Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #134 - Sarah Nahm and Holly Liu

Episode Date: July 10, 2019

Sarah Nahm is the CEO and cofounder of Lever. Lever builds modern recruiting software for teams to source, interview, and hire top talent. They were in the Summer 2012 batch of YC. You can try Lever out at Lever.co.Holly Liu is a Visiting Partner at YC. Before that she cofounded the gaming company Kabam.You can find Sarah on Twitter @srhnhm and Holly is @hollyhliu.The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/***Topics00:00 - Intro00:41 - Did Sarah grow up thinking she'd be a founder?8:01 - Why did she decide to leave Google and start Lever?13:56 - Thinking about product in the early days of Lever15:51 - Fundraising and figuring out the team24:06 - How do you figure out someone's career motivations?27:26 - Getting concrete when interviewing29:31 - Hiring remote employees32:11 - Writing job descriptions around impact37:41 - Eva Zhang asks - What's the biggest roadblock you faced in trying to make hiring more inclusive to diverse candidates?42:06 - What does thinking about inclusion mean at a small company?47:21 - Not buying into technical and nontechnical people50:26 - Setting up a culture that allows for conversations about diversity and inclusion

Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Sarah Nam and Holly Lou. Sarah is the CEO and co-founder of Lever. Lever builds modern recruiting software for teams to source, interview, and hire top talent. They were in the summer 2012 batch of YC. You can try Lever out at lever.co. Holly is a visiting partner at YC. Before that, she co-founded the gaming company Cabam. You can find Sarah on Twitter at S-R-H-N-H-N-H-M, and Holly is at Holly H-Loo. All right, here we go. Sarah and Holly, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm pumped. So, Holly, you have a question to start it off. Yeah, I'm super curious. Did you ever see yourself becoming a founder, a founding CEO? Oh, my gosh. I have to honestly say no. So I, you know, growing up, I could not have grown up.

further from Silicon Valley. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, so deep south. And kind of back then, I probably wanted to be, you know, a different thing when I grew up every three months. I was dabbling in anything. I was dabbling in everything, but probably one thing I spent a lot of time on was social justice. I volunteered at Civil Rights Institute because all the amazing people that were a part of the civil rights movement, they're obviously still around and they're still doing amazing work. And that just was something that so defined, like, my experience of growing up in Alabama. And when I came out to Stanford first school, for college, I was the first person from my high school to go, like, west of the Mississippi River for college in, like,

years. And I had no idea what I wanted to do or who I wanted to become. And, you know, I think that that period at Stanford was a really interesting one, like pre-med was. the number one major, which has since changed, I think, to see us. And it wasn't super obvious that, you know, you as an undergraduate could be a founder. And my freshman class at Stanford was the first class to start with Facebook. And I think that that really changed so much in Silicon Valley, where young people now were seen as people that could innovate and that could bring kind of game-changing ideas to market. And I remember so many kind of moments where the people around me were stepping into, you know, taking the leap, like stepping into these kinds of roles and positions where

they were just going for it. And I think subconsciously that influenced me. But consciously it did not. I studied design. And I always thought I was just going to go into design consulting. So you're going to like take a job at IDEO and see what happened. Exactly. Yeah. And I loved it. I mean, I was like drinking the Kool-Aid, mixing the Kool-Aid, distributing the Kool-Aid to everybody else. Design Thinking was... Post-its. Oh, yes. More post-its. Oh, my God. All the post-its. It's going to solve everything. I mean, I got to admit, it's still a huge part of how I see the world. It's still a huge part of how, like, what I bring to my company. So I totally thought that's what I was going to do. And it was a total, yeah, total surprise to me.

Was that your first job out of Stanford? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I was very unfocused in my job search. I think the only way I even ended up, quote unquote, applying to Google, as like I was dropping off some form for a friend at, you know, Stanford's Career Development Center. And there was somebody there who worked there was like, oh, are you going to sign up for the Google interviews? Oh, that's a, that's really fast. I know. A part of me is sort of like, look, total privilege check because it's not like, you know, it's not normal, so to speak, for there to be a clipboard with a pencil dangling from it, for you to sign your name up for like an amazing kind of career opportunity. But that was right in front of me. And it was,

did you know what you were signing up for? Like, do you do design or? Oh, no, not at all. I think I just kind of like went into it and was curious and was engaged. And I think I was one of those annoying ones who couldn't make up my mind. And I just had this like outstanding offer for like months, like literally nine months before I officially kind of made the decision. And then I think even then I didn't know what I would do until, uh, my first day of work. That's a whole story. Because you were in that program where you transfer around, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The associates program. Okay. But it was super funny because I showed up to, uh, you know, the new higher orientation and you get, you know, your laptop and all the things. And then they have this moment where you're,

you know, all sitting around in, you know, the main cafeteria, Charlie's, you know, and you're supposed to get picked up by your manager. I'm just sitting. I'm just imagining. I know. So I'm waiting, find out like what I'm doing. And I'm still sitting there kind of at the end when everybody is all like set. Because my first job out of college was total kind of like came out of a left field thing.

