Unknown Speaker 4:15
As are a lot of people these days,
Anoop Gupta 4:18
you know, I have lots of fun hobbies too, but you know, where we work? What we do for our work, gives us purpose, gives us meaning, gives us like livelihood. So making helping people get to that right path making the right matches, so they can find that purpose. Satisfaction feels good about it, to me was a really, really important problem that I felt we could do better, that we could bring a lot of AI data analytics to solving the problem and that is You know where we came from? I also felt that as a hiring manager, so actually if you say what perspective do we bring to the problem? One of the factors that bring us as a hiring manager How do recruiters and hiring managers work with each other? If we do things right in the beginning, can we do a lot better? Right? You know, the whole notion in today’s world of going from being order takers to become advisors is very fundamental to me on how we apply well the whole you know, to profession. That’s amazing.
Greg Toroosian 5:35
Yeah, something that I feel very very passionately about. So yeah, no big deal there. You know, Microsoft Research exchange Skype and all coming together now to SeekOut but just as small little projects cool. But yeah, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. Like I said, something I’m very passionate about being a talent advisor being consultative, working directly and collaboratively with hiring managers and You know, full disclosure, I you see how it’s one of the first tools I invested in when I went out on my own to start elevate hire. And it’s been very, very useful for me with a lot of insights, a lot of unearthing candidates I wouldn’t have seen. And I placed, you know, tech and non tech people from using it. So a great tool. Can you tell us actually, before we dive into this a bit more, a little bit more about the product, like, where you’re at with it? Is there like vision for the future there? And what kind of because obviously, there’s, there’s several now, you know, ai tools out there, and you guys are definitely different. So how have you got to that point?
Anoop Gupta 6:38
So, you know, we focus on the top of the funnel, that is how do you find and engage with candidates, okay, and lots of people claim lots of things. So one distinguishing part for us, is the talent pools that we bring together. for you. So not only do we have 430 million public profiles, we have 25 million plus profiles on GitHub. And it is not just the GitHub profiles, GitHub is the, you know, open source coding platform where people come and collaborate. It is also going and looking into their repositories and seeing what these people actually did, what discussions they participated in bringing together the public LinkedIn profile and the GitHub profile so you can search across. Similarly, we have 75 million plus people with their papers, their patterns, and other social information. So the first you know, part that I think just totally distinguishes us is the unique data sources. A lot of people will say we do all of that, but all they show you is the Get up symbol they have you’re not on deep inside and looked at what it is and this part becomes really useful. Important, you know with COVID-19 for example, my mother is hiring for a world going digital. Satya Nadella when they announced their great earnings, you know a few days ago. He said what Microsoft has seen is we have seen two years worth of digital transformation in two months.
Greg Toroosian 8:22
It’s insane, insane. People, like everyone that had an idea about going remote or even being more digital forward in their companies have just been pushed into it and fast tracked.
Anoop Gupta 8:34
So you know, you got to do e-commerce when the stores you got to do digital payments, your employees are working here, how are you going to handle the security, how are you going to take all your assets and move them to the cloud. So there is a tremendous need. And we are, you know, the best places if you want to find all that talent and as you were saying, you know, the non digital talent to Yeah, I’d love to seek out coda scores.
Greg Toroosian 9:00
Yeah, that’s really, really helpful for anyone that doesn’t know or hasn’t used it as, as, as the new mentioned, you go into GitHub and the repositories and see what they’re being active with. And then there’s obviously a score there. But then they give their own score, after collating all of the public and private profiles together, to give them your, their own score on their coding abilities, which is great.
Anoop Gupta 9:24
The second aspect is, you know, given where I come from data and data analytics is really important. I believe, you know, we go to talking a little bit about the hiring manager and recruiter conversations. It is much better if the recruiter goes and comes with some data to talk to me, you know, this is going to be hard. You know, there’s so many people here you’re asking for them and candidates, how many out there What can be done? I love the Jim Barksdale code. So you know, so he was the founder of Netscape which, you know, led to the whole thing. browser world, he said, so he was the CEO of Netscape. He said, Well, if it is all about opinions, so if you’ve got data, let’s talk about data. If it is about opinions, let’s take mine.
