Great. So we, jobRely are also your customers and very glad about your service and you know all the customer support and all the other benefits. You could not compare it if we would be directly using this from AWS. So Julius, when talking about recruitment failures. What is the biggest one or the one you learned most from?

Well, that's I would say a tough question. When I was thinking about what kind of topic could we raise here today, I had a few options in mind. But after thinking more about it I would say that for me personally, especially at this stage of the company the biggest failure so far was hiring two senior people at the early stage of the company and then paying the price at least in our case basically in all of the senior hires we made in the first year or 2.

And what happened?

So, the problem is how I see it now, of course, I was not that experienced or smart way back then. It was that we kind of had the idea that it would be great for us like to start for the roles that don't have like even well-defined environments or structure or processes, let's take sales, marketing, operations - at the very beginning of the company when we just starting to get the market product fit and decided that okay, let's scale this and add some more people next to the Co-Founders, we thought that if we get senior and experienced people, first of all, they would be very fast to start delivering the results and as we were naturally planning that all of it will scale fast and then we'll be hiring more and more people and at some point we'll need like team leads, managers and then we thought, okay, then those first hires would be a great fit for those roles because they would be like the most experienced both like generally and in terms of the product and they would basically just own that area of expertise and then we could, Founders and Co-Founders, could just maybe delegate and focus on the other areas, like product - which was a big mistake actually at least in our case. I would count like 5 maybe first hires like mostly in sales, and marketing and then some in operations that we did at the beginning, and the reality proved to be very different from what we expected. We saw that seniors, they're used to some comfort. Many of them were coming from the enterprise world, directly, or at least they had spent most of their career there. So and there's like very little unknown there. So yeah, then we kind of saw that they don't feel comfortable in the unknown and ever-changing environment which is like normal for a fast-growing company, in the early stages, and we saw that they were not delivering, procrastinating, finding excuses and so on and that was a problem and once we hired some, let's call them "hungry mid-level people", who were already a bit experienced but still with the grinding attitude and open mindset for anything possible in the future and they were saying "Okay, let's figure out along the way". So we saw that the less experienced people were way more productive in that kind of environment, at least in our setup.

Do you think this is because of the experience in general - the years of experience or the experience in the enterprise and corporate world and it was pretty difficult to adjust to the startup vibe and all the unknown things you have to work on from scratch?

Well, that's a good question and actually, I was asking myself those things a lot as well and we actually have quite a few successful hires coming from the enterprise, even one of our Co-Founders came directly from a company of 5000 people, and actually for some of them, moving to a different kind of setup made a big part of their motivation - like changing things, because they just got fed up with all the structure, rules and things staying calm but at the same time quite boring. So that's like one thing and I would say that maybe the experience part played the bigger role here, because with experience it means that people know in advance what needs to be done, how they will do it and so on and that's a big benefit in most cases. That's what we're like paying the extra money for, but if they come to a setup where is a lot of unknown which is new for them, and they need to figure things out on their own and experiment, break and fix and so on, kind of like saw that most of those people just because it has been so long before they have been doing the same thing, they kind of forgot that or maybe thought that they will not need to do; we kind of set the expectations I think quite clear in the beginning when they were coming along. But yeah, it seemed that they were feeling uncomfortable and comfort is a thing that kind of comes along with the expertise and higher salaries, being able to pick roles, projects, and so on. So that was something we learned the hard way and why this is also very important - this was a very expensive lesson for us because those people cost a lot, and not delivering any results is very expensive, especially in the early stages.

Exactly. Was there a problem with being hands-on too, because most probably those people were managers and were responsible only for managing other people, but not doing some things hands-on? And at your company, at startup, they had to be hands-on right? Was there a struggle?

In some cases. I wouldn't say it was a big problem. We were kind of aiming for hiring experts in their field, but not managers, that we kind of had a feeling that those people had the ambition of becoming managers and that was one of the reasons why they decided to switch to smaller companies. There were cases definitely when we saw that kind of attitude, "I'm not doing this, get me an assistant to do that" or something like that, which is something very uncommon in a startup world. But I wouldn't say that this was a big problem though. Most probably this also like added to the overall, discomfort that they felt because they had to do things differently than they have been doing for the past five or ten years which is for some a big challenge.

Yeah, well, we also had a C-level manager but of course, from the very beginning, we agreed that they will have to be very hands-on because we don't have a huge team for them. But we always felt this attitude that it's not my job to do - I will create the strategy, I will create the deadlines, but someone else has to come and do that. So this was very unfavorable for us because C-level managers cost a lot and then, in addition, you have to hire people who are doing things. So, sometimes you have to evaluate the person's not only capabilities but an attitude towards the work. And did you say that there were five managers - sort of five senior people you hired and had this experience with?

