 Yeah, so thanks Sarah for being here today Really excited to be here to talk with you about recruiting at scale. Do you just want to introduce yourself briefly to the? Persons in the audience just a small the small little room. Yeah I'm Sarah Manning. I lead the people team at Hoppin I am I hope I live up to the introduction and where he said that I do this well I tried to do this well, but I think that's what we do every day So I do lead the people team at Hoppin We are mission at Hoppin is to try and make the world feel closer through Events like this running in-person events online events virtual events I'm building a platform that supports making making the world feel closer. So my team then yes, we have scaled from Small handful at the beginning of 2020 to now close to a thousand people and which which which Is it calls to me a bit of anxiety What I think of what we have done and and reflecting on like how we how we did it and where we're going But it's also been an amazing journey. Yeah, thanks. So nice to have you um, let's jump into the questions Sure, so in Hoppin's case. I heard that your founder and CEO Johnny. He hired the first 50 employees himself So that's quite a feat Do you want to kind of explain what your recruitment process looked like in the beginning and then? Do you think that that like level of founder involvement is like necessary sure so so yeah, I mean it's true So so Johnny Buford our founder and CEO at Hoppin He was and still is very passionate about the team that we're hiring and and the people that are joining so in the beginning Yeah, it was it was just him, you know, so we had he got his first first investment and realized He had money to hire a team and he had built like the early very early stage of the product himself And but but needed to hire in particular as many people know like he wanted other engineers He needed developers to help him build and scale and and and deliver what he needed So he genuinely like when I ask him, you know Like it's not being like a people professional It is not the the how you would do it if you had a larger company But actually it's what worked and he he went out and literally went on to LinkedIn He would contact people and potentially on a Friday and and have them start on a Monday Like it was it was that scrappy But he did and and his like for me The reason it's so important for a founder to be there and involved at those first I mean up to that first 50 hires He's still continued to be to be to be involved with him doing that personal recruiting Because at that scale you don't have you don't have a brand yet So if you're if you're and from my side side of the world an employer brand There's so many employer brands out there that you're competing with that. He was competing with and What what's what was different? What was the sale why join hoppin over, you know And I there were more established startup or a better brand that has maybe a better compensation package or different things But what the reason that that I've discovered and that I know from speaking to him and far from those first 50 employees who joined It was his passion Nobody as much as I can try to sell the vision and mission of hoppin and I hope I do my best But a founder the something like the person whose dream it's their baby There is there is something I don't know like contagious about us that there to sell that vision The best person to do it as a founder So when you're trying to poach somebody from a like a good job where they have benefits and they have a secure income And it's a brand that their family know it's it's hard to get them to join your company to join your startup But it is it is it is priceless to have a founder involved who can sell that ambition that vision and get the buy-in and Trust and belief in where they want to go That is the best way to hire though, especially in the earliest in there in the early days. Yeah, that's definitely true If you think about how you hired in the beginning, what would you have done differently looking back now? and I think you know as this I don't think we'd have done that you know, I could say from like a process point of view I wish we had better documentation I wish we knew who all those people were that he reached out to that I have no idea because we weren't tracking it So I do think one of the and I know money money can be tied in startups But investing in in it even in a basic ATS So it's like a talent attraction tool Because it does allow you to keep track of who's talking to who because when he then started we then started You know those first 50 people and even until until now You know what I think in a lot of companies to say everybody's always selling but in startup everyone's recruiting So it was definitely one of our tactics whereby Johnny did say and I think it was something you were gonna ask When we when someone did come on board and we did convince them to come in and join the hop-in journey We did ask who are the best people that you know like who are the other best people that you know and Because we'll convince them and I remember like talking to Johnny about this and people saying oh But what do you need? What's the skill that you're looking for and he's like we need it all like with with where the vision he had and thankfully the Investment that we had we knew we needed to build a company We needed to build a company that was sustainable and that was grow that would grow with us and have build that infrastructure So it was it was it's quite funny because it was like just who are the best people Who did