Build Series EP.5: The Role of Talent in High Performing Teams with Jake Dancyger and Cyrus Symoom – EP.259

Hood & Strong LLP – One of the nation’s premier full-service public accounting firms, Hood & Strong LLP provides buy- and sell-side quality of earnings, due diligence, assurance and tax services to search funds, private equity firms, and business owners and investors. The H&S Advisory team helps expedite a smooth, cost-effective transaction process that maximizes value and minimizes tax impacts for both buyers and sellers. To learn more about how Hood & Strong can support your M&A objectives, please contact Transaction Advisory Group Partner Jerry Zhou at [email protected].

Oberle Risk Strategies– Oberle is the leading specialty insurance brokerage catering to search funds and the broader ETA community, providing complimentary due diligence assessments of the target company’s commercial insurance and employee benefits programs. Over the past decade, August Felker and his team have engaged with hundreds of searchers to provide due diligence and ultimately place the most competitive insurance program at closing. Given August’s experience as a searcher himself, he and his team understand all that goes into buying a business and pride themselves on making the insurance portion of closing seamless and hassle-free.

If you are under LOI, please reach out to August to learn more about how Oberle can help with insurance due diligence at oberle-risk.com. Or reach out to August directly at [email protected].

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(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:04:44) – Introducing Cyrus and Jake

(00:06:25) – Talent development, acquisition, and integration

(00:13:29) – Common objections from talented prospects

(00:17:07)- Role/Title Guidelines and structures

(00:21:06) – Involving boards and investors in recruiting

(00:23:51) – What tends to win talent in 2025?

(00:27:08) – Interview processes

(00:29:42) – Setting outcomes

(00:32:28) – How should CEOs involve themselves in interviewing?

(00:34:46) – Crafting Culture questions

(00:39:42) – Closing on a candidate

(00:43:54) – Comp plans

(00:46:34) – Onboarding and performance measurements

(00:52:14) – Designing career paths

(00:57:18) – Communication styles

Alex Bridgeman: Jake and Cyrus, good to see you both and have you on the fifth episode of the build series on all about the role of talent and fast growing companies. And you’ve had a lot of experience adding tons of talent to Clariti. So this is going to be a ton of fun. Could you talk a little bit about Clariti and like what the business looked like when you got there and the early role of talent as the business went from, 25 employees to a hundred plus today.

Cyrus Symoom: Yeah. It’s a great to be on again, Alex. So thank you for having us. The Clariti journey has definitely not been a straight line and the timing is really good for this podcast as Jake and I were reflecting that we just crossed the five year mark of being with the Clariti business since January of 2020.

So I think to your point, joining the organization when it was about 20 people. And just starting to get our first kind of grasp as to what does high performance look like in a small growing business I think has evolved pretty significantly as to, today running a 120 person organization and having an executive team, having a management team having different cascading layers and what that means.

And I think for us along that journey, we’ve come to realize that like the key to a high performing team is to find that talent early and cultivate it and make it talent density across the organization as soon as you can while you’re operating. And so for us, we really thought about talent through the life cycle of an employee how to source talent, how to interview talent, how to close and incentivize talent how to develop and performance manage talent.

And then of course, how to retain talent for the longterm. And jake and I were just talking ahead of this and we have a couple of fun stories and experiences through every part of that journey. And I’ll admit we were quite naive before and candidly still naive now, but more than happy to share our experiences over those different stages.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, the life cycle will be really fun to dive into and it’s a good progression of thoughts down along the talent journey. So that will be, we should definitely dive into that. But just before doing that, what was your kind of, what was your thinking around the role of talent? Early on and how did you get to understand the team you had and where talent was and where you wanted it?

What was that kind of maybe like the first like going from 20 people to 40? What was that journey like?

Jake Dancyger: Yeah, it’s so important. And we listened to, all the podcasts, read all the management books we could, as we were jumping into being first time CEOs and everything. And everyone told us, it’s all about the people.

And that was extremely true when we were 20 people. And it stays true today, being a hundred plus for us, it was really just getting to know the people in the business as we joined it. And so Cyrus and I met with every single employee. One on one right away. And it got a sense of, what they were excited about in the business, what they thought challenges were.

And as we talked through that with them, I think, came into three camps, like people who are really excited about Cyrus and I joining in the gross story, we’re bringing into, to Clariti and people who, were maybe uncomfortable about the change and then frankly, people who just.

Didn’t really care oh, Jake and Cyrus’s are here. That’s great. And so you, you like quickly find out like, who’s really excited about the growth journey and to people in all those camps, you have to prove, why you’re here. And really at the end of the day, it’s to help grow the business, grow their careers.

And when. In the software business we’re in, people build our product, people sell our product, people implement our product. It’s really all about people. At the end of the day. And so people are so critical in our early journey. And so it was about finding who are the champions that want to help you thrive and help build the business.

And what are the key roles that you need? And then, if you don’t have those folks internally, having to look externally, especially as you have pretty big growth targets, you of course need to build the team to meet those targets. So that was the early days for us and just a lot of learning in that period.

Alex Bridgeman: And within that, before sourcing talent externally, how did you source your internal talent and identify the rising stars that can become like larger pieces of the team over time? Like, how did that? Initial almost like in sourcing talent versus, looking outwards. How did those internal kind of talent evaluations like who can play a big role in this company as we grow?

Like, how did that discussion and work and evaluation go?

Cyrus Symoom: I think that’s one of the advantages of having a small lean team where, you know, with 20 people. You’re really working alongside everyone, everyone, our first name basis over the course of three or four weeks, you’re typically exposed to everyone at the organization in some way, shape, or form.

And so to Jake’s point, it was as simple as having those one on ones and having people ask us like, what are your growth plans? How can we contribute? How can we support where you have that initial inclination about this person’s really excited about the growth we have ahead. Or it can be some of the kind of ad hoc special projects that you don’t have a team for at the time of does anyone want to help with this employee survey or does it want to help put together the town hall content, or does anyone want to help research this market and seeing the individuals that are being proactive, raising their hands, starts to get a feel.