Yeah, it's that's how much I counted from the past few years and unfortunately, none of those hires became a success. Of course, I'm not referring to the Co-Founders because of course you usually have more experience working with those Co-Founders and know better what to expect from them. Usually, they also are way more prepared for grinding till the end because they understand that there's a bigger benefit for them in the end. But for the people coming in with just a salary and changing the setup, that's all of the cases when we decided to hire senior people and in the early, the first two years of the company all of them finally ended parting ways just because we were not able to set the environment where they could feel comfortable enough and deliver, they were not being able to change, to adapt to the setup. That was it. So yeah, we needed a shift, but then the shift actually proved to be quite good because even now we're mostly, first of all looking for mid- plus people that already have the experience, but still have a lot of motivation and a lot of potential for the future and we see that at first, we need to spend more time on training, coaching them, but in the long run it's a way better result for us.

What made you realize that you have to change something and that senior people are not the best fit for your startup?

Well, I guess the same thing that comes for all the startups and especially in that early stage, we just saw that things are not working out. And we tried experimenting, we tried one approach, another approach. We tried doing things with one person, then other people, switching roles, switching the structure, changing bonus systems, and other things. But once we got the grasp of what can be achieved with another type of people in that particular role, then we tried again and then we saw that the results show it's a way better approach for us. So basically the short answer would be experimenting - like all is in the startup world in the early days.

Great, well this is the thing. It's sometimes our wish to have something stable and repeat, but unfortunately in the startup world where everything is changing very fast, we need to be very open-minded and try out new things. And when thinking about these five hires, hiring senior people. What was the feeling? I believed you tried to solve these situations, right? You see that you hired a senior person, with many expectations and you don't have any delivery. What were the solutions? What did you try to do?

So, of course, the number one thing is just talking and trying to understand what is happening in the other person's head. And in most cases (they're also experienced), we did not have a problem of misunderstanding that things are not working out, they saw that themselves. But then we kind of first of all tried changing the structure, the role. For example, adding some more junior people to do some part of their work that was not going as expected, which was usually the first excuse was "I don't know this, there's not enough data to work on or not enough prospects". So we tried working with the first set of excuses. Usually when those were fixed other problems occurred and still in the end - no result. We tried even changing the format - "Okay, maybe you should be the manager". And for example in sales, we were hiring quite fast and there was already a big enough team that already needed some leading and then we said "Okay, then maybe you're better at managing other people" and using your experience there than for example, closing sales yourself. But it also proved that still if the problem is the environment, the unknown and uncertainty that you have around you then in all those roles usually the problems consisted - they were of different flavor but still we saw that the person is not thriving in that environment. In most of those cases, our goodbyes were quite normal, and decent, both sides understood that it's just not the right place for that type of person to be in that particular moment.

And what is the difference you see in comparison to mid-level people?

Mostly I would say is the attitude. I think attitude is mostly the main thing that distinguishes a startup from an enterprise or even small-medium business - you come in, you're open-minded. You are okay with the uncertainty and you're open to spending a lot of energy, doing a lot of experiments, and finally figuring out a way of doing things better than they are being done right now. For those people who are a bit earlier in their career, it seemed that there were fewer things that they needed to unlearn from that side and I would say the attitude and the motivation were the main things that changed. Personally at Cloudvisor - the culture and attitude are the main things we look at while hiring, especially now once we have all this experience at hand. Because experience - we can gain it, we can learn things, but the attitude that's the most difficult thing to change if that's even possible - in most cases, it's not.

I totally agree with you. So what would be the key learnings or key takeaways which you took from these experiences and maybe you could suggest some other startups. What to do and  how to scale better?

Sure. If I would be starting new I would work a lot on the Co-Founder side, that we have all the experience and attitude there as much as possible because that's the core team that makes up 90% of the probability that we will live through the first year, but once we get the first customers, signs of market product fit - we need to start hiring. I would start with mid-level people. Maybe in some cases even junior people if we have somebody that would be able to coach them and manage. I would pass the whole stage of uncertainty and experimenting and then once we know for sure what we need to scale, we have the processes in place, we have already predictable results that we can expect from then it's time for the senior people to come in and bring in their "know-how" while knowing the specific areas and places where that "know-how" is needed.

Great! Thank you Julius so much for your time and for sharing your story.

Thank you very much for having me.  It's been really a pleasure and honor. And everybody, we're also customers of jobRely -  really recommend working with them, a great company and a partner to have.

Thank you. And thank you for all the listeners for more podcast, please visit http://jobrely.com.