 Well, in the meantime, I'll certainly introduce myself and hopefully my slides will show up otherwise I'll just have to do some hand gestures to show you what's up there. This is sustainable recruiting, building a sustainable recruiting strategy for a D8 and beyond if you were wondering which room you're in. There you go. My name is Colleen Carroll. I am also known as Carol Tron in the Drupal sphere as well as Twitter's and other social medias. I've actually been in Drupal for roughly seven years now and one of the things that I suppose you should know about me is that I'm incredibly passionate about all things that can be sustainable. Partially driven out of laziness, the idea of like trying to somewhat replace myself but at the same time realizing having been in the web for a very long time that you can't do things yourself forever, that you have to build frameworks or systems that can scale beyond just you. This talk in particular will be about recruiting and some of the lessons that I learned over time and put in place at Palantir that I think are good lessons to share today. The real question is why are you here? I wouldn't be able to do a sustainable session unless I had some kind of garden metaphor. For this it could be that you're here because you're starting fresh. The gardener in me says that that looks like cilantro and I feel like I need to tell you already about the balance of sun and shade to make a proper garden there. But really maybe you're here because this is new to you and you really want to get some insight. Or maybe you're here with a group. You're in progress. You're starting to build your recruiting garden, your hiring garden. Quite possibly you're here to weed out some people and that's also an important part of the process. Or maybe you're here to just straight up compare because you have the most beautiful garden in the world and that's also okay. I want to hear what you have to say. But there's also this. You may be here because you're debating whether or not to go with a talent acquisition or if you should do it in house because of the burden of the challenges of having to recruit talent in the technology world as we do. So what is recruitment really? It's a lot of things but to many of us it's about finding the best. It's about making connections, going out to conferences and making sure that you're hearing what's being said, you're being present. But it's also about keeping that talent that you just brought into your team. The reality is though is it's so much more than that. It needs to be consistent, it needs to be scalable and it needs to be adaptable. Without these values, without these principles, you cannot make it the same beyond you or with your team or as technology changes, any of these things. I feel quite strongly that it needs to be a group effort that you can rely on staff or other members of your team to help you with this effort that you have ahead of you. But most importantly, it does need to be sustainable and how do you do that? How do you grow something? How do you build a framework and let it live and breathe beyond just you and your efforts? If you are a recruiter yourself or if you're in charge of that hiring process, you probably do some of it intuitively. You may not even be able to completely articulate what it is that you're doing. And hopefully through this, through my story and through some of the lessons I've learned, I can help you articulate that so that it can, you can grow a framework that you can share and invite participation to. So I can't tell my story unless I give you some of the woes of hiring. There's a lot of them. If you've been in hiring or recruiting, you've gone through ups and downs, you've gone through attrition, it's exhausting. It's never ending. And I think it took me probably four or five years to realize that it was never going to stop and I just had to embrace it. So here's some of the thoughts that go through my head in a hiring capacity. This is kind of the latest one. So technology is changing every single day. The names are getting crazier, more ridiculous. I'm not a developer anymore, I used to be, but it's challenging to keep up. And I have people telling me I need to find somebody who knows Travis. And I'm thinking to myself, all right, so I can figure this out, right? I'm, who's Travis? He's got to be somebody, somebody important, but the developer and me know it's smart enough. I should probably Google it first and maybe look at a few different pages. And, you know, sure enough, I find that it's yet another new technology that is important, it's critical to our development process. And there was a blip in time where I thought I didn't need to know this stuff. And it's true, I don't need to know every single tool as a recruiter. However, I do have to have conversations with my team. I do need to know what it is that they're interested in. And I need to set them up for success to help me recruit. I can connect them to the people, I can connect the people that we're recruiting to people on my team who know, you know, quite honestly better than I do. And that I support that effort in and of itself is one of the most beautiful ingredients to a successful recruiting strategy. Because I want to work with a great team. And if you can demonstrate that, even better. So there's Travis. Then there's my other favorite, you're getting promoted. This one actually strikes anxiety in me now because what I've realized as a hiring person is that, well, that's great. Moving up in the team, staying wonderful, oh my God, I have to fill their position. And I hadn't been thinking about it. And I've been helping them move to this new position, which is fantastic. I want that. I want to encourage that. That's how you keep retention. But you can't, when you're, what I've learned from a, you know, employee advancement side is that you have to be thinking about a succession plan. Who moves into that position? Is there someone else on the team that's moved into that