Hello! Welcome to the podcast of Startup Recruitment Failures, I'm Indre, Founder and CEO of jobRely, we're building LinkedIn automation platform for outbound recruitment and today my guest is Mindaugas Petrutis, CEO at Coho. Mindaugas, could you please introduce yourself and your company?

Sure, thanks for having me. So I'm Mindaugas, I'm the CEO, Co-Founder of company called Coho. We are the direct to experience learning network for professional growth and what that means is essentially we build highly curated communities and spaces for tech professionals. So folks in design, engineering, data science, chiefs of staff, marketing, sales and business development who have certain career challenges or goals. And we curate kind of a peer-to-peer learning experience around them.

This is nice and this is a global company - in which countries are you operating?

Yeah, so I mean we're incorporated in the US, I'm the CEO, I'm based in Lisbon, Portugal. We have some of the team in the Netherlands, in the UK, in the States and Canada, in Turkey. So we're kind of spread around the world and we just have a registered office somewhere I think in San Francisco but not an actual office.

I see, very nice. And what kind of the recruitment failures you had? Maybe you could share your experience and your learnings?

Sure, so I think the one that kind of comes to mind and I'll set the scene and I think, especially critical in early-stage companies. So Coho came from a company called On Deck, where we built these fellowships. That's where I joined two years ago and so when you build one of these fellowships or communities if you will from 0 to 1. I joined as the program director and your role is to essentially bring this community to life from nothing so you join with, you bring your network, your ideas and then you start building out your value proposition. It's essentially like building a company from scratch, and at some point in that process, you hire somebody else into the team sort of like a program associate to help you with a lot of the day-to-day operations. And I think there was probably a big miss on my part because I was extremely busy and there was a team already who was willing to support in hiring, help, and hire this program associate I think the lesson for me there was I should have taken ownership of that process myself because when I reflect on it now, that first person joining, you're just going to be a person a team of two people. You're building something from scratch and so you need to know each other extremely well and support each other and if you were not part of hiring that person the chances of it not working out is extremely high and it doesn't always need to be the case that it's the fault of the person that gets hired. It's the fault of the process itself if that makes sense.

Okay, and what happened? How much were you involved and what did you miss?

I wasn't at all, and so I think that was the miss or the big mistake on my part, right? Where I was so busy, I had a lot of things to do in building this community out and when somebody offered me assistance in taking that off my plate instead of saying, sure I'll take the help, let me be involved in some way, I basically said, you know what? I'm so busy. Somebody's offering to take it off my hands, you guys take it and just when the person is ready to join just let me know who that is. I think that was the biggest kind of mistake that I made.

And what happened when that person joined your team?

I think it was just not a good mix there's no other way to go about it. There was a lot to do the onboarding process from my side into the community was probably not the right way and it probably wasn't a fit for that person and so what that ended up impacting is the work that we had to do because there was a point where I had to look at who was doing what and that the other person's kind of spirit or heart was not in this right? And so we had to part ways but the problem was I had launched the community, and the experience was running on what for context means running multiple is for very intense eight weeks there are events happening nearly daily. You have a hundred people in your community who have joined who have paid to join have a lot of expectations of you and so, yeah, what happened was letting somebody go in the heat of that process was tough because it then falls just fully on my shoulders to manage everything because you're not going to have somebody step in the same day to help you. Luckily, the team was able to get me somebody who was amazing and kind of helped me get back on track but still it was a very intense kind of moment in time that was very stressful and exhausting.

And how long did it take for you to realize that this is not the perfect fit?

I think there was a moment one night when it was maybe 12 am or 1 am and I felt like I had cleared a bunch of tasks off my to-do list and it seemed there was no end to it, and something just kind of came to my mind - wait a minute, something doesn't feel right here, right? There's just too much on this to-do list. And so then I went and talked to some of the other team members from the rest of the organization and just really tried to assess whether I was correct in my thinking before making any snap decisions or accusations, right? Because that would be the worst thing to do in the heat of the moment. And yeah from there that kind of confirmed my suspicions and I had to take action.

And how much involved are you now and what would be your recommendation for other hiring managers?

Yeah, I think when I started expanding the team, after the first fellowship or cohort, so we would onboard people like 3 to 4 times a year if that makes sense, in groups, in cohorts, and so after the first cohort finished I started planning for the second one and I had to hire somebody else for the team and I made sure that was such a learning moment that I made sure, to as busy as I was, to meet, to find time in my day to be part of that process and to ensure that the person that was going to end up joining the team had the right expectations, was excited about working with me and that we were building, so that was kind of the biggest thing that I changed, that I carved out the time in my day to ensure I was part of that process and that hasn't changed since. I think it's such a learning moment that I don't think I want to change that going forward.