And so I think there’s through some of those kind of initial feelings for the first few months, you start to delegate and empower a few kind of people that keep raising their hand. And then you start to get a sense of, Oh, these are individuals that really want to drive the business forward. Not just do their kind of day to day tasks.

And I think that’s how we identified some of those initial champions at Clariti who, five years later are still with us today and doing really well.

Alex Bridgeman: And so priming for sourcing talent externally, what has been your strategy over the last few years? And what are some kind of parts and pieces of that sourcing talent lifecycle stage for each employee?

What does that look like today?

Cyrus Symoom: I think the thing we always laughed about on the sourcing talent side is you have no brand when you get into the business, typically you have no background of sourcing or hiring people. And so there’s a lot of like net new creation that needs to take place.

I think Jake and I were fortunate where we came from, tech businesses that had great recruiting processes. And so we were able to implement a couple of additional kind of, processes to get started, but really the early days of sourcing talent, whereas Leveraging our personal professional network, looking into the industry and what I’d call seed planning.

I think the best kind of consideration to think about is when you’re searching for a proprietary business, you’re often reaching out to owners that have no interest for 6, 12, 18, 24 months. And it’s the same thing with sourcing high profile talent. I think Jake and I reached out to every CEO, CRO, CMO in our industry, along our competitions, knowing that they’d have no interest in joining us at the stage.

But at some point in time, as they see our progress over the few years, they’ll eventually come back and then eventually get entrusted. And so I vividly remember, we’d wrap up our day and then at 9 PM after dinner, we’d both go on LinkedIn and we’d just be cold outreaching.

Industry people that looked like they had great backgrounds for intro calls and coffee chats, just to kind of plant those seeds for talent down the road. And to our surprise, some of those people actually responded with interest up front. And I think a big part of that sourcing at the starting point which we talked about before Alex was it’s not really selling them on the company yet.

Because the company hasn’t done much yet, but it’s selling them on the vision of what you plan to do with the company. And it’s selling them really on yourselves as co CEOs in our case. And I think a big part of the story was the board we’ve assembled behind us, the investors behind us, the power of the search fund model.

And I think, a lot of the humility we have and almost the partnership approach we take to some of the initial kind of talent we bring on board where we’re not directing you on this journey, you are partnering with us on this growth journey. And I think it was those early messages that really resonated in a couple of folks taking interest in an earlier stage, candidly unknown company fast forward five years later and, it’s amazing what traction and long term time can do where you spend five years in an industry and suddenly all of your competitors turn over you, private equity owners a bunch of your competitors go through exits a bunch of your competitors see the traction you have in market.

And then you start to get more inbound talent. And then the initial talent you hire starts to refer talent in their network because they’re having a great experience. And suddenly it’s no longer the co CEO sourcing on LinkedIn. And now it’s a lot of those seeds you planted in the early stages coming back to you.

And that’s a lot of the key talent in your team, bringing talent that they know to your organization. And that’s how I think sourcing is really scaled in our organization.

Alex Bridgeman: What is it like the winning, winning, here’s everything, growth and momentum, like fixes a lot of problems. Sounds pretty familiar.

Cyrus Symoom: Revenue solves all problems. And so I would say that you can really feel the traction if you’re gaining progress and momentum over a period of time in an industry. And we’ve really felt that over the years

Alex Bridgeman: early on with some of those. So when it’s just 20, 30 employees and company hasn’t done much, like what are some common objections you’d hear from like the most talented prospects and like, how did you address them or talk through them and explain what you’re trying to do when there’s less visible traction for the company?

Jake Dancyger: Yeah, I think one of the more difficult things when you’re that small, honestly, is it depends on the market and industry you’re in, but is compensation expectations as a small company, with a relatively smaller P and L it’s a lot harder to pay. Of course, top of market, but even in some cases right at market.

And and that’s just really tough for people. Cause of course, people are in different life stages come from different expectations. You want someone who’s going to take you to the next level, but of course they want the comp at that next level. And so that’s evolved for us over the years and learning around that, but that’s definitely really tough early on is just, can you, and if you can’t meet the market compensation what other things can you bring?

And as Cyrus mentioned the, of course, like selling them on the vision and impact, especially at 20 people and impact is huge. Like people really do want their work to be meaningful. That’s for a lot of people, why they join a small company, it can relate to your mission, what you’re trying to do in the market and, as well, just frankly, Cyrus and I being young and energetic, certainly not experienced to the level of CEOs they might have worked with at the time.

But even just saying, we’re new to this, we’re new to learning as well, and just being genuine and transparent. I think that really helped us sell people early on, because I don’t know how transparent people are. In most companies they come from, but Cyrus and I have always led from the start there.

And so where we can’t win with traction or comp we really do, especially in those early days have to overemphasize on the impact that they can have and, leading a team or growing into that really quickly. And so a lot on the career development is where we’d where we’d get people excited.

Cyrus Symoom: The only thing I would add to that is I think. In absence of maybe Jake and I having credibility from the start, we really leveraged our board in those early days to have the board demonstrate credibility to these high profile talent candidates where they’re able to speak to their experiences, their trust in kind of Jacob myself, and that went a long way.

And then, second, I think just being vulnerable with kind of, Jake and I in the early days, I think there’s always this question around titling. And I think titling is a two way sword where You know, sometimes we’d have people that came from 100 or 200 person organizations where they were a manager or a director.

So coming to organization, we said, we’re a smaller org. You can come as a senior manager or senior director and often given them that incremental title made them feel like they had more autonomy and ownership going into our business. But the two way sword is as your organization scales. If you’re being treated as a director versus a manager, our expectations for you are also higher.

And so the higher title you have coming in, the higher we expect to be the organization grows. And so that’s just, I think something to keep in mind where some people run into problems where if you hire 10 VPs, once you’re 20 people, and then you get to a hundred people, are those VPs now the VPs of your a hundred person company?

And so I think. Titles is something that we’ve gotten right. We’ve gotten wrong, but I think it’s another kind of key criteria to keep in mind as you’re thinking about these different chips you have on your table when you’re sourcing early talent. Can

Alex Bridgeman: you tell me more about the titling piece? There’s a there’s plenty of companies that will have someone titled as CFO and then the owner describes them as a controller.