position? Have you been having those conversations with your various managers or just peers that you've been? Have you been looking out across the community that you're involved in for potential fit? Are you constantly having those conversations so that you're not caught off guard when someone gets a wonderful promotion? There's also when somebody quits. I wish, I don't know if anybody's actually seen this video, but it's totally amazing. And I wish I was excited as I was to watch this video when someone tells me that they're quitting. I keep thinking it's like my heart breaks. No, I just trained you up. Or, you know, you're amazing. You were challenging everybody else on the team. There's so many things that I was excited about. But this is a reality. People in our industry do not stay at places for a long time. You know, when I grew up, my father, you know, worked for a union. He worked at the city for 35 years. That's what you did. You worked your craft across those years. You got better and you moved into management. You did these different things. Two years, maybe, maybe a little longer, maybe a little less, is what you have to start to expect. And I learned many years ago that I needed to embrace that. Embrace that as an opportunity. Sometimes we need to say goodbye. That's also very important. You, you know, back to the initial image that I showed of a garden that we need to weed, you're looking for a cohesive team, a team that can perform, a team that can sustain, that can grow, that can be challenged. If you have people in the team who are not challenging others, your team is at risk. So you have to make the horrible decision to ask somebody to leave. It's not easy to make that decision. It's not somebody to leave. It's not an easy thing to do, but, you know, it's a part of the life cycle. Then there's this one, which is really interesting. This one I probably learned most recently this last year. It's that it's, it's like, never fails. I just hire somebody and then all of a sudden we need to hire three more engineers or two more feds. It's like, I just, I just finished this. Now I've got to start over again. So what I've learned is that I have to have a bench. I have to say, oh, I got you. I got, I got like three candidates. I've been talking to them. It'll be great. I won't now have to start my entire recruiting process over. I'm not starting, you know, back on my back foot. So truly this process or, or what you need to embody as a recruiter is being proactive and adaptable. It's key that you embrace the fact that we, we live and breathe a landscape that's changing every second. And if we can anticipate it, if we can be proactive, if we can be adaptable to it, it won't overcome us. So it needs to be sustainable. You have to build a framework. So let me introduce D8. And you're wondering probably what, you know, maybe you're here because you're thinking, how do I prepare my team for D8 or how do I get new talent for D8? And it's true. D8 offers a lot of challenges. It also offers a significant amount of opportunities. And I think actually, quite honestly, it shows a mirror to us as recruiters. Things that we should have known all, all along. So to quote Larry Garfield here, who works at Palantir, this is from a blog post you wrote about D8 for the win. Your next hire is outside of Drupal, essentially. So he says, one of the challenges to finding good Drupal talent is that Drupal has historically been, well, weird. And by weird, I mean entirely unlike any other system on the market. I feel this statement so, so far to my core, I can't even tell you. They said, I started at Palantir as a front-end developer about eight and a half years ago. And, you know, now I'm the director of operations. So I'm, I'm looking at how the company functions. I'm looking at building the team about employee development. All of these different things. I'm not developing anymore. But when I came into Palantir, we were a little CMS agnostic, but then we embraced Drupal. I was excited, right? Because I was like, ah, no more like 500 CMSs. I don't have to learn these five different languages. I can specialize now. But it was so unlike anything I had ever met. I wanted to fight it. I wanted to rip it apart. I wanted to, you know, kick it out the door. Because it didn't, it didn't, as a, as a developer, I was a creator. I was, I was, I could create something from scratch. I could build up on it. And with Drupal, you had to work with it, or at least at the time when I was developing. It was very much a system that you had to play nice with. And what I found, as I started to do recruiting for Palantir, is that people didn't want to go anywhere near it. I mean, I, it took me probably about a year and a half to even embrace it and love it. And, you know, and I still have a great deal of, of love for it, but I know that that learning curve is so steep. And what I found with many of our clients is that they had an even greater curve to hit. They couldn't hit the compensation structures that we could at Palantir, because we were a profit company. A lot of our clients are not for profit. So, their talent pool was much smaller. And now, they have this, you know, very elaborate system that we help build in Drupal, and they can't extend it themselves because they want to customize it. They don't want to just do some build up. They want to do something more. And that always made me a little bit sad. It made me feel like it couldn't be sustainable beyond, you know, beyond us, beyond Palantir. And sure, maybe they could hire us and we could train them up. And that was also fantastic. But I found that our clients also would go out and try to seek Drupal developers and they just couldn't find them. And they had all these other systems. They had nothing to do with Drupal. So, hire in a developer who just does Drupal, but yet they have a handful of other custom systems. A lot of not-for-profits have FileMaker Pro, you know, things like that. Hopefully, we don't hire FileMaker