I ended up being a speech writer, which I never saw coming. And it was a job that nobody had had before. for specifically supporting Merse Meyer. So, you know, she was a little tied up, so she couldn't come get me at Charlize. But, you know, I think in a weird way, that was probably my crash course in a lot of what it is to be a founder because had to kind of create something from nothing

and figure out what I was doing and be really bad at it for a while. And I think also in hindsight, so many lessons learned about leadership and strategy and just getting, to be a fly on the wall to conversations way, way, way above my pay grade and out of my element. Really amazing experience. And I think, like, you know, to this day, super grateful for it. I obviously spent time on other things at Google too. Notably, I spent a lot of time on the Chrome

team, which was just incredible, incredible people. You know, Sundar was like leading that initiative at the time. That was amazing. My direct boss is like this amazing kind of like growth guy. marketing guy, creative guy, who would go on to be the head of marketing at Instagram. So, yeah, like just some amazing people around me. Yeah. I've got to ask, though, when you speech write, do you use post-its? Oh, 100%. Oh, that's impressive. Yeah, I also take it the other way around, which is when I design mocks, I use keynote, prototyping tool. Yeah, so. Oh, I like that. You like, reverse it. Yeah, no, I think there's so many insights from a design kind of practice that I think are super applicable to being a founder, to being a CEO.

You know, for a while, I was actually really sad because I was spending less and less time on product. And for someone who loves product, that was actually really hard. Like, I felt like the sense of loss. But then I sort of started re like reframing a lot of the work that I was doing as a, you know, founder around, hey, you know, I still work on a product. The product is this company. And I still have to do user research.

It's just that my users are my employees. and my customers. And that same process for, you know, generating a clear strategy around user needs was just as needed, if not more so. In that design thinking coming back. Yeah, I know. So I really ought to say that to me, I think more designers should be founders. I think that that skill set is so, so relevant to the work it takes to actually get a lot of people together to work in a system and to create value from from scratch. So, you know, definitely I think there's some amazing designer founders out there. But a part of me wishes, you know, that there are way more. Yeah, that could be way more. So to me, to me, it's not obvious. Obviously, you jumped around

at Google, but it's not obvious as to how a speechwriter goes on to found lever. Yeah, not really obvious to me either. Right. Which is probably fair for most people in the world. But like, was there a point when you're at Google where you thought yourself, you know what, I'm going to go be a founder? How did you decide? Why did you leave? How did you decide to start lover? How'd that go? Yeah.

I mean, I think like so many founders, a path is nonlinear. You know, I think you read in mainstream media about these lightning strike moments that suddenly happen. I mean, I think that's all just media, right? And the personal experience of founding a company, it's, first of all, it's a period of time. It's not a strike of lightning. I think that even, you know, leaving Google, I didn't leave to start a company. I think I left to just grow and experience more things and ended up pursuing a lot of different stuff, things ranging from just like personal projects to obviously working with several, like early stage teams. And I think personally, you know, a lot of what I was really doing in the time that was on the path to founding a company was experiencing working with a lot of different types of people. Yeah. And so I, you could say that my co-founders and I were like almost trying out working with each other for a while before we like actually officially went for it. So I think that's a huge part of it. And I credit, you know, the fit to my co-founders for a lot of the success that we've had as a company. So in a weird way, like, I don't think I was doing it consciously at the time, but like making sure that you're finding the right people is it's like probably the hardest to predict, but most important part of like that super, super early stage. Was it very, it seems like you found the people and you were working together, but the idea wasn't quite there.

I mean, and Google was probably still on this rocket ship when you decide to leave or doing really well. Like what was the most difficult thing to overcome to just say, I'm going to be on this. Like, what was the thing that A, propel you? forward and then what was the most difficult thing in getting you to leave yeah i mean it's cushy there oh sure i mean first of all i just have to say like huge privilege check like having been at stanford having been at google like i think that it's not lost on me that there's like a lot of opportunity open to you and i think at the time i knew that i knew that you know in a way there was no good and bad choice spectrum. It was like all shades of good. And I think like a lot of people I just like knew

that I had an opportunity just in my life overall to take risks and try things out and really like grow my my sphere of experience and took that, which, you know, I think people who have it, like should embrace it and then people who don't have it. I mean, I don't think should beat themselves up about, you know, like having to think a little bit harder on taking the leap. So in terms of like, leaving Google, that was easy. I think in a way, it always kind of like felt like there was just more to experience. Starting lever was harder. And that's because, yeah, I mean, you know, so for one, he just didn't know exactly what we were going to do at first. I think very few teams know exactly what they're going to do. And probably the biggest thing to truly getting started was

you know, again, people, believing in the people that you're working with, believing in the people around you. And then secondly, you know, I think believing in a change that's happening in the world. And, you know, I think distant third to that is believing that you have what it takes to like bring some value that speaks to that change, right, that reacts to that change. So the change that we were really believing in that, you know, I think has really played out ever since was, you know, the world was, this is like 2012 when, you know, the founders of Lover kind of all got together. And we just saw that the world was quickly becoming a world where revenue, competitive differentiation, innovation was all driven by talent. You know, like you look at what was limiting

the growth of companies. It was that they couldn't hire enough engineers. They couldn't hire enough salespeople. You think about what was causing like some companies to win over others. It was because there was like some sort of like 10x talent thing happening that led to some sort of leapfrog in what they're bringing to market or, you know, some sort of like better marketing strategy. So essentially what was happening is just like kind of software was eating in the world, knowledge work was eating the world. Like as kind of technology and digital transformation was playing out in every single industry, even the most blue of blue collar work manufacturing was transforming into something that looked a lot more like knowledge work, you know, like you don't need just undifferentiated

assembly line workers. You needed people who could program like a robotic arm or, you know, like rethink manufacturing process, right? So that was happening in every single industry. And it was really transforming how organizations had to think about people, an HR. and hiring because kind of gone were the days of, you know, my parents' generation where you, like, join a company and you work your way up the career ladder. Like, my dad has had very few employers this whole career. He, like, stays with them for decades, right? And nowadays, like, millennials, Gen Z, they're entering the workforce and, like, people are staying at jobs for, like, three, four, five years in Silicon Valley, maybe even less.