Like that, that happens all the time. Did you have, did you design like a rubric or progression guide to help explain like this is what a VP at Clariti means. And here’s what the job looks like. And then as you go from that to work your way up, here’s how that evolves.

Is there something more is there, was there a structural set of rules you established for setting titles? Or was a lot of it like case by case, depending on what the person was before? Yeah,

Jake Dancyger: early on. It was definitely case by case. I’ll be honest, Cyrus and I were trying to figure it out. And as Cyrus said, it was a lot of, using title as a form of compensation.

Someone’s a manager. We can probably convince them to come over senior manager. It shows career progression. But then, of course, you start building a people and talent team which we haven’t had an incredible leader of for the last few years with us who starts, helping us Create those frameworks and realize, a VP level is certainly different than a director level, which is certainly different than a manager level and the expectations you have to have for them as a people manager them in their role.

Is so important and it changes as your, size and scale grows. So yeah we did have to put together more of the what does a manager mean? What does a director mean? Compensation levels to make sure that people have equitable compensation at the same roles. So that started to come in later years and we, made sure everyone was treated really right and equitable and today, we spend a lot of time before we interview a role to say Hey, what is this role need to do, are they a builder, are they a people manager and what do we expect their outcomes to be?

And spend a lot of time on what does that mean? The title should be for the business versus, I think, before it was, what does this person need in their title to join us? So it’s much more structural equitable. And I think a lot better process now that we’ve scaled

Cyrus Symoom: the other thing I’d just add there at that jig, I think we’ve done a reasonably good job of Whenever we hire someone that’s joining at the kind of highest tier of the company at the time, whether that’s like our first director, our first year director, our first VP, we will fight to make sure that they come in at the level just before that with our commitment that we are going to promote them in six to 12 months if they meet the performance standards.

And that allows us to show the organization how we set the bar for that talent where kind of that talent gets internally promoted and gets set as the bar for this is the bar for what this entails. And I think doing that internally versus bringing it from outside makes the organization see that like that promotion has been vetted from Jake myself and the idea of who we promote to those levels, I think just helps set the bar for the organization on standards that we expect.

Alex Bridgeman: It’s interesting nuance in the kind of internal facing value of titles. And setting promotions as a benchmark standard or quality standard. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Can you expand on that?

Cyrus Symoom: The lowest common denominator of the title is the benchmark that people use for that title.

And so if you have three directors that have completely different years of experience and completely different performance standards, everyone that’s looking for the director of promotion, we’ll look to the person with the lowest years of experience or the lowest performance standards. And so that’s where, when we have our first hire director or first hired VP, Jake and I spend a lot of time to make sure that individual beats the bar across all standards.

Because that is going to set the new bar for how people think about getting promoted to that level. And so that’s, I think the level of thought we put into those types of roles where we just want to make sure the bar is very clear to the team and every person who hits that role is meeting that bar.

Alex Bridgeman: I love that. You also mentioned leaning on your board for getting a couple of senior hires and telling the story a little bit more fully what are some effective ways you’ve found of getting your board and broader investor group involved in that recruiting?

Jake Dancyger: When we. Figure out like this is the role we need in the organization, especially for senior roles.

Oftentimes Cyrus and I will send them to our board and our investor group and with an ask of, Hey, this is the role. This is what we’re looking for. Do you know anyone? And so we use them from the early stages of sourcing talent and just to see, do they have any referrals great people that we could bring into the interview process.

Especially early on, we use the board in the interview process. So typically Cyrus’s and I would have, especially for senior level levels, assignments or presentations. And we bring the board in to see that, to see what is that senior leader’s executive presence and what they’d expect there.

And then for selling the candidate on joining us and closing them Cyrus and I have also used the board to, send out emails. To them and reach out and offer time and say, huge congrats on getting an offer. And Cyrus and Jake loved you through the process and would be super happy to jump on a call with you and share why I’m so excited about being on the board of Clariti.

And so the board has been really instrumental to us throughout it all. And that’s one of the great things we hear from candidates who decide to join us is I’ve never seen a board member reach out and say, Hey, congrats and willing to jump on a call. And many of our team members do that. And we of course have to keep the capacity of the board in mind, but in hiring and especially in growth mode, the board was so aligned that’s been our priority.

And so they’ve been amazing at supporting that through the years.

Alex Bridgeman: Did you set any expectations like that with your board early on, like in selecting board members for Clariti? Did you say we want you involved in hiring and recruiting and in these ways. If you’re excited about that, we’d love to have you as a board member.

Was that a conversation that happened? I think we’re, I think we’re

Cyrus Symoom: both smiling because we weren’t that thoughtful. I think early on. I think it was more organic than us being deliberate about it. That being said, I think we were grateful where. Between a combination of having boards for the search fund ecosystem and having board members that were worth their industry.

We had just a board that had a very broad talent network that I think played to our favor. And then the combination of domain experience and historical search success, I think just played a really positive story to prospective talent. And so I wish Jake and I were that thoughtful ahead of time, but yes, if we were to do it again, having a board with a broad talent network that can resonate with your kind of peak talent profile you’re trying to hire, I think I think is a great thing to consider.

And

Alex Bridgeman: lastly, if we’re jumping over to interviewing and that stage of the life cycle in the later years or later days, once you now have traction, and there’s a lot more kind of proof in the pudding for different roles and big new customers and whatnot. What tends to win talent in these, in like today, like this year, like what, for this year in 2025, like what is going to be your sourcing and kind of talent winning strategy?

Jake Dancyger: It’s definitely changed over the years. And I think for. Any company in any industry, no matter what you need to energize your existing talent and your net new on what your mission is. And for us, we’re in the permitting and licensing space. And and that can mean various things to people, but ultimately at the end of the day, Building permitting is our core.

And what that means is making housing grow and making it more affordable because we’re increasing the supply of housing by reducing permitting time. And so we, first off, spin that into a sexy way to say it of we make housing more affordable. And we really do believe in that mission. And that’s, I’d say one way.