Pro developers. But all this to say that in order to prepare for D8, this is where the mirror comes to play. We have to look at ourselves and say, what make good developers? And what the answer to that is, is people who have an understanding or have a background or have the desire to learn the core principles of many of the programming languages that we learned before Drupal or that they're doing outside of Drupal. What is it, you know, pure PHP, for instance, or template engines like Twig, all the things that are starting to be baked into D8, get us back to the roots of being web developers. A handful of years ago, about the time that I was starting to come out of development and I was doing project leading at that point, I was doing less code. I don't remember who I was talking to, but we were specifically talking about Drupal and I said that it doesn't mean I missed being a web developer. I missed being able to create, to add things in and build this beautiful thing instead of having to unpack what felt to me like a box full of, like, you know, knotted Christmas lights. You know, if I was really good, I could probably get it all out and not break any of the lights, but that's how it felt. So to prepare for D8, you have to invest in your existing team, but you also now have a new set of communities that you can reach out to, different PHP conferences, for instance. Get the message out there that Drupal is more than what it's been, that it is welcoming now to many other people who in the past may have steered clear of it because it was like, that's just a little weird. I don't understand it. It doesn't play nice with these other things. The hope is that it does. And the reality is that we probably should have been doing this all along, even with D7, even with D6. It doesn't matter what the tool is. If we hire people who are, you know, have foundation in core principles of programming language, they can apply it to most, if not anything. You know, finding people who are strategic thinkers, who are strong problem solvers, who have strong soft skills, who can adapt, who can grow with your company and with your team, because who knows how long you're going to be in Drupal even. You may have to expand your tool chain. You may need to include different things. So, it's important not to get Drupal myopics. I think it's super important to think about this world out there beyond Drupal that has amazing talent in there and bringing them into our Drupal community, you know, and maybe even having them help train up our talent. So, let's talk about a strategy that I feel, you know, worked at Palantir that, you know, for instance, is multifaceted that, you know, uses this desire to find people with soft skills, just to find people who are adaptable. The best way for me to do that is, quite honestly, to tell you a little bit more about my story and the journey that I took to get where I'm at. So, as I said, I joined Palantir about eight and a half years ago as a front-end developer. There was seven people at Palantir at the time that I joined Palantir. And we're at 40 right now. Throughout that entire time, I've always been involved in the hiring process in some way or another. Obviously, now I'm much more actively. It's under my domain, you know, I run the process and I do quite a bit of the recruiting. But prior to Palantir, I worked for a very large not-for-profit that, you know, couldn't keep talent. We didn't have strong, skilled talent, you know, or talent that truly understood a lot of the systems that we were doing. But I saw good people come and go and it was sad. So I very much wanted to be a part of that hiring process. I wanted to find the people who had that same passion that I had and that would stick through it and help us steer towards what it was that we were looking for, which was to do really great work, quality work, work that could scale, work that could meet, you know, clients' needs and especially in the not-for-profit world, people who couldn't get the big, at-the-time systems that were like, been yet and things that were just completely out of their reach. So I did hiring by myself for the most part, a couple people here and there, but it was very intuitive, it was very ad hoc and it did not scale. So about three years ago, we hired Susan Golland, who works with me. She's the people and process coordinator. She's incredibly level-headed, I promise. Susan was hired about the same time that I was, a handful of months before I was about to go on maternity leave. So it was really important that I somehow translate all these things that I had been doing intuitively to somebody else so that should the need arise, you know, processes could keep going on without me. So Susan was quite instrumental. Actually, the process of just training her was very eye-opening for me. The second thing that happened is that I had my daughter, Winnie, you know, about eight months after Susan joined the team and my life changed. I couldn't be recruiting anymore. I couldn't be going to conferences, so everything changed for me. The things that I could do so instinctively, like get a beer with somebody or just have a conversation at our booth or over lunch or I just didn't have access to these things anymore. My priorities had shifted. So I needed to change something. So Susan and I worked together to essentially document our hiring process. This was the first step. And one of the first things that Susan said to me is that if you're gonna delegate something, you need to give it all. You cannot give me part of it. You need to help me both succeed as well as give me a space to fail. That was probably the, that's probably a life lesson beyond just this alone. It's just in life, if you, if you can delegate properly, you can have a network of opportunities, a network that can help you achieve whatever your goal is. So the hiring process that we established was actually quite simple. It took us a while to get there because it involved me having to