving them flexibility to work from home is great. But I'm just I'm not

I'm not all bought into this idea that we'll all just sit at home from a desk and that's how work will be from now on. Yeah, no, it's interesting in the sense that, well, you mentioned the fact that, know, bandwagoning and I've started to see that as well in the sense that like any news article that comes out locally or even...

locally or internationally or just, you you pick it up on Twitter and a company makes an announcement and you find that, you know, all of a sudden I, you know, one of our competitors, like the largest competitor in the U S basically went fully remote. And then I get three messages from people saying like, look at this article from our largest competitor. Shouldn't we be doing what they do? And there's actually no context. It's just like, here's an article. Here's what I want to say to you, which is interesting.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (20:57.614)
And that's where people are getting their information from. And in comparison, there's other scenarios where during the process, people are like, look, Shopify is giving $1 ,000 to all their employees for their work from home economics. there's just this gentle reminder that you have to give of, we're not that big. We don't have 10 ,000 employees. We are not the world's largest.

second largest e -commerce tech startup that empowered like there's different levels and people tend, it's almost like there's no reminder or education that the companies try so hard, think startups, true startups like in scale ups try so hard to be like startups, they forget that there's a vast difference between the ones that have ballooned into these monolithic organizations and people tend to forget that

your point the war chest is very different right so i guess my question to you is is how do you help with the messaging and and to to remind folks that the this isn't necessarily the case and that's not necessarily the option i think it comes down to transparency right like people don't want

I think everybody accepts that there are no definitive decisions at this point, right? The world is so variable, the world is so sort of ever -changing with these external factors that we cannot control. But I do think teams need transparency on how leadership teams are thinking through the problems that they're going through. And when I talk about transparency, I'm not saying that like,

whatever's discussed in your leadership meeting should be broadcast to the entire company. That generally does more harm than good. But more around like once you've arrived at a decision as a leadership team with whatever inputs are valuable in your organization, that you really invest the time in explaining how you arrived at that decision to the wider organization so that everybody sort of gets on board and understands that this was a really well thought through solution to the current problem. And I think

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (23:15.064)
When you do that, articulating why Shopify can commit to, you know, being a fully digital by design organization and yet also retain all of their office spaces, right? But for those in not in Toronto or Ottawa, you know, I can't even think how many millions of dollars Shopify spends a month on office space. have five, six offices in Toronto alone, like

That's just completely unfeasible for most startups, most scale ups, right? You don't have that money. think secondly, their business is also booming, right? They happen to be operating in a space that plays directly into what people are doing during a global pandemic when people are laid off and at home, right? They're starting e -commerce stores. They're following those dreams. So they uniquely positioned that the crisis actually accelerates their business plan instead of

sort of putting it on the back burner. So I think these are all the factors that make it the right choice for Shopify, but maybe not the right choice for other organizations, right? If you have a very traditional organization that's very hierarchical and top down, the work from home transition is gonna be really, really painful for you. And I'm sure there are folks listening to this, all four of them, that have sat on like eight hour long.

Zoom sessions because they have to, right? They're trying to move their traditional operating procedures digital. But that's not really how it works. And this, think, is the whole point that like this transition is going to be very jarring and very painful, even for Shopify, even for Google's, Twitter's, Facebook's. And they have to invest heavily in it. It does give you an advantage, right?

But if it was just as simple as like tap into global talent and everything is fine, then Google wouldn't have 120 offices worldwide. They would just have a globally distributed workforce and everything would work. But you have to factor in things like cultural norms and different social expectations from different countries and working hours and how you collaborate and what the experience is. If it was as easy as everyone is just say, everyone works remotely now.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (25:36.504)
that everyone would have done this years ago. But there are lot of complexities to it. And I'm not entirely sure that everybody has thought through what this actually means for their organization. But it's a challenge that I think all of us are going to have to face in some shape or other. But we just have to be transparent with our teams and talk to everyone as adults and say, these are the things we don't know. This is what we do know. This is how we're making the best decision that we can at this moment in time.