And, for any Okay. CEO or company, whatever your mission is, the person leading it is of course, passionate about it. You have to find ways to make others passionate about it and something that they can connect with. And so for us, and that is definitely today as we scale, people do want to join a company that has a a meaningful mission.

And so that is a core part of how do we get people excited and show, momentum and what we’re doing or why we’re doing what we’re doing. And then of course, there’s the actual growth, like I think in today’s day and age. Employees are just very smart. Like they want to know, what is the company’s traction?

Is it profitable? Is it going to be sustainable? Do you have the capital base? Do you have the board behind you? And and I think that sophistication is great because of course we’ve had. Many years in the business to build upon that. But we’re, it’s definitely Hey, this is how much we’re growing.

We’re really transparent people. Her capital base is fantastic. Our board is fantastic. In fact, I’ll let me have them give you a call right after this. But that’s really, a way that we’ve been able to to get that conviction is by being transparent, sharing numbers by sharing the mission and the why.

And then offering to them of Hey, you can connect with any of our leadership team members while you’re in this process. If you have questions and, our leadership team members, of course, are people we’ve hired on or have grown over time that are energized by all those things, by the mission, by who we are and what we do.

And so I think we’re at a lucky point where, because we’re growing well, because we have a mission driven business, because we have a great group of talent, it’s become a lot. Easier to hire people than it was in the early days of saying, Hey, we’re Jake and Cyrus. I swear we’ll grow one day. Please join us.

And yeah, we’re able to use a lot more variables today to get someone excited.

Alex Bridgeman: And then for kick off the interviewing stage, so that, that part of that life cycle, once you’ve identified a handful of candidates and you have a good sense for I guess you’re going to develop a sense for what the role needs, but how does that interviewing stage begin for you?

Jake Dancyger: Yeah, we’ve also evolved that over time as we’ve learned, but I’ll even say like in defining the job. It’s so critical whoever is hiring for it. So say if it’s Cyrus Sinai and we ask the team and cascade this down, but like really three things up front, like what is the mission of that job and make it super clear.

What are the outcomes of that job? Three to five ideally outcomes of where that person or individual would drive outcomes to end of year. And then, what are the competencies to be able to effectively be in that role? That’s super, super critical to us to define before we even get to job description and job qualifications.

From there, we do define, okay, now that we’ve all aligned and circulated that and are good with the mission and outcomes and competencies we need now, let’s get more specific on the responsibilities on the qualifications. And as you called out here on the interview stages, and so those do differ on the interview stages themselves, it does depend on the seniority of the role.

And, how many interview rounds are there and the types of interview rounds and in general, we’ll always have, upfront application reviews, phone screen followed by typically a hiring, hiring manager screen. And then, potentially a deep dive into that specific role and their experiences there.

And then we follow that up with a pretty lengthy, we call it functional interview, but it has the tenets of top grading interview of really getting deep on their prior career experiences. And then, for more senior roles, we’ll have an assignment or case presentation and close it out with a culture interview and move to offer and all the rest.

But yeah the. The amount of stages, I will say, Cyrus and I probably do more than the average person. And I know it’s become popular, or at least was a few years ago of you should know within two conversations. If you’re going to hire someone, I think you learn a lot through the interview process.

You need time with an individual and you need to make sure the right people are spending the right time. You’re only going to learn so much. You can actually learn a lot from references and people that have worked through them or back channeling. And so we do. I would say a lot of external interview stages as well as a lot of behind the scenes to really get conviction on candidates, and it’s just so important to get the right person in the seat.

Alex Bridgeman: You mentioned setting outcomes for this role. How do you go about doing that? What are, what would be an example of a good outcome to set and what’s a less useful outcome to set? Yeah,

Jake Dancyger: happy to give an example. And for. At the highest level, like setting an outcome needs to be super clear on, did you achieve that or not, whether it’s binary or, clear that you can track that the progress across the year.

And I’ll give an example, top of mind, we hired in a executive vice president of customer experience. And for her, it was super clear. We needed to do three things in the first year with her here. And. For that role, we’re building a whole new function of customer experience, which for us encapsulated customer success, customer support, and professional services.

This is a big leadership role to oversee those functions. And so the first outcome for us was, we need you to spend time in the seat. And then design the org chart for what year end looks like for those sub functions, having the right seats and the right people in those seats. And number one, have a super clear org design and number two.

Customer journey, really being clear on what the touch points are across the customer journey and what that looks like across each of our products and therefore defining the customer segments we have and having that as an output that, is signed off by Cyrus myself and the leadership team and we’re actually using that customer journey and then third and this is just top of mind.

I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot more, but The top three, the third was KPI metrics, like designing a dashboard for customer experience, including KPIs, capturing the baselines, capturing where you want to be by year end and agreeing on that as well. And so it’s to go back to it. What we realized is those were the things we needed in the role.

As we need to grow that new function and get that senior leader in there. And why did we need a senior leader? We needed someone with the experience of designing the right org, of designing a full end to end customer journey and of, having the experience of creating strong metrics, creating a dashboard to track those.

And so really needed someone that was special with the build capability, as well as the people management capabilities. And yeah, just. I guess I got pretty specific there, but we do get really specific in the outcomes. We want to drive for the role.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that’s specifics are great. So please have Adam.

How do you as CEOs involve yourself in a hiring and interviewing? This is all about hiring, but the interview itself, how do you involve yourself as a CEO in interviewing, whether it’s high end hire high managers, C level or anyone else in the company, where do you insert yourself?

Cyrus Symoom: Yeah, this this has definitely changed from the early days to later days. When we’re 20 people, Jake and I are interviewing everyone to the organization, whether it’s a, entry level technical support analyst or a senior manager for marketing we’re generally involved primarily in the functional, I would say interview process.

But also involved in the cultural element as well, since we’re still defining the culture for the company. So the culture is really resting with Jake and myself and on the functional side, it’s usually Jake and I that are driving the desire for those new roles. I think as the organization has grown we have now documented and trained the organization and set the example for what a strong culture means in organization.

