Hiring And Retaining Panel

Welcome to our panel conversation um of this year's bside Seattle uh this is actually my first bide Seattle so very happy to be here and thank you for all the very warm welcomes actually to all of us this is not a lot of people's first beside Seattle um but not definitely not your first um but thank you for coming to listen to us um the panel discussion that we're going to have this afternoon uh this morning is all around hiring and retaining and scaling uh top security engineering teams in Talent we'll be exploring how each of these leaders who I'll introduce in a second um approach hiring um and kind of their different attraction um

models um internally and how they kind of have built these teams at different companies um we'll be working through some of their successes and challenges um and hopefully the goal of this this the session is for each and every person to have learned how these leaders approach hiring um but also if you're somebody that's looking for a job just to think about how maybe you can uh drive your search with looking internally with some of these roles or externally so uh I'll do a quick introduction and I'll throw it over to the rest of the team but I'm Tom Alcock uh I run a cyber security Staffing practice called code red I've been in the industry for about six years now um

and have built uh teams actually a lot of these companies that these people represent um and help early stage agage technology startups scale security talent and then larger technology companies to do the same um so maybe we'd love to hear from the people that going to share some wisdom uh with us uh so Erica would you like to introduce yourself sure uh my name is Erica Dean I am the CSO at Robin Hood and I've been in the industry for roughly 26 years um so a really long time can you hear me yes no oh cool now we can all right hi I'm Kevin Hanford I lead trust engineering at Discord team it consist of security safety privacy

and platform engineering I've been doing security stuff for accidentally for about 10 years uh been in Tech and interent management and stuff before then yeah uh Sasha F uh security um director of security engineering for GR uh I've been in the security since I think professionally since the around 98 so yeah 20 plus year maybe I'm getting old as well uh and at Grimley I lead um kind of a diversity of teams uh product security platform security security intelligence as well and uh what the name came actually at Microsoft Green Team which is how do we fix systemic issues uh with uh several developers as well thank you and uh welcome so uh the flow of today is we've uh prepared some

questions that we've kind of asked uh that come up quite a lot put it on uh Twitter and Linkedin so we've got some really great questions to ask our group of panelists and we would like to leave probably 10 15 minutes at the end so if you've got some dying burning questions to ask some of our leaders this afternoon uh please say with them for the end and I'll open up the floor with probably 10 minutes to spare um but let's let's kick it off he um the first question that I did want to ask you and maybe Erica we start with with you but the the question that I had is what are some of the key factors and

considerations you've had when you are looking to build a sec uh interestingly I start with how the company actually operates um because I think that one of the most important things when you're hiring is the culture of the company um so take that in consideration plus what your priorities are um so you want to know exactly what you're trying to achieve what your current Talent state is so if you are starting with a net of zero it's a little bit easier because you don't have anyone to compare against right but and you you know what you want to hire for but if you have a team already existing have to evaluate understand what skill sets do you already have and that way

you can build upon what you currently have as a team the other component that I typically look at is um really making sure that you understand like how you want to grow in the future so that you know whether or not you have the room to scale because when you're hiring for the company if it's a large company you have a little bit more room to play with with a around development versus uh a more Junior company that's maybe small so you want to start off really really tight in skill sets um so that's the kind of thing that I typically look for when I'm I'm building a team cool um without repeating everything that Erica just said uh I think one of

the things that I look for really is what are the like sort of biggest most pressing problems at the moment a lot of my career has been starting like from zero and building towards one like building teams kind of the exact opposite of like inheriting a team and so for me A lot of times like what are the core set of problems that we have what are the most pressing of those problems and then how do I sort of order that such that I hire the people that can fix those problems which allow me to look at the next set of problems rinse and repeat that process so a lot of it for me is understand the landscape um

and then while I'm hiring hire for the culture piece basically understanding like who can I bring here that will fit into the company not necessarily who can just solve the problem uh I think that you you bring in problem solvers that don't fit they will only be problem solvers for short periods of time um but beyond that is figure out like what the what the pressing problems are hire for that make sure you have good fit move on to the next set of problems not much to add there um but maybe perhaps all three of us are doing the same is these are questions I personally ask before joining like what's the mission uh so for me it really starts

there and then a little bit of selfishness there is what can I align there right so once this is baked in then everything my colleague has said is what I what I would look for I tend to live a lot in the future so like where do you want to be in the year uh and and that usually align well with what I like to do uh so I build for the future for the most part great um and then just just to tag on on that question like going in and going through the interview process yourself and understanding the mission and the vision of the company um just to tag on one extra thing how how soon in