Greg Toroosian
Let’s speak louder. Mine counts more.
Anoop Gupta 10:19
Yeah, you’re just— my rank is higher. So, you know, that’s what we’re going to do. So what we give you is the ability to slice and dice and get talent pool analytics in any way. Right? So you can say, people at Microsoft who are software engineers with 10 years of experience, who know Hadoop, and who are women and show us where they are, what companies they work for, what locations they are, everything else. Or you can look at a whole region here and just tell us about data scientists in the Boston area are one of the you know places. So a lot of data and data analytics. I think it is a foundation. on how you plan, okay, now this data analytics leads to better conversations with hiring managers. So you can come out with, you know, what the true must have and not have. So, you know, one of the things is that job descriptions are one of the worst things yet.
Greg Toroosian 11:21
It’s true because all the time they’re not written accurately, they’re not, they’re not a right representation of what you’re really looking for, or what someone’s experience is gonna be.
Anoop Gupta 11:31
Yes, yes.
Greg Toroosian 11:32
I really love rewriting them.
Anoop Gupta 11:34
The kitchen sinks now all things recycle. So what is data analytics? The second part that we do is, if I may say so myself, and I get a lot of credit to my co-founder. Who do you know, search engine so we are an AI powered Talent Search Engine. So if you look at Google, actually, some I’m going to go on tangents of you know, Google is not a single search engine, Google is an e commerce search engine, they are a flight booking search engine, there is a hotel search engine there is a map search engine, there is a lot of specialization that goes into making a search engine littlez rarely sing and dance for you and deliver your results. So, the same is with a talent search engine. When somebody types in you got to understand is that a title is that a name is that what it is you got to understand that and allow you to search so the power of you know SeekOut is one. You give us a JD Ville parser you give us a few must have nice to have terms and we’ll show you great candidates and we will ask you for your feedback a little bit. But we can be the best if you know automating that sourcing is needed but if you’re looking for hard to find positions and you want to do Boolean or what we call feel base Boolean or analytic space that we are also the best said that, okay? Because it is kind of okay sometimes it gives you the right thing sometimes I’ll give you and you want to have a fallback. So we are the best search engine, regardless of whether you’re a Boolean Ninja, you’re a novice, wherever you are, we can find you very solid results and we feel confident about that.
Greg Toroosian 13:29
Yeah, it’s very helpful to like, like you mentioned, if you’re strong with Boolean, great, you can put that in there. But if not, you have your fields there that you can do drop downs. And it’s very part you know, I use a combination of it. I have to say, I’m not against AI, but I just I’m too much of a control freak when it comes to sourcing that I don’t like just putting my terms in and candidates being snapped back at me because I never I hardly ever find really what I’m looking for. It might be my own fault for not doing enough upfront configuration on it. But like I said, I’m a control freak, I want to see every single candidate and go through them.
Anoop Gupta 14:03
Yeah, you know, there’s something called blackbox AI a lot of these neural networks, you know, you put in some times and out pops something. Yeah. And then you say I don’t like it, how can you really change it? How can you factor now so that’s that AI engine as a second part. The third part, you know, is diversity and inclusion on just you know, throughout my career, I’ve been a big believer in that and not only diversity in terms of you know, gender, ethnicity, viola cat, but also in terms of part you know, how people think, you know, and how people you know, formulate their ideas. So SeekOut is very powerful in giving you these diversity filters to find people. It also gives you diversity analytics, you know, if you’re going to the hiring manager and they’re saying you say, what, you know, fraction of people in this data scientists are African, a man. And oh, well what are, you know, cloud to salespeople. So we give you a lot of those analytics, we give you a blind hiring mode so you can hide unconscious bias. We give you ways when you’re sharing projects who read, you know, hiring managers, you know, you can do that. So that’s the second big component. The third component is you know, how do you engage with people and best in contact information, automated messaging, etc. Integration with 80 ss CRM workdays, you know, an enterprise admin. So, that is how most people now SeekOut but where we are headed. Okay, one part of that is when companies and you know, Greg, you deal with a lot of startups, so you’re looking for a lot of referral candidates. Yeah, a lot of good companies. There are a lot of people in their applicant tracking systems whose resumes are getting old and you don’t know the latest thing about it. In the COVID environment, there is a lot of interest in, you know, saying, Hey, is that internal talent in some other division where we might be laying off? You know, definitely repurpose them? Yeah. Can you repurpose them? There’s a lot of interest in alumni boomerangs.