Often less. I think it's 18 months or something right now. It's like, yeah. So did you guys feel Was there a unique insight in the beginning or were you just like, we're going to go, we see this change happening and we're just going to build a newer, better version? How did you approach product in the beginning? Oh my gosh. Well, like, first of all, the beginning, that blurry period, that probably lasted two and a half years. So, you know, I would say, you know, we were super engaged in making sure we were defining the

problem. And I think like in a way, probably different from other companies, we didn't rush too quickly lead to solutions? Well, I should say we actually did. And then we've always been kind of at the end of the day driven by our users and our customers and making sure that we're being honest to them and like holding ourselves accountable to them. Like you can think that you're delivering this game changing such and such platform something something. But like what your customers say about you or what they say to their friends when they're talking about your software, I mean, that's ultimately who you are. Right. So I,

I would actually say that first we built an entire thing and actually had to kind of come to terms with, you know, what our customer feedback kind of was. And we had built just something incremental. And we had built something that was just like a better version of what was there before. So then we threw it out. And I think went back to the core fundamentals. So, you know, you kind of ask like, did we know what we were building? I think that while we didn't know literally what product or what solution we were going to bring to market from the beginning. What we did know was how we were going to hold ourselves accountable and that was through listening to our customers. Though you were in the startup game, which implies VC, which implies pitching VC. So how was that

process? You know, even your industry wasn't really as much of a thing as it is now, seven years later. What was that process like in 20? Do you fundraise in 2012? You're on the winner. batch, right? So we did our first meaningful round of fundraising series A in October 2014. Okay. So I would definitely say 2012 to 2014 was that process of us figuring out what problem we were solving, how to achieve product market fit, how to build, you know, that traction that you want to show. And I think in that period, we also discovered a lot about ourselves as a team. In that period, just for me personally, I went from being, you know, an individually contributing designer to literally kind of on the eve of our series A, we had signed a term

sheet, but we hadn't closed the round. Kind of we as a team collectively agreed, I should be CEO. So you figure out a lot in that period. And if you're not confronting, like, those hard things about who are we and what are we here to do? Who am I? And what am I doing? You know, I think that you can put it off for just so long before it actually, you know, starts to intersect with like what you can achieve as a company, as a team. So, you know, when I think of those early days, yeah, like all fronts, we are figuring out who we were. And it's some of the most fun and terrifying, you know, chapters you've ever had at Lever. So. Yeah, those are stressful years. So now, you know, we're way further down the timeline.

And you do have kind of unique positions on recruiting culture and diversity. Back then, I assume you're just, again, figuring stuff out, right? A lot of our listeners are early founders. And they are competing against Facebook and Google. Google, I was going to call it the Google, Facebook and Google. And every big tech company, right? How do you differentiate as a small startup and land the top talent? Yeah, it's so true. It's a global talent market. And I think that it's competitive in so many ways.

And every startup, I think, does have this experience of like there's well-resourced recruiting machines that are kind of out there. And on the flip side, early stage startups have such a unique opportunity to offer. And so I think advice for startups is to spend actually a lot of time thinking about like what truly is your value prop actually figuring. out how you're going to approach hiring and what is kind of like the way that you can almost use your culture and all of its unique glory as like go on the offense with it. Because that's like you can so kind of run circles around a lot of the competition by bringing that experience of what it's like to work at your company into the candidate experience. So yeah, I think that there's so many kind of like hand-to-hand combat tactics that startups can employ that give them, frankly, a much better shot at recruiting the most talented people than these sort of large environments. Can you give us an example that you guys did at Lover? Oh my gosh, yeah, 100%. I think the first thing is,

you know, proactive recruiting. So, you know, any startup out there that's just posting a job and waiting for great people to apply. Yeah. Yeah. Shame. Shame to all of you. Hiring is, like, hiring is the strategy when you're a startup. Like, there's a period at which, like, you know, like, you can be the best founder on the

planet and you will be holding your own company back if you haven't figured out how to truly prioritize hiring, how to truly invest in it, and how to do. it damn well. Can we swear on this podcast? As far as much as you fucking want. Yeah. Like, how did you guys proactively do? I mean, you're usually so stretched thin. Yeah. Yeah. So this is actually like a concrete thing. Proactive recruitment. I think it's like the, um, it's going outbound, right? In the same way you wouldn't just like throw up a website and wait for customers to come find you. You've got to actually reach out to people.

And so like the first thing that everybody tells you is reach out to your network. You'll tap that out at some point. You should still do it, still do it, but you'll tap that out at some point. And then I think what you have to start doing is getting really confident, reaching out to people that you believe are going to be strong fits at your company that you're finding, not just on LinkedIn, though, you should. And then you'll tap it out. Get creative. Like look at meetups, look at Eventbrite. Look at GitHub. GitHub's a great place to find people if you actually, you know, kind of know, like what your technology value prop is or, you know. What's been the most surprising source for you guys?

Like something you just didn't expect, you're like, wow, I would not have expected to find a great candidate here or several great candidates. Oh, that's cool. Honestly, we have so many amazing and unique hiring stories in our company. Our team, so my, you know, engineering org has largely been built up by my co-founder Nate Smith, who, you know, we are recruiting software companies, so we think a lot about hiring. 81% of his team was proactively sourced. And I would say that, you know, you can genuinely find people and connect with people anywhere.

