Tom Griffiths. How the devil are you? Good to see you, my friend. Good to see you, Tom. Yeah, well, thanks. I hope the UK is treating you well over there and yeah, excited for the conversation. Yeah, it is indeed. Yeah. Thanks for spending some time. You know of the founders we’ve worked with over the years, I would be lying if I said you weren’t up there at the very top of the chain. You’ve been an absolute pleasure to work with from a hiring capacity and I’m looking forward to kind of talking through some of these points because I’ve seen firsthand how you operate.
And I think you can offer quite some intel on some pretty topical points here. I appreciate that. Thanks, Tom. And yeah, working with you and the team at The Collective has been great over the years, really helped us build our sales team and customer facing team. And so the feeling’s mutual. Yeah, wonderful.
We’ll get straight into it then. So just to start, how many people have you hired, Tom? Yeah, I was thinking about this. So, I mean, over 10 years building FanDuel and now six, nearly seven years building Hone, it’s hundreds. I think I’d put the number probably somewhere between 300 and 400 people that I’ve been involved in hiring.
All right. So, I think then you definitely have a say on these matters, given those numbers.
So within that, let’s talk maybe about some stories of best and worst hiring surprises. Uh, yeah. I mean, you know, hiring’s an imperfect process and you can get better at it over time, for sure with some best practices.
But I definitely do think that it still has room for surprises. I think the biggest surprises I’ve had have been times where you really expect someone from their resume to make a huge impact and just be a genius at so many things. And oftentimes, you know, those folks are harder to get and you’re kind of whining and dining them.
I remember one particular person was on the sales side where just the resume was amazing and tremendous growth at a company that everyone would recognize. And we travel to their city, me and the sales leader to try and reel them in and we thought we’d won the lottery when they actually agreed to sign.
But actually, you know, when it came down to it, they wanted to do kind of the strategy work and they wanted to, you know, have big ideas and not really roll up their sleeves and actually get into doing the hard ground game of making sales. And so that ultimately didn’t work out. And it was always just a reminder of the fact that no matter how big someone’s resume is or how much you think you want them on the team through the hiring process, if they’re not prepared to do the work, then it’s never going to work out.
So that was a negative surprise, for sure. And maybe on the plus side, is there one that stands out for you? Yeah, I mean a lot. I think oftentimes on the flip side of that story are the folks that have the more kind of modest backgrounds who really have the hunger and want to come in and make an impact.
They’re often the most conscientious and really looking to prove themselves. And sometimes you’d be pleasantly surprised that someone you hired for a junior role, can really step up into something that was more than you thought they could. I’m thinking of perhaps someone on our QA team at the moment who- QA as a function is essential, but it wouldn’t necessarily be the place that you look for company or cultural leaders. But someone
who has really stepped up recently, has been our QA lead and helped to lead the culture of the company as we grow and change in, you know, different ways. And I think that’s just at the top of the list for me, or top of the rankings, where you get pleasantly surprised is when someone can show their leadership potential that they perhaps hadn’t in the past. Someone stepping up as an unexpected leader.
It’s kind of like the movies where, you know, kind of in a difficult situation and the unexpected character kind of saves the day. I love those stories and examples and we’ve got a few happening at the moment. Yeah, that’s a feel good one for sure. So within 300 to 400 hires, lots of sourcing and attracting talent.
Do you have a secret weapon to finding and sourcing top talent, Tom? Yeah. I mean, I think, not just saying this because we’re speaking, like finding the right select group of partners that can be on the recruiting side, like The Collective to help us really target top talent who’ve taken the time to understand the business and our needs and the culture and the way that they fit, is crucial.
I’ve interviewed recruiters where they’re just like what’s the job title? How many? What’s the salary? Okay. And I’ve stopped him and said, like, don’t you want to know about the business? They’re like, no, no, no, it’s fine. You know, we get it. Let’s go. We’ve looked at your website. That’s definitely not the kind of recruiting partner you want to work with.
But you and others have just been really thoughtful and deep about the business. One of the lesser expected ways I would think that we’ve been successful has been hiring contractors from Upwork. It’s a really nice way. Sometimes if you’ve got just like a small amount of project work to do,
you can find really hungry people who have got that entrepreneurial streak, right? They’ve chosen to work for themselves and put themselves out there on a platform. They need to be organized and professional enough to build their reviews and reputation and you need to do great work to do that. And we’ve found some really superstar folks that have been super cost effective in that capacity that then we’ve ultimately hired full time and have not only just come onto the team like that, but actually progressed into leadership roles as well.
So going from really kind of hourly contracting, proving themselves there to their entry level employees, proving themselves there to managers. And I think it’s a really nice way to kind of check on both sides that things are working as someone progresses with you to start at that contracting level. Yeah, very nice.
