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 Pedro Veloso, CEO at Near Partner. Pedro, could you please introduce yourself and your company?

Welcome! I'm Pedro Veloso, as Indre said, I'm CEO and Founder of Near Partner. My background - I did lots of things, and founded lots of companies in different industries.The last few were in the IT sector and I founded Near Partner almost 6 years ago and Near Partner is a software house - we develop software, using whatever technologies are necessary, we are a product company although we don't have our own products, we develop products for our clients or our clients products.

Okay, that's great and how many people are working at Near Partner?

We are around 50. So I'm not sure if it's 51 or 52 or something like that.

And I guess you had a few recruitment failures if you hired so many people already?

I would say that we try not to have lots of recruitment failures. So we didn't have huge recruitment failures or I would say that our recruitment is the getting together of the experience, the sum of the experiences of everybody that works with recruitment in the company and that's a lot of people. Because our recruitment process includes not only the HR people but also many other people in the company so we try very much to include as many people as possible into the recruitment process. So the sum of all those experienced. Nonetheless, I would say, yeah, we didn't always get it completely right, but I am very happy with how we got, so more than failures we had near misses and those were very good signals for us - that we almost had a failure and that's what we don't want to do again.

Could you share a few situations with us when you had some misunderstandings with recruiting?

Sure. To give a little bit of context - while recruiting, we look into 4 things. Regarding the people that we are trying to recruit, and are if people are smart, if people are hard-working, if they are honest people and if they have grit. Besides those characteristics, we're trying to figure out if there's a cultural fit. If they have the same long-term mindset that we have and if they don't lack professional skills. So the biggest near misses we had were around these 3 things that we're trying to focus on people - we had a few doubts over the processes with the several people that we hired along the way. And sometimes when we were convinced that we wanted to hire the person, we had some doubts, we were trying to figure out if that was a good person and a good professional and sometimes we had some doubts mostly on the cultural fit side, and personal side. And the conclusion that we got was that when we have doubts, we shouldn't hire that person. A few times we thought that maybe we should still give it a try, but we came to the conclusion that no, it's better not to do it. So these near misses come in several ways, people that we go to the last phases of the recruitment process with, and make a proposal, they don't even come back to us or they do a U-turn and say yes, and then say no, so things like that - in the end, that gives us an idea, that if we sense, that something is not right, probably something is not right. And I'm not even saying that these people were not good or had some defects, but I'm just saying that probably they were not the best fit.

Yeah, exactly, but did it happen that you hired someone, while having doubts and then had to fire?

Very few people over the years. A couple of them, I think. I'll have to backtrack a little bit and give some context. We feel that the hiring process is the first step of onboarding. From the first moment, someone begins the process with us, we are already in the onboarding mode - we are already thinking that these people might be working with us. I will not go very deep into this, but it's important that the person begins and wants to work with us. Since the recruiter calls the person or sends the message, they're trying to show already the person what we stand for, what we are. So it's very important to manage the expectations from both sides. Not to give an impression that we are what we are not and that can be many flavors - it can be that we are loose and we are not formal, so someone who's not good with this might not be a good fit. On the other hand, we try to be very professional, as in Portuguese we say it's loose, but it's not loose in every way. We are very informal, but we try to be very professional, so we try to give this impression to other people - to anyone that we are recruiting, and there's another thing is about money - making them know exactly what are our expectations in terms of the salary range. And that's also very important. We are not very flexible with that - I don't mean, that our salary range is only what it has to be, but it means that if someone has some expectations that don't fit with this salary range, even if people afterward say, "oh, I like it so much that I can change my expectations and I can have a smaller salary than I was expecting", we don't accept that, because we know in the long term, this person won't be happy, if they're below their considered average salary. That sometimes happens. Things like this have happened in the past. We try to manage the expectations and be very honest with people and we expect the other way around also. Sometimes, yes, that has happened. For someone, that we hired with a salary that was below their expected salary and person accepted it, we knew that it won't work in the long term. We should have known that it will not work in the long term. Our expectations were not aligned. We have a long-term vision and perspective, so we like to hire people for the long term no one is obliged to be here, but the first 7 or 8 people that we hired are still here with us. Almost 6 years. A couple of weeks ago, at our Christmas Party, I shared a photo of our first Christmas party, we were 7 I think, and all people in the photo are still with us. Only those 7 and afterward it was a nightmare? No, the average 10 years is a very long time. We expect not to go, to be fully aligned for the long term. That's what we try to look for in the hiring process and be very open with it, honest so that everyone can understand, that we don't have misaligned expectations.

This is super important - nowadays, you need to compete with other companies for talent. So what happens, is companies start to exaggerate about themselves to get people to do the work. But it's a short-term strategy.

Recruiting is very difficult nowadays and attracting talent is difficult in Lisbon, in London, in Berlin, wherever. It's kind of funny that for the past few years, we've been hearing about retaining people, and learning how to retain people. But this is not what we're doing, this is what we are. We don't do things to retain people - we are what retains people. Actually, because of the hype - how to retain people, every day, articles and whatever, every time we do something, I share that with a team - guys, I don't want to do something just because that might retain people and we have that mindset which is - okay, let's try to be very honest on why we're doing this. We're doing this because we want to do this, it's good for us - Christmas party or sunset party, we do a couple of things along the year and we always have that - let's not do this artificially, just because the photo will be nice. If someone forgets to take photos it's not a problem, it's better not to share but fully do it.