And so now we have, culture champions that are all outperforming in our culture matrix that are allowed to do our culture interviews for organization. And the functional interviews are now driven by the leaders of those departments because those leaders now have more functional expertise in those areas than Jake and I do.

Where Jake and I are most heavily involved now is on the executive leaders and on the management team members. And, back to the analogy between this and proprietary searching for a, a search fund business, people always debate how much time do you spend with the business up front before, deciding like a go or no go on it.

And for executive roles, Jake and I will actually just do a 30 minute kind of almost coffee chat call with individuals just to get them excited about the organization, if we’re finding these like high potential, high prospect individuals. Before we jump into grilling them about everything to do with, their background and expertise, we actually spend a lot of time upfront where we build a personal relationship.

They get to know how we think and we feel, and then we give them the option of, Hey, you’ve gotten to know us. Do you want to participate in this process or not? And so I think we do a multi touch extra special approach to those executive team members, knowing the magnitude of impact that they could eventually have for the organization.

And so at the executive level, we’re involved in multiple stages of that process. At the management level, the executive really drives the process, but Jake and I are there for the culture interview to make sure we agree with the executive’s decision.

Alex Bridgeman: What are some good culture questions you’ve been using or started using that have been most helpful for you?

Cyrus Symoom: So the way that we structure our culture interview is we actually list out the core values for our organization, and then we have questions that support each of those core values. And so as an example of learning constantly, we’ll just ask someone, what’s the last thing you learned recently and can you teach us it?

And their kind of approach to thinking through something that they’re learning, whether it’s, I don’t know how to play chess better, or it’s how to be a better project manager. And then their ability to eloquently explain to us how they’ve gone about learning it and how to teach us just gives us a good sense of like, how much does this person think about learning and, how do they think about learning in their own way.

Whereas when it comes to courageous communication, which is this whole idea of making sure you have a voice of how you feel, irrespective of your role or your level or how uncomfortable the conversation is, what’s a time you had to courageously communicate with your senior or to a customer and what was the situation that led you to have to take that kind of courageous communication and what was the outcome of that?

And so I think we often go to situational questions or questions that kind of their past experiences tying to those core values. And that’s how we get a sense of how well do these people interface with the core values of our organization.

Alex Bridgeman: Are there any common questions that folks like to ask that you’ve found actually are not very helpful or that you’ve stopped using recently?

What’s been cut? What got cut?

Jake Dancyger: Yeah we’ve definitely iterated over time and we have a standard list of questions now but every hiring manager will adjust it specifically to their role. I’m trying to think about. Questions that we’ve cut Cyrus, so I don’t know if any come to mind.

I think culturally we’ve kept them pretty consistent cause we’ve kept our, cultural identity fairly consistent. I think as it comes to more functional interviews, understanding about them and their experiences, I think things like, how do you collaborate with, other stakeholders in these roles?

It’s pretty easy to talk about Oh yeah, I work well with sales and marketing and I was able to, do a campaign with them and support them as a product manager. Everyone can say they collaborate well. And so I think we’ve tried to avoid like the things that if you ask yourself the question, can you easily answer this without any, specific way to pick out is this person someone that I know can really get into the trenches and deal with this?

I think we’ve just gotten better with general. And generally getting the right types of questions, but Cyrus, so I don’t know if you have any top of mind that we’ve been like, let’s ask that question that, can’t be asked anymore.

Cyrus Symoom: Yeah, building on that to your point, I think sometimes we take that superficial response and we’d say, okay, and we write it down and then we debrief and be like we didn’t really get an answer there.

I think we’ve trained ourselves in the team to just call it an interview. We got to dig deeper there. Okay. What does collaborating with product mean? What does it mean when you supported the marketing manager here? Get us into the names, the specifics, like what actually took place.

And so I think we push a lot more interviews to get to really quality answers versus the fluff of yeah, this project went great. Okay. The project went great. Let’s move on.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, can you talk more about that? Because there’s, it’s easy for, to take the take a very disciplined approach and try to quantify as much as possible.

We’ll get lots of examples, but it’s easy if you do a lot of interviews to start drifting away from that and being okay with okay, this superficial story yep, we’ll write that down. What are some self correcting mechanisms you have to Keep that quantitative force and investigation within your interview process, especially as you now have lots of other executives doing interviews that you’re not a part of as much anymore.

Cyrus Symoom: Two things, I think number one, we have programmed interview training for kind of all individuals in the organization that kind of highlights a couple of these kind of key considerations beyond just the questions in the format of the interview for them to keep in mind to in the debrief process.

In almost, I think in all cases, there’s always an executive or Jake and I in a debrief for a candidate. And I think another thing we’ve learned is to move away from like feeling and to go with what was the example that illustrated this? And so when someone says, yeah, I felt like they were a relentless builder, the executive that asks what was the example and what did they drive to demonstrate, reliance building.

And so I think that kind of constant iteration within even the interviewing panel keeps it top of mind for people that, that is a really important aspect for them to verify over the process.

Alex Bridgeman: And so having multiple people in the interview also has a, it sounds like it has a check and balance dynamic to it as well.

Cyrus Symoom: Totally. Yeah. It is never one party throughout the interview process. There’s most often three, sometimes four people that are involved in an interview process start to finish.

Alex Bridgeman: And so now that you’ve identified someone that you like, how do you close, what’s your close?

Cyrus Symoom: Jay covered it earlier on, but we, we joke like about the swarm approach, right?

So we like swarm the board on them. We like swarm the executives on them. We like swarm the peers on them. And this is something that’s also noteworthy that we can only really do with the board early on but in these days, what’s even more powerful we find is like when their peers reach out to say, Hey, Congratulations.

Who do you got this role? I’ve been with the organization for a year. Let’s jump on a call because it’s one thing for the CEO who’s selling you or even the board that’s arguably somewhat removed from the business to say, Hey, this is a great organization. But when you’re the, Jake’s example, the EVP of customer experience and then the EVP of finance and the EVP of sales and the VP of marketing reach out to you and offer a call.

And there’s kind of peer to peer information sharing of a, like they’re not telling you bullshit. Like this is the experience I have. This is what I’ve had relative to the last companies. Here’s like the honest truth of what’s good and what’s bad. Like that, like report building in the closing stage, we’ve found to be super critical.