Yeah, yeah. So, and I mean, no, that's that's good food for thought. And I mean, if any any decision, especially our organizations that are smaller, where you where your decisions do have a much larger impact. You know, sometimes it's easy to think, you know, I'll just do this. I get caught up in that.

fantasy sometimes. we could just do this and this would solve it and then you go to do it and you're like, there's 15 other things that rely on this decision that you didn't consider. And I mean, that's, you know, that's a good, you know, it's a good lesson to learn. It's a good, you know, but you don't always want to learn lessons through, going through the hardware, making a decision in in a rush sort of manner. So, I mean, from

Not to, I mean, you had some points that you were open to chatting about and part of me thinks like diving deep into your concept of recruitment isn't just hiring people, it's solving business problems is effectively the secret sauce. So I fully respect the fact that if there's, know,

the Colonel Sanders, you know, a few things you don't necessarily want to go into so that, you know, you don't so your recruiting job is actually effectively easier. I always wonder about that, right? If you share all this information and effectively you're making your job harder because other companies are going to be picking up on your tools of the trade. But I'm happy to take the conversation in whichever direction. But that that I mean, that's the point that stuck out to me because it's so

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (27:56.234)
in front of you and obvious that like this is yeah, this is what you're doing. But for some reason, there's this disconnect where you categorize yourself differently and then you just go and do your recruiting and you and you fall into this, this strategy and routine that doesn't necessarily appreciate the impact that recruiting has on the business. Yeah. So

I don't really think of it as secret sauce. think that's the joy of kind of taking this approach is that I truly believe like there are no great people, right? We've all heard this, just go find great people. And I think it's all situational and it's all based on like, what are the challenges your organization is trying to solve? What's the...

what's the intersection of competence and commitment that you need from this individual for them to be successful in your environment for the challenges that you're taking on. And so like, I actually have no issue sharing this stuff because I want recruitment to get better, right? You know, I hear these absolute horror stories. Like I've been through those horror stories when I've chatted to other organizations and I'm just like,

cool, you have not responded to me for two weeks and you can't answer any of my questions. Like I have no confidence in you as an organization. Yeah. And I think that's my first tip is that like all recruitment leaders should regularly go and interview with other companies and remind themselves of what it's like to be on the other side. Cause I guarantee it's starting to change your perspective on like how quickly you respond to candidates when you're left in the dark and people fail to meet the commitments that

that they've made to you, it re -emphasizes like, I remember that this was an important thing when I was, you know, an IC, but now that I've like all these reports and these competing things, like I de -prioritize it. Right. So I do think that's important. But just kind of put a, put a finer point on it, right? Like the person that's great for you, like let's say a software engineer, the software engineer that's great for you is very different to the software engineer that's great for open care.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (30:19.51)
and they can have exactly the same background, the same thing on paper, but where they want to take their career or the next opportunity for them is going to be very different. And so their competence could be exactly the same in terms of these are the skills, these are the experiences that they've had, but their commitment to the broader mission, to the specific challenges they have to take on will vary. And that's what's going to make them exceptional at your organization or God awful.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (30:52.556)
I guess when I'm thinking about talent acquisition, there are drawbacks to this approach. I'll caveat first with the drawbacks. It is super time intensive. You need a bigger talent team to do this effectively. And that's a cost that your business has to be willing to incur to do this more effectively. If you try to take on all of the

writing a job descriptions, defining roles, all of the sourcing, all of the networking, everything yourself, you would just implode. So it's not feasible unless you have a couple of people on talent and you can kind of share that workload. But I do think it means that the caliber of talent that you bring in is much, much higher because it's so much more closely aligned to the problems that you're actually trying to solve. So.

just trying to formulate in my head how I want to run through this. Let's start with, you know, walk through the journey from the beginning maybe. How does your philosophy start at sort of the discovery stage, right? In the process, like how do you, you know, before anybody even starts talking to you, they've discovered the company or they, know, word of mouth, reputation, whatever the case might be, and they've discovered

this organization or organization that's using this model, what's different compared to, you know, your, your tip company, ABC or whatever. So I think process wise and structurally wise, not a great deal, right? Like the, same touch points to kind of there. there's a couple of notable differences. So one is that the recruitment team is, is the first kind of point of contact generally.

And their understanding of the whole business is so much deeper than most recruiters. So when you're hiring a software engineer, you can say, you're going to work on this tech stack. Or you can say, you're actually building this component that allows us to do XYZ things for our overarching business strategy. This is what unlocks the next stage of the business's progression. And the difference is that the focus is just like, here are the

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (33:13.706)
the languages you're going to code in versus like, here's the impact you're going to have in this entire organization. And people want to do meaningful work. People want to be connected to the, you know, why does this company exist? What is the mission? Like, do I believe in that? And so understanding that interconnectedness across the whole business, you nobody works in a silo in a startup or a scale up, right? You hire a director of sales.

they need to understand like what's happening on the engineering side, what's happening with marketing, like all of these things kind of roll into like how successful they're going to be. And those folks that I've found to be particularly successful at OpenCare are the ones that want to understand the whole business from the outset, right? They're asking questions about, you know, what are the limitations of

the people that you have today, like how does the leadership team function, like who are the personalities? And they want to understand the whole thing, not just like, this is the job I'm going to come in to do. Because nobody succeeds in isolation at a startup. In terms of the process, like, I always advocated for competency -based interviewing. So define from the outset what you want to hire for.

set questions, set a case study that tests their skills in the most real life way as possible. And then we also do a cultural interview as well, which is with people from different parts of the organization. it's not, none of these things necessarily have a perfectly defined, like, this is the right answer. They have a rubric, they have a guide to like, you this is how you should think through, you know, if you're hearing these things, then you need to press a little bit harder to understand a bit further.