Yes, of course, employer branding is important, but employees themselves share about what a great workplace they work at, with a personal touch, it's different. There are so many companies that look very nice on social media, but when people start working there they don't stay very long.

And we all know the examples, right? We all know those companies because people work there and tell that. Those are not very good companies to work for, but when you look at their social media it looks like a paradise. So that always gives the sense of the chill - let's not do this artificially, let's not look like those guys.

Yeah, I just remembered TV series about Uber. When you think about it being here in Lisbon, and this is what's happening in Silicon Valley and this is such a great startup. I recently started meeting people, ex-employees from Uber, and they just don't want to talk about that culture and what happened, because it's just too bad, it's impossible to stay there. When from far away you look at it, you see it as a miracle, and when you are in this, it's different. So it's very important to minimize this gap. Otherwise, it's destruction.

You were talking about employer and company branding, as a way to attract talent. And obviously, that plays a part in everything, we don't to be something nobody knows, of course, we want to hire the best of the best, always. And the examples that you're giving show that it's possible to be successful while being not your best. It's also possible to be successful by being what you want to be and making sure that people feel happy and comfortable where they are. And as I said before, we always look for the long term, we always have this perspective. I think that you cannot fool everybody all the time. We also have these conversations when we talk about brand awareness - for instance, we want our social media to show exactly what we are - it should be a window to what we do every day. It shouldn't be outdoor into something, it should be a window. It needs to show exactly what we do.

Agree. And work takes a lot of time in our day, it's our life basically, we need to feel good when we come to do something and just to see the purpose in everything, not just to hustle and get a lot of money and then be depressed or something. So when you mentioned that you had to fire a few people, what were the reasons? What did you miss during the interviewing process?

I can think about the situations very well because there were as I told just a couple of them. Two things. One, we didn't miss it because we understood that we had doubts about the mindset of the set candidate and how it would fit our mindset. And those doubts revealed that we had different mindsets - it was more like, I don't think you belong here. It was never something that was a shock. Because we were coming to the same conclusion. Let's make it happen. There's one other thing that has to do with professional skills and that's something that is not as easy to get in the recruitment process. We only missed it once, but actually, the situation was as we are very informal it's easy to misinterpret that as a lack of professionalism. At some point, that confusion appeared.

And what do you mean by the lack of the professionalism? What was the behaviour?

What I mean is someone that does not understand that although we have a calendar, we don't manage the calendar of the person. The hourly time they spent working, it's flexible, and the work hours are flexible. But work hours being flexible is not the same thing as not being available when it's necessary, and if we set a meeting it should happen exactly at that time. So if you miss meetings or miss some appointments, it's not like I'm half thinking about it and half thinking about messages I'm exchanging with friends, or a game I was playing yesterday. Those things are perfectly fine outside of work hours and by work hours I don't mean 9 to 5, but when you are working. It can be flexible hours as long as during that time you're doing what you're expected to do. So more than understanding if the person has technical skills, and can do something is different from actually committing to doing something. And that's harder to find in someone. We were very successful almost always, gathering this information and understanding and probably also giving the impression that this is what we will do, this is what happens every day. Because it also might be a misinterpretation and misalignment.

In that particular case, so how long did it last?

It was quite fast and the conclusion we came to was the person was looking into something that might not be a full-time job. Okay, that was the problem. It was a misalignment. Okay, so the person got under the impression that it would be okay with us if someone was not fully committed to doing the job and there was a misinterpretation between this - flexible hours, flexible days even but if you're here, you're working, and also one of the things is some near misses we had and some stories I know, people that didn't come to work with us but ended up working somewhere else and there's a story I heard recently which is about remote work. We don't have any problem with remote work. On the contrary and for us it's completely flexible. We are not 100% remote and we are not otherwise, we don't have any obligation to come one day, seven days, whatever. People come or they don't come whenever they want or better said they work remotely or they work in the office whenever they want and so that means that we have people that come to the office every day and people that almost never come to the office, but with the remote, we don't have a problem because we try to hire people who are responsible and who can self-motivate themselves. After all, motivation might be a problem when you are working remotely. But again that also can be misleading and because of that, we try to in the process make it very clear that we don't have any problem with people working remotely every day. But we have problems if people don't work - whether remotely or here.

So to conclude, what would be your main advice for other hiring managers?

I think the 3 main things are we try to manage expectations and so I will say what we have learned, we learned previously in Near Partner, which is managing the expectations and being very honest on what you will get once you come here. The second thing is onboarding from day one, onboarding begins with the recruitment process. The person is already learning your ways. Okay, so if the recruitment process into something which is the opposite of what you expect to happen during normal work, it will not work well. The third thing is when people come on the first day to the job, prepare for that. We try to begin the onboarding when we begin the recruitment, but when they come, we're prepared, and the team is also prepared to receive a person and everything is prepared for the person. So the first impression is really important. Not because the of the looks, but so that the person feels welcomed.

Okay, great. So thank you so much Pedro for your time and sharing your stories. And thank you to all the listeners, for more podcast, please visit jobrely.com