Lots of interviews. Do you have a weirdest interview moment that might stand out for you? There’s been a few for sure. The one that comes to mind was at FanDuel. This was maybe 20, early 2010s when the Facebook platform was really getting started from an advertiser perspective and you could do all these amazing new things,
demographically by targeting people by location and age bracket and so on. And we were interviewing a data analyst to support the team at FanDuel that was doing that. And it was kind of like a so-so interview. And I was asking, you know, give me examples of times where you’ve used some of this demographic information to really drive a business outcome.
I think they were selling jeans online in his previous role. He’s like, well, we tried, you know, the location targeting and that didn’t work. And we tried the age profiling and that didn’t work, but then I had a really good idea. I thought if we’ve got their birthday, we know their Zodiac sign. And so we just need to go to the Zodiac and figure out who likes to be adventurous and like in line with our brand values and target people by their birthday based on that.
And I was like, this is a data analyst who’s meant to be scientific about these things. And he was like targeting people based on Zodiac signs. So hopefully that works for him, but it wasn’t going to work at FanDuel. So that didn’t work out, but it was just an interesting angle or story to hear from him.
Yeah, thank you for that one. It’s definitely a good one.
Secret or unconventional interview questions or tactics, do you have any? One of the questions I like to use towards the end of an interview is one that uncovers people’s values. And really, I think through an interview process, a lot of it is kind of managing risk.
You can get other team members to assess skills. And then as the senior person in the process, you’ve identified a bunch of risks through the process. And it’s like, what risks do I need to mitigate so that things don’t go wrong here? We can see the upside, but one of the things that does go wrong is just the mismatching culture and values.
And people can talk a good game about that. But an interview question I used to uncover how they really feel is, imagine in 90 days you’re calling a friend to say, working at Hone or whatever company hasn’t worked out. Thought it was going to be great, but I’m actually leaving. What can you imagine you would be saying to that person about the reasons that you left?
What would cause you to actually walk away from this role in three months time? And everyone’s like, “Ooh, that’s a good question. Let me think about that for a minute”. They come up with something that feels authentic and they’re often disarmed by the kind of fun hypothetical of the question, but you really can get into detail of the environmental factors or the type- the things you’d be asking them to do that would really be turnoffs for them.
And so that’s been a good one to unearth some of those issues. Nice. Very good. I like that a lot.
You’ve been doing this for a while now, Tom. So, I’m hoping to maybe draw something from wisdom on hiring you wish you’d known much earlier in your career, maybe the most important piece. Yeah. I mean, I think this isn’t novel, but it always bears repeating, which is just to not make assumptions.
I think, especially when you’re starting out interviewing people as part of your career, it’s easy to look at a dazzling resume or a great educational background or even just a really confident candidate who tells great stories and think, oh, man, they must know these basic things. I’m just going to focus on the higher level things.
It’s going to be insulting if I ask them about, you know, the fundamentals of the role. And you would be surprised that the dazzling resume and the overconfident person can often fall down on the fundamentals or the basics, or perhaps, you know, have gaps because they were involved in an incredible company, but they themselves didn’t do a lot of the fundamental work or the pivotal work.
They were just kind of along for the ride. And so if you don’t make assumptions and structure your interview process so that you do respectfully drill into those basics asking the simple questions about how they were involved in certain projects, following up to say, you know, what did you really do?
Give me an example of time that you took ownership or leadership. Then you can drill in to get past the bravado of the confidence and the resume and just ensure that they’re not going to rest on the laurels once they get into the company and fall apart on the fundamentals. Love that.
Simple, effective. Can I ask Tom, so you’ve had some pretty exciting product updates recently. For those maybe that don’t know about Hone and I recommend that anyone who doesn’t, does. Would you like to just share a bit about Hone and kind of what have you been up to recently? And who might benefit from talking to you and the team?
Sure. Hone started life really trying to disrupt the online education space for corporates to reimagine what stuffy corporate training could be in the modern age where we have remote and hybrid teams. And so we got known for our live classes around manager training, and that’s still our primary way of working with companies, or at least the way that we start.
But what we’ve released over the last few years is a much broader range of live classes to the point now where we’re actually the world’s largest library of live online interactive classes for things like communication skills, team collaboration, DEI. And last week, we launched a bunch of new experiences like peer groups for engineers or sales leaders that allow them to learn from each other
as well as personality assessments, team development, and so on. And so we’ve evolved from our humble beginnings as kind of manager training experiences to almost like a live LinkedIn learning for all sorts of different employee development. And so we’re excited to be taking that to the market at this moment.
Very cool. And again, anyone who hasn’t experienced Hone, highly recommend reaching out to Tom and the team. Tom, thank you very much. This was an absolute pleasure. I appreciate the pearls of wisdom you’ve shared, mate. For sure. My pleasure. Happy to do it. Thanks, Tom.