you love working with who did you who would you love to work with again? I don't care what they did because so long as they can they want to come in here Whether it's like you know were they in marketing or sales or they were in engineering It doesn't matter because we're building something brilliant and we want brilliant people on the journey So I think but to go back to your question What would we have done differently is is some form of being able to track that some form of when everybody then is going out You've got a ton of people talking to people and we've we had no way internally of tracking it So I know certainly my head of recruiting now would say that was because I asked her before I came and she said oh God please just like track it whether it's documenting who you're talking to Or investing in like we use greenhouse as an ATS now. We brought that in only we brought that actually It's probably in about a year So we brought that in probably within our first year and it was one of the best investments that that we made But it doesn't like that it is like an enterprise level level system But there are others out there But it is about being able to track who you're talking to so that you do protect because you are starting to grow your Employer brand and you need to protect that brand and you don't want to look sloppy and scrappy by lots of different people Reaching out to the same person and you still want to look like this is a real company and we know what we're doing. Yeah, awesome Yeah, you said you you have greenhouse as your ATS What else has changed, you know, how do you do your recruiting now? I know you could like 50 people a month in the beginning of the year So what's your process like how do you manage that? Yeah, it's it's been it's been interesting because we've we don't want to lose Be moving fast and that is one thing gosh if Johnny says to me like if it doesn't have to be 10 times a day Yes, we need to focus on building the infrastructure and we want it to be sustainable But we can't lose momentum. We can't lose momentum in the speed because of the market opportunity that's there and available right now So we but we do need to bring in so that's where he and I have good debates because I think of things like compliance and I think of Things like you know, it is like documentation because we are now a much bigger company So our but what we're trying not to so we compromise so we try not to have a big lengthy process It does depend on the roles in the jobs, but right now. So our Johnny does not central in our recruiting anymore We have recruiters so every every role has a designated recruiter and that that is key So having one person in charge of the entire process Making sure there aren't multiple different points of contact reaching out making sure the candidate experience is top priority and understanding that Someone will shoot even if they've you're selling the company like it's it really interesting when you're in a candidate's shoes You don't always see it that way But from a business's perspective you want to attract the best talent into you a lot of they're judging you though They are judging you on that experience on every single person that they meet But also like what's the gap like or did you leave them waiting two weeks with no contact? They're gonna go somewhere else so it's been really mindful of that process So I think that's the main difference is is not we haven't what we've definitely lengthened it from Call on a Friday start on Monday that has gone But but to try and do it within a few weeks from from kind of getting your your short list of your preferred candidates Getting them to meet internal people having What we call a hiring guide is really key at the beginning So that's just a maybe a Tool tip more so like a technique that we would have once the recruiter is assigned the role now They need to sit with the hiring manager or if there's gonna be if depending on who the decision maker is work with that person Or what is a what is it that we're looking for? What are the questions? We're gonna ask What's the process like what is the process we're gonna follow is it gonna be like a quick two-step process? Are we gonna do some type of like tech test? Determining what the process is at the beginning so that you are consistent you can explain that to the candidate They know what to expect and then you're consistent with everybody else So you're fair also and when you're not changing process in between so agreeing what your hiring guide is and then still trying To work through that stages don't leave candidates waiting respond as quickly as possible and reach your decision Informed but as quickly as possible. Yeah, thanks. I think that's great advice for everyone in the audience We already kind of touched upon this but if you think about then how to get good candidates So I guess a common piece of advice is that people you know from before really are the best ones to hire So how do you hop in like source brilliant candidates, especially at a scale? Do you use your current employees networks for that? Yeah, so like I said at the beginning. It was definitely Johnny saying tell me who the other brilliant people are and we've kind of kept that philosophy and I'll caution it in a moment, but generally I like like right now We are I say it laughing because we're still so young, but we are more sophisticated So we have a referral program we So for any internal employee because they are now we need everybody selling because we are still we still have a lot of hiring To do and we still