And I think the other thing that's been remarkable about our hiring strategy has been so many people that we actually hire. We actually met them and nurtured those relationships. So you actually several times interacted. Oh, two to three years. Yeah. Yeah. It comes back around. Like it's, you know, you're investing in, you know, I don't want to call it like a database of talent.

It's like you're investing in relationships. And like you may not see returns from those immediately. But, you know, those are going to be the people that actually when it is their right time, like when they're ready to make their next move, they're already going to be familiar with your team, with your culture, with your mission. They actually get hired. Like we have the data to prove this like 35% faster. than people who are meeting you for the first time. So, you know, people, I think, are familiar with the cliche that as a founder you should be spending like 50% of your time on hiring. I'm just like it's a cliche because it's true. And I think like, you know, hiring just takes so

many forms. And I think like one thing is obviously go out and meet people, you know, no expectations, no strings attached, let's meet. Second thing you can do is encourage people on your team to do the same. And that's really tough. I think actually, for whatever reason, people feel awkward pitching their friends about job opportunities. I can't imagine why. I can't imagine why that would be awkward. You can make some money. Great opportunity. Well, you know, I'm being a little facetious because yeah, it is a little awkward. It's awkward to sort of like, you know, sell something like that because it's so important. But then on the flip side, everybody has so much passion about like why they joined. And everybody does feel really strongly about the startup they're working for.

And I think actually as a founder, one of the most impactful things you can do is help your team find its authentic voice about why they give so much of a damn about your company's mission and why they joined and what it's done for them and what they've learned and how they've grown. And you don't have to say anything about the other person. Just telling your authentic story is an incredible, incredible thing. And so I would say that if, you know, any founder out there right now is trying to do a lot of hiring, you know, go book a team offsite where you actually help people come up with their authentic story for why they are so committed to this company. And just watch it transform, you know, the conversations that they're having. Build some email campaigns, if you will, even. So related to this, you talked to. about motivation fit at the YC hiring event a couple weeks ago, which basically describes like,

is this person's goal in their career and in like the near term, at least, aligned with where your company is at and their impact that they're going to have? How do you suss out someone's motivation when you're, you know, it's like kind of crude to talk about it, but like building this like two, three year database of people you meet, like having coffees with or whatever. How do you figure out their motivation? Yeah, great question. You know, I think, the simple answer is really just ask and the more complex answer is of course get really good at listening. So the simple kind of way, it's, you know, I think if you ask people what, you know, are, where are you taking your career? You know, what have you done in your past career decisions

that have been most meaningful to you? What is it that you're doing at your current job that you like to do more of? What are the things you're not getting to do at your current job? that you hope you get to do in your next one. All those are ways to like get some of the facts. But I think fundamentally, to me, like, you know, at Lever, our first stage of our hiring process, it's not phone screen. It's not something like that's just screening. It's motivation fit.

Like literally, that's what the name of the stage is. Because I think it's like it is kind of at the root of your best hires and it's also at the root of your worst hires if you don't get it right. So, you know, I think that what I'm listening for when I'm talking when I'm asking people these questions, it's usually to suss out, you know, is this the right stage for people? Ambiguity is kind of famously, you know, the huge factor of the experience at being at an early stage startup and finding people that thrive with ambiguity or finding people that really love, you know, the diversity of problems that you're going to be solving. you got to make sure to have an ear to listen for when people are really actually ready for that, when they're excited about that. I think another thing to listen for is, you know, when people are sort of looking to, say, take a big impactful role at a company, because everybody's going to say they're looking for impact, right?

So when somebody says they're looking for impact, really, do they know what that means for them? Is it generalities or do they actually have something that's really like revealing that, self-awareness of what for them is like in it from their personal seat of experience. And I think that the more specific someone's gotten about their own career, the more maturity they bring to the role, the kind of more they can probably up-level your team. So yeah, I think like simple answer, ask, just ask. And then complex answer is like really learn how to listen to how people, you know, express like their thoughts about themselves at work.

and what they're looking to get out of it, and what they're looking to do next and what they're looking for in a team. I certainly have a tactical question at this point. They used to train a lot of interviewing around, like, tell me about a time when X, Y, and Z? Oh, yeah. How do you, like, do you still feel like those can help suss out?

Totally. Like, to test for, you know, commitment or something like that. Yeah, so getting concrete, you know, concrete examples, concrete situations, as opposed to abstract like brain teasers, I, you know, would summarize that as behavioral interviewing. And I'm a big fan of behavioral interviewing, especially for early stage startups. And here's why. You know, I think that you as a founder are hiring for a lot of roles. You've never actually had personal experience doing those jobs. And beyond that, yeah, beyond that, nobody else at your company may have ever done that job. So you're operating on a lot of theory.

at this point. And one way you can really, like, de-risk hiring and also not be too clever about how you're going to, like, interview somebody is by actually just methodically asking them about their own career. And I think what you can get really good at hearing in their story as a founder is, you know, what are their patterns of success? What are maybe their patterns of failure? And just kind of like, you know your company really well. So you know whether your company has, as like the contours for this person to be successful. And, you know, I therefore am a huge fan of, you know, we do a step in our process that we call career trajectory.