But nothing is black and white, right? There's no like, say these words and then you pass the interview. It's about, and again, this is kind of one of the drawbacks of taking this approach is it places a lot more emphasis on your interviewers to be able to assess and know when to follow up and ask deeper questions. But that's also what we, you know, if we miss anything through the interview process, we do references at the end and we specifically ask questions around those areas that we maybe didn't get enough data on or we have questions about.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (35:29.592)
So they actually become the valuable part of the interview process and not just like an administrative task that we do. And I think a lot of companies just kind of, give me two references. That's less effective. But if you say, OK, you worked with so -and -so person at company X, I want to speak to them. And if you bring, these are the positives that we see about this candidate. These are the concerns that we have. Do you have any input? We've heard, you know,

We've heard that somebody else has said that they maybe struggle with time management. What's your perspective on that? You actually get really, really salient insights that help you assess the higher. And the criteria that we have are strengths and risks, right? Because nobody's straight perfect, right? It's about do the strengths that this person brings to the problems that you're trying to solve outweigh the risks that you inherit with them. And those risks could be cultural, could be...

a specific skill that they don't have. could just be, you know, they've only worked at large companies and you're not sure how they are going to adapt, right? Like you have to make these decisions. And I think the strengths and risks framework really helps people start to think objectively instead of trying to sell the candidate to whoever the final decision maker is. I'm sure you've seen it where like the hiring manager is like, this guy's great, this guy's great, this guy's great. And it's like, okay, I'm sure they're great. Otherwise they wouldn't be at this point, but like,

What are the risks that we inherit as a business from an individual? And that's generally, that's how C -suite evaluate all of their decisions, right? What are the pros? What are the risks that we take on? And you just kind of try and weigh the two. So it's a very similar approach to that, which means it's very easy to interact with your C -level executives and your leaders in your company, because that's the mental model they use every day to navigate problems they don't have a depth of expertise in.

Yeah. So I don't think it's like a particularly different process. I think it's just like the underlying, you know, the willingness to go that step further, willingness to ask a deeper question. And, you know, if you if something worries you, you should follow that thread so that you fully assess the risk that comes along with it. Whereas I've been definitely be guilty of it where I like love everything about a candidate. And then we start to get on something I'm like, this is this is problematic. And you're like, do I keep

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (37:55.886)
Do I keep tugging at this thread and seeing if it all unravels or do I kind of leave it there? It's hard, right? It takes your own integrity to keep pushing forward. And our higher conversion rate from all candidates coming in to the actual hires we make is like 0 .28%. It's a very probably ludicrously high bar and it's something that

I have to constantly work on to normalize. Last year, OpenCare tripled our revenue whilst only doubling our headcount, which is a great ratio to be in. I think it does pay dividends, but you have to be prepared for the work.

There's scaled back versions of this and you can take principles and apply them to your current system. And it doesn't have to be this complete rewriting of your talent acquisition process. It's just starting to incorporate like, what's that sense of ownership? Do you feel like your job as a recruiter ends once this person signs or does it end when they leave the organization in whatever period of time? Yeah. Now it's interesting that you mentioned that, right? Because

I mean, this is something I think about a lot in the sense that someone's, you know, experience at the company, right? You obviously, you work so hard to get them in the organization. And then the, in tech, people aren't working at companies for 20 years or 10 years or five years even, right? It's a very...

you know, two, three years is like, this person's a veteran of that organization. They've seen everything, right? And to a certain degree, they're not wrong just because those businesses are moving so quickly. And I think there's a big, there's a few organizations out there that I've seen and heard of that do a really good job of acknowledging the fact that you're here for a good time, not a long time in the sense that like, you know, we want

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (40:09.346)
We want you to have a good experience. We also just assume based on the data and the way that the industry is working, that you'll probably move on relatively quickly because the market's competitive. People will reach out to you, especially if you're a developer. just the acknowledgement that these things will change as opposed to this sort of permanence. perfect.