Greg Toroosian 16:26
I love boomerang hiring, not enough people, you know, unfortunately, as a startup, you probably aren’t able to do that, because you don’t have enough history with your candidates. But it’s such a powerful way of hiring. If you’re a larger organization, or you’ve been around for a while.
Anoop Gupta 16:41
Yeah, because these people already know your culture, right? They know, the environment and the tool sets and they know the politics. Exactly. Exactly.
Greg Toroosian 16:51
And now they’ve gone and they’ve learned new things. They’ve been somewhere else and you know, sometimes better that we know, are they coming back with new skills that they want to analyze? Yeah.
Anoop Gupta 17:00
So what the old really delivering is combining the great public data sets that we have with the private data sets, right, which is candidates, you know, as candidates, you know, HR is the referrals that, you know, the connection that first off employees in your team, we are bringing all of that together. You know, I call it doing more with less. Yeah. Okay. Because there are a lot of siloed tools that are there. There’s no shared analytics, I will tell you, people in your referral, which schools they come from, what happens versus passive versus people in the ATMs, you can get that big picture. Get to the right town folks and engage with them.
Greg Toroosian 17:44
It’s a you know, from being internal myself. I spent quite a few years there and it That was one thing that was tough, right when you would source I would go out and sometimes I’m like, if you weren’t, I used to work for a company who had a very good brand and used to get a lot of Applicants and stuff like that. But sometimes you’re like, you know what, there’s a lot of noise here, I need a source I know what I’m looking for, let me go out, and you will be doubling up your work. So I’m there deep in LinkedIn or using different tools, and then I’m reaching out to people. They’re like, Oh, I applied last week. I’m like, Well, that doesn’t look very professional. Whereas I was like, Why can I not integrate these so I can see who’s Yeah, yeah, and exactly that. That’s great. And, you know, the whole talent part and leading with data. The concept is amazing. And using something like you know, I sound like a big fanboy of SeekOut here, but honestly, I’ve done it with without, I’ve been internal I’ve been external and it doesn’t matter where you’re at, if you’re leading with data and you’re dealing with factual information, as well as leading a conversation, helping your hiring manager to really unearth what they’re looking for, you know, put that job description to the side. And they’re like look, I want so that’s in LA but I do not want anyone from Amazon. I think against Amazon, but like Hey, we just don’t want someone from Amazon, we want this. And if you pull them up and you’re like, well look, 80% of the people in LA are actually from Amazon. And here’s the data. This is, you know, this, this is the analytics. I’m leading with it. Are you sure? like can we tweak it on different skills? You know, it’s very useful. Very useful. Yes. Amazing. Okay, cool. So talk to me a little bit about your experience building teams, you know, whether you I don’t know if you did that personally while you were at Amazon while you were at Microsoft, sorry. Or if it’s all been for seek out like, how have you gone about? What’s your, your strategy?
Anoop Gupta 19:39
No, I’ve always had teams. Yeah, you know, like, when I was running Skype In exchange, I had 1600 people reporting to me, a tiny team, you know, developers and engineers and marketing and sales, in fact, because we are doing some incubations and we have done accurate acquisitions.
Greg Toroosian 20:01
So were they primarily like acqui-hires? Or were they actually for the products?
Anoop Gupta 20:07
While the private practice i’m saying is we had probably around, you know, out of the 1600, I would say around 1400 in the product side, and then around 200 so we leverage the larger Microsoft sales teams, which I shared but we had some very specific marketing and sales teams for our information products that we were doing my—
Greg Toroosian 20:35
A lot of internal teams then yeah, yeah.
Anoop Gupta 20:38
Yeah, yeah.