And it's basically a behavioral interviewing interview where you go in and you just kind of start at, you know, college and then go step by step by step through people's career and allow them to tell you about it. And it's kind of basic, but it's so impactful. Yeah. And, you know, if anybody is really curious about looking into that, we kind of modified a version of top grading, which you can Google and find a lot of information about. But, yeah, I think it's actually great to just give people the space to tell you about how they've kind of grown in their careers. You learn a lot about someone that way.

In the context of remote work, do you have specific advice around finding out someone's kind of working style, their dynamic? I think what's a common one I hear is, have they worked remotely before? That's a good one right there. But are there other pieces of advice you have there? Oh, my gosh. I think this is where a lot of innovation is happening right now. And hiring, people are sort of putting two to two together. Oh, it's a global hiring market.

And then also thinking about, like, what would it mean if we actually just tapped in really meaningfully to, like, that global hiring market with hiring anywhere? It's tough. You know, I think that there are clear benefits. I think obviously you get some advantages around, you know, beating the market, so to speak, and tapping into, like, a lot more, like, you know, rare opportunities and a lot of kind of, like, immediately upon hiring someone, it's, it's kind of like winning the game, you know. But then on the flip side, you've got to build a culture that can support remote work as a first-class citizen.

And I think there's some people that really nail it, and they think about the details. They think about how meetings work. They think about how information is transferred. They think about tribal knowledge and how you're going to actually create like, you know, systems for information to flow freely, whereas if you're all co-located in the same office, you kind of get it for free. So, you know, Lever actually didn't really embark on remote work until you're pretty late as a company. And that was for people that had already worked in our company for a while. and then like for maybe personal reasons or whatever needed to move. And I would say that we're just getting started with a second office.

We're now starting to actually meaningfully do some experimentation with our team composition. But we had kind of the other side of it where we stayed together as long as possible. And I think that was pretty intentional. And I think it, I will say, connected to us being able to build a really strong culture together. it allowed us to I think really quickly you know I guess like spread a lot of best practices and it led to us certainly like sharing a lot of the load of skilling the team really effortlessly. So you know again pros cons. I would also say that we had to get real good at hiring in a tight talent market here in the Bay Area to be able to do that. So I definitely think it's a really huge. talent strategy question that any founder that's building a team right now has to ask themselves,

what tradeoffs do we want to make and go eyes wide open into like how if you're going to, you know, accelerate hiring by like really casting a wide net hiring remote. Okay, how are we going to prepare our culture for that? Another thing you mentioned in your talk was how you write job postings, which I really like. I just kind of like broke down a few of my favorite points. You described it as basically just describing the impact that you'll have a job. Can you elaborate? Absolutely. Well, I can tell you kind of the story. So we, just after we raised our series A, big moment for us, right? Like we started talking about what we were going to do next. We started really strategizing about it and something that we knew we would be doing that we hadn't really done

up until that point was hiring a lot of people. Right? Like we had been a really tight, small team, you know, for a long time. And here we were about to, you know, double the team in a matter of months. So being a recruiting software company, we were like, okay, well, we know a lot about recruiting. We know we really want to invest in, like, building a great recruiting process. So we decided to take, you know, an offsite. We all loaded ourselves into a van, company is small enough that we fit in a van and went to like Tahoe or something like that for a few days to actually really design how we were going to hire and what our hiring culture was going to be like and how we were we going to design our candidate experience. And by the way, I'd recommend

anybody who's about to do a huge amount of growth to do some very end of this. And, you know, one of the things that we kind of asked ourselves was like, well, like when we start hiring for a role, how are we going to know what jobs we need? So we actually like developed this little exercise. like it's literally a Google Doc that, you know, has like text boxes and stuff we made, um, that laid out, okay, like what would, you know, someone with this job need to achieve in one, three, six, 12 months, right? And specifically we tried to make them not like tasks or like, you know, start doing blah, but impact results, outcomes, right? Like, well, ideally they'd like improve web conversion from this to this or they, you know, actually like nailing the,

the results of success, right? So we patted ourselves on the back. This was a great way to define a lot of jobs to be done. Like now we had carved out all these like amazing, you know, I think you're hiring a lot of generalists. You're hiring a lot of athletes at that time. So here we had this great way to define like our work and we thought we were like really proud of ourselves. So we actually were able to go out and like start hiring with confidence, interviewing with confidence. And we got all these amazing people in the door. And like when they got pretty late stage, we'd be like, oh yeah, like, here, let's share this internal doc that we have with you. And people would just light up when they saw this. Oh, my gosh, this is so clarified. It's so amazing. And then we, it took us an embarrassingly long

time, like, probably six months to like be like, hey, why do we even write these like boring job descriptions? Why don't we just take these impact descriptions that candidates and people that end up actually joining the company like find way more interesting and frankly, like accurate and, you know, all sorts of other adjectives, like find way better. Why don't we just use that as the way that we talk about the jobs that we have? And ergo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so do you find yourself, do you still list required skills, for instance?

So say, you know, I'm looking at to apply for a job at lever and it's like, you're going to, you know, increase X, Y, and Z. And I'm like, I'm on it. And then you read the application. Like, this person has none of the required skills to actually do that. You know, every once in a while, I think for some of our entry level jobs when we do know, that there's like a few things that really do feel like great assets to have coming in. We list it. But actually if you go to like our career site, like actually most of our jobs, like the vast, vast, vast majority are actually just written this way. And I would attribute, you know,

this impact descriptions as opposed to job descriptions as not just being one, like a great way to get the most talented people, like the top 10 percentile of the talent market interested in your opportunities. It's also been a huge driver for us of diversifying the people that are self-selecting into applying. Because by having this lengthy list of skills and requirements, I mean, you're basically, you know, broadcasting to the world assumptions about what kind of people should apply. And I think the beauty of impact descriptions is you are putting out kind of like a statement about what you're looking for. and it welcomes people from non-traditional backgrounds, like, you know, kind of tech outsiders, so to speak. From your book club.