We found that DevOps person, they're gonna be, that problem is solved. Like to a certain extent, no, you've got someone great that can do great work, but at some point, the leadership and the person managing that individual and coaching that individual should say to themselves, six to nine months into their stint, they're probably gonna start hearing from recruiters more often, those emails are gonna get far more convincing.

it's water on a stone and eventually you'll erode and you'll start getting curious, right? About, you what else is out there? And, you know, after, you know, a certain point in, you know, the honeymoon phase being at an organization wears off pretty quickly. So I guess, you know, with this, you know, the business, solving business problems and coming up with solutions for the business versus just hiring people, are there different approaches that you take with sort of

how people end up moving on as well and that philosophy? Not specifically, but I do think the kind of business problem based approach helps with stickiness and retention, right? Because if you just hire someone to do a job, you have to keep making that job sexy and interesting for them. If you hire them to take on a problem, they self select that they want to be the person that

contributes meaningfully to solving that problem. And that could take 18 months, two years for them to solve that one problem to a level of high fidelity where it's actually no longer a challenge or a blocker for the business. And I think that's part of the issue with, you mentioned DevOps, and I know that this is a crazy pain point for just about everybody. But that's part of the issue as to why DevOps is so hard to hire for.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (42:33.144)
their entire job is fundamentally to deal with issues that are unexpected and for problems that you can't anticipate and you don't see at this moment in time. You hire a DevOps person to make sure that problems don't sort of manifest themselves. And I think that's why it's so hard for them to like really stay somewhere for a long period of time because that's what they're geared to do is just like solve like smaller scale problems very rapidly.

And so when someone keeps offering you more and more money, of course you move. But to take it to sort of the meta point, like, yeah, people should move on. And like, it should be a tour of duty. And when you're no longer the person, the best fit for that problem set, you know, maybe the problem has changed or evolved as the businesses has moved on. Then you should expect people to leave, but it's not a bad thing, right?

there may be pain of you having a vacant spot or something not being worked on, but it's not a bad thing. Because if that person's not committed, like the quality of their work is going to go down fairly rapidly. So I think it's always at OpenCare, we talk about the bus factor, which is if somebody, any one individual in the business got hit by a bus, what would be the impact to the organization? And so it's thinking about that from like a contingency planning and a workforce

workforce management approach. And this is where my colleague Megan McQuarrie is, is just absolutely world class. She's, she's so on top of every hiring manager, you know, diagnosing every part of the business to understand, you know, okay, what do we think of the churn risks here? How does that affect, you know, your ability to deliver on your OKRs and so forth. So I think it's just about being realistic about, you know, what's actually the bus factor.

And if there is somebody that, you know, if they leave, then the entire business shutters down until we find a replacement. makes sense strategically for you, for your business to invest earlier in having somebody to share the workload there. You're very unlikely that two people are going to leave at exactly the same time. So, you know, if it's that critical to your business, it could be like your lead developer. could be your architect. It could be DevOps, for example.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (44:55.138)
But if that's going to stop you being able to generate revenue as a startup or a scale up, invest now in putting another person by their side that they're invested in the success of as well. So make them part of the hiring process, make them part of the decision making process. That's also going to create stickiness and tie them in. And worst case scenario, you accelerate this critical area of business on what they can deliver on. So.

I don't think it's so much about like when people exit. We do exit interviews and we do stay interviews as well. So we actually go and interview all the folks that haven't left of like, why are you still here? Right? Working in startups, hugely stressful. There are much more comfortable jobs out there. So it's also important to identify what it is that we're doing well that's retaining folks. And what's the stuff that's, you know, would correlate that with why people are leaving. Cause that's what

then helps you to shape what your people and talent direction is. And I think one of the big realizations we've recently had is that we've not really been testing enough for adaptability and resiliency. And we've been sort of skewing a bit more towards

Probably actually like hiring more for like a late B, early C stage company, where it's your hiring deep technical skills or deep competences in certain areas. And I think it's the realization that we're actually still just post series A startup and things keep changing. that's causing me to go back and look at like, how do we assess that consistently and in a fair way?

adaptability and resiliency look different in different organizations and different people. So how do we assess that in a uniform way? No, it's definitely a

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (46:53.398)
It's definitely a challenge for most any tech company, right? But I think to your point, you're right in the sense that you spend the extra time on the front end, you don't spend as much time on the back end of a person's career journey troubleshooting those issues, right? It's preventative as opposed to reactive or proactive as opposed to reactive.

