Recruiter spotlight: Q&A with SalesLoft’s talent manager
7 mins, 17 secs read time
One of the best parts of Greenhouse is, without a doubt, our incredible customers. Their talent, hard work, and dedication to improving the hiring process inspire us each day to create the best talent acquisition suite out there. We recently spoke with one of our customers, SalesLoft, to reflect on their team’s recruiting journey.
Through strategic partnership and harmonious collaboration with Greenhouse, SalesLoft was able to scale hiring and nearly double their employee base by implementing structured hiring, making recruiting a company-wide effort, reporting on performance, and iterating on processes to constantly improve.
Below, Emily Maher, Talent Manager at SalesLoft, tells us about her own perspective as a talent acquisition professional, discusses her team’s progress, and offers advice on how other people teams can achieve the same success.
Greenhouse: Thanks for hopping on the phone with me, Emily! First off, tell me about taking on the role of Talent Manager at SalesLoft. What has the experience been like?
Emily: Overall, I would describe it as fun, challenging, and overwhelming.
I’ve been in this role for about four months. I was pretty intimidated at first because SalesLoft is currently the fasting growing tech company in Atlanta. We’ve experienced incredible growth that has really put the spotlight on SalesLoft. Representing the company in such a community-facing way was nerve-wracking, but I had great support within SalesLoft. Many hiring managers were doing their own recruiting, so they understood the importance of my role and pain points.
I had never really used an ATS before Greenhouse. Our former ATS was really limited in functionality, basically just a database for resumes. Starting with Greenhouse in such a big role has made my job easier. Greenhouse is intuitive, so I didn’t have to train our other recruiters and hiring managers because the software is so easy to use.
Greenhouse: Thanks for sharing that and being so open. What advice would you give new talent managers?
Emily: Be hungry, humble, and smart.
“Smart,” for me, means being intuitive with the people around you and developing your soft skills. Learn how to communicate, engage, and empathize with hiring managers, candidates, and C-level executives to understand the full picture.
“Humble” means admitting when you don’t know something and being resourceful to find the right answer. It means learning from your mistakes and recognizing that there’s a lot to learn from everyone.
Be hungry to find success. Stay self-motivated and driven. You don’t need someone to push you along. Take initiative and ownership. SalesLoft is notorious for taking action and asking for forgiveness later. While this is still challenging for me, it’s something I’ve really grown to respect.
Greenhouse: Hungry, humble, and smart. I love that! When you first started using Greenhouse, what were your goals?
Emily: Our goal was to track metrics like time to hire and quality of candidate per source to be strategic as we scale. We also wanted to keep track of candidates at various stages in the hiring process. We doubled the size of our company this year. SalesLoft had no talent team before Greenhouse. We mostly used agencies, contract recruiters, and relied on employee referrals. Greenhouse was originally implemented to help make scaling easier. It definitely has.
Greenhouse: Tell me more about the specific pain points you were looking to address.
Emily: Feedback was difficult to track in our previous ATS. It goes back to the metrics piece. It was hard to figure out where we could improve. For example, cutting down on time to hire, knowing where our candidates were coming from, and keeping track of our activities. We had no benchmark or way of understanding if our department was actually successful.
Greenhouse: Tell me about your partnership and collaboration with the Greenhouse team.
Our implementation specialist, Rosa, was patient, kind, knowledgeable, and answered every question. I would be sending her emails at midnight the night before a launch. She always went above and beyond. She helped us onboard Greenhouse as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The Greenhouse live chat team really knew our names by heart. Ultimately, we realized we needed a dedicated person to help us out. Emily, our account manager, has been a joy to work with. She’s the most gracious, empathetic, all-around helpful person I’ve ever worked with at any company, ever. She’s proactive and anticipates problems before we ever see them.
Greenhouse: That’s so wonderful to hear. Tell me about how you use Greenhouse on a daily basis. What 3 strategies or tips would you offer to those (who may just be starting out) trying to get the most out of the product?
Emily: A couple of tips:
Watch the training videos! They are a lifesaver.
Understand the metrics and reporting features. Leverage them in your favor.
Emphasize with your hiring team how important timely feedback is. Our rule is that we can’t make a hire without everyone submitting their scorecard.
The reporting features are really important for our executive team. We can provide them with answers to questions like, “How is the talent team performing? Where do we need to invest every quarter in order to get the candidates we need?”
We must have all the feedback and the scorecards within 2-3 days of an interview if the hiring team wants to make a hire. We see every hire we make a partnership. It’s really important during the offer process for the candidate to understand why we want them here. It’s more meaningful for the candidate when we’re sharing specific feedback. It gets them excited!
Greenhouse: But besides your team, how do you get other teams, interviewers, and hiring managers invested in the recruiting process?
Emily: Our hiring managers love Greenhouse. It’s super easy to use, you can see candidates in the pipeline in various stages, and simple to understand the hiring manager’s role in making a great hire.
Adding another piece of software to an executive’s busy life is tough. Greenhouse being easy to use is helpful. We also use single sign on software and have integrated Greenhouse into this, which makes it more simple for executives. We always go through the metrics and reports with the executive team each week, and they know this data is only available through Greenhouse.
Greenhouse: That’s a great tip. Now having been in your role for some time, how would you describe the recruiting and hiring process at SalesLoft?
Emily: First off, every candidate does a culture interview. We ask them things like, “What annoys you? Tell me about a time when you were really frustrated at work.” These assess if a candidate adheres to our cultural values. The interviewers have these core values in front of them on the Greenhouse scorecards. This is now a critical part of the hiring process that we didn’t have before.
Greenhouse: Specifically, what goals or accomplishments has your team achieved to-date that you’re particularly proud of?
Emily: To name a few:
We stopped using recruiting agencies in Q2.
We made 45 hires in 4 months and 15 of them were super tough tech positions.
My teammate built an entire customer success team with 0 pipeline in 3 months.
Greenhouse: Um, wow. First, congratulations! Can you tell me more?
Emily: Thanks! It takes a lot of extra work, but I was confident we could stop using agencies. I told the team, “We’re going to stop using agencies for 3 months. Let's see what happens.” We ended up hiring 45 people, built 2 new software engineering teams, and hired 8 additional customer success employees.
I’m also just proud of the fact that we finally have all of our feedback in one place through Greenhouse. When my team shares specific feedback from the SalesLoft team during the closing offer call, it really gets candidates excited.
Greenhouse: What are you working on or focused on now in terms of recruiting and hiring?
Emily: Sales, sales, sales.
We have 11 open sales development representative positions right now. Sales is hard to hire for. SalesLoft is a sales organization at heart, so we really try to find the best of the best for our sales positions.
Greenhouse: Last question. Looking forward, what would you like to see your team accomplish in 2018?
Emily: We’re looking to add 150 new jobs in 18 months. Every department is probably going to double in size over the next two years. My team will be heads down focused on growing all teams. For example, we’re hoping to add 5 new engineering teams and build a data science team.
Thank you so much, Emily, for sitting down with us to tell your story and your team’s story. Greenhouse thrilled to partner with SalesLoft to support your hiring needs and goals.
Does any of what Emily shared ring a bell for you? Tell us in the comments below!