So my philosophy and terms of hiring is it’s a mix of skills and the soft skills that we talked about that are important. So you know, you suddenly look for customer service. First person, you know, you want to say, maybe they’ve done customer success but you know, I might look more for empathy. I might look for more how curious and learning and engaging they are, you know, I might look forward to them having a small ego, so that they will be collaborative. So partly what I’m saying is, you know, to me what’s been important is in addition to the skills and experience, you’re also especially when you’re looking at the, you know, senior roles, you’re saying, hey, I want this person to do more than you know, simply have past experience. So those things are very important. I like diverse teams, but I said in addition to you know, gender ethnicity, it is also diversity of ideas and diversity. off target and diverse approach because that is the best representation of the customers you know when you’re trying to address very wide customers that’s also the best route but that also requires the match when if somebody is a quite a person you know how do you get them to speak up yeah yeah your your How do you shut out the person who is speaking hundred percent of the time and give other people a you know chance to speak so you know and always learning as the other thing you know for all of us in some sense the world is changing rapidly and tax once you come there you know even if you’ve done to stick with customer success Have you done it in different company? What is needed for your company is different. This is never the same cookie cutter that comes across Yeah, is the idea. It’s the approach, it has the learning, it has the empathy, it has the thoughtfulness that all brings that, you know, together. So that that’s been you know, from small, it’s the same. SeekOut. You know, we have people, we believe in robots to debate about ideas, and we will go at it. But the end attitude is the goal we are trying to achieve as the SEC. We are and let the best ideas come. And through asking questions we refine to be not shy of asking questions. But you it’s not the ego that drives you know, the best idea may come from the junior most person on the team.
Greg Toroosian 23:46
Is that something so? I don’t want to miss anything here because there was a lot there. So that’s great. The stuff that you mentioned is more like a soft skill, the personality like that empathy stuff. You know, diversity of thought things like that. Two things on this one is how do you honor those people when either sourcing or looking at your applicants because it’s tough, right? Because they’re not going to especially if you’re saying, oh, customer success, but we might take someone from a different background that has the personal attributes, right? Do you tend to lean more on referrals in that sense? And someone’s like, Look, I know and I can vouch for this person, like, give them a chance. And that’s where you interview around, or do you have an initiative internally, we’re like, Hey, we’re going to source for this role, but we’re going to source outside of customer success,
Anoop Gupta 24:40
just as an example. Yeah. So there are multiple things we do. So one is, you know, we have power filters and other things. So we might say these are the words people use. And it’s not a perfect system or something inside their profile, or you can look at You know, they’re worked on cross collaborative projects. So we look at hints in the profile and in our search terms when we look. The second is and you know, this is the game, the hiring manager recruiter collaboration to say, do they have to be customer success? You know, they have simply been an account manager, which has grown and expanded the account, you know, could they have built recruiting teams, and I’ve had empathy and they’ve managed so you know, there’s a lot of different ways we source and that flexibility in that dialogue with the recruiter to say, I’m okay, if you give me more candidates hair is what is called right. Okay. And the second is, of course, you know, a lot of it comes out then and the interviews themselves and in the conversations and referral. So it’s really a combination of all those things that we use in that and I think that’s what sorcerers recruiters need to learn to tune out what is really important what’s on the hiring manager and the candidate for whom it has to be a growth opportunity.
Greg Toroosian 26:10
Definitely, yeah, it’s rare people are just going to take a sideways step. Yes, unless they have to. Or they’re a big fan of, you know, the company or industry and it’s a foot in the door, but most, most of the time people are looking for progression. Yeah. Well, you want people looking for progression, right? You want people that are hungry, that want to prove themselves when doing a job, not just, you know, yeah, others long in their role. That’s, that’s great. And then the other question I was going to ask you is with that stuff, like, you know, healthy debate and you know, voicing your ideas or your concerns or rebuttals? Do you factor that into your interview processes, or is it something that you know, people in the company are just great at reading? Or do you like to do roundtables?