But that's like a fundamental decision that you have to make with your leadership team, right? There is a very strong argument to be made of like, spend less time on talent acquisition, give them a three month probation, see how they perform on the job and just retain those ones that are successful. That is a completely fair strategy that I've seen people employ and work very well. It's just not, I think this yields better results, but it's much harder work and it requires more of an investment. But again,

I take it back to the fact that our companies are entirely run by knowledge workers. That is the only asset we have. We're not manufacturing. We're not creating things. It's all ideas. like, if you, if you're not investing in the people, where are you investing? Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. So, I mean, pivoting a bit from a conversation perspective, you, you mentioned

building balanced teams and we've kind of dug into that and you've been quick to run some numbers down. And I think that's the one thing that escapes a lot of people is metrics in recruiting. And I mean, we could talk about this. For a long time, this is a big rabbit hole to go down.

Just even the concept of like, what are you measuring as opposed to, know, the metrics aren't hard. mean, if you're using an ATS, it's measuring something already, right? If you're using an applicant tracking system, you've already probably got the important, or the cliche in stereotypical data points, you know, how many roles are, you know, time to fill, the...

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (49:16.686)
time and memorial, like the stuff that you get everywhere, right? And I guess, you know, with this different approach and unique approach to the hiring process and solving the business's challenge, are some of the metrics that you're more interested in and how did you come about discovering them or deciding, you know, we're gonna use this metric, we're gonna value this metric more than another metric?

So don't think I'd do anything particularly unique from a metrics perspective. We measure conversion rates top to bottom through each stage. We measure kind of time to hire, but we just defined it as role definition to hire. So that's from like when you identify there is a problem in the business or there is a challenge that needs to be solved to the point of hire. So it's just a little bit more role encompassing and more defined.

We like there's not kind of anything magical. I haven't discovered this secret metric that tells you you're going to be successful. But I think where the difference lies and why I'm such a fierce proponent of metrics is not not for the ability to measure, but for the bill for the ability to infer and analyze based on that. And I think that's actually what unlocks the effectiveness of your team. And so

If you use metrics to beat your team over the head and say, your response rate is down, make it better, then they're just going to fear the metrics. And I say this because that is exactly where I came from. At Google, I was just beat over the head with keep these metrics high. But nobody took the time to actually say, this is why this metric's important. These are actually the levers that go into how this number moves up or down. And so.

with the team, actually worked on like helping them understand like, this is these are the metrics, these this is what gives you control over your own success. And so when you say, you know, what are the total number of, you know, candidates that need to go into the top of the funnel in order for you to be statistically successful at hiring this person. So we were averaging out about 120.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (51:38.478)
So about 120 people had to go in top of funnel for us to make a successful hire. That could be through inbound, could be through source candidates, whatever. And that seems like a large amount, right? But what it actually does is gives power to your team to be able to plan their work effectively and know when they can actually rest and say, you know, I'm actually in a really good spot with this search. If you don't empower them with that knowledge, they just

They'll find 10 people today and feel really good because they looked really good on paper. Great. So you're 1 12th of the way to where you need to be in order to be actually successful. Whereas if you say, you need to reach this really high number, how many weeks will it take you? How are you going to divide your time? How are you going to actually set your search strategy so you can hit this number and be successful? And again, it's then monitoring the conversion rates at each stage, not to try and shame anyone or get on anyone's case.

But it's more like if your response rate spikes or drops, we actually need to diagnose what happened there. Where did you find those candidates that responded really high? Or what was the messaging you used that made it drop? It's all a learning process. And so it's really empowering the team. And I tell this anecdote regularly. When I first hired Charlotte on my team,

During our interview, I had to draw a funnel on a whiteboard because she worked in an agency. So she never had to do anything down funnel. It was just like number of candidates at the top. So I drew a funnel. I was like, this is how recruitment works. And you could just see her mind exploding. And about, I don't know, maybe six or seven months later, she just came to me and was like, okay, I've diagnosed all my metrics. I don't understand how these things work. And I was like, that's awesome because I would never have done that earlier in my career because I was always just

afraid that if I said like this the metrics going down someone was gonna shout at me or I was gonna get replaced because I wasn't good enough but instead like if you actually teach them like this is what sends up your red flags of where you should invest time to figure it out so I think that's actually the biggest change from talking to a lot of people because I don't know I have built this reputation as the guy who talks about metrics a lot and so everyone's like what are these secret metrics I'm like they're all basic it's all the stuff that you do today but it's like

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (54:01.474)
what are the actions that you take off the back of it. That's what actually determines your success because you can measure everything in the world, but if you make no changes off the back of what the data is telling you, then you may as well not measure anything. You can step on the scale every day, but if you're not seeing the number change and you're not doing anything differently, then scale number is going to be the same. Exactly.