And we’ve had many candidates say Oh, like that was a real differentiator. It’s very rare. We talked to our peers in an organization before we joined the company. Like you guys are really transparent and it’s cool to get a sense for the culture and the vibe through that closing process.

I think Jake also highlighted like the second point that we really emphasize across organization, which is just that transparency piece. And so we are very transparent with kind of our compensation packages and our compensation bands and where those bands are driven from. And I think also probably different than a lot of organizations.

We’re extremely transparent about our equity. And so we do everything from walking through what enterprise value means to how enterprise value has grown in the organization over time, to what type of package they’re receiving and what a benchmark value is for that package to based on a base case of the business growing over the next five years.

What could that package be potentially worth? And what happens if we grow more or less? And so we also get feedback that against other organizations, folks have a really good understanding of their compensation package coming in and how that compensation package is influenced. And so I think them just seeing how we work with them through like compensation negotiations or kind of closing the process with the team.

I think that really gets them the feeling of, Oh, this is what the company is going to be like coming in. And we often find that those are the key things to close. The final thing I’ll add is, we’re a remote organization. We always do our best to close the candidate in person, whether it’s an executive or kind of a management team member where that kind of face to face interaction and almost the ceremony of taking them out for lunch or dinner and really getting to know their kind of personal life and family beyond just the interview process, I think there’s also a good touch we use to close.

I think the final piece that we’ll call out, and this has been like a journey for us. As Jay called out, like naturally as a 20 person organization, I think we had to pay like 25th percentile, like kind of a market and mind you all that’s in Canadian dollars. And I think as the organization has grown, we’ve really advocated to hold the budget space as our business has grown to elevate our compensation bands.

And so I’d say today we probably pay closer to the 50th percentile. And in some special technical cases, even the 75th percentile for talent. And I think that we earn the right to pay that for talent because we really edit our process for getting talent. If we’re paying 75th percentile to a bunch of underperforming talent, that’s a very bad place to be in a business.

But if you have conviction that you’re bringing on the right talent, you should not let compensation be the factor that stops you from great talent. I think Jake and I have been in a lot of cases where we’ve tried to save 10, 000, because this talent is less expensive than the other. And in all cases, great talent is 10 X plus the ROI of what that kind of incremental five or 10 K was.

And so there’s been many times we’ve advocated to the board or to our con benchmarking saying, Hey. We think this extra five or 10 K is worth it. And I think it’s rare that we’ve been wrong in that, incremental excess budget to support great talent. So those are like a couple of thoughts that have come to mind on on how we close and incentivize that talent.

Alex Bridgeman: You talk about that kind of push and pull, like you have these transparent comp bands for every role. But then great candidate is probably going to want more. Maybe they have had great results at prior roles. They want more. How do you negotiate that push and pull internally?

Jake Dancyger: Today we actually list the compensation bans for every single role online.

So anyone who’s applying for a role knows, what’s the comp band. And we make it super clear, why you’re at the bottom of the range or the top of the range. And we actually don’t go outside of our range. So to Cyrus’s point, if one candidate, maybe there’s two final candidates, one is at the lower.

Point of our range. One is at the midpoint of our range, and we will, say it’s probably worth it. If that midpoint candidate has more experience and can provide more for us more value. And we think they’ll do really well in the role. It’s been worth going for it, but we’re really clear on. We don’t go above budget for or above what that role is because we do want to keep equity in our organization.

And so we always stay within the range. And if it’s a senior role and for us and kind of director level plus has equity, we’ll look at equity and just honestly spend a lot of time explaining the value of equity. Cause that’s another thing to Cyrus’s earlier point. That’s really important is just being transparent on that.

Cause not many companies do that. And so that’s where we’ll try to extend. And it’s honestly just information sharing. And, but we do keep our team members within bands just as we scale. It’s so important for equity.

Cyrus Symoom: And to Jake’s point we made this mistake in the early days where we didn’t talk about compensation early.

Cause we felt like it was something that should be kept secret. Then you spend six hours with someone, you get to the final stage of the interview process. And you’re like, we have 150 K as the band for this role. And they say I was making 220 K on Amazon. And then we say shit, I wish we validated this earlier.

And so it was a big culture change for us to reveal compensation bands. Where we, again, have conviction is. If we do benchmarking analysis against North America, we know our bands are in the 50th percentile. Why are we hiding where our bands are? And naturally you’ll always get people that, are paying 75th or 90th percent, looking at you, Google, Amazon, Facebook.

But ultimately beyond compensation, there’s a lot more we offer to individuals beyond just that point. And so if they are optimizing for just compensation, they probably should be going to work at, Google or Facebook. But I think to Jake’s point, us being transparent about that band. Is more about when we get to final stages, where do they fall within that band versus saying, Oh, wow, we were off by 60 percent here.

Alex Bridgeman: There’s a couple of notes around KPIs and plans for the role. So once they’ve, they’re excited to join the company, they’ve, onboarded or the first couple of weeks or what have you. And you’re planning out what the next couple of quarters, a couple of years look like for this role. How do you set and.

Measure performance from there and, score them against it.

Jake Dancyger: So for us, those outcomes that I mentioned at the beginning, you want to make sure you didn’t just create that for the job description that truly you are measuring, them on that. And you shared that in the interview process.

And then as they join in your very first one on one or what we do in our first one on ones is we build out a whole kind of onboarding plan for them and an onboarding sheet. And in that onboarding, we make it super clear of Hey, what are we working towards? It’s, these three outcomes or five outcomes that we talked about in the interview process.

And in this initial 90 day period, let’s help get you there. And so what Cyrus and I do for all the roles and now ever in an organization does is we scale is we build out what’s the 30 day plan. What’s the 60 day plan. What’s the 90 day plan. Of course, early on, you’re learning about the organization and connecting with stakeholders.

In 60 days, you’re delivering, measurable results. And in 90, you’re really building the plans to get to those year end outcomes. And now that you’ve learned, now that you’ve delivered some results. And so it’s important for us to just have that transparent two way communication and an agreement.