Anoop Gupta 26:53
Now, curious, we don’t do roundtables. It’s mostly one on one say, as far as interviews are concerned. But we do divide into you know, areas of focus. There are some really nice guides from the first round, which is a we see and they’re very well known, you know, early stage VCs on, here are questions you could ask to suss out some aspect of fat, right? When was the last time when you lost a customer or when you weren’t, you know, or you were losing their man, you turned it around? And what did you do? So that there’s some pretty good question guides that we try. That’s great. That’s great. Yeah,
Greg Toroosian 27:36
yeah, not not a lot of people do that. You know, it’s, you get past a certain point. And then you’re like, if you especially if you don’t have a talent partner there to lead that conversation. There’s some self reflection of like, having all these interviews and we’re not unearthing what we need, then it’s like, do we need behavioral based or situational based questions and I just love doing a combination of direct and open questions and if you frame them in The right way you do on earth what you need to know.
Anoop Gupta 28:04
So that’s great. That’s great. Yeah, what you’re saying makes a lot of sense. Of course, of course.
Greg Toroosian 28:10
So what are your thoughts of the impact of AI on time acquisition?
Anoop Gupta 28:17
Now?
Greg Toroosian 28:20
Obviously, you’ve, you’ve been there before. And now you’re leading the charge with it. And you’ve built teams with them without so I’m curious, what do you think that impacts gonna be?
Anoop Gupta 28:30
Yeah, so the first thing I would say is, you know, I truly believe AI is going to be transformational, and it is important. But I would also quickly add my PhD was around artificial intelligence. My piece’s advisor was a Turing Award, which is the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in auto housing. It’s one of the founders, the people I work for that Microsoft reset. The main point I want to make with that background Is AI is also misunderstood on what it can and what it can’t do and understanding you know what the limitations are. So today’s neural networks when they call you know a lot of things they are very good classifiers so if you give them a yeah you know, make lists they will find you equivalent categories and things like that they can see patterns and where it is a pattern matching problem. We can kind of do up simple kinds of natural language and you know, those are there in chat bots. If you have high volume roles that you hire for, you know, we can go and do that. Use AI and different things to say what words might be there, you know, what’s called using labels set for security clearance or whatever else. There’s a lot of things you know, we can do our diversity classifiers you know, we can do if we underStand who the past people in the country if you say if I can look at a team of software engineers, and then say find me simple, similar people quoting, you know, we can do that. But then there is a lot that AI simply can’t do. Right? And they work on large data sets. But if you give me a single person and say, you know, actually, I’ll use a funny example. So you know, you say, you know, you want to replicate a noop Yep. You want to hear me give that task to me? Yeah. Hi. Yah has no clue. You know, is it my Stanford background isn’t a scam, it was the topic of math. He says, you know, the fact that they are part of the bill gates. You know, people are very multi dimensional, and what is important and what is crucial, and what is really the crux is still a very hard problem and you need a human being right? When you’re talking to the candidate and positioning lies at a growth opportunity. Right? You’ve got to do the reason why, you know, I can’t use AI to just sell my product and relax in Hawaii or something like that is because understanding the customer understands how we fill their needs. So I think a lot of that part will remain human for a long time. A lot of the simpler tasks can be automated. And my advice, you know, to recruiters, to everyone really is if you are not bringing insight if you just even bring data, that’s not sufficient, but if you’re not bringing insight, right, if you’re not bringing that human element, you will be replaced.
Greg Toroosian 31:56
Definitely.
Anoop Gupta 31:57
All you’re doing is I can you You know, put in a few key words results in I’m going to do that. Yeah, it’s going to do that. I’m just going to do it better than you.
Greg Toroosian 32:06
It’s the same for a number of those, you know, firstly, I’m glad you said that I’ve heard it from a few people and it’s nice for it to be reiterated and put in such a way that AI is just an enabler of you. Yes, better job right. In other words, and especially something like recruiting, it’s a people business, right? You are, you’re not selling a product you’re selling opportunities to need and you know, people’s times in their lives and life decisions, etc. And I’ve mentioned this, I don’t think I’ve done in the podcast here bound talks and training and stuff, but you get different types of recruiters that do different types of qualifications, and you have to, as a recruiter, qualify your candidates. Yeah, and then qualify your jobs, right? Yes. And yet match those together. So if you’re doing just tick box qualifications, where the candidate that is literally you could put that on a questionnaire. Yes, and AI could do that for you. Why on earth? And like I said, there’s open questions and digging deep and, you know, noticing red flags and trying to honor even simple stuff like, well, what would it look like handing a notice in how they counter offered people? How long would that take? Like? Would you take it? Why? Things like that? And then with your hiring managers really getting not just working with that job description, because like you said, ai just feed it to the feed? Yeah. So yeah, no, that’s great.
