 I think we're on the hour now, Jessica, if you're ready. All right. So I would say good morning, good afternoon, wherever you happen to be. Thanks for joining us today to review the reference check process for GitLab managers. Before we get started, I just wanted to take a moment and introduce myself. My name is Jessica Mitchell, and this is my third week at GitLab. Prior to GitLab, I worked at Cisco for 15 years, and most recently I worked at a company called SailPoint Technologies for two and a half years. I'm the HR business partner supporting engineering and product, and I report to Barbie Graber and PeopleOps. I live in Austin, Texas with my husband, Alan. I have a daughter, Lindsey, who's eight, and a son, Cameron, who is four. And as yesterday on the team call, I mentioned we were kind of starting our allergy seasons, which are really terrible here in Austin. So if you hear my voice crack, or if you see me drink, I'm trying some new tea to see if that helps. It's because of allergies. So Abby Matthews and I will actually be co-presenting today's session on reference checking. Excuse me. So today we're gonna review the process for reference checks, the business case and reasons for why we actually complete reference checks, what you can and cannot ask a reference. Abby and I will role play a reference call and then answer any questions you may have. All right, so you found the perfect candidate. Their job experience is a perfect match. The culture fit is just right and everyone who interviewed them loves them. And so you think it's a done deal, right? Well, not so fast. It's now time for reference checks. Too often hiring organizations treat the reference check stage as a necessary evil as the last required stage before the excitement of finalizing an offer. Checking reference is actually a crucial step in the process designed to help you identify the candidate who'd be the most successful in a specific role and within GitLab as a whole. The beginning of the process, you should have outlined the competencies required for success in the role. And during the interview stage, you gather data about each candidate's ability to be successful in that role. The resume, CV and cover letter gave you some more information. The interviews gave you a lot more information and then your ongoing interactions and any assignments you had with the candidate completed added to that picture. The reference checks process is your first opportunity as a hiring manager to gather data from an outside source. So take advantage of it. And before we move on how to perform a reference check. Someone's coming. Let's look at the business impact of a bad hire. While the financial impact is quantifiable, chief financial officers actually rank a bad hires morale and productivity impacts ahead of monetary losses. Why does a bad hire cause such disruption? You know, other team members are left to pick up the work not completed or even spend time correcting the other employee's work, impacting the hire, excuse me, the overall productivity of the team. Poor performers lower the bar for other employees and bad habits can actually spread quickly across the organization. You know, also the time it takes to rehire, ramp up a new employee, can have significant impact on product delivery, deadlines, sales goals, and overall customer satisfaction. It's an important part as your role as a GitLab hiring manager to ensure we're hiring the right, hiring right the first time or at least we're making the best informed hiring decision. So why should a GitLab manager do a reference check? You know, reference checks are more important than just finding out if a person worked where they said they did and said they used to and to perform their essential job functions. That is important, yes. But it's also a crucial note that reference checks are extremely valuable in learning more personal working style information about how a new employee can be successful at GitLab. As a manager, you're gonna have a head start on understanding how to interact and develop a new employee by knowing what makes them thrive and what frustrates them in their working environment. You know, it also helps build the talent pipeline. You've all heard, you know, most people have heard the saying birds of a feather flock together. Great talent actually knows other great talent and may be intentionally able to provide great employee references to join GitLab. You know, these are exciting days at GitLab when Barbie reached out to me and I started looking at the company. I mean, I was really jazzed, it was pretty cool. So, you know, checking references actually helps spread the GitLab story. It can enhance our GitLab brand and could potentially lead to new customers. So, you know, what is the process for reference checks at GitLab and Abby is actually gonna walk us through some of those steps. Yeah, thanks Jessica. So, I've added a link there to the handbook page and I just wanna walk through a few things that we've added. I think the first thing is that Jessica mentioned we want hiring managers to be to take the lead and do the reference checks prior to that I believe the hiring team would sort of doing them but we think it's really important that hiring managers do these. So, when a candidate applies to GitLab they're actually asked to provide three references to contact during the application process. We insist that