have huge ambitions So we want if if we've hired someone who's passionate and loves working with the company like let us know who else is good in your network So we do have a now like we are incentivizing that financially So we do have a good referral program in place and I think we probably get I'd say over 40% of our New hires now coming in or all through can't through referrals if not even higher actually I think it's probably close to 50% and our referrals from our current team the one caution that I have For anybody who's not so word distributed So our team the team that we have today. That's over 900 we're across 47 different countries So we are fully remote. We have no offices. We have no headquarters What what being in 47 different countries when you do a referral program enables it enables Differences it enables diversity if you have your whole team coming from the same school Coming from all based in the same city and you do a deep referral program. You're gonna get more of the same So it's definitely a caution I would put out their referrals are amazing because you've worked with great people before and if you know They will fit with the company that helps you run fast And but it is a pitfall if you're hiring from the same pool Consistently we're looking at that when we put in our referrals. We were already we've been very distributed from the very beginning So when we refer now we're thankfully getting referrals across multiple different countries multiple different backgrounds So we're getting multiple different perspectives So yeah referrals definitely work for us. Yes, that's really valuable What do you look for in a candidate like what are top top things you look for? number one for for Bespoke to us and and I think I think for many like if your founders here Agility agility number one being able to be flexible being able to deal with ambiguity being able to move fast Our key so when we we do it now, but that was what we looked for in our early joiners. So the early joiners joined a year ago That's what we were looking for because they knew they you do you have a Perception of what startup is but it is good to articulate it It is good to articulate that you do need people who who are okay If their job change like if their their job might change in the next few months, what you're hired to do today If you're working in startup and a fast-paced startup that things are gonna change You need to be able to flex what the company is doing. It is going to be ambiguous things will change like for us The different levels of investment you get will change what may change what you're focused on You might be able to acquire another company. You might be able to do different things invest in a different product Those things if you have a core team working with you for them to be able to roll with that and not just be tunnel vision I'm oh, but when I joined we were just doing this and I thought this was the sole thing We were here to do and that I was here to do that person is probably not going to scale with you So I think how you do that is being transparent as early as possible being as transparent With your heart with those candidates you're interviewing and in interview stage and in like that onboarding stage making sure They understand what they're getting into and is really important I think additional to awesome and with agility and is is understanding what it means to be remote So understanding what it means not to come into an office every day not to have your team right beside you And it's something that we're we're quite clear about so obviously with what we do We tried to to if we're here to try and bring people closer in the world I'd be kind of failing in my job if I wasn't able to bring our employees Close in the same way So we are very purposeful about how we bring our team together and how we connect and engage being remote But but yeah It is something that is important for us to articulate and have people understand what working in a fully remote environment means First and what it what it is and what it isn't yeah, definitely Just quickly after you hired these brilliant people. What is your onboarding look like? Yeah, so so like it's a good follow-on question So one of the things that I had to unlearn was coming from like a Background where we did pre-covid Every day, you know if we were doing onboarding in a Mia everybody came to Dublin or if you're you know Depending on where your office is you typically brought people to your office So a lot of companies had to obviously rethink that when when the pandemic hit and we had to do onboarding remotely That was such a beautiful gift when I joined up in because that's that was the purpose We we it wasn't as if the team were trying to reconfigure how you do onboarding Because I think what a lot of companies got stuck in was figuring out, okay This is what our onboarding was when we were in office. How do we make this work? Which is different to we're remote. We're starting from scratch What does that mean for how we onboard people and thankfully when I came in there was already a couple of folks in the People apps team that that I took on who had already thought about it who they had come into a fully remote company and they had Designed actually what will work what like and and we do use like so It's easy for me to say because it's easy for us to use hop in so we actually put on an event So we would run a virtual online event. We call it our Academy. It's a five It's the event itself takes place over five days, but we prep people. It's as if it's