Accelerated Talent Acquisition in the Hyper-Growth Stage

...and how I can't seem to stay out of #HRTech, although I'm not a big fan

Ever since I started my own journey, outside of UiPath, in February of this year, the question I have most often received has been: “What will you do now?” 

With its many interpretations and nuances: “Is anything as challenging as UiPath possible?”, “What will you miss from this experience?”, “Will you repeat what you’ve done with another company?”, “Will you be posting funny pictures from wherever you will be travelling to?” and last, but not least: “Do you promise to send us a video of your first ever stand-up comedy act, as soon as you perform?”

More about stand-up comedy later and on a different social media platform. 

How was that growth even possible? And can it happen again?

For now, I must say that most underlying nuances and tones in these questions hinted towards the second most frequent question I got asked, both during my tenure as Chief People Officer at UiPath and after: “How was that growth even possible? And can it happen again?”

While there isn’t a single all-encompassing answer, it is important to say that there were several forces at play to allow such a story to take place. I will name the top things I believe worked in UiPath’s favor:

1. A virtuous cycle between market conditions <-> customer demand <-> proven ROI <-> availability and openness of UiPath’s teams;
2. A relatively constant growth / infrastructure ratio during the acceleration phase: growth would always be slightly ahead of infrastructure (but not too far ahead);
3. Relentlessness. While it was never clearly articulated as one of UiPath’s culture pillars, relentlessness was a direct consequence of people’s belief that what we were doing was very important for the greater good. People (employees, shareholders, customers) believed the world would be a very different and somewhat worse off place without our work.

From a business philosophy perspective, we had a lot working for us. But, in the operational day-to-day weeds, things were not that simple. While we were eager to eat our own “dog food” (read automate as many things as possible in day to day operations), it’s difficult to know what exactly to automate when you are not running operations at scale yet.

What does that mean for Talent Acquisition teams?

Let’s take Talent Acquisition, because every good story has a chapter about hiring the right talent. Being an unicorn company as of March 2018 definitely helped create some buzz - but more so in the home-country, Romania, than anywhere else. The reason is that there are now thousands of fast growing tech companies valued at more than 1 billion USD in the US, Western Europe and China. What was once “one of a kind” is now “one of many”.

Furthermore, being a fast growing enterprise software company does not necessarily make you an established employer brand in countries where the workforce has a more conservative way of thinking, like Japan or South Korea.

Soon after celebrating our hard fought and hard earned unicorn status (read: the day after the champagne drinking was over) we in the People & Talent team of UiPath found ourselves doing the same things as before: countless hours of interviews every day, sorting through hundreds of applications which had nothing to do with the job specs we had published, celebrating very small wins while hiring managers where growing ever more dissatisfied with our hiring pace.

And the hiring managers were right to be unhappy: the company THEY had joined with big hopes and dreams was proving to have a very hard time attracting the next top talents and firmly establishing itself on the enterprise software scene as a top employer. Nobody was challenging the long hours put into the work. Hiring managers were challenging the outcome.

What changed?

In the summer of 2018, when many of us handling recruitment were already frustrated, tired and quite frankly overwhelmed, we decided to make some very important changes:

1. We would change the way we attracted talent, especially in new markets / territories where we were expanding. Instead of relying almost exclusively on external partners (who had been very helpful, don’t get me wrong), we would start telling our story by ourselves, leveraging social media channels to the best of our ability and identifying country specific channels for attracting talent. For example: LinkedIn is not big in Japan at all, India has some very specific job boards and usage of social media by job seekers.
2. We would start actively engaging influencers and building events with communities, especially when it came to R&D talent we wanted to make aware of UiPath’s existence.
3. We would take back control of our budget and leverage it for a long term hiring strategy to make UiPath one of the most attractive tech companies in the world, instead of using it for short-term gains/hires (they were valuable, but expensive). Nothing was forbidden in the building of this strategy as long as it was in-line with UiPath’s cultural pillars of boldness, humbleness and speed. Hence, “Ulysses the Unimpressed Unicorn” is now a permanent guest star on UiPath’s career page.

We needed partners who could make the above things possible and the SmartDreamers team enthusiastically jumped on board to help us, although their business model was different at that time. They offered us the possibility to get our message out there on multiple channels, simultaneously, while identifying new ones (with topic-specific or country-specific focus). Over the next 6-9 months they started helping make sense of the data and see which investments were solid and where. (Hint: Facebook or Twitter advertising is far more effective than LinkedIn advertising in some countries, but it is domain-specific. What works in retail does not necessarily hold true in tech.) 

The UiPath case study published on their website is accurate: after iterating for approximately 4 months, UiPath reached more than 25,000 applicants per month via the career page, which could be tied back either to the paid campaigns done in social media, or on tech platforms like StackOverflow or on country specific job boards.

Why SmartDreamers?

SmartDreamers learned their own lessons along the way, pivoted more times than their investors could count and I could witness the team progress from the early days of throwing a small event for their customers and partners in a cramped-up pub in downtown Bucharest, Romania to winning the CEE UiPath Automation Award in 2019 and signing their first customers in Singapore, the United States and France. 

Fast forward to now: they are scaling globally and I am looking forward to advising them on this journey. I am not looking and the team is not looking to repeat the story of UiPath. SmartDreamers is a practice-specific business application platform in a space that is not as prone to automation as others. Nothing will take the human out of the loop in Talent Acquisition and Talent activities in general. But connecting social media / outreach tools, Candidate Management Systems, your ATS and HRIS, by means of an underlying business application platform allows you to take back control of your cost per hire, more clearly understand the number of touch-points before a candidate actively engages with your brand and ultimately figure out who are those employees who “stick”.

If you’d like to see the product at work, feel free to request a demo and if you want to learn more about why and how I decided to leverage it during the hyper-growth stage in 2018-2019, feel free to drop me a message.