Anoop Gupta 33:26
I think people need to, you know, we are entering a world of data data is going to be central and if you can’t manipulate data, if you can understand from data, and you can’t get to the right subset of the talent pool to present the data, you know, a lot of people will tell me Okay, you know, we’re going off. All Boolean is going to be lost, everything is going to be lost. telling you if you are the kind of recruiter that just puts a JD and says how 15 candidates and you send them over and you’re not doing your value add? Yeah. in learning about what these positions look like, you know, you don’t look at 20 job openings and see what they look like water off. So—
Greg Toroosian 34:11
You have to get so much deeper.
Anoop Gupta 34:13
You gotta stay curious. You got, you got to become proficient with data you got to become proficient with inside. You’ve got to become proficient on the human level, and understand people’s motivation and things and you’re going to have a job. Okay, forever.
Greg Toroosian 34:31
That’s good to hear. Thank you. For me, and for all the other riggers that dude, thank you. Yeah, it’s powerful stuff. You know, because I was talking about this recently, I, when I first started in recruiting, it took me a while to actually understand the power of data and the importance of data, right, because my I had like this very surface level understanding of it, and also from what I started recruiting in an agency, and their version of data was your KPIs. And it was like, if you haven’t sent out X amount of resumes a day, if you haven’t targeted X amount of managers or whatever, you’re not doing your job, and that’s like, it’s very old school, firstly, but also very surface level. And I understood the recruiting and I understood the human element and I understood all of the details that are necessary to do the job. And I would just think that would translate to everyone to a hiring manager or to a candidate if this is the importance of my job, and why do I need to show you more information, just trust me. But when you go internal, and you’ve got different stakeholders, and you’re asking for budget, or you want to grow your team, or you’re trying to influence people, data is so powerful to show, especially if you’re like I was working with like very, very smart engineers and engineering leaders on hardware and software. It’s like they normally they’re gonna listen to data over listening to you. So if you want them to change a process, or if you want them to be quicker at responding or if you want them to take your advice on anything Within the recruiting process leading with data, having factual information is so, so important
Anoop Gupta 36:06
and very powerful. You want to lead with data. And then also, you know, just from my perspective, and you want to additionally come with humility and an attitude to learn nothing, right? Definitely no, but they can see you did the work, you did the analysis, you did the homework, and they will treat you with respect. Yeah, we’ll treat you when, you know, help you grow better. And next time, you know, take that input in coming. You gotta we just all got to be on a learning curve got
Greg Toroosian 36:34
Yeah. Yeah, people want Yeah, if you’re always in that state of learning and being better, yeah. You know, we talked about a recruiting first mentality as a company, recruiting for, you know, a great example of this is candidate experience. People would never think, you know, let’s, or somehow hopefully a lot of people do think actually, let’s have that candidate experience conversation with data. And you can look at what a bad process looks like. Too many steps were drawn out interviews or you know, all of this stuff that is, you know, and then talk to them at that human element of like, put yourself in that position when you’re looking for a role. And if you’re not being considered property or communicated properly or, you know, seemed like an afterthought, or whatever it is that’s come out in your process, because I’ve seen it all almost. It can be very, very useful to have both sides of it the human element and the data element. Sure.
Anoop Gupta 37:26
Yes, no, absolutely.
Greg Toroosian 37:29
Well, thank you for that. Any I mean, you’ve shared a lot here, a lot of best practices, a lot of advice. Are there any major things that you would say, for founders or two things? Double two part question. What, what advice above and beyond what you’ve given already? Would you give for early stage founders or even people just building their teams? You know, it doesn’t have to be early stage founders or anything? What advice would you give them about recruiting or partnering with recruiting or even that process? Is there anything that you know, key gems that you want to share?