one of those be a previous manager and a colleague and we endeavor to complete two references because we may not be able to reach or contact all three. There's another side to this which we would like to encourage hiring managers to do is to try to seek what we would, what is known as backdoor references in the process which means that people can be called who may have experience with the candidate but have not been listed by the candidate as a reference and although backdoor references can provide important information it is essential to recognize and be respectful of the position that this could put the candidate in. It's a small world and letting someone know that a candidate is on the job market could easily get back to the candidate's current employer which of course we don't want and the candidate doesn't want either and that could put them at risk. The next thing is that we also would hope that hiring managers can take a reference over the phone but obviously as we're remote and with time zones that might not be easy to do. So, an email can be sent if you're not able to speak to them on the phone or perhaps we can even do a video call maybe. And the referees themselves won't be contacted until the candidate moves into the final stage or the stage before the final stage of the process. I think this kind of goes without saying but I'll say it anyway. It's important to be respectful of the referee's time and also to remember that you're representing GitLab. So you may even be talking to a future candidate or even a customer of GitLab. So it's important to introduce yourself and be upfront. You appreciate their time in meeting with you. You can explain the hiring process and where the candidate is and why it's important that the referee shares as much information as they feel able about the candidate's skills and experience when they were working for the manager or with the colleague, depending on the relationship, the referee relationship. Also as we do in our screening calls, ensure you mention that you'll be taking notes because I know sometimes it may seem to the other person if they can hear you tapping on the keyboard they might not know why or they might think you're not listening to them. So that's important that you just make sure you mention that. All of the reference check feedback that you get and you receive should be entered into the reference form in Leva and I believe Chloe has already set that up. So it's important that we have it all in one place rather than in a Google Doc. We need to make sure it's kept in Leva. Okay, excuse me, I apologize. Following the GitLab process, these are the four following questions that should be asked during the reference checks. These are not the only four but we wanna be consistent across the board and make sure at least these four are being asked. You shouldn't hesitate to ask any follow-up questions for more clarification. This is your time to dig in a bit deeper into the qualifications, the skills and culture fit of a potential GitLab employee. As a hiring manager, you should also be very careful and we'll review it in the next slide of what you should not ask a referee. You know, other questions that can be asked are, did the employee prefer to work on a team or independently? How did he or she support coworkers? How did they handle conflict? What about pressure? What about stress? You know, engineering has a great set of reference questions that can be utilized by any group within GitLab and we've asked Eric to take a moment to give us an overview of the questions that he uses and kind of talk to us about what he has felt has been successful in the past doing reference checks. Yeah, sure. And here is a, oh good, you're projecting my document. This is a script I developed over the course of several years and I think we'll share it with everybody. You can use it, you can extend it if you want. But basically the first thing I want to say is that I think Abby mentioned front door and back door reference checks. So this is for front door reference checks. Back door reference checks, I typically make it just very conversational and very fluid. It typically is based on the strength of your relationship or a other GitLab employees' relationship. They typically tend to be very frank. The reason to structure a front door reference is because these are people that are supplied by the candidate. So we can assume that they're friendly to some extent with the candidate and are incentivized to get the person the job. They've been hand-picked, which means there's a little bit more gamesmanship for lack of a better term with a front door reference. So the first couple of questions here, you're sort of just verifying information you hopefully got through the interview process. It's making sure that the role, as you understood it, that they played at these various companies is reflected back to you by this other person. So things can be exaggerated, things can be kind of misapprehended. And this is the final chance to kind of make sure exactly what they were and weren't doing. If we scroll down, we start to get into issues of performance and things like that. And what I try to do is actually ask, what's essentially the same question in multiple different ways? So the first time I try to get at like, what are the person's strengths and weaknesses? I say something like, hey, how would I best set up