articulate what I have been doing instinctively for so long. But essentially it was a three step process, a screening process that was with she and I looking for soft skills, followed by a skills-based process or interview that was with peers on the team and was able to get into the weeds. And I didn't have to be a part of that one. Maybe the development manager or somebody within the project management team to pay on who we were hiring could be part of that. And then the third round interview would be with the final round, the people who were gonna make the final say, I might also show back up in that interview. What's important about the fact that we had a three step process is that we knew what it was. It was a framework that we could use but it was also something that I could communicate to the people who I was interviewing. This to me is what I have found to be the most influential of all, is that when you're interviewing somebody, they are interviewing somewhere else and quite possibly somewhere that's got a better offer on the table. So somehow you have got to hook them to stay with you through that entire process. And I have found that the best way to do that is just to be honest about them about what the process is when you're gonna get back to them. And how we do that is that we treat it in three steps and we make a decision about who makes it to the next round after that first round. Genius. I learned that because prior to Susan helping me define that, I let things go a little bit longer and I lost some really great candidates because I didn't have my schedule, I didn't have under control, I didn't have things organized. I couldn't clearly communicate expectations. That made, I lost so many candidates because of that. Additionally, when you start to involve peers in the interview process, now the person who you're interviewing gets a sense of culture. They get a sense of who is gonna be on their team and how smart they are, how challenging they are and why do they really wanna work there. So that was fantastic. So in general, I decentralized the process. It kinda started off just most like people wanted to be involved but then I realized no, no, this has to happen every time. The second round always has to have peers. It always has to have people who can ask the real questions, get into the weeds. And I even set that up in the first interview. I say, you're not gonna talk to me about technology. You can, I will probably understand you but it's not gonna be that fun. So save it for a potential second round. So this is great, I decentralized, amazing. So now I have to be in less interviews which is really exciting. What was an unexpected surprise is that I actually created recruiting ambassadors through this process. This was not my intent. This was never my target. It was an unexpected, wonderful outcome. The people who were involved in the peer process and the skills-based interview now became people who could speak to the values and values of the company, the hiring process, why we wanted to work there. They were set up to ask the questions. So when they would go to conferences or they'd be out with friends or at a meetup wherever they're at, they already know how to ask the questions and they became recruiting ambassadors. However, I realized that that only went so far because while they knew some of the values, they didn't truly understand the vision. They didn't feel that they had all of the information to make a decision about somebody who is truly a good candidate. So they would say, Colleen, those three people were great. I loved it. Can we just hire all of them? I said, no, I'm sorry, we can't actually hire all three. We have to hire one and I want you to consider all of these factors. So now I had to describe to them again an intuitive process that I had around soft skills married with technical skills and how a wonderful combination of the two makes somebody who can truly scale with your team. And so what I realized is that I really needed to articulate what the vision and value is not only of the company were to the people involved in the interview process, but what the vision and value was of the interviewing process. Because I was able to do that, now they're even more powerful recruiting ambassadors. And actually another unexpected outcome is that they started to seek out people who fit that skill set and bring them back to me without, you know, I didn't have to solicit any of it. So that being said, then we hit the next maturity level, which is that you need to identify your gaps. You start to realize that, ah, my team looks really similar. And it's true. We hire within or we network within people we know. The only way to change that is to network outside of your familiar grounds. So, you know, one way to do this is to send people to conferences that are, you know, outside of your familiarity. You have to look at your team and ask yourself if they're representative of the population or the audience that's actually going to use your product. And if they're not, those are essentially the gaps that you have to hire for. And then when I say gaps, I don't even just mean from a demographic standpoint, I truly mean from all avenues, even from an intellectual, from a skill set, from a problem solving background, everything, the more diverse your talent is, the more challenging, the more challenges you can give a team, the more willing they are to stay. That was, I remember years ago, we lost somebody at Palantir who said, that's just, you know, I'm looking for a new challenge. It's just starting to feel a little cookie cutter. And it was, I just had to hear that once for us to change the way that we did things. And now it's all about finding rich, engaging challenge for the team. And that's not just about projects, it's about your peers. So, I talked about this a little bit earlier, but the way for you to truly be proactive and adaptable is to have a hiring bench. You could call this whatever you want. At Palantir we