like you coming here today We reach out in advance. We let we obviously send people and logistics is really important So the last thing you want is for someone on their first day because they're not physically for us going to an office And they're staying possibly still in their bedroom and making sure they have the equipment They need making sure they have a laptop making sure you've given them Understanding what setup they need and are supplying that setup for them in in their homes But at a minimum like that's us being more sophisticated now looking at office setup Minimum you have to get them a laptop They have to be able to work to get on to your systems to be able to access what you're doing and So we communicate early on so from we have a really good now Handover from the recruiter on to somebody on our onboarding team on people ups team who then holds their hand there are new hires through what to expect on your first day making Sure, they get their equipment making sure they know Not physically where to be but online where to be and where they are is in an onboarding event So we created this event and called our Academy and people on your first day and it's a mix It's if you picture this online So there's going to be an expo area within the expo area. We have tons of resources for people So we'll have a video from our founder welcoming them. We'll have a video about our values We'll have video links to product training. So for any eager folks who sign up who who who joined the event before start time They can go in and just start having a look around and then across the week It's a mix of and sink and async because I think that's the way people are receiving and learning more in This new way of working so we would have mixed like in person like intros to hey These are all the other new joiners higher being hired. This is your cohort Two different facilitated training such as product training training on our sales process training on how Finance works that happens. So we'd have all facilitated training and then a lot a lot of self directed So we would have links then to some self-directed reading self-directed training over over the course of that week and I know that sounds Probably like a lot, but it wasn't that was done before I joined. I was employee around 250 So that was done way before I even started. So that was just a team of not HR people That was just a group of people going. Okay, how can we on board now? We've evolved it since and we've become more sophisticated, but at the beginning it was okay. We'd like literally, okay Let's get in a virtual event. Let's just load it with some content Who are the people who know who can facilitate who knows about products? Let's get one of our product managers in to talk to the new hires It doesn't have to be complicated with the volume we do. It's definitely a more sophisticated machine that we run But it doesn't have to be Difficult or overwhelming to to set something up just to be purposeful about how you on board. Yeah, awesome Yeah, you just said you know hop in as a fully remote company or distributor across 47 countries. Yeah Yeah, that's that's quite a lot But you've been that from the beginning so you're kind of the experts on remote hiring I'd say So what do you think other companies should take into account when hiring remotely like what are your main tips for that? I think I've probably touched on some of this I think if you are hiring and I don't know if we're experts where we're still so young We're totally learning and I am on learning a lot of what I've done before to try and look through So I think probably to answer your question one thing is to look at what you do through remote lens So understanding everything like how how can how will somebody now submit an expense? And there's obviously great tools out there for that now through to engaging meeting their team How much are you going to do that is sink versus async how much like as we've all been through it Like you like dying at the end of the day because you've just been on back-to-back video calls How much can you do now in different ways of communicating? So I think probably it's being purposeful and how you connect with your team Understanding and and thinking through how you communicate Why and when you communicate and and like we have little things like meeting etiquette We really try not to have a meeting longer than 30 minutes We have 50 like 15 minute check-ins are really common because it helps you just get to get to like What is the purpose of the meeting and anything that is shorter than that should be like we will record videos now? So it's I feel I'm a bit old I'm my team are all doing it regularly so instead of like hey, can you jump on a call? They're sending me like a quick loom video or a stream yard video like that. They've just recorded themselves That's like a five-minute update on something. So I think being aware of how people consume Information how people connect there's multiple ways of doing it. So so again one of our tools You need to invent you need to figure out what how are you talking like the regular talking? So we use slack and we don't like I would say I think less than 1% of my email is internal So there's internally we done it's something I need to remember because I rarely check my email anymore But but it is obviously we do have like different external people reaching out and customers and stuff that we need to obviously stay on Top of email, but but slack internally for us is is our main means of communication instantly and But then yeah combining it