Anoop Gupta 38:05
In terms of, you know, recruiting, as I was saying, you are looking for, you know, so that partly I say because we are looking for a director of customer success, okay. And, you know, so that that’s one of the roles that we are looking at, we do have our Director of HR who’s helping so you know, one is for startups, referrals are a big thing. But you want to combine your passive sourcing along with the rough rolls and not just go rough rolls only. And look across the talent pool, you know, we don’t have a big a Ts or anything like that. And that becomes really important. You know, I am talking to some of the leaders of other people who have done that to learn what the role should even really look like. So there is a lot of that JT specification, not that the hiring manager like clinics to Experts that we do, you know, second is we do passive sourcing using SeekOut and getting contact information and personalized outreach. We are not at pray and spray. And the third is we look at draft roles, then you bring this in. And then I told you the values we have, yes, we look for certain skills and experience, but what kind of a team member will they be? And how curious they are, how learning they are, and what kind of hard work and work ethics, integrity, honesty, you know, of course, those things are
Greg Toroosian 39:33
amazing. That’s great stuff. Yeah, that’s, that’s super important. And I think specifically for early stage companies or people who haven’t had experience building a team or a company before is a triangle outside of just your referral network or the people you know, because there’s nothing wrong with them. But you never know what’s out there. And you never know, maybe better better suited because, yeah, they’re going to bring us stuff.
Anoop Gupta 40:00
Yeah, and one of the problems with referrals people says, you bring a lot of people like yourself.
Greg Toroosian 40:06
Yes, hundreds.
Greg Toroosian 40:09
When, you know you mentioned, 80. Diversity of thought is super, super important. You know, obviously, you don’t want, we talked about culture and you want to culture, not just, you know, yes, winning our culture and being like, Well, you know, the bros club or whatever it may be whatever the culture is, which sometimes there’s nothing wrong with that if there’s like five of you working out of your garage and you know, you guys all went to school together. And now you’ve built this thing. Being mindful about having a diverse team afterwards is key, right? So when you start hiring for these roles that you don’t have direct experience with or knowledge of like go outside you know, outside your own comfort zone and have that self awareness and self reflection of I don’t know this better let me lean on someone who does. Yes,
Anoop Gupta 40:56
Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Toroosian 40:59
And then the last thing before we go is, any major things for people to avoid doing? If anything comes to mind?
Anoop Gupta 41:10
Um, you know, nothing particular pops in mind. But you know, the culture aspect. You said, of course, you can’t define culture as people who look like ours. But, you know, the values and things that are important to the team, you know, whether it be you know, the collaborative, nasty level of ego that you have. You know, they harbor humility, right. So a lot of those things. You want to look at that and if it’s not a match, just because they’re more skilled because just because they’re more pedigreed, you know.
Greg Toroosian 41:54
That’s, yeah, that is great advice. Yeah, yeah. I am to compare from what I’m working with right now and have a similar mindset. And it was like, you know, if someone for one better word right now is a jerk or you know, has a huge ego doesn’t matter if they’re the most skilled engineer or whatever, it’s more detrimental to hire someone like Yeah. Right, it’s gonna be toxic to your team to manage them, frankly, it’s going to be difficult. And then for the culture, and you’re just going to have to undo that work, because they’re either going to leave or you’re going to have to make them leave. And then you’re going to be in the same boat again. So you know, we’ve looked at amazing engineers, but if their egos are too large, and they’re not gonna be a team player, then it doesn’t matter what they’ve done beforehand is not right for you. Yeah, you’re right for another place.
Good stuff. Well, that’s been great. Okay. Well, we’ve been talking to Anoop Gupta, co-founder and CEO SeekOut, where can people learn more about you and your product?
Anoop Gupta 42:58
So, you can get to our website, seekout.io. You know, you’ll find all the information there. And I’m very happy to, you know, share my personal email, anoop@seekout.io Please feel free to reach out directly to me. And, you know, we’ll get back to you. And thank you so much, Greg. Thank you. I really enjoyed this. All right, hopefully we will speak soon. But everyone feel free to lock in again and share this show. This has been a great conversation, great topic and secrets, a great tool. So I’m really happy we were able to have this conversation kind of in the back.
Intro 43:40
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