your journey in as being a new leader would you would you think about hiring would you do that immediately or would you kind of tag on a 90-day period just to see the lay of the land and then start hiring question for me yeah um I actually think about this even before signing the deal yeah yeah yeah uh I look at the structure um I think it's very important for me at least at this point in my career that the leadership team is a team that I feel comfor with some might be known some might be unknown but I spend a tremendous amount of time actually getting to know them first um and very often we discuss about you know

growth in head count even before I so that that's usually where I start cool it is interesting though I I think when I first start looking at a company and I don't I don't think I actually do that I don't think I start off with actually deciding what I'm going to hire I think what I typically do is once I get in the door I evaluate the the situation I almost don't start hiring right away because I think that I need to understand like is the culture that I perceived during the interview actually the right culture that I perceived um is the Dynamics between the engineering team and the security team what I perceived it to be and so I actually do

take a little bit of time before I even start hiring so that I can understand um so I'm actually hiring for the right type of person for the role and where I want to go for my team I I I agree sorry I I and misspoke is I for me I like to understand where they want to go and let's let's have a conversation about generally like do you understand the cost of this right uh and I've met people as hey we want to go hire 10 people and I well how much do you think it cost and we're completely disconnected uh so I I agree don't hire before joining uh sometime you can can

you just have some reference and you get the wheels going yeah uh but I think doing a proper as you mentioned profit assessment uh within the first like I would say 45 day or so uh sketch out a vision a vision dock that that points out like here's basically the the current state of affairs here's the market here's the tradeoff we I believe we need to take circulate that and then go double down then then you yeah and I actually have seen u h managers coming into larage organizations and try to bring in their a team before they've understood the lay of the land and it's actually had detrimental detrimental effects because you don't know what the internal culture looks

like you don't know about some of the challenging conversations you need to have with the existing team before or understanding the landscape by bringing in your a players that are very talented but also can upset the status quo which is can be a good thing but certainly as you're trying to build trust within that organization it can be a bad thing too and if you answer questions on on some companies I work for um of how many people would you bring on day one and they give you a firm answer on how many uh they would have fail the the interview immediately yeah for for that reason yeah well when we thought about putting this panel together um I work with some

of the founders of uh bide Seattle and I wanted to bring a level of experience of large companies so Capital One some of the Fang organizations but all of these uh leaders and heads of security and cesos are currently in companies that aren't maybe Fortune 500s are in growth periods but come from that and so I think it's really intentional and deliberate when I thought about putting this panel together um what that looks like from a large organization and what it looks like in the current state of of play and so the next question I had for you all is what do you think has led to your success and you can talk about any

part of your journey it can be uh previous companies or where you're at now but what do you think has led to your success in building and hiring technical um security teams maybe Kev will jump into you first yeah um my MJ reaction to that is I I like to observe and I like to learn um I also like to surround myself with people that are better at their jobs than I am like very intentionally so the vast majority of my career has been like that and having started kind of bigger companies like started here Microsoft actually like sto it over um you know work Amazon PayPal and like a lot of these big places being

able to observe like what success looks like at scale uh makes kind of kind of allows you to put a point in time like in the future like I got to get some like somehow get to that point um however I can take away like what isn't working also so you can kind of understand like okay usual things are working really well for them especially over time and scale to be really really large um but also I should avoid these other pitfalls and so for me being able to take a lot of that into smaller places if I had a few startups sorry a couple of security teams it's been like I know where we are today I know what

scale looks like really far away for now and then feel the confid of the company the industry whatever else I'm I'm dealing with and it helps me kind of like navigate that a lot easier than if I didn't have a good idea of like what it looks like like you're trying to just charge course in the middle of the fog it's hard you know general direction you're going makes a lot lot decision picking simpler I think for me um interesting enough it's a it's the mistakes that I made along the way that really helped me um so early in my career as a leader um I would build teams and I thought just hiring the best talent was the right

thing to do but I quickly found that that was not the case it's why culture became such a big like part of my hiring process um because one time I I hired someone they were not a good fit for the culture and they disrupted my entire team they became very toxic and then I had a a problem to fix because the Trust on the team was lost no one was getting any work done there was a lot of fighting like it just wasn't working so for me building great teams has become something that over time I have developed to be able to do um but it took making mistakes in order to actually find that right pattern of how