Yeah, like it's all really basic numbers. I wish it was a bit more advanced and like we were kind of getting to a point of just launching our candidate experience survey just before the world ended. So I'd like to start tracking like a qualitative metric there, but that's kind of where we are today. There's not like some magic number. If I figure out the magic number, I'll be sure to let everyone know. Episode, episode.

Part two. I'll put back on here and tell you all how to like run super effective processes. Well, the listeners that we have know that I at least to try to extract this secret sauce from you and you refused. One thing that I find or I something, I think I was actually sitting in an interview with a marketing manager a few companies ago. So I was sitting with the COO.

and we were interviewing one of these candidates for the final stage of a marketing manager role, director of marketing or whatever. And they started drawing a funnel on the whiteboard, obviously, because marketing is funnel based. Everything is funnel based. Everything's a funnel. That could be the next podcast. Everything's a funnel. Today's was, what was it? was everything is a facade. Next one is everything's a funnel.

That's when it clicked to me that conversion for some reason and I'd been recruiting for a bit of time up until that point. But it's just and I mean not to add to the point. I think there's a crazy amount of value for marketing folks and folks that care about optimization to sit with talent leaders. Right. If you're in an organization and you've got a talented marketing person I mean

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (56:20.812)
that that organization I sat down with, Hakeem and he was just, he was like a full blown data junkie. Like if he didn't have data, you can see him like sort of scratching and just like, need, I need something. Right. He's awesome for kind of walking me through, okay, well, this is how this works and this is how we do it. I'm like, well, this is identical. You just replace, you know, site visitors with candidates and everything else basically aligns. And it's funny.

to see the marketing stack from a technology perspective being so robust, right? Because you tie revenue to marketing dollars and revenue is abstracted further away from candidates or from people when in fact they're actually closer because they're the ones that are, they're the ones pulling the levers and everything behind the scenes so that revenue can happen, right? So it's an interesting,

Discovery that I personally had and that's when I started reading more marketing information on okay well conversion rates and like You know my copy like if I can get you know two or three more people to reply to a message that I sent then that exponentially impacts the bottom of my funnel and And a lot of people are still just sending out generic, you know, and I'm like

I'm kind of glad because that means my message to stand out, it's also, just, it seems, it seems so, so kind of archaic to a certain extent. So, I mean, I don't know. I mean, you're shaking your head. Yes. in the sense that, you know, okay, makes sense. But I guess my question to you is like, what have you seen from that perspective? Reducing similar situations? Yeah. So I'm a big proponent of building, especially as you scale up your organization.

If you are going to invest in talent acquisition and retention, I'm a big proponent of building out diverse teams with different skill sets. We had sources, had sort of recruiter, like full stack recruiters just before the pandemic. One of our recruiters was kind of moving, was going to move across into more like an operations role and do some project based stuff. So I think you need that blend of skills and

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (58:43.05)
Most organizations will have marketing. like loop them into the conversation, right? Every marketing team is hiring, right? Because it's such an in -demand skill set, especially sort of anyone who's in the sort of B2C, direct response, performance marketing space, like super competitive. So what they're doing is, as you said, directly relevant to talent. So actually loop them into the conversation. As I said, most people like solving problems. So present them with a problem on the talent side.

We had a really good conversation a while back with Dan Gray, who's now director of marketing at Cotton. And he taught the talent team how to set up experimentation and how to manage experimentation so that we weren't just doing random ad hoc things. There was actually a process to how do we set out an hypothesis for an experiment, how do we run it, and how do we like

circulate the feedback and learning so that we continue to get better. That's such a normal muscle for a performance marketing team that they look at it. Same with engineering. If you actually get one of your engineering managers to sit down and go through the workflow that you go through on, we use Lever as our ATS, but go through the ATS to LinkedIn, to any emailing tools that you have and so on and so forth, their mind will explode. And immediately they'll be like, I can write you a script that will do this in like four minutes flat.

Because that's the way they think, It's like, how do you automate, how do you smooth the process? So do leverage the people that are in your organization, right? Like, they don't need to know anything about talent, they don't need to know anything about recruitment. In fact, if they don't, they're to challenge the presuppositions that you have of like, what's possible. And so I think that like that, that friction between different functions is so, critical. And I think if you

are really trying to aggressively expand your head count, you should invest in someone to do talent marketing and branding, right? Someone who actually knows how to leverage like longer term email campaigns to generate lukewarm interest. Someone who wants to write blog content, someone who wants to control social and like, open care has none of that stuff because I am not that person, but you know, it's

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (01:01:02.99)
I think the modern recruiting function is not just a bunch of people on the phones trying to convince candidates. It's about how do we nurture these people who have expressed interest in the broad problem space that we're working on. I'm sure with CoinSquare that you've had candidates that have been very interested in the crypto space, but never actually ended up converting and joining your company.