this person for success at our company? And then you typically get a set of answers that are based around the person's strengths. And then I immediately ask basically the same question from a negative perspective of like, what are this person's failure modes? And if they haven't covered everything over in the first question, you typically get a little bit more frankness out of that second one. And then finally, just to close it out and make sure you've pulled everything you can out of this person. You can say like, hey, I'm responsible for this thing at my company. It's a very critical launch. There's time pressure around it. I'm putting my name on it. If you were in my shoes, would you hire this person during the team? And if they haven't really revealed everything that they're comfortable with in the prior to your questions, you typically get it there or you just won't get it at all. So it's a matter, I would call it sort of triangulating in on this information, given the fact that this person was handpicked by the candidate themselves. And another thing this partner remembers that like, because they were handpicked, you expect front door references to be positive. So a positive reference, as we would think of it, really just kind of confirms everything that you know. And what, so it's an issue of calibration where I would say a really positive reference is an over the top reference. So I'll give you an example of that. I am my last company hired an individual, I said I made two great hires. One was what I would call like a, you know, a gem out in the open as opposed to a hidden gem, you know, MIT startup pedigree worked for a big tech company like Slam Dunk Hire. And he was great. This other individual came from the East Coast, a not very well known tech school, worked in fintech and had been let go. And I was a big fan of him because in the interview process, you know, I asked him, he sailed through the technical questions and, but I asked him a particular question. I said, like, what do you do in your spare time? And he said, I read JavaScript frameworks for fun. And I really liked that answer and I had a lot of confidence in him because of that. But when we got to reference checking, his references weren't just positive. People were actually angry that he had been let go at the company. They literally said, our company is no weaker because this individual is no longer there. And it turns out he had been let go because on the East Coast, particularly in fintech, the web developers believe not reunionized. And when they had to do a right sizing, he had the less tenure, so he mathematically got let go. But the team was actually upset about that. So his references were incredibly passionate and that's actually a positive reference. A merely positive reference essentially is just, you know, kind of neutral. You expect them to be possible. So that's important. And something I'd be said, I think it's important too, which is I want hiring managers on my team is doing these reference checks. It's one way to scale out people ops. If they're doing all the reference checks it's a huge time commitment. If we have to divide and conquer, I would say our hiring managers should do the manager reference check because that's your chance, manager to manager to understand what were their performance reviews like? What were their strengths? What were their weaknesses? How do they stack rank on the team, you know, technically or otherwise? And it's really your last chance to get that sense of how, how can you manage the person? How will you be communicating with them? And how can you most effectively set them up for success in your team? So I think this document will be shared after the fact. If there's any questions in chat or Slack me after the fact, I'm happy to go to another level of detail. Great. Thanks, Eric. We're actually gonna be adding that engineering questions into lever. So your managers will have the access to those additional reference questions. You know, Abby and I will reach out to each function in the beginning of the new year and we'll work with your leaders or anyone in your team to maybe identify additional BU specific questions that you would like to add to lever for your particular team or organization. We'll also partner with you to determine if there is a need for a manager reference check document compared to an individual contributor reference check. All right, we can go to the next slide. Oops. You know, as a reminder, the same discrimination laws that apply to irrealing apply to reference checking. So do not ask about marital status, age, gender, gender identity, disability, religion, ethnicity, or other personal characteristics. And remember that all questions have to relate directly to the candidate's ability to be successful in a position that they are filling. All right, so at this point, you know, Abby and I are gonna do a little role play for you of a potential reference check. You know, and please note that not all references will be able to speak with you due to their company policy of providing employment details. This is becoming more and more normal. If you receive such a response, do not push for more information. So today we're gonna do a reference call and it's being conducted by myself. I'm the hiring manager. I'm looking for a UX designer for my team and a candidate by the name of Jason has reached the reference