call it a hiring bench, but it's people who I've met who I do a screening interview with. So I only do a portion of my framework. I do the initial screening interview. I keep it short, I get to know them. I say, I don't have a job available, but I wanna hear everything there is to know about you. And then I keep them on my bench. And I set expectations again. It's all about being transparent, about being honest. I have no job. I really love what you have to say. I'd love to keep in touch. You know, I'll let you know when a position gets posted or maybe here's how you can find out about when a position gets posted. It's just about setting expectations. If you don't like, for instance, that cat metaphor, you could use a dog metaphor. You have a small talent pool or maybe you have a large talent pool. Do you have a way to track the people who come to you? Because I guarantee you, you will forget that most amazing person when it comes time, a year later and someone says you need to hire for a position that you had never thought about before. It's a brand new position, never in your hiring plan, but you know you need it now. And here a year or two ago, you had actually met that person. Or they knew of people. Those are the types of things you need to track that you need to be able to access when, from your hiring bench or from your talent pool, when the time arises. This is what allows you to pivot and to also not have this recruiting process be exhaustive. So let's come back to the framework. I talked about the whole story of how I got here and how it evolved for me and I'm still evolving. I'm still learning. I'm still making lots of mistakes. The key is to be able to iterate on those mistakes, to be able to have conversations with the people who are involved in your hiring and your recruiting process, take their input seriously and incorporate it back in as soon as you can. And you can't do that again if you don't set this vision. Set the vision and consistently communicate it. Make sure that they can repeat it back to you. This quite honestly goes again to everything in life. It's like, how do you run a business? Set the vision. How do you figure out schools for your toddler when they're gonna go into kindergarten? Set your vision and goals. Just focus on where you're headed. And then invite participation. Decentralize it. You cannot do it yourself, nor should you. Why wouldn't you, you have, I don't, it depends on how many people you have. You could have three people, you could have 20 people on your team, but they're on the ground, they're doing the work. They know what it means to be building these websites or designing for these websites or being strategic consultants, problem solvers, whatever it is. Rely on them, invite them. That's another way to also retain that talent. Talent always wants to, or team members, I should say always want to feel like they have an impact that they're adding value back to the company. There's no better way to do that than to show them that you respect their opinion, that you respect their professionalism, that you want to invite them into helping build this team that they're a part of. But most importantly, you have to also invest in them. You have to let them practice. In my experience, the best way to do this is to encourage them to go speak at conferences, at camps, encourage them to go to meetups, speak at those, maybe they're a little bit more friendly to do, because some people might be a little bit nervous to do something at a larger scale. Invite them to do blog posts. Have, get them out there. You, as, you know, going back to the fact that I'm a mom of a toddler and I can't travel, you know, we have a team of 40, so there's a handful of conferences that people want to go to JavaScript conferences or other open-source conferences or, you know, women-focused conferences. There's, the gamut is across the board. And I can't go to all of them. I can't be in all of these places at the same time. But they can, and I can train them up. And that's something that I've started to do. I've coincidentally been able to get away without having to train people for a while because the people who have been doing speaking engagements have also been involved in the hiring and the interview process. And so they've just naturally embraced this. So I'm using them as sort of my model ambassadors to say, like, let's bring some more people in so that when you go to that meetup, you can say like, oh, you should absolutely join my team and here's why. Here's what it's like to work with us and here's how you get to impact the process. I think people just want to feel that they're part of something bigger, that they're not just, you know, just a, I don't even know of a good way to say it, but that they mean something. But lastly, I think it's so important, so critical, that you actually track it. You, as I said, you can't remember all of the people that you talk to. Doesn't mean you need to track every single conversation that you've ever had, but you need to be able to access them and why they were so important. So that, for instance, if you're at a conference like this, you can find out or you can see if they're there and if they are, then you can be prepared to talk to them and say, hey, how are you doing, you know, have our stars, you know, align. Can you, what do we think about some new opportunities? Being always ready to have those conversations, always ready to make connections is kind of another important ingredient of being a successful recruiter. So essentially, this is it. Vision, participation, practice, and to track it. I'm sure there's like 500 more steps, but this is this framework, this four-step framework. I apply it to so much at Palantir, and it gives me, because it's a framework, it gives me so much room to adapt it, to change it as our needs change. So for instance, at Palantir, we're starting to do more symphony work. We're branching out of the Drupal Sphere. So, okay, well, oh man, I don't