But in terms of the involvement - well, many companies do that, right? Many hiring managers do that - they give their recruitment task or responsibility to other people, recruiters, to do and then basically have one interview, like 1-hour call or meeting, and then make the final decision, right? Well jobRely, and especially me, I believe that the best recruiter is a hiring manager and the hiring manager's involvement is so important that it's not enough to just have the final interview and to make the final decision. It starts from the very beginning. To identify candidate profiles, if there's like the help of a recruiter to guide them through your expectations, giving some specific profiles, assessing profiles, so it's not just an hour meeting. How much do you think hiring managers should be involved in terms of the whole process?

So I used to be a recruiter myself a few years ago and when I think about the most successful client relationships that I had and this is a direct correlation to how I think about hiring managers spending time or being part of the recruitment process. The worst thing you can do is just hand somebody a job description and tell the recruiter to go and get you the people and then maybe spend one hour as you mentioned doing the interview and then question the person when it doesn't work out. I think in that situation often the case may be that's the company's fault and not the person's fault. There are nuances to every situation. But when I think about the most successful way to do this would be, if you're a hiring manager, who's working with a recruitment team, allow the recruitment team into your team - to understand who is your team. What are they working on, what do they care about, who are the different personalities in the team, and then help translate that to the candidates. I think that's the only way because when I reflect on the best relationships that I had with clients were with those who allowed me to come and spend time in their office and showed me everything that they were working on so I could very passionately explain and translate that back to the candidates that I was trying to source for them because it went way beyond just saying like here's the job description, here's how much they're paying. Why would anyone be excited about that? So then I still actually have folks who I've placed six seven years ago at work, at those same companies and it was because of the relationship that went both ways between me and the hiring manager. So investing that time to allow the recruitment team to spend time and get to know your team's culture, and the things you care about - it's the best way to avoid these kinds of failures.

Yeah I agree and most of the companies don't do that if there's an external recruiter, I used to be an external recruiter myself for quite a few years, and it was tough, I wasn't sleeping at night and was trying to make the decision, which candidate shall I present to the hiring manager and it was so difficult to assess the personal, cultural match and all the other criteria and sometimes you don't know what are the priorities. Maybe the person is not so strong in some kind of area but hiring managers don't expect that, they appreciate motivation more and it's very difficult to just know what each of the hiring managers is expecting but what I also found out, especially working In-house is what it's very important is to get the involvement of the hiring managers, not only showing how they deal and what kind of the people in terms of personality they're looking for but to work reviewing the potential candidates' profiles before reaching to them out. There's so much value in that and it's a very boring and time-consuming task, and it was very difficult in the very beginning to convince hiring managers to sit down and have a look at a 50 or sometimes 100 candidates list. But when you do the outreach you are sure that the hiring manager is interested in talking to these people, right? You're not wasting anyone's time and it's so efficient in the end.

Yeah, absolutely, and my point was I was talking about my experience as an external recruiter but actually the same principle applies in-house, in internal teams because you end up often working in silos, and again it's the same situation - the hiring managers are just handing a bunch of job descriptions and saying go and get me those people. And I remember talking a few years ago, so I think he was like a VP of design at Audible. We were talking about a similar kind of conversation actually to this. We were talking about recruitment failures and successes, and he told me about his challenge, that he had to scale the team at Audible when I think they were acquired by Amazon, he said we had a recruitment team, and we would hand over a bunch of requirements and the people they sent us were never a match and then he told me about what he did to change that, which was - he talked to the recruitment team and said does anybody here have a genuine interest in design in some way? And one person put their hand up and he then started bringing this recruiter into their team standup, into their design reviews, into their design critiques, showing them the whole breadth of the culture, of the design team at Audible and he said that changed the people we started receiving was night and day, and that's the same principle applies In-house - bring the people in with you and you'll see some magic.

Yeah, and it's also important to understand the specific area, right? If you are a recruiter, how come you know about the design industry, right? You know nothing if no one tells you about it. So yeah, it's extremely important, I agree. Okay, and to summarize this, what would be your main insight or main suggestion for other hiring managers and the people who need to hire?

I think as hiring managers, and as leaders we're busy. But carve out the time to do the dirty work in the early stages. Don't expect somebody else to do it for you and then bring you the perfect results. Especially when we're dealing with human beings here, right? Handing somebody a job description, expecting to receive the perfect candidates if the recruiter or whoever is helping you do the hiring had no previous context on who you are, what your team does and cares about - it's pretty tough to do. So invest the time to do the dirty work, review the CVs with the person who's helping you hire, and help them calibrate to understand what you're looking for. It'll be time very well invested.

Great! Thank you Mindaugas so much for your time and for sharing your story, and insights, and thank you to all the listeners. For more podcasts, please visit jobrely.com