Early on, and documented of this is what we expect. And it’s early on, like we’re pretty hands on involved through the hiring manager is on, it’s actually our goal, make them successful. We hired them for a reason. Let’s make them crush this 30 days. Let’s make them crush this 60 days.

Let’s do everything we can to, have them hit their 90 day period. And if you’re doing everything you can as a hiring manager and they’re not performing. Then you have to have those tough conversations, but the goal is, of course you early on are trying to get those early success signals to see, are we taking the measurable steps to get to these outcomes that we’ve agreed on upon your end?

And so that’s like. The first way Cyrus and I and the org look at it is helping them across that journey to get to those outcomes.

Cyrus Symoom: The the other thing I’ll add is to Jake’s point, like we set outcomes to hire this person. We share with them those outcomes. There’s alignment through any of your processes in the starting.

Our goal is to get you to these outcomes because that’s how we’re measuring success for you. What Jake and I also do is we make sure everyone at the organization understands the vision, the mission, the 10 year goal for the company, the three year strategy we’re pursuing. The one year company priorities and the KPIs, irrespective of the role they play in the organization and, in the early stages of 20 people, that’d be Jake and I taking an individual for coffee and talking to them about it, in today’s stage, Jake and I actually have a call after this, where we’re onboarding everyone who just joined the company in the last 30 days.

And they spent an hour with Jake and I going through these areas. And we really have a two way conversation about this is how we arrived at that vision. What questions do we have? This is why we set these three years strategic pillars. Does anyone have a sense of, questions here or do they think differently because we think that beyond the individual’s role that they’re contributing against, we want them to understand why the company is doing what they’re doing, which gives them the opportunity to raise their hand and take on more if they know the direction the company is going, that gives them the opportunity to say I know they’re doing this.

Can I also help here or there? And I think that just gives people the space and the context where they can even contribute beyond their roles.

Alex Bridgeman: So that call is happening right after we’re done here? That’s right. Wow. Nice. So what are you going to say? What’s like your opening quick hits?

Let’s practice.

Cyrus Symoom: I think it’s important to first show gratitude. And so Jake and I first thank everyone for joining the organization and for the journey that they’re about to embark on with us. Jake and I get to know everyone individually name, hometown role, why they joined the organization.

And then we jump into why Jake and I joined Clariti, Jake and my background and ultimately why we’re here speaking with them today. And then we go through that. The reason we did this is the vision of our organization. This is the mission we’re all on together. Did everyone join the right company?

Are we all on the same page about the mission and why we’re here? And then we go through the core values of the organization and highlight how Through their interview process, we were vetting them for these core values. And, we’ve all demonstrated them. And then we get into to get to the vision and mission.

Here’s this kind of 10 year goal that we’ve set for the organization. In our case, it’s serving 100 million citizens across us and Canada. And here’s our progress towards that goal. And then to get to that 10 year goal, here’s the three year strategic pillars that we’re pursuing. And here are the decisions we got through to arrive to those decisions.

Now that we have that three year here, the one year milestones we’re pursuing, and here’s our progress towards those milestones. And when you get into our town hall next week, you’re going to see these quarterly objectives. These are the stepping stones to get to that kind of annual kind of goal set. And if we accomplish all those things, we’re going to get to our 10 year goal.

And that’s what success means for us. And so having everyone just getting that sense that they can talk about it in their own one on ones, they can talk about in the group meetings, everyone has a sense of where we’re going. We find that’s been really important to make sure that everyone’s rowing in the same direction.

And again, getting back to the high performing team.

Alex Bridgeman: And a big part of that talent retention over time is laying out a career path. Within the company and making sure there’s, early and quarterly and, fairly frequent wins along that journey to keep them excited and interested and engaged.

How do you design a career path for somebody? How does that, what does that look like? And what are some like pivots and adjustments you sometimes have to make?

Jake Dancyger: Yeah career pathing is so important and you can’t spend enough time on it because especially as your organization scales, it’s just really like internal talent that’s building that knowledge and building those experiences, building those relationships, especially like really high performing ones, you want to do everything you can to show them that there’s that career path.

And now at our size and scale, we’re above a hundred employees. We really have defined levels and titles for every single function and job. And we have paths because some people want to just continue crushing it as an individual contributor and some want to become a people manager. And for us, it’s super important to have career paths.

For both, because we don’t want that to, so traditionally companies have these levels that you can only get to if you’re a people manager. For us, that’s a people manager path, but there’s also just an individual contributor path. Some people are just amazing at the work they do. And so for us, it’s about making it super clear.

What are those levels? What does it take to get to those levels? What are the responsibilities and to the earlier point on interviewing, what are the outcomes you’d need to do in that role to make expectations super clear and, playing that higher level role. And we always have this like triangle that we talk about.

Of course, like when we look at real progression, you have to first evaluate what does the business need, because you don’t want to hire people into roles just because they really want it, but you actually don’t have the budget or the outcomes that you need to drive that are important to the business.

First, what is the business need? Second, what does this person want? Like, how do they want to grow? Do they want to be an individual contributor? Do they want to be a people manager? And then third, of course, where are their skill sets in alignment with those roles and just making it super clear where they are in that journey, where the business is on that journey, what it might take to get there.

And coaching them through that. And, we have a whole slew of performance management discussions and that we go through, but at the end of the day, it’s about being super clear on what are the expectations of the role and why does the role need that business? And, does that individual want to go that path?

Cause we have all the different paths for you here at Clariti. So it’s a, yeah, it’s a really thorough process today, but certainly made a lot of mistakes along the way to get there.

Alex Bridgeman: ways has has equity been involved in talent retention over time? It’s a, something you think about a lot. So I’d love to hear like, where does that come into play as someone’s doing really well in their career path, maybe exceeding or has different demands or life circumstances happen and you want to keep them involved and keep them excited.

How does, what’s the ingredient and role that equity can play in that?

Cyrus Symoom: So our our view on equity has definitely evolved over time. I think when we first joined the organization and I think rightfully we were raised selective of where equity was allocated across employees.