even, like, where do symphony people go for conferences? I have no idea. Now I gotta figure that out. Doesn't matter. I have people on the team who do. So I get with them, I sit down with them and I say, okay, here's the vision for hiring. Here's the type of people we're looking for. Here are the gaps that we're trying to fill. Don't forget that, because it's important that our team still be diverse, maybe challenged, that they're able to adapt with the company as we scale. So essentially, it is critical that we have a community to come back to the garden analogy. The community garden, while it may have its little cubbies of where you're planting things, it's a group effort, and it really is kind of why we're all here in the first place, right? Open source, it's like we do better together. So why not apply that to recruiting as well? I think the other big thing, though, is that we have to market that this is an option. That DEA isn't a scary monster, or it isn't, how are we ever gonna train up our talent? It's yet another version of Drupal. It doesn't matter. There's so much talent out there that already has the hard skills and the soft skills to get you to where you need to be. And investing in them and supporting them is the way to get there. So I think in summary, I think the thing that's important to know is that, you know, as I said, I've been at Palantir for eight and a half years. We started off with seven people. We're 40 right now. And I believe about 10 of us have had a tenure of over five years, which is amazing. And in my first handful of years at Palantir, I would say our turnover rate was fairly high, which is to be expected in the industry that we're in. But by establishing some of this framework, we've been able to keep people engaged. We've been able to keep them challenged, invested, and feeling like they have an impact on this bigger thing that is our team. And so I hope that some of this is something that you can apply back to what you're doing if it's with a team, if you're by yourself, or even if you are going to a talent acquisition service. If you're going to them, you still have to have a strategy. You still need to know what your vision is, where you're going, and how you're going to invite participation with your team. They can help you find that talent, but if you don't have that strategy, if you don't have that goal to find, you won't get the talent that will stay and will help you as a company do better. That's it, thank you. So I talked really fast and we ended, it's like 5.30, but I welcome questions from anybody. Sure, so I'll repeat the question because I'm assuming are we supposed to use the microphones too for the, okay, so the question was, I can repeat, thank you. At what point, I joined Palantir when we were seven people and now we're 40, and at what point in my tenure did I transition from a billable to a non-billable employee? And the answer to that is somewhere around four years ago. It sort of started like five years ago, but I was probably half there, so it was a slow trickle. I started off as front-end developer, then I started doing project management and project leading, and then I became the only director at that time. So as Palantir has scaled, we're slowly putting in pieces of overhead for lack of a better word because we can, and we see that now what we were doing wasn't sustainable. And so at that point in time was when I really was able to focus on this, but I would say probably not until about two years ago did I actually, of all of that eight and a half years that I realized some of the stuff that actually needed to be standardized. We were about 12 people, yeah. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes. Oh, there you go. I didn't even realize. And I'm wondering, so you talked about the participation piece and that's really intriguing to me, mostly because as probably similar for you, we have like eight extroverts and 32 introverts. I think we're, I think at Palantir for the record we're like 39 introverts, and I am one of them. I didn't mention that in my slides. That's a whole other conversation that I would love to have with you offline. That's all great. How the heck are you recruiting the extroverts? I'm just kidding. But I'm wondering like in terms of participation, I struggle with, and maybe just because I'm a control freak, but like I struggle with trusting these very introverted, very non-social, socially adept people to make a judgment call on soft skills especially. Sure. So let me think. So this is something I certainly still struggle with. Not as much as I had in years past. So I told you what the framework was as we've got it right now. There was a period of time where I was actually still involved in all three steps. And so for instance right now, the screen level, it used to be me and Susan. She would work with me to screen for certain soft skills and I would tell her why I like certain things afterwards. We would do a debrief almost immediately after each of our things. And then I started to coach her on okay, well who do you think was the best candidate and why? By doing that process, this is with someone who's non-technical. So again, just the screening interview. She was able to demonstrate to me that she was understanding exactly what it was that we were looking for, that worked well at Palantir and she could articulate it back to me. So I actually was able to step out of that process. I'm not involved in the screening interview anymore. The skill set interview is a little harder and I probably stayed in that interview for a much longer time and then I started to pull in the development managers, which you may or may not have a management tier. But I coached them on again, what soft skills we want and why. And quite honestly, what I did is I compared or I tried to reflect back on past experiences with people who did not work well and why that was the case. And it's neither here nor there. It's not about the person being a good person or a bad person, it's