check stage of the hiring process. So it's, hi, you must be Abby. It's really nice to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me, I really appreciate it. I'm Jessica, I'm the UX manager at GitLab. As I mentioned in my email to you, Jason has applied to join my team as UX designer. He gave us your name as a reference. I do have a few questions for you. I will be taking some notes if you're my keyboard, that's the reason why. Do you still have time now to speak? Yeah, sure, no problem. I'm very happy to help. Jason is a great guy, so yeah, whatever I can do. Great, I'm glad to hear it. Can you briefly describe your working relationship with Jason? Yeah, I was Jason's manager. What does Jason like to work with? I don't have any complaints, generally good interactions. You know, what could Jason improve on? Well, I think he could have a sharper eye on the finer points, but nothing really major that I can think of. What advice would you give to their next hiring manager? Jason, he responds really well to feedback in general, and he's keen to contribute to new projects. Okay, so I'm gonna take a moment. I really haven't gathered much information that's very useful here. Abby, though she's helpful, she's been pretty vague, and there's still some time left on the call, so this is the opportunity for you to ask those further questions. Well, thanks, Abby, for that information, and thanks for answering those questions. You know, I have a few more, as they will really help me get a better sense of Jason's knowledge, skills, abilities, and work style. Yep, sure, fire away. You know, what are Jason's strength and weaknesses as an employee? Strength-wise, he's able to work in a team exceptionally well, very keen to support his teammates, which is great, and I would say that he's able to communicate effectively and share his ideas. On the flip side, he has struggled with managing multiple priorities, and when that happens, I think he finds it difficult to ask for help. Okay, you mentioned multiple priorities. You know, how does Jason handle pressure? How does he handle stress? How does he handle the conflict that arises from those? He really becomes very focused and will put his energy into getting whatever it is that he needs to be done, completed. The downside of that is that he doesn't become very communicative, because he's so focused on what he's trying to do to relieve the pressure, but he does seem to remain quite calm, and I think, although this kind of a good and a bad thing, it can make it difficult for the rest of the team if they need a response from him. Would you rehire Jason if the opportunity arose? Yeah, definitely, and I'm actually sorry to see him go. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you would like to share with me as Jason's potential new manager? Um, I don't think so. What I would say is that I know Jason is keen to progress in his career, so I think it's really important that you have a visible career path for him to follow so he can continue to learn and grow. In actual fact, I can probably give you the name of someone else that you could speak to who could give you a little bit more information about what I think about it. Yeah, I'll send you their details. Great, I appreciate any more information I can gather, and thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me and I really appreciate it. Yep, you're welcome, and I hope Jason is successful. Thanks. Okay, so just finally, before we finish, just have a bit of a retap. So increasingly, organizations, as we mentioned, have a policy that prevents their employees from giving references. They'll only provide literally employment details such as job titles, start date when they finished, and that'll be it. That doesn't mean to say that the candidate has given us or given you a reference that you're not able to contact. It's just that most employers have this policy and they do enforce it, so it doesn't mean that the candidate was not successful. And I think we probably could go back to the candidate to get a name and contact information of an alternate reference if necessary. And finally, hiring and inducting and training a new employee involves a lot of time, effort, and cost. Reference checks are a wise thing to do before you make the final decision about hiring a candidate. It's good to know your potential member of your team how they like to work, what their strengths and weaknesses are, because the more informed you are as their manager, the more you'll be able to understand how to really get the best out of the new team member and ensure that they perform well and that they're a good fit with GitLab and everyone will be satisfied with their performance. And before we open it up to questions, I know I believe there were a couple of people on the hiring team on this call. I don't know if there's anything they want to add that I have missed, that we haven't talked about. So I think I would just, a couple of things to add here on the back door references. There is subtle ways that you can do those that put the candidate at less risk. One of those ways is to not imply that they've actually applied to a role and not to imply that you've actually interviewed them, but to be a little more careful in your words in that I have seen this candidate's resume, I'm extremely interested in them. I would like to know if they're a right fit for us and I