how are you going to engage them long -term? Because you know there's always going to be a fit there with the problem sets that you're taking on. So getting into that space. I think that was the next step and evolution for open care prior to the pandemic. So I speak with lots of confidence on the theory, but not on the execution of it. No, no. You bring up an interesting thing that kind of

I realized while with CoinScore in the sense that every candidate is a potential customer. And that was a new experience for me being somebody who was more, who had more familiarity with a B2B background, right? And it's a similar, you're in a similar situation with OpenCare, right? I'm interested, how did you respond to that as you came to that realization? Like, how did that impact the things that you did?

think it changed the conversation I was having and it actually added a level of, know, it became part of the onboarding process in the sense that, you know, there's a section of our onboarding process where we talk about how, you know, at some point you might be involved in the hiring process to decide who joins the organization. But one thing you need to keep in mind is these people are potentially, you know, whichever way the

the wind blows, so to speak, or whatever way we end up going with that individual, there's still a relationship that they tie to our brand. that didn't feel like a very recruiter thing to say. It felt more of a business owner thing to say, or it felt more like a marketing thing to say. And it's of planting the seed of that really anybody you speak with, especially at a B2C company.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (01:03:26.754)
you know, where every user counts and the cost of acquisition, depending on your circumstance and industry can be really high. And you effectively have a role and maybe you're not, you know, maybe it's difficult to track those metrics and say, well, you know, this person had a conversation with Martin three years ago. And then, you know, a year later, you know, they ended up becoming a customer and tracking that journey might be difficult.

you know, from an interviewing process to like, okay, they eventually saw an ad and finally decided to install the app. But that became more of a conversation that I was having with hiring managers. And I would constantly, I still do just say, you know, at the end of the day, you know, if this person, for example, you know, one of the simple things that I, I kind of believe in is if you have somebody that is bombing the interview from a hiring manager perspective, and they're like this person.

let them learn something, teach something, right? If you've still got, you know, 15, 20 minutes with them, you can still spend some time with that individual helping them grow and just being human about the fact that you'll probably not move forward as opposed to turning it into like, you should have done better. Which sometimes is the case, right? You see the feedback that's written in the ATS and you see, this person, you know, was really disappointed in seeing this person and not...

performing to the expectations that they were hoping to, did you leave that person, it's sort of like great candidates teach you something. Okay, but if a candidate doesn't teach you something, maybe you can teach them something, whether it's for the next step or for whatever company they end up interviewing with next time so that they become a better person. I think,

that just speaks to the quality of the experience. And if you give them that experience, right, then they're going to look back positively towards your brand, right? And, you know, at some point they're going to make a decision and say, okay, now's the time for me to invest in crypto or now's the time for me to go see a dentist. And they're going to say, I'm going to go to that company that treated me well. Right. And I mean, it's obvious when you say it, but it's forgotten a lot of the time as well. Yeah.

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (01:05:47.434)
I'll zoom in on the point that you made there about like, it's not a recruiter thing to say, it's a business owner thing to say. And that's the mindset we all have to go in with, right? Like, think about all of the downstream impact of your work, right? You give one person a crappy experience, they tell seven other people and that great DevOps person you're speaking to happens to know this person. They'll discount your company because their friend said, I had a crappy experience with Martin.

which has never happened because everyone else says great things about you, obviously. But you know what I mean? Like that can be what's up as your chance. And you've spent all this time trying to find the perfect candidate. And because you weren't paying attention and because you weren't giving the due time and respect to someone who sacrificed their time and interest in your company, it'll harm you further down. And let's be honest, Toronto is not that big as a sort of city and reputation starts to spread.

businesses, you know, gain a reputation very quickly that really harms your branding chances and also your ability to retain and attract the best talent. So I think it's, I think that's a really key takeaway for every for all three people that are still listening to this. 25 % drop off after an hour. That's not bad. That's pretty good. But you know, like,

I think having that business owner mindset starts to open up all of the possibilities of what you can do. I remember being fairly lost early on in my career because I didn't see a future in talent. I thought it was something you did and then you moved out and did something different because there was no way forward unless you were just going to manage people. I think that by building this business owner mindset and this skill set,

there's loads of things like in the last six weeks, I've done, I've led sales for a new product line. I'm currently doing business strategy because like we're obviously not hiring very much at the moment. like that adaptability is not something I would have had prior to spending the last two years at OpenCare. But now I'm like, okay, like this is all the same stuff that I'm thinking about day to day with, with, from a talent standpoint anyway, let's just get more in the weeds with it. So,

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (01:08:10.134)
It's always fun to help people realize that they have a lot more potential than just being a recruiter for the rest of their career. And even if they want to be a recruiter for the rest of their career, it means something more than just sending in mails every day and hoping for the best. Yeah. No, that's a really, I think it's an important point maybe to sort of finish off on in the sense that the...