about whether or not they're able to succeed within this environment that we've cultivated. And I will say quite honestly, actually, it's at Palantir, you're outnumbered by introverts. So if you like to have conversations, people are gonna be on their headphones all day. So it might not work out and actually what I will do in an interview process is I will let that candidate know that. So the trusting process of your internal team is hard, it's not an easy thing to do, but the best advice I could give you is quite honestly just to coach them through it and get them to demonstrate. And if they can't do it, they can't be in that process. Other than you have to stay in there or you have to coach somebody else or bring somebody else in. I had a question about the decentralization part of it. So that assumes that there are multiple people to move things. So what about even before that point and any strategies for like, if we're not even at that point yet, just to grow the team out? So because you don't have anyone you can decentralize to. Sure, so let me think here. It's like a chicken egg thing. It is a chicken and the egg. Well, I mean, I'm sure there's, if I think through it a little bit, I'm sure there's another strategy, but what I did is I had to do it myself for a long time. I had to screen. And what that process turns out like is that you hire a lot of people who are actually not a very good fit because you're not doing, for instance, development anymore or maybe you're not doing project management. But the minute you do have someone that you can rely on, you should invite them and bring them under your wing and say, hey, we should have another project manager or have conversations with them before you're even interviewing somebody. Maybe you don't even have a job posted but you know it's gonna happen at some point. So those are having those conversations with people on the team who you think can screen for that type of candidate. And if you don't have, or rather you need to actually articulate what it is that you're looking for. So for instance, you put up a job description. What in that job description are the deal breakers and what things do you want people to expand on? Just highlight those bits and then talk to different folks on your team to see if they can help you identify that in a potential candidate. But it is hard. I mean, you gotta get to a point where you have a team before you can actually do centralized. I hope that answers your question. Well, yeah, I was just thinking more in terms of the specific skills that they're, I know people in my company, they don't, most of them don't do Drupal, for example. Sure. So it refers more to like higher level concepts maybe and sort of vague hand pointy stuff. Right. So yeah. That's a good point. Yeah, so right, because one of, in our skills round, one of the other things that we do is we ask for code samples. But obviously I can't review a code sample, that's not gonna go well. So that is interesting. I think what you, I think the way that you do this actually is that you, let's say you are hiring someone in Drupal, for instance. It's actually quite easy because if they're involved in the community, and hopefully they are, because there's a lot of people that are involved in the community who are looking for jobs, you look them up, you try to see how much involvement they have. Yeah, you check their comments on issue cues and see how often there's like positive versus negative conversations. Are they always starting troll wars or are they actually proceeding to move things along? So you really just have to screen for the soft skills at that point and kind of hope for your best. But by doing that, you will end up with incredibly strong talent that can then actually be part of that process later on. Thank you. You're welcome. So you're asking what does technical diversity at Palantir look like given that, for instance, where you are all Drupal. So the first challenge or the challenge that's the most obvious is actually the type of site, the type of problem that we're solving. So we tend to work with higher ed and for a while we're working at a smaller scale. What we've done in that avenue is actually moved up to a much more complicated scale within higher ed. We're starting to take on more migration work or multi-site situation. So it becomes about governance challenges, problem solving that actually doesn't, can't always be done with code. And because of that, or at least what I've seen in my personal experience is that you end up in conversations about like, oh, you can't write code for that. And then someone says, oh, maybe you can. And then it becomes a debate between the developers to say, no, no, we can actually create something that would streamline the efforts of the people that are maintaining the site. So it's not even necessarily about the people, the end users, the audience that will be using the site, but rather the administrators. So sometimes the challenge is in there. Sometimes the challenge is in the requirements gathering. But from a technical skill set, I think it's about finding things that are maybe missing in Drupal that solve the different business requirements or needs the client may have. Right, so I can give you an example of a symphony developer that we've hired. We hired him for a symphony project. That project is done. And most of our projects are Drupal, for instance. And then some of our Drupal projects have ended. And so what we've decided to do is actually get some training resources for our team so that this symphony developer can actually learn up some Drupal experience, maybe help us build out some internal infrastructure tools. And then for the Drupal developers, we're saying, hey, you know what? Like there's some symphony stuff that you should learn. And now there's internal resources within the team that can also help mentor. Collaboration among the team is also one of the biggest things that is, I would say, the retention thing for