should try to pursue it. And so give me your thoughts on what it was like to work with them, what would be an attractive workplace to them. There's a lot of information you can get from managers, especially with those who are nervous about providing a reference. If you don't directly ask, were they good to work with, would you hire them again? Those are good questions. And if they're comfortable, it's great to ask them. But other questions, they can give you some great feedback and information about the candidates. What environment do they thrive most in? And generally speaking, that answer won't be a negative, right? It'll be, oh, they're great in this environment, they're great in that environment, but you can glean information from that. If the kind of environment they're in is a fast-paced, unstructured environment where they can collaborate in conference rooms with their colleagues and they love to go out for together after drinks and work, and that's really what drives them, then maybe that implies that there could be better for a different kind of environment than in a remote work environment where we're together on Zoom and I think getting along wonderful together, but we're not having as many beers together after work. Similarly, when I was at Netflix, I asked the question of what environment do they thrive in and I got the answer that they do like a lot of structure, that they thrive in process-orientated environments, they prefer very clear guidance and recommendations. I would know that in the Netflix environment where it's pretty ambiguous, no one really knows what anyone else is doing and it's very, very freeform, maybe that wouldn't be the best place for them. So some of the answers you can get that are very positive and the person giving the reference thinks they're being positive, but when you apply it to GitLab and what we're doing here, maybe they wouldn't be such a great fit. So I think some of those ways of asking questions can be beneficial. I think that Kathy is right, there is a very small circle in security and I think that's where you get more nuanced of who are the best candidates in security, who should we be looking at? Here's someone I've heard of, are they good? Would you recommend them? And it's less of a, I'm taking a direct reference. Does that make sense? Bobby, I'd like to add that we've had, sorry about the dark background, I'm sitting outside just to get fresh air, it's really hot and great in South Africa right now. Basically what I've noticed is from the first reach out, yes, there's been a bit of a delay and people coming back to us to arrange the calls or respond to an email if they were un-contactable, but they are responding. So the positive news is we are getting great references and some with quite critical feedback. So I was very surprised this week, there's been a few interesting responses but we are most certainly getting the references done and I am surprised that they're coming through in the volumes that they are. So even though it's not allowed in certain countries, if the candidate gave the hiring manager the heats up that we're calling and yes, there's not a back door, so we're probably not gonna get the information Eric mentioned earlier, but they are coming back to us. So I do think there's some sort of positive commitment because we emailing and calling from GitLab, which is good. Yeah, and I can't minimize the added benefit of getting your network broader and stronger and getting the GitLab message out there more. I did a reference today, I want my candidates and the reference was the president of McAfee and the president of McAfee really enjoyed hearing about GitLab. He was a great reference, but the call went a little long as I explained the way we work and how Julie would have to actually use the platform and he thought, oh my gosh, that's wonderful. You know, a product that everyone at the company actually asked to use means a better product and you know, there's great added benefits to this too and that's one of the reasons it's great when the manager can actually check these references because as the manager you're expanding your network and you're being able to also send a great impression of GitLab that might get people interested either to work for in the future or to use our product in the future. So I have a question and I'm like, I'm still trying to understand where the actual value in this whole thing is. If we are not getting all the references from all people and we will mostly get positive feedback or rather the people provide their own references, how can I even make a decision based on that, right? Like if it's mostly positive, like it's going to be a hunch, so that requires a lot of experience so I cannot just go straight into a reference call on my own for the first time or first couple of times and how do we make sure that the people who we cannot get references from, what do we do with them? I would worry about someone for whom no one was willing to be a reference for. Most people, if they've enjoyed working with you and I called them up and said, hey, I'm gonna use you as reference, they would respond. And so part of it is, do people get back to you? So I would say and Sid can speak up here Netflix has a policy on not giving references. They have very few policies, but they tell their employees to not give references. Sid had no problem, I don't think, calling