Syelo Ventures

Today we hard pivoted Syelo into Syelo Ventures. A community of the world's greatest talent professionals who collectively invest in early stage startups, but our investment is unlike any other... Syelo invests in startups by deploying fully-embedded Talent Leaders into their company for ZERO cost -?in short we trade People services for sweat equity. This offering makes us the *only* recruiting service that is truly mission and incentive aligned for Founders. In a space full of charlatans Syelo ensures that your long term success is our success and we're willing to bet on it. As Talent Leaders we have always been the ones building the unicorns with the human capital they need to succeed. When companies go from 0 to a billion executives, engineers, and sales teams reap the financial reward but very rarely do we. Nor are we given the opportunity to invest in the best startups at their earliest stages. That all changes today. As a community based fund membership dues means automatic vesting in the companies we partner with. A true retirement plan for Syelo members. We do this because we believe in human exceptionalism. We do this to champion the gold standard of our industry. We do this to achieve incredible returns for our community and their families. Mike Rubino Sabrina Baez

Very excited to be welcoming our new Senior Advisor Carla H. McIntosh to Syelo Ventures! Recruiting has no "alumni association" and because of that there is a massive gap in information sharing that typically happens between seasoned executives and up-and-coming leaders. As a community we believe deeply in bridging that gap and creating learning and mentorship opportunities for our members through?a network of seasoned executives. Carla has spent over 25 years leading and building and leading world class teams at brands like?Reddit, Google, and Robert Half. We are extremely excited to be collaborating with such an incredibly knowledgeable, experienced, thoughtful, and passionate?leader in our space. Over the next few months Carla will be hosting multiple events here at Syelo (office hours, roundtables, etc.), including being the featured executive for our monthly fireside chat in September. As a community we cannot wait to learn and build with her. Welcome Carla!!!! Mike Rubino Sabrina Baez

The problem with recruiting is that it is undemocratic. Talent Leaders actually have no say in the very industry we operate in. There is no standardization, there is no retirement plan, there is no pathway to executive leadership, there is no gold standard, there are no standard operating procedures, and there are no barriers to entry. When you hear the expression,"recruiting is broken" this is what they mean. We work within industries & companies that individually define our value vs. a communal agreement on what we bring to the table and what impact we drive. No tool can fix this. No piece of software. So can it be fixed? Or is this just status quo for our space? The only way democracy works is through a collective coming together and voting their future into existence - that takes capital. In business you vote with your dollars so if Talent Leaders became "the bank" of their industry - suddenly they could redefine and democratize an entire industry. Food for thought. Syelo Ventures :: September 2nd, 2024.

Last week we had Senior Advisors Rockman Ha and Suzy Hathaway spearhead a panel discussion on, "Stakeholder Management" - gems were dropped. Here are 5 key takeaways from the conversation: 1) Data is king. Find it, clean it, understand it, present it, build your workflow after it. 2) Be prepared, heck, over prepare. A deep level of preparation builds trust across the entire organization, it should be obvious that you are the subject matter expert. 3) Be direct. In a service based role it's really easy to skirt, sidestep, and avoid tough conversations - don't. 4) Establish and execute on QBRs. This builds a level of transparency that furthers the professional relationships with managers. 5) Everyone has a belly button, not everyone wants to see yours. Syelo Ventures Sabrina Baez Mike Rubino

Sourcing is the one brute function we execute on that has the potential for AI. Thus far a lot of companies have implemented some sort of AI function for outbound sourcing - and to be frank, none are very good. This is why we are incredible excited to have Pin presenting their product in this weeks SyeloTank! We have had the opportunity to test Pin internally and it's a very impressive product. Makes sense given that their founder Steven Lu founded Interseller which he sold to Greenhouse Software a few years back. Pin will be executing on a live pitch of their product to an audience of Talent Leaders represented within the Syelo Ventures ecosystem! The best part about SyeloTank is that it is open to the public!!! If you are curious to see what a next generation sourcing tool looks like feel free to join us this coming Thursday at 11am PT - invite in the comment!

We just launched a game changing tool at Syelo. The best part of being a curated and intentionally small community is harnessing the power of a truly brilliant collective. “Out of every one hundred, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle." - Heraclitus.

Incredible companies are built by incredible Talent Leaders. Founders have the dream and a vision but that can only be achieved when the right talent buys-in and believes. Talent Leaders are the brick layers of enterprise and I say that with tremendous pride. Bricklayers are masons, engineers who are responsible for the brute scaling of complex structures. Our work requires precision, endurance, and a deep understanding of architecture/design (human). Despite all the work we are rarely the ones that reap the rewards of our ingenuity. When companies go from 0 to a billion, executives, engineers, sales teams reap the financial reward but very rarely do Talent Leaders. Someone should do something about that. Syelo :: September 2nd, 2024.

Magic happens when a talent executive and hiring managers mind meld. The hiring manager and talent leader relationship is the *most* important relationship within any hiring function, it's also one of the hardest ones to develop and nurture. Like all relationships, trust is the cornerstone. Unfortunately, most talent executives enter these relationships with many managers already having a negative past experience that has broken their trust in recruiting as a function. It can sometimes be impossible to recover. After chatting with a dozen Heads of Talent within the Syelo community here are six ways to manage and potentially fix a pre-exisiting broken TA function: 1) Listening Tour. Go on a listening tour. Interview every stake holder and simply listen to their problems, concerns, challenges, etc. Don't try to solve the issues on the tour, just listen. 2) Go on a data dive. Pull historical data from the internal ATS and all other TA tools and analyze. Find data that supports, challenges, or addresses what you learned on your listening tour. 3) Reporting. You've learned about the challenges, you dove into the data, and now on a consistent basis you need to share your learnings, key findings, results, with your team. Do this weekly. 4) OKRs. Come to an agreement with your executive team and stake holders on what "success" looks like for your role. What metrics are you tracking? Be extremely cautious of volume based metrics as these typically result in spam like outcomes (IE: reach out to 500 candidates per week - trash OKR). 5) Push when necessary. Many TA leaders, especially in this market are concerned about ruffling feathers and upsetting their stakeholders. This is fair but if your goal is to build a world class TA function you *must* push back on bad ideas, bad processes, bad managers, biases, etc. You know the problems, you have the data, you've done the reporting - now be the subject matter expert. 6) Build an extremely strong relationship with the Head of Finance. Most recruiters never report to their finance lead - but they absolutely should. The Head of Finance, CFO is the all seeing eye. They know it all, see it all, and most importantly are the most "honest" executives in the room - numbers don't lie. If your CFO values your function so will the entire org.