Yeah. Yeah. To, you know, like throw their hat in the ring. And so I would say, therefore, that it's not just more effective. You're actually getting the top talent interested. And those are the people that you want to hire, right? It's also, I think, more inclusive. And it's really, I think, more clarifying also.

So like teams do hiring. And I think getting everybody aligned on what you're looking for as a founder, huge accelerator to being able to really scale hiring, to do it with confidence, to get lots of people like who are all contributing to all be on the same page. Yeah. I mean, it's related. YC has the same thing.

Like a lot of people from non-traditional tech backgrounds who might be into tech look for reasons to disqualify themselves. And they're like, oh, I didn't go to a standard. for it and drop out. I didn't go to MIT or whatever. And like, maybe you should redo the YC application. That's an impact description. Yeah. Yeah.

It's not a bad angle. So related to inclusion, Ava Zhang sent you in a question. She writes, what's the biggest roadblock you faced in trying to make hiring more inclusive to diverse candidates? Wow.

There's so many things going through my brain as I'm thinking about this. I mean, so there's a few levels. Like, for one, we as a recruit software company, we're trying to actually scale out how all of our customers, how the entire industry can make hiring more inclusive. So, you know, we've got things that we're doing on a product level that I think answer Ava's questions. And then, of course, we are a company that's going through a lot of scale that is trying to like figure out our own culture and how to

be more inclusive internally. So there's also like that side of it. So, you know, in terms of roadblock of making hiring more inclusive for the world. Gosh, there's so much to be done there, and there's so much to be done there completely outside of software. So I think the biggest roadblock is sometimes you're sort of caught up in this tension where people would love for software to solve the problem. And you, as a software, you know, as a technologist, you have an opportunity to move the needle that way, but also I think it's really important when we're talking about a more equitable world that people do have to change. And so the biggest roadblock probably is when people maybe hope that the problem can be solved easily without confronting kind of like

these questions of what are we as people doing. And I think it's an opportunity for, you know, companies like Lever to actually drive a richer conversation around that and to make people maybe more aware that there's things that they can do. And I think in particular with things around diversity and inclusion, there really is that will. I feel that year over year, more and more people care, more and more companies from more and more verticals and stages are all coming forward and saying this is something that they want to invest in, that they can't ignore. And if anything, you know, this isn't a roadblock, but maybe something that would remove roadblocks, I think people need more success stories out there because they're happening.

And I think we see a lot of news reported on all the bad. It'd be great for the stories about what is working and what is taking off to be out there. In terms of what we have done to make our hiring more inclusive, oh my gosh, I think we're constantly running experiments. I mean, I am really happy to say that diversity inclusion has been something that the team at Lever has made a huge part of our culture from like day one. And it's not because we were diverse from day one, you know, for two, two and a half years I was the only woman at Lever. And it took us a long time also to diversify in other dimensions like race and ethnicity

or having parents and people with different like family situations, having people with different backgrounds, like all those different facets like also came kind of later. But we always cared. And I think we always had a vision for like what the culture could be. and I would say like probably the biggest roadblock people face to making their own teams and hiring more inclusive is thinking that it's about demographics and thinking that they have to reflect the demographics of diversity before they're allowed to make their culture more diverse or inclusive. And I actually give a lot of people advice like, look, before you're about to do a big investment into diversity in your recruiting and making kind of your hiring more diverse, I actually think it's really. critical to start by making sure your culture is inclusive. Because what's the point of like hiring all this quote diverse talent? If when they get there, they're not ready to succeed. Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah. Number one roadblock when founders think that because maybe they're like in a majority, they don't have a credible ability to lead their company to, you know, have a strong DNI culture. Well, I mean, it's what we were talking about before we started recording. Like now founders are not only tasked with leading the company, thinking of a great product, hitting product market fit, doing all this other stuff. Now they're in charge of like being included in completely with whatever's going on, whatever's social issue. So let's like spell this out a little bit more. Like inclusion. What does that mean at a company that's five people? What's an example? How do I do that? Oh my gosh. Well, I can definitely tell you how the conversation got sparked meaningfully a lever.

and it was who does the dishes. Oh, interesting. Did they all look at you? Hopefully not. Well, I wasn't the only one, but I was one of them. But like a very obvious kind of group of people did the dishes. And a very obvious group of people did not do the dishes. And, you know, I think it was really like everybody knew, you know?