up random people at Netflix. Yeah, no, that was easy. Yeah, I didn't even give them the heads up that they would be called because I had no idea who Sid would be calling. I think we're a bit, though, like we're not being clear. Like when is a reference, a bad reference and when do we not hire someone? Can we please give examples of that? Because we're kind of, we're not being clear about what's a good, what's a bad reference. I think when it's a really obvious bad reference, it's obvious, right? So when you ask the question, would you wanna work with this person again? They just say no, pretty clear. However, you're not usually gonna get it that clear. You'll get people who are more vague, hedge more, or just don't wanna check a reference, wanna give you no answers, wanna just say yes or no. And then that's a sign that something could be going on there and you wanna dig a little further on this one or at least question your assumptions that they're the right hire. A reference isn't gonna be your primary deciding factor. It's more data for you to consider and making your final decision. And if you're getting references that do not wanna disclose information, do not wanna discuss the person, seem really standoffish, then that's something to give you pause, really look through the qualifications of that candidate, look through the interview feedback, consider any red flags and think, maybe these that I dismissed or rationalized, I should give most, you know, closer consideration to. And so it is judgment. It's not gonna be always simple black and white, but they should just give you pause to think more. Yeah, let me give you, let me give some examples. So I referenced Jack, someone, and they talked about leading a team and how many people reported to you? They said 15, and I find out that really, yes, they did the project, but the people had an operating, like we're reporting to someone else. So someone else was doing the people management to hire in the fire. That should have been disclosed. I think in the example interview that was given in this call, I thought it was the example of a bad reference call because there were three or four points where I would have started digging. And I don't have the example, the exact point, but for example, yeah, they were good in this. And then it was sometimes when they focus on something or, oh, can you name an example of that? Just do what you do during interviews. Obviously, like it's different, it's a reference call, but just try to dig in a bit. Of course, be respectful of the other person's time and as Barbie said, it's good to not make them feel like they're causing problems, but hey, I'll continue. Oh, why do you say that? Or, oh, how might I prevent that? Like, yeah, that is seen as constructive, but also will mostly force the person to come up with an example of when it happened. So you wanna start digging into anything interesting that you hear and you wanna, of course, cross-deck it, but I wanna give examples. So it might be like, hey, yeah, they need a clear focus. Okay, how could I provide a clear focus? Well, I'm not sure. Well, what did you do before that didn't work and what did you do afterwards that did work? Well, before we gave this person their assignments per week, afterwards I had a daily call with this person. Well, if this is a person that is like intermediate level, buff, red flag, if maybe go back to your other interviews and other references and find like disproving evidence, but if that stands, that's probably a no hire, or that's a hire as a junior. I'm trying to give examples. Of course, there's a lot of new ones in these things, but that might be an example. Does that make sense, madam? Oh, no, that's not a good question. Anna, what do you think about that example? Yeah, I think that actually clears it out or plays it out for me. Thanks. Marin, I'd say there's another value of reference checks from the positive sense. Like the ideal position for a hiring manager to be in is that you have multiple candidates who have met your absolute bar and are suitable for the position and you're having trouble deciding which one to actually make the offer to you because you only have one vacancy, let's say to Phil. And you have two of them and one has positive references, which I would interpret as neutral and one has over-the-top references, which I would interpret as positive. Then it's a very easy way. So like, well, this breaks the tie, we do that one. I would also say it's important when checking references to be aware of cultural differences. So I do think that when you're checking a reference, I think to your point, Eric, some will be over-the-top, like, wow, they can't stop singing your praises and others will maybe more subtle and neutral. There are cultural differences there too of the way people express their joy, right? So I don't wanna generalize any cultures, but if you were talking to someone in Brazil, they might be a little bit more effusive with their feedback and if you were talking to someone in Germany, they might be a little more measured. And so you do have to take that into consideration too when you're evaluating the references. Can we do the fake hole from the beginning again and try out this digging into things? I will share my screen again. Do we think that's a good idea, Barbie? Yeah, I think that's fine. And if Abby, Jessica, if you're comfortable doing