with Different etiquette around video and face-to-face meetings I think one thing for us as well with regard to how we maintain connection with with a remote team is Having a cadence where people can know what's happening So one thing it's similar to like our thought process and setting up the the academy was Our team all hands meeting or some companies call them town halls It's where you bring your whole company and that's a company of ten or for us It's a company of 900 plus people together That for me was something that I realized had to be different in a remote environment when you all sit together You know in the same office you're talking so regularly you've maintained you have that connection you you've you've you understand You should understand what is happening with someone else is working on when you're so distributed And even it doesn't have to be distributed like us across 40 plus countries when you're simply just not in the same Office together or not necessarily in the same time zone together You do miss just knowing what what's what's happening with somebody or what's happening in a particular team So we do what we call our weekly all hands again. We run out like an event. So that was something for me I came from You know looking at town halls or all hands as information receiving that yeah the CEO or some leader is going to join and tell Me what they're what we're working on and that's going to be good and that's helpful for me But I was never interactive it was it was not something where but yes, there might be a Q&A at the end But it wasn't something necessarily that was really Engaging like whereas what we do now when you when you think about it differently in a remote setting We treat it now like a show and again. I know it's it sounds like High-production, but it's not like we simply have like we've a couple of hosts there They're hoppin employees. We sometimes alternate the hosts. We do it for 30 minutes once a week Johnny our founder CEO always joins top But we start out with music like we just do it things a little bit differently It is not just a a meeting whereby people are here to listen. We want to hear from the team We want to engage so we have our chat feature running throughout it, which is ridiculously on fire throughout the whole thing and We have the the our founder talking will do will bring on like customer spotlights We will talk deeply about you know what what our focus is this week this month this quarter But it's really engaging and that's I think that's one of the things is it's it's a similar Tool in terms of okay We need to have like some type of all-hands or town hall to communicate But it's how you do it and how do you do it in a way that keeps your team staying on for the full hour? And actually engaging within it engaging in the chat asking questions participating in polls There's different ways to to do it. Yeah, I definitely relate to the chat feature when we have our all-hands meetings as well When they were remote The chat was always on fire everyone writing things and I think that's a good thing because when you have a live meeting It's you can't like interrupt the person who's speaking like that. Yeah Yeah, that's one of the very good features of you know being remote Just so you can just like have a separate side chat where you write things. Yeah, that's really fun Yeah, we're nearing the end of our stage time So I just want to ask what are your like key learnings from your journey at hoppin What are the like most important things you want to share with everyone in the audience? I think the for a founder Have being willing to go out and hire the team like to me that was Being open maybe to different ways of working. We were open to hiring anybody anywhere. And that certainly helped us Not be restricted So if we were just picking one particular city or two cities to target We would never have scaled as fast as we did it just wouldn't have been possible So when you can like cast your net literally worldwide the way we did you will find amazing talent in the less obvious areas So I think being being willing to do things differently I think was super important for us and then that coupled with As a founder being able to articulate your vision being able to sell Passionately what you were building why somebody should leave their steady job or that other funky startup that they're working with to Come join you have that story ready because that is what will grab people that is what will bring them And then once you bring them they bring more and I think lastly like I touched on it before but Agility in the team having hiring people who will be flexible and it's hard to predict it So I think the only way you can get around that is just being as transparent as possible that hey This is startup like this is we like who knows what what ebbs and flows we're gonna have on this journey Everything is not going to be crystal clear straight up it like a clean line to where we're going Been able to articulate that to somebody so that they're they're okay with it and they realize okay. Yeah, I can do this I can be agile I can flow with With where this journey is gonna go because the last thing you want is hiring somebody great And they do a really great job But then they become a blocker because they're not able to flex and move with where the company's going Yes, awesome. Thank you so much Sarah for coming here today, and thank you for sharing sharing your insights It's been great. My pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks. Enjoy the rest of the event everyone