do you actually identify the talent that's the perfect fit for the role and for me sometimes it's not even like I want to hire really fast but I know I need to sometimes just take that time yeah take a step back because it's worse when you hire someone that's not a good fit because now you're wasting time and you should have just taken that extra couple months to actually hire the right

person for me I need to see passion I am a passionate person so uh and passion will overcome many things uh Erica makes a good point is you learn through your mistakes I think the management and Leadership role is all case study like uh building your network talking to other people as a way to you derail hey I'm the rail what happened right so I think having that in introspection which for me came late in my career um but predominantly passion and in creating good Synergy uh I actually spent a lot of time with my with the candidates uh I don't have the the bandwidth the scale all the time if I need to go higher 50

people I will be somewhat selective who I spend a lot of time with but I also late in the process I encourage my team to go meet with the candidate where I'm not there so start building that relationship early on um if you can do it depending on policies and in recruiting and so on you may have some constraint there but generally get people like get passionate people right and create that Synergy within the team so that these things are bonding and uh somebody made me realized recently that even though I don't think about bringing sort of uh my Serv in it it tends to somewhat happen organically and from company to company some of them

I I have the pleasure to work for almost a decade if not more but it's snowballed over the years why because we build that relationship right so I think that's super important to to me and I've declined extremely lucrative offer because that connection was not possible I had a c that kept sending me the offer with more money but never gave me the time I was like okay you're supposed to court me at this point how is it going to be when we disagree and we will disagree I I have strong opinions like many other other leaders so anyway my short answer is go focus on passion and build teams that produce better result than what you

can think of do not hire people that you can quote unquote surpass intellectually I like to be I like to be the impostor when I look at my team I was like you guys are great uh so kind of work yourself out of the job and the trick is they don't need you and then you go do more school something else that's a nice Point um so not only do you look for passion for when building your own teams it's also important for you to land in an organization and and see that by the SE suite and your your hiring manager is is what what you're saying there I work hard I've ear the right to

be KY yeah yeah I I you're you're also stumbling against uh pretty complicated problems as well right so um I I heard a quote I some investor that says I always ask the people even though they have a great business plan like how many sort of argument have you guys had can you resolve them right so I I look for that sort of support system in my own leadership uh we G A headbunt that's fine but are we head buting with mutual respect yeah yeah thank you um so over the last couple of years we've seen like the last five we've seen quite Vol like a volatile market in terms of just general hiring um and a golden thread of

all this is that cyber security hiring and compliance and trust is very challenging and especially when you're going after top teams which is the the panel discussion we're having today and building like worldclass security organizations my company literally exists to help try and bridge that because it is so hard so when you're thinking about going out that we've just run through what some of your secret sources is are as individuals but now you've kind of identified the team that you want to build you've seen opportunity and you know where kind of you want to get to and you're in that kind of scale mode I guess one of the questions I had is in this competitive market that we find

ourselves in what do you do differently or commonly what's like a Common Thread that you have between them when things about attracting and hiring security talent I think one of the things I I typically do is uh a numerous different things actually um one um sometimes we use Sorcerers right external Sorcerers um we also go after talent that we see in the market so like going to conferences seeing people speak seeing them in their in their environment is really helpful because then you can actually understand is that a person that would fit with the culture and a person that we would want on on the team um meetups is another great way um I find that referrals are amazing um

because it comes with a level of authenticity that you actually know how they have performed in Prior roles um so I do leverage networking quite a lot when trying to find new talent because I think that the security world is a a very small world uh I think that when you go into a place you typically know a few people and so it is very easy to kind of like pull from strings and actually pull the right kind of talent and that's that's one way because then you have the referral of both sides yeah the referral for you as a leader to that person and then from that other contact for you right and so it is a a mutual

agreement to say oh you know what this is probably a good person to talk to doesn't always guarantee it's going to be a fit but it's a starting point I think there are two things that I care about like a lot when I'm trying to hire even like regardless of what the market is like like it's probably a little bit easier to hire now than it was two three years ago um but pretty much always I hire very slowly but make sure I have the ability to close quickly um and the idea basically is like I only get a chance to basically sign somebody up for like a you know oneish plus year contract by talking to them for a few

hours it makes sense to me to be very selective about who I'm talking to and who I'm bringing through that process such that we can like get the best assurance that we can possible by the time they get through onsite that we're actually going to have somebody who will fit uh our needs and the culture the team that already exists Etc um the other thing I do that I think takes can I surprise sometimes is I generally do my hiring manager screens early and I call them shoot the [ __ ] interviews because I don't ask like questions really I don't have like give me an example of a time when type of stuff it's like just talk to me about you and

