The Three Questions #10 - Nadia Vatalidis - Global Leaders
Leo Capelossi
Founder @ambi.careers I Helping funds, startups and scaleups to grow their teams across Europe and abroad 🌍 Exploring the Future of Work.
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☝️First things first
Hola everyone! Hope you are well and enjoying this pre-summer weather.
I wish I was writing here more frequently, but as I've mentioned in the last issue, I was busy traveling, especially to Spain, where we started The Sales Gang ops. Actually we operate remotely in many countries already, but now we have a local Director, Patricia P. , actively partnering with Spanish and international companies based in Spain. We made it to be featured in the local news, so happy with this new chapter! Read the job post and article here.
These past weeks I´ve had many interesting conversations with talent and HR professionals from all over the world. Really nice people like a Global Recruitment Director from one of the biggest U.S. Tech companies, from which you are probably a client, or an old friend managing the Startups and Innovation area from a global top-tier strategic consultancy in the U.S., latam, and Europe. And people are feeling the same: there's no doubt that these layoffs, high-interest rates, war, etc. Are making companies really apprehensive. Companies are people, so making people really apprehensive. Startups cutting costs, expanding less, funds investing a fraction from the same period last year, the impacts of generative AI... all of that seems to be affecting many talent-related jobs. Said that I'm thinking about re-starting our talent community and maybe promoting some small meetups for people to exchange, learn and support, if possible. If you are keen to be part of it, fill out this so I know there is interest out there.
On the other hand, some light at the end of the tunnel, the average number of job openings per company is growing a bit:
Cheers to the small and medium companies!
To finish this session, some funny but important article about job descriptions. Yes, sounds old-school to even write about job descriptions in the chatgpt 4 era, but it isn't. I don't think AI is replacing transparent, no-bull** and creative content, at least yet. Look at this piece:
See you soon, folks.
Leo
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🤟 Three Questions - Featuring Nadia Vatalidis (she/her/hers) - Global Leaders
0. Could you share a short bio? (just a small paragraph about you!)
🚀 Previously VP of People at Remote.com 💜🌐 and running all things people, scaling from 70 to 1000 employees and working with phenomenal people across the globe.
Then a few years back, at GitLab, I lead People Operations, People Experience, People Engineering and International Expansion and helped scale GitLab from 75 to 1300 employees. Extremely proud that GitLab has since become a successful public trading company.
🚵🏼 ♀️ When I'm not working, I'm hiking with the fam, trying out new plant-based recipes, doing Pilates, chasing Frenchies around the garden, running or taking my Scott Spark 910 29'er for a spin! I’m slowly gaining an obsession with gravel bikes.
Recommended by LinkedIn
1. Nadia, you are a scaleup expert, aren't you? Being one of the talent leaders scaling Gitlab and Remote from 70 to +1000, what would be your learnings and advice for talent professionals, involved in their first scaleups? (not just in recruitment, but in the talent area, in general).
Appreciate you calling me that, I absolutely love the start-up and scale-up phases of tech companies!
My number 1 advice always remains: create accessible documentation very early on to avoid folks making assumptions. This is not just for remote companies, but really all companies. The biggest mistake scale-ups make, is often around documentation and communication and sometimes delaying that, can result in an organic company culture, that is not aligned to what they truly wanted to build. Providing guidelines with intentionality, creates a very clear and open environment. Extra points for ensuring folks can contribute to what you are building from day 1, this will not only create shared ownership but will also create a sustainable company that is running efficiently while it evolving and growing!
2. I've heard you promoted a source-a-thon with your team at TestGorilla. How to organize one, and what could the results of doing one be? Any sourcing special tips to share?
Source-a-thon's is a sync session whereby an entire team's network is accessed to find critical candidates for hard-to-fill roles. Sometimes, you might host a sync source-a-thon to diversify a hiring pipeline, that isn't diverse and therefore hire more diversely overall. I usually host these as 45min (you can do shorter, but it needs to be enough time to chat about the role + get some solid keywords for sourcing and boolean strings and ensure everyone knows exactly what the hiring manager is looking for.) Within that timeframe, you could walk away with ~60+ potential candidates, sourced by the team that want to hire them and have a nice outreach email planned to get in touch. I often use this method if we are struggling to fill a critical role or a role that simply had no organic hiring pipeline.
3. Nadia, in contrast to scaling, we are witnessing a massive layoff period, globally. Many talent professionals are being laid off and becoming available in the market. What would be your advice for those who had been laid-off, in terms of finding a new (maybe remote?) job or do you see other kinds of opportunities for recruiters these days?
I often see folks not hitting the apply button on their dream jobs and waiting to see what's out there. I would highly encourage a similar method to sourcing: use keywords and boolean strings to find your dream role and hit the apply button immediately. Don't wait for you CV to be "perfect" and instead jump in and concurrently, learn as much as you can about the company. I once had to find a new role within 4 days and part of the reason I was successful, was because I simply didn't wait and didn't let fear of failure or imposter syndrome get to me. I simply believed I could be successful in the roles that I applied in and I absolutely was. Something that is important is to find a company that has a mission that you are actually interested in or aligned with, otherwise you might never find a meaningful career.
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You still here? It´s a good sign :) For feedback, requests, interest in being featured or anything, send me an e-mail to leo@thesalesgang.com