It wasn't like surprise. Like everybody knew. And it was not something we'd ever entered into the domain of like something that we realized was the surface area of our culture. And at some point, I can't remember how this came up, but somebody shared an article about how like findings, you know, research shows that disproportionately women do office chores. And like basically when sharing that article, like also pointed out like, hey, that was happening here and what did we want to do about it? And literally, I can't remember if it was the next day or maybe like two or three days later, we just decided to do something about it.

we built a Slackbot that assigned a rotational dish duty. And it would just tell you in the morning, today is your dish duty day. And then we just like made it completely equitable. And people didn't shirk their duties. Well, that's a whole other question. But no, actually for a long time, even when like, you know, I think it was until like we were like actually a like significantly like maybe 100 person company. And then we actually had like maybe somebody who's like facilities team that was like taking care of it. like we did this for a long time, rotational dish duty. It became part of the culture. It became

something that people would talk about on like tours for candidates. Like, yeah, it was something that actually I think was us doing something about it. And, you know, a more kind of at scale answer. You know, if that's like the five person company version, you know, we one year, you know, launched our vacation calendar. Like here's our official lever office like, you know, like vacation schedule. and holiday holiday schedule. And, you know, we shipped it, we moved on, blah, blah. And then we found out later, like maybe a day or two later, that there was a lot of, like, critical feedback from the team about our decisions about which holidays we had chosen

to recognize and not recognize. And specifically, we hadn't chosen to recognize Martin Luther King Day because we had recognized like President's Day or something, like the same month. And, you know, from the people team's perspective, they were just trying to, like, they're heuristic was let's just balance out the holidays like as evenly as possible throughout the year. But we realized in that moment that our holiday schedule was surface area to our culture. So I think like in thinking about making your culture more inclusive, A, it's really about like, what are you choosing to make your cultural surface area?

What are you choosing to say like this is part of it and this is not? And that's like one decision of founder has to make. And then secondly, it'll change over time. Like literally there were, you know, at one point, our holiday schedule was not part of the culture than it was, right? I think that's like a dish duty was not and then it was. And that's just a dynamic part of culture. But I think the important part about being conscious about building inclusion into your culture is that dialogue. What a founder can be responsible for is that anytime something comes up, because it'll come up, right?

It'll just come out of nowhere is to make sure that you're the kind of company where, people are able to bring it up and where you're able to sort of like give it back to the team like okay what do we want to do about this and where people take action i think that's actually at the heart of getting you know this really murky world of how do you be a socially responsible founder you're not going to know but what you have to do is builds that like i think capability inside your your company to question yourself and to have a diet dialogue and then to take action. And that's, that's, I think, at the heart of like what early stage founders in particular have a real advantage on. Yeah. Versus these companies that are trying to add

this on later, you have so much ability to shape how your culture talks about itself and how, like, employees are shaping that conversation. So, yeah, yeah. Oh, it's really funny. I've actually visited the lover offices. And I noticed in the kitchen, they have one, which I'm super appreciative. before they have a bunch of like cups. And then there's this one lower shelf that says, please leave for the vertically challenge. I was like, oh, this is so great. I'm so included.

I know. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, you'd be surprised. Like, obviously the diversity and inclusion conversation is so driven by certain kinds of categorizations. But, you know, one of the most profound shifts for us when it comes to diversity was to talk about how we didn't want to buy into the idea of tech.

and non-technical people. Oh, interesting. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Absolutely. Like, you know, I think Silicon Valley has actually this deeply ingrained stereotyping around technical people. And like, for the most part, I think that's a seat of privilege. Like if you are an engineer, if you've got like coding chops, if you're a hacker, like there's

all these kind of attributes about, you. you may be being like a more worthy or valuable or like higher potential founder, right? Or employee, right? Like I think there is even some companies where like the technical parts of the company get free lunch and the non-technical parts of the company do not, right? Yeah. And of course, like with hiring being as tough as it is for like software engineering rules, data scientist roles, I think that like there's this value placed on these people that,

you know, I think frankly a lot of people buy. into, right? Like a lot of the people that are not on that side of the spectrum, like the quote, non-technical people have almost like kind of internalized to self-handicapping about it. And we actually, for a while, recognized that not only was that kind of against like some of our cultural beliefs, but also it was holding us back. We needed our quote, non-technical people to embrace and adopt like designing systems that were as sort of like scalable. sophisticated and scalable and have that sort of engineering mindset about their work. And then we also needed our technical people to understand our customers,

understand the value proposition, to really embrace some of the qualitative aspects that we as a B2B software company really needed them to actually really, really get our customer and why we were doing some things and get our go-to-market motion and our sales pitch and why we were doing these things, like on a deeper level. And so we just realized that that stereotype wasn't serving us. That's a great insight. Because, like, yeah, I've met many technical people with no product sense. So, like, the opposite can be true.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I'm guilty of it too, right? Like, I sort of embraced the idea in hindsight in a weird way that I was like proudly our non-technical founder. But fuck, I have a like BS and mechanical engineering from Stanford. So it's sort of like what, you know, like it just was like confusing. And so we actually, yeah, we ran a training of like, I'm technical.

and so are you, that we just, like, had a few, like, Brown Bag Lunch kind of seminars, one of our early employees. Shout out to Jennifer Kim. She runs a blog, inclusion at work, check it out, you know, helped us kind of build. And we just, like, ran a bunch of people through it and, like, tried to, like, you know, spread this empowerment, I think that, yeah, like, I think, again, just like my missive of, like, there should be more designer founders. I think, like, there's a lot of people out there that are limiting their own potential by

not thinking that, you know, they can access any part of what it takes to to get creative and solve problems. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So related to all this is like, as you said before, having the conversation about it, I think people are often terrified to have the conversation about this at work because they're like, I don't know what I'm supposed to say. I don't know what I'm not supposed to say. I might know what like the prevailing thing to say is, but maybe that's not how I feel or I'm just curious. Like, how do you set up a culture that, like, allows those conversations? Is it just like with your manager directly?