And I think it was after our first year of really understanding the business that we introduced our first equity program. I think over time, we really saw the kind of ownership that can come with equity when folks are properly educated on equity. And so we made a decision to really open up an equity program starting at the senior manager level at the organization, which was our view of it’s at that level that you start to really own KPIs of the business, at least there’s really own functions of the business and you really have direct decision making authority over potential enterprise value.

And so once you get involved in that equity program, as Jake and I mentioned, there’s a lot of conversations we have around the explanation of enterprise value, what value creation means, how people’s activities tie into the growth of the business that tie into the growth of the value of the company and how that equity does over time.

And then we’ve also introduced bands where as someone receives promotions through the business, they receive more and more equity. As someone’s in the business for a longer period of time, they receive an equity refresh. And so over a three, five, seven, 10 year journey at an organization, there’s more and more incentive to stay for longer because of how that equity value grows consummate with the company.

And again, just like hiring someone at first, you’re just believing us, right? In year number one, this is just a vision for what this means. But once you get to years three, four, and five, And there starts to be people that have built meaningful equity positions in the organization and have demonstrated the real growth in their equity value.

That’s when there starts to be a culture in the organization of people really seeing and feeling the value of the equity and also candidly being motivated to drive equity value. And so I think that’s been the story that equity has played in our organization. And,

Alex Bridgeman: Throughout all of this, you’ve clearly become like pretty effective internal communicators and have emphasized to me just in other like chats, how important common like frequent communication has been.

If I just shadowed each of you for a month, like what things would I have noticed communication wise with the way you communicate with the broader team or certain departments or groups what do you think I would notice if I followed you around for a month?

Jake Dancyger: Alex, open invitation. You are more than welcome to come on this journey with us.

That’d

Alex Bridgeman: be super fun. That’d be super fun.

Jake Dancyger: We’d love to have you here. Yeah, at this point in the journey it would definitely be different than, year one of Cyrus and Jake running around, trying to figure out how we build a great business and convince people to stay. Today our communication has definitely evolved.

At the. I guess I’ll first focus it at the company level. Of course, Cyrus’s mentioned, we’re communicating the vision, mission, core values to every single employee. And that’s not just when they join, but we’re communicating it in every single all hands town hall. So you’ll always see us go back to that a hundred million, citizens served that Cyrus’s mentioned is something that we really rally everyone around because we are able to show.

What was our progress since the last time we spoke? How many more citizens have we served? And that’s just like rallying people around that vision, mission, core values. You’ll get tired, sitting with Cyrus and I of hearing us talk about that. And because. Almost every single company meeting.

We, we are communicating that because it’s so important to when someone wakes up in their day, why are they here at the company? Of course, there’s the having a job is important, but like the, why they do their job is really important. And so you’ll hear us. Communicating. And I think oftentimes over communicating that and these days you’ll see that communication and slides, you’ll see it in a recording sent to you afterwards with bullets again on the vision and mission and where we are on track, you’ll see it in our internal company database that we refer back to, so you’ll see it everywhere.

And as it comes to then more like I’ll call it people management level meetings, and you’ll see Cyrus’s and I come in and talk more about those priorities that service is mentioning and where we are around them. But you’ll actually see us trying to empower others to communicate it. So giving them the spotlight to hey here.

Why don’t you drive where we are in this priority and work with this team and management group on that? And so I would say it’s definitely become more of empowerment of our messaging and of our frameworks. And then in one on ones today, you’d see us hanging out, right? Like we’re normal guys.

And of course, like you want to connect with someone personally and on that personal level in any. Conversation we’re having with anyone in the org and as well, you want to make it super clear on where do we need to be in the org? In, mix of trying to inspire them on where we are and also the clear, like accountability measures that we need to uphold that individual to and what we need to see.

And you’d probably come into some fun performance feedback conversations in that 1 month here. You absolutely would. And just the back and forth that takes place. But through it all, I would hope that you would feel the transparency that we have across the org at that full company level people management level or in our 1 on 1.

And, but it’s definitely evolved over time.

Cyrus Symoom: I was just smiling because I think Jake’s kind of talking about like where we are today. And I think it’d be really funny to see where we were like a year and a half ago. Because I think like to Jake’s point when we were 20 or 30 people. We could just tell everyone something and they’d all communicate it to themselves.

And that would be it. Whereas like we kept that communication channel going, I think for too long. And if you looked at us like a year or two years ago, we get questions like, where’s the company going? And like, why are we doing this? And what’s the purpose of this? And we’re not really sure like why this was decided or we disagree with the decision and we were never like looped in for it.

And so I think it took like a lot of feedback to Jake and I to recognize that. Oh, for like communication to work at scale to Jake’s point, we need to deliver it in the town hall. We need the people managers to know we need the written communication behind it. We need to check in on one on ones of how the communication was received.

And if we need to reiterate on it. And so I think just the, how deliberate we’ve needed to be with communication has significantly changed over the journey. So it’d be funny for you to see us like this month versus two years ago. Cause I think it was. And there’s a lot of adjustments we need to make a couple of years ago.

Alex Bridgeman: It’d be wild to record your first town hall, like five years ago and just watch it once a year just to see like how we do and where, how much have we improved since then? All that I

Cyrus Symoom: was I was going through actually. Cause I know their CEO was asking for what is the first like six month town halls look like?

And Jake and I were like kings of like management and consulting banking of having 7, 000 words on one slide with all these charts and diagrams. I would just watch us like presented and then it’d be like, any questions? I’d wait one second and we’d move forward. Versus now it’s like, what is like the one point where we’re trying to articulate on this one slide with this, like one message and let’s spend 10 minutes on that.

And so Yeah, a pretty, pretty big change in communication from from the early days.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah certainly a big change in a good way from what it sounds like for sure. But thank you both for coming on the podcast. This has been super helpful. And I wish you luck in your onboarding call up next.

Go break a leg. I’m sure it’ll be good. I’m sure it’ll go well. So thank you for sharing your time in the meantime. Really appreciate it.

Cyrus Symoom: Awesome. Great catching up, Alex. Good to see

you.