Palantir. People want to be able to talk to each other, to brainstorm, to come up with ideas for tools within our infrastructure stack. So when you have gaps during projects, that's a great way to train up people and to help them flex on muscles. But with this symphony developer, we hired him and I was incredibly honest with him about the fact that symphony is a very small portion of our portfolio at this point. We are still very Drupal focused. And I wanted to make sure, I wanted to assess out whether or not that was gonna be a problem for him if he wanted to learn Drupal. And you know, and vice versa, if I'm hiring Drupal talent now, the first thing I'm asking them is like, how do you feel about Silux? How do you feel about symphony? Do you know Angular? Do you wanna know Angular? You know, what other technologies do you like? And be as candid or as transparent as I can about what limits exist at Palantir or within our team, but also that there is a drive and a passion among the rest of us to constantly be innovating, to be constantly learning new tools and trying new tools. And that comes, that gets demonstrated very quickly because of the projects that we select because our sales team talks very closely with the dev team about what it is that they're looking, you know, what technology they're learning or they want to learn and why it would be a good solution for some of our clients. You're welcome. Any other questions? So this is a question that could fill up a whole session in itself. You guys do a really, really good job about hiring and maintaining female developers in an area that is really, really hard to hire and retain female developers. How? Beyond just having a really magnetic female president, but what else do you guys do to make that? We seek them out. I know that is a gap. There are other gaps, you know, putting gender aside. People who don't want to identify with a gender and what does our space look like? And is it an environment that is safe for them to be themselves? And I think we do a very good job of both blogging about that and communicating that. And again, that's a value that I hold as a recruiter, but it's a value that comes straight from the owners of the company, from George and Tiff. And so because we live and breathe that, it comes across in any person on the team. And that's, surprise, another thing that I screened for in the initial screen interview. What is your, are you an inclusive person? That actually used to be a question. Sometimes I ask it, it just sort of depends on what the person divulges in their first interview. But I try to ask a question about like, what does it mean to be inclusive and how do you create that in a conversation that maybe is a little challenging? Oftentimes people give me client versions, but I try to then unpack it from a peer to peer. How do you handle a conflict within your team? Or a difference of opinion? Because of that, I think that that is something that people know about Palantir, about our team, is that we value many different opinions, many different perspectives, many different backgrounds. And then I have to figure it out. I hear like so and so is doing some sessions about this and that and if it's something that I can go to or I know someone on my team is gonna go to, I'm gonna ask them to start talking to them. This is actually one of the other interesting things is to get your introverts to actually network. That's even crazier. It was like, just ask them, are they happy at their job or find a way to just say, what kind of challenges are you looking for and then tell them about Palantir? You know what I mean? That's what we're here, that's what we do, right? We share our stories, we talk about why we love what we do and why you should come work with us. So you gotta strike that conversation. So some of that is also about demonstrating it to certain people. If I know somebody could be a really good recruiter then I try to find a way to talk to them about that recruiting process. So it could even just be through, you know, not in person because at Palantir we're a semi-distributed company. It may just be through hip chat and they'll say like, hey, you know, Steve, I heard you're gonna be speaking at this camp and that camp and like you should really, like I bet there's gonna be people like this there or I see these sessions, I see these people, can you try to have a conversation with that person? Or reverse it, because maybe I don't know this information and I say you're gonna be at these camps. Do you think there's gonna be any good people that you feel like would love working at Palantir? I try not to use the word fit anymore, like oh, this is a great fit at Palantir. It's not about fit, it's about, I feel quite strongly that it's about challenge, about safe challenge, but it's about always moving the target a little bit further. That's how you retain, you know, I've seen it at least in the last four years, I've seen that that has been the greatest success for us is by keeping the conversations challenging, by listening to our team to find out what it is that excites them and setting them up for success to find more people that they wanna work with. So, any other questions? Well, thank you so much. You can find me on Twitter at Carol Tron. I'll be at the Palantir booth for the rest of the week too, and I would love to hear any stories that each of you have that if you'd be willing to share it because I, you know, when I moved out of development, the thing that I missed the most was having a peer group to talk about, like, ah, you know, just all of these different challenges that I face at work, and you know, for me, my project is Palantir. It's this team that I love so dearly and that I wanna keep around, knowing that I'm gonna have some changes, but how do I keep it as wonderful as it has been for me? And so, I'd love to hear, you know, stories and feedback from many of you, so I welcome it. Thanks, and thanks for coming to a five o'clock session. Thank you.