The impact you end up having is far greater than in mails and signed contracts and whatnot. There's a lot to it. There's a lot of meat on the bone when it comes to recruitment. And transparently, I've been in that situation where I'm like, is this the progression and where do you go further in your career?

becomes an interesting, tricky question, right? If you're a salesperson, it's like you start as a VDR, a business development rep, and then you get moved into the account executive role, and then you become a senior account executive, and then maybe you become a sales manager, and then maybe you the director of sales, and then VP of sales. And the latter is very standard.

Right. And from a recruitment perspective, there's this even, even on the agency side, you worked at 360 desk. I worked at 360 desk. We have similar routes. didn't go down the Google path, but the, the, the, the, the interesting thing is, you know, there's the ceiling is so low in from, from the way it looks, right. And the ceiling is low from a perspective. It's almost

is almost one of those interesting pictures where you look at it at a certain angle and then you step three feet to the right and then you see a completely different picture. And the second, and to what you're talking about in your point, as I'm sort of understanding it, is like, if you just step a little bit to the right, more into that ownership box, and you look at all the things that you do from the perspective of an executive or a leader, even if you aren't, you will start to see that the ceiling to your role is

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (01:10:23.308)
very high actually. still a lot of way to go and the title might not necessarily change but the things that you get involved with and the nature in which you get involved with them, there's a lot more meat to that bone than just I have to send in mails all day long. you you said it, I think I just said everything that you said but that was my way of just saying wow that's a really good point. So isn't that the key to podcasting?

I think so, People think I'm smart now, which is the whole point of this really. I think if there's one takeaway action is for any talent or people leader to actually go and speak to their CEO and ask what their CEO wants to see from talent and people and understand the perspective from a leadership, from the highest leadership level. Even if it takes you two months to get that meeting, right?

the amount of leverage and perspective you'll get from having that one conversation of like away from the tactical stuff, like where direction should you be going to meet the leadership's needs from a people or talent perspective will help you realize how big your scope is. know, the sending in mails is the reactive piece, right? Your CEO is going to want to know like, we want to open up another office as part of our expansion. Where should we put it? That's something that falls squarely on talent, right?

that's a massive undertaking, an opportunity for you to impact the business that you probably wouldn't have seen if you keep your head down, just looking at, you know, how many emails should I send today and how many phone screens and, look, Monster has got 50 ,000 new resumes today. And that's a good point. guess, you know, one, we'll leave off on this. Maybe this can be the secret sauce for people that are

maybe don't necessarily have that opportunity or that confidence to reach out to their CEO, how would you recommend people ask that question?

From A People Perspective with Martin Hauck (01:12:23.918)
So I think you have to start from a perspective of understanding what their viewpoint is and actually really going in to try and learn. And maybe you're not in a position to go straight to your CEO, but work your way up and work from every level above you, all your key stakeholders. And what's top of mind for you in general, not related to talent or people? What's actually the thing that keeps you awake at night? Why is that? How can I help you?

Nobody has ever been angry about someone coming to them and saying, let me understand your problems. How can I help you? Yeah. Right. So I think it's all about the discovery. And this is not just a one time thing. It's a constant thing. Right. Every quarter, you need to be touching base with all of your executives to say, like, how have things changed? This was top of mind for you last time we spoke. How has that changed? So I think it doesn't necessarily have to be the big bang of like straight to the CEO and maybe

that's my own bias from the organization I work in, but you know, constantly talking to like, who are your leaders? How are they viewing the world? What's important to them? And then you have to kind of connect the dots between like, what's super important to your leaders and where you're at and like, how can talent or people or HR analytics or whatever bridge that gap and help make their life a little bit easier because being a C level executive is just such an incredibly hard job to do. it's

I feel underappreciated. And so like you providing that support will help them be effective and also get you the visionary piece that'll help you see where you can take your career next. That's awesome. No, I think, I mean, not only did we figure out how they get caramel into the caramel bars, and I think we cracked open, you know, the secret ingredients to KFC's fried chicken here.

Like you've shared a lot of awesome knowledge today. I've learned a ton today. I feel like I'm going to go into work this morning and just rejig the whole thing. So thank you very much for sharing your insights and experience with me. It's been great chat, Martin. Really appreciate it. Awesome. Now, take care. You too, mate. Bye.