it, that's fine. If you want me to step in and participate too, that's fine as well. Okay, I'll be, I'll be... I can hear Jessica going to say something, but she's muted apparently. You're muted, Jess. No, Sid, how about you're the... You could be the hiring manager and I will be the employee's current manager. Would that work? Cool, yeah, for sure. Great. You're up. Hi, Jessica. Thanks for taking the time to discuss this personics. I've, they're applying at GitLab for the role of a demand generation advocate. Are you familiar with GitLab? You know, no, actually, I've never heard of GitLab. Okay, so we're a startup where we make... Wow, we have to just prepare. We make software that helps people... Or we help people with their software, so allow people to make better software faster. It's a 200-person company. We're all over the world. People work, mostly work from home. We're a fast-growing company. And the position they're applying for the demand generation advocate means that they demand advocates. I know, I'm not sure. I'll make, not only make something more better, but be sure to describe the role of it because for the person checking it, it's really important. Like they want to give feedback that's relevant to us. So you've got to set context. So, Jessica, I understood from personics that they've reported for you for three years during working at your company. Oh, that's correct, they did. Well, I kind of like all the other questions. So, what would you, as after the calls I've done with personics, I have a very positive impression. And I wanted to make sure I'm a great manager for them when they started Give Up. So, what advice would you have for me? Well, you said your company is remote, correct, every employee? Yes, it is. So, people work from home. We do call often and there's a lot of information out there, but people work from their own location. Well, I think that's a really interesting concept, but that may be an issue for this employee. You're making this too easy, Jessica. But if Jessica would have said, like, oh, that's great. Well, it's really, they're really go-getters. They always get there. And one thing to watch out for is they can give lots of, they can give feedback and reinforcement. And I would say, oh, that's great. Tell me about the go-getter aspect. First talk about the positive things. And then say, hey, Jessica, tell me about the positive reinforcement. Can you give an example? You managed them, how you did that? As part of reinforcement, this person really values real-time feedback. So, it's important that this employee has done something good to acknowledge that. They also are a more private person and they would prefer that feedback privately than being in a group. Okay, great. That's really good. I think I can accommodate that. How did you realize that this was needed for personics? In our many one-on-ones, we have a career development conversations. We talk about what they're doing well in their role, how happy they are, and what they need from me as a manager. And we talked about this person's need for recognition. And when having those conversations, I just dug in a little deeper and asked them, well, you know, how do you like recognition? You know, we have some people on the team who really like to be out in front. Is that something you would like? Or what is your preferred preference? And so, through just normal conversations, we discovered that this person likes it, but wants it private. Okay, great. And how often do you get positive reinforcement? Well, it depends on their performance. You know, if they've done a great job, I'm not a demand-gen expert, so I'm gonna make this up too. You know, if they've completed their goal-setting for the month or they exceeded that, I will then go ahead and give that a real time. With this employee, I would probably say, I do recognition the normal amount, nothing more than, you know, that. Okay, and you said that person likes, prefers it in private. What happens? Have you ever, like, mistakenly praised them in public? No, I have not. So, fortunately, I was able to ward that off. So, I've not had that issue. I also- Okay, did it happen before they reported to you, or how did you find out? I don't know. He never mentioned an issue. This is happening before, but it was just something that we've talked about in our question. How do you think person X is uncomfortable with being praised in public? I think he's a, when it's the right way of playing this, I would say he's, even though he's in demand-gen, I would say that he is a forced extrovert, but he's truly an introvert. And so I think his introvert tendencies lead him to have things more private. So, this little pause here, I think this is a good example of checking in when someone makes a generalized comment about someone, but can't back it up with a detail or an experience that would actually give evidence to the perhaps assumption they're making. And so I think this is a really good example of that. So, well done. Yeah, thanks, Jessica. I would not hold this against the person. Like, this is nothing. Like what I'm looking for is, once I sat well done on a podium and they barged off really angry and they wouldn't talk with me for two months. Like, oh, well, that's a res lag. Like, what's happening there? Like you're trying to find stuff like that or they need reinforcement every single day. Well, there are many