Intrro: Scaling Stories

In this episode I learn from Amandeep Shergill who is the Director of Tech Recruiting at Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Tumblr, Simplenote, Longreads, Crowdsignal, Atavist, Happy Tools, Day One, and more. They have been a distributed company for more than 10+ years, with more than 1,500 Automatticians in 84 countries, speaking over 90 different languages. Amandeep has previously scaled teams at ConsenSys, Cleo AI and Lendable. He brought some incredible insights about why distributed is the next level to remote working and how Automattic approaches candidate assessments. Automattic have a truly unique trial process, mandatory for every position in the form of a “project” related to the specific domain of the role. The objective is to work on something that you would as if you just started whilst being assessed for technical, cultural and written communication skills {how you write commits/PR’s in an async environment for example}. Further, these assessments are overseen  by software engineers who have volunteered to spend their 100% of their time (from 3 up to 12 moths) just hiring other engineers and become “trial buddies,” to prospective candidates. Please like, share and subscribe. Thanks for tuning in! Read Matt Mullenweg’s: The Distributed Work’s Five Levels of Autonomy {CEO Automattic} https://ma.tt/2020/04/five-levels-of-autonomy/

Thrilled to release another episode of Intrro [https://www.linkedin.com/company/intrro/]’s scaling stories, a discussion with talent leaders about their lessons building teams at some of the worlds fastest growing companies. In this episode I learn from Ruby B, who is leading technical tecruitment at Astra and is an acgive career coach. Astra is a uniquely cool company that manufactures rockets and are hiring some of the world's smartest minds {their CEO was the CTO of NASA}. Recorded at “the office” Ruby spoke to us from the Naval Air Station Alameda [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Air_Station_Alameda], known as "Orion" which is a former naval jet engine testing facility! Ruby has scaled teams ranging from small YC startups to Coinbase, Lyft and Waymo. We get into the nitty gritty areas of building a well oiled TA function from scratch at high quality and speed, as Astra are set to scale from 250 to 1,000 FTE next year. This was a remarkably candid conversation, with amazing actionable tips on eliminating practices that negatively impact the company’s D + I initiatives, the importance of interview standardization when scaling, building solid relationships with your hiring manager & so much more! The link to listen can be found in comments. Please like, share and subscribe. Thanks for tuning in!

In this episode I learn from Beatrice Domiguez, Head of People and Talent at Aviros. Founded in 2015 in Zurich, Aviros is building fleet management software in the cloud and is one of Europe’s fastest growing B2B SaaS companies. Listen to how recruiting in the Bay Area and in Europe have subtle yet important differences such as definitions of what diversity actually means, why "Hiring managers are the keys” to an effective hiring process and why you’re only as good as the people as your recruiting for!

Nicolas Bowles, is scaling Product & Design teams @ Productboard and is a mentor at Femme Palette 🌱 We talk about how recruiting is "project management" and how he's used that to help scale Productboard's headcount from 100 in 2020 to 300 today, how to provide a worldclass candidate experience, how to attract talent when the best are usually employed somewhere else, how leverage engineering + design communities and more!