Like, how does that happen? Oh, gosh. It's like layers of an onion. Yeah. You know, I wouldn't even say levers solve this problem, but I'll just enumerate some of the things that we do to help. We do everything from the super structure to, you know, the super just human skilled. So, you know, we have a new hire onboarding that we call Ramp Camp, and it's this week

kind of where you get onboarded to the full 360 of the company. It doesn't matter if you're a salesperson engineer, we onboard everybody to every part of what makes the business successful, and one of the sessions is on diversity and inclusion. So like literally your first week at Lever, you're hearing us talk about it. You're hearing us talk about where we're at with it. You're receiving an explicit invitation to be a part of it. Other structural things that we do, we have a lot of employee resource groups. So these are like, of course, a lot of companies have them.

We have leverettes for the women at lever. I love that. Yeah, so we have a bunch of them. 65% of our employees are a member of one of these groups. And we actually not only have them and sort of like obviously support them, we actually asked them to help us build policies. Like the Lever Parents, ERG, was a group that we, like my VP of people, like went to and asked like, hey, we're trying to revise and improve our parental leave policy.

Can you actually help? And like using these groups to inform real decisions is kind of the next level. We also do kind of programmatically a lot with our management groups. So or our management layers. So we actually are, I'm a big believer in coaching. We do a group coaching program. So every twice a year, every six months we do like a six month program that we run all our managers through, some who are promoted internally, some that we hire, to be intentional about our management culture. And I think that they can be such great advocates in terms of like spreading great practices that do make work more inclusive. And, you know, if you're not already engaging your management team on D&I, like, you know, hello, that's really impactful. So that's

some of the structural stuff. And then some of the things that are just more human, oh gosh, well, here's a funny example. So we really encourage people to engage with each other, solve problems like with each other. But, you know, sometimes having difficult conversations, like you're kind of navigating these murky waters of, you know, you don't want to kind of go over the net and like accuse someone to something, but maybe you're trying to surface or highlight like a difference in point of view or assumptions or background. And what we didn't want is for people to resort to stereotypes. Yeah. Well, you're like, you know, an introvert and I'm an extrovert and so blah blah blah blah or you're salesperson and I'm an

engineer and so therefore blah blah blah blah so one thing that we also built into ramp camp is we have all the new hires kind of take one of these like assessments and like the output of one of these is like a color one yeah so the number one the color one yeah there's even an animal one too yeah oh yes well we are also big fans of spirit animals with the company but yeah so um you know now everybody has the shared language about how to talk about difference that isn't about like how you were born or you know socioeconomic background or anything like that and um I think that that's really empowering for people so now we even celebrate it and I think it's become a way we can celebrate difference um so at the end of ramp camp uh obviously you kind of complete it and then we actually do a happy hour for that month's

ramp camp class and so they come and come and exit kind of their last session of the day where they get their and enter our commons area where we have this, the whole company is like clapping and, you know, we kick off this happy hour to celebrate their first week. And the sort of like, it's the colors reveal is at the happy hours. And so all the new hires are wearing lays that correspond to their color. So everybody's like, oh, like you're green or you're like a red. So, you know, I think that, you know, whether you're doing it kind of in these structural ways or you're just giving people like tools to work in her personally. It's huge. It's huge. I like how you created a common language and then kind of celebrated and said like it's okay to

to kind of talk about it. We're kind of huge dorks, aren't we? I love it. I know. Like, so we call ourselves leverroos. Oh, Leverroos. Yeah, we are such, I mean, I love us obviously, horribly biased, but yeah, we're kind of like goobers in that way. That's awesome. That's great. Yeah, no, it's so Much of it is just like, I mean, like comedy even. Like it's just intention, right? It's like coming from a good place. You're like, okay, we can work with this. Yeah.

Yeah. And you know what? Like so many of those ideas I just described, bottoms up. Yeah. It's not like I'm some like architect of all things diversity and inclusion at lever, quite the opposite, actually. I credit like the team collectively as really being the drivers of this. And I think that's the opportunity that the early stage founders out there really have.

is if you do get this into your culture, what you get long term is this, you know, collective ownership over, you know, everything cultural, but certainly diversity and inclusion as part of that, that if you can get that seed planted, it just like is a little bit self-reinforcing. And so I don't only that. It sets you up for scale. Yeah. Yeah. It pays in dividends later. Yeah, I think so.

who comes in will like get ramped up into this color and it would just know, you know. You love the colors thing, Holly. Oh, yeah. I'm going to go to the camp. Sign me up. I want to know my color. Amazing. Okay.

So just wrapping up, YC, we have a batch going on right now. Most of these companies are quite early. What's your advice to the companies in the batch to make the most out of it? You know, I think that the number one thing I would say is, is, you know, your culture is your people. It's who you hire. It's who you fire. It's also who you're recognizing, who you're promoting, who you're rewarding, and how you do all those things. And you probably feel like you have a million things going on and everything's on fire. And you have so many things to get done in a given week. But the secret to solving all these problems is

through really, really getting great at building your team. Yeah. And so, like, I found this to be true. I work with thousands of companies at every stage of growth with hiring. I think, like, you have to get great at talent. You have to get great at hiring. And I think that if you can really embrace that as a true part of being, you know, an authentic founder, I think you will attract the right people that will run with all those things that you've got to do in a given week.

And it is the shortest path to building a strong culture. It's the shortest path to building your results. So, you know, embrace that a founder's number one job is recruiting. That's excellent advice. All right. Thanks for coming in. Thanks. Thank you. All right.

Thanks for listening. So as always, you can find the transcript and the video at blog.w.Ycombinator.com. And if you have a second, it would be awesome to give us a rating and review wherever you find your podcast. See you next time.