positions that get left or we're not gonna be able to offer you that. So you're looking for hard data, for frequency and stuff. And you gotta, this is already beginning. Like, when Jessica started Psychological Profiles, that would be my last question, because you wanna back off then. That's not what we do. We don't do a Myers-Griggs when people join or stuff like that. That is getting too personal. It's not function-related anymore. But yeah, I like to kind of dig. And then it's especially nice if you've got multiple references in the company because you can then dig. And sometimes you find something not great, but if the story is consistent with all the different people, you know, it's fine. It's great, or it's like you've added value if you get different stories from different people, then there's something amiss and that can go up too. Yeah, people that agree to a certain storyline and then one person not being informed about it and then you find out that there was something that really didn't go well, all kinds of stuff. Well, that's a bit spectacular. Most of the time it's just, hey, I should pay more attention to XYZ. And sometimes I go back to the notes. Like if it's about positive reinforcement, can we go to the interview notes, find any situations about that? Or maybe I've had done reference goals where I'm like, we should have another call. If I would have known this during the last interview, I would have asked about this. And so just do another interview. And the worst thing is you talk about, a hard subject to talk about before they join and it's clearly on the radar during the course. So the personality thing is very interesting, Sid. I was saying security that I've encountered a lot of people who can be really negative, right? And what I mean by that is that they say, oh, this is awful, this is horrible, but not necessarily offer like a constructive feedback kind of thing. So that's something that I really try to dig for. Because when you have a team of people working together and there's one of those or maybe two of those types of people that can really cause kind of a toxic environment for the rest of the people. So it can be kind of demoralizing to have that. So that's why I feel like sometimes I do dig a bit on personality. Yeah, I would say I'm not gonna name any names, but there's people at GitLab and maybe including me, that are a bit like negative by nature. So I don't think negativity per se is something bad. I think it's like not being result oriented. So saying like, it's all messed up. And then as you said, not doing anything about it. Like you want people that make a difference. And I think there are some of our engineers who with a lot of humor, like say the worst things about what they're digging into something like, this is broken and that is broken. This is horrible. And then after a few hours, they ship an amazing migration to fix that stuff. So that's great. Like I think it's allowed for me, it's allowed to be negative, but it's like to have an attitude to fix it and make it better. I think that's what you're saying too, but I wanna, I try to, we want a diverse company, including diverse personalities. For some people are very enthusiastic and some people are very negative. That's fine as long as there is collaboration and as long as there's an result orientedness in it. Probably we're trying to say the same. I totally back that up Sid. I would phrase it as like skepticism as long as it's healthy is really valuable. Like in engineering, security and legal in particular, skepticism is like necessary to do the job. But I like using results orientation as the way to differentiate between what's constructive and what's not. Because we need both types here. We need our salespeople to be incredibly optimistic. And we need our engineers to be, you know, healthy skeptically and be both of those personality types to be successful as a company. Yeah. And proven psychological generalization. You have matches and mismatches. Like, if you're a sale, you're likely to be a match and you see opportunity. Like you, you connect things that other people can't connect. If you're an engineer, you're more likely to be a mismatch. You focus on the one thing that is wrong. So it's always fun. Like engineers and sales talking. Engineers like, there's one thing wrong. We can't do this. Sales like we have nine things in common with the customer. This is awesome. Like it's kind of, I find that a helpful framework. By the way, if you haven't noticed, I'm a mismatcher. I look at the one thing that's wrong. So that's, it's one of the most CEOs. Well, probably CEOs tend to be mismatches. General CEOs tend to be matches. Like they see the me connections. And who is having fun in chat. Skeptical engineers, never. You know, I think this dialogue has been great. Are there other questions that folks may have? I mean, I think we've talked about quite a few things here. And thanks, Sid. I hopefully didn't make it too easy or too hard for you in my. No, it was great. Thanks, Jessica. Alrighty, if there are any other questions, you know, thanks so much. And like I said, Abby and I will kind of follow up with you regarding, you know, particular questions that you may want to add and deliver for your organization. So if you're starting your holidays soon, you know, have fun and see you in the new year. Thank you. Thanks. Take care. Thanks, everyone.