like what you want what you want to do um and let's talk about stuff that doesn't even have anything to do with work uh my for those of you that have not been on like a video call with me and my background is full of guitar amps and guitars and stuff and that's half the time a topic of conversation which uh is is really interesting because it pulls us out of the work conversation talk about like what do you want to do outside of work what do you what is your life like outside of you know the professional version of you and that helps me very quickly get to a good understanding of is this person going to

fit sort of the culture components or requirements that I have in my head so that throughout the rest of the process I can say well you know ask him about this or let's pull more on this or they said X Y or Z in my first interview can we get more information on that so between like hiring slow and being very selective and um maybe this is manipulative like disarming the candidate kind of right out of the gate uh helps I think it results in better interview in my op it works I think I I kind of hear two fold to your question one is the sourcing one is the closing um and I think from the sourcing great

answers there uh maybe in addition as I'm a little bit you know a little bit obsessive is and I'm still even though I lead engineering team I'm still kind of geeky I like to look at new things and so on so I do spend a lot of time on GitHub I just look at Co project and like who wrote it and just engage with them with with No Agenda Beyond just hey I like what you're doing how you're thinking about this and so on sometime it leads to a a conversation that perhaps a year later you get a ping saying hey I'm kind of like looking for something else so like of better ter I

had a friend of mine is just play the long game maybe that's one trick uh right and then from a closure perspective uh especially right now um and and we've talked about certain constraint in large company versus small company at gr we we're a small company we have to be extremely extremely selective um I don't talk about the job per se I talk about my problems I was like this is like I have problems right now of uh how do you manage multi tendency Enterprise level multi tendency in ATM like I don't know I Sol this like what do you think about this and it just as you as you mentioned kind of diffuse the conversation from

work and it dives into the passion and then that's where I see can they go deep right what problem have you face and so on so that's how I generally look at closure and just make myself available I've had several candidate tell me I haven't had a manager spent three four hours with me uh towards the end and I was like listen every time you talk to me about money I'm going to cut you off I'm not like go talk to recruiting about money right I want to talk to you about the problem and you interested here's what you can learn and so on so I actually talking about the problems and sometime i' even open book as like here's the

laundry list of things that we're currently working on right so uh that seems to pay dividend finding that that top talent uh which is extremely hard uh I would say very it gets harder and harder that strikes a chord with me in particular because I've had so many experiences where I've interviewed for roles and if it just felt like I was in a funnel for somebody and they're like yeah I'm just going to check some boxes and move you through and I might make you an offer but this industry is so small you're probably going to run into that person again at some point in time and there's a good chance that might be your boss or something like that so my

Approach when I'm talking to candidates is is really like can I have a relationship with you not just like is this transactional can I hire you or not uh it's happened so many times where you know two companies later or whatever that person's back in my Pipeline and maybe what we talked about last time has changed or they've evolved they've been promoted they've learned all these things and now all of a sudden this person is a great fit and exactly what I'm looking for and if you know two three years ago last time I talked to them it was a bad experience where they felt like you know like I just another sheep uh they're probably not g to come

on to work for me so small industry buildt a relationship with people think is super important I think you're actually saying the same thing like what you're talking about there is just by being a good person and being intentional with interview process um and then if it's not the right fit for you or them at the right time then kind of come back and and I'll work on those things in the interim which plays into what SAS is saying which is have a longterm view or vision of this which to bring it to D tell about to Erica is about referrals right we all do a lot of business or make hires and transactions from our referral Network it's something

we're very proud of and why kind of were're able to all build teams and by not rushing in that first instance but to try and get something in it for you or to make a quick hire it's really impactful for longer term that you're willing to go out of your way to make a referral or a recommendation for a team member into your team I would say that adding on so it s it's also about being transparent right about what they're getting when they come to you because I think in order to actually close a deal you want to make sure that you both are on the same page because you want them excited about the role just just like

you want to be excited about them joining and so that transparency obviously to an extent you can't like air all your of course but um but being transparent that there are problems that you want them to help solve or there are things that you want to innovate on to build out a new future of security I think all of those things are what helps get that candidate excited and therefore hopefully be able to close that deal but you have to be transparent about it right you you can't you can't just ask a bunch of questions like that time because that's not going to get someone excited yeah so some of the key things we took from that then is uh referrals

in person events you talked about kind of meeting people there um we talked about interviewing slow but hiring fast having the ability to do that um and I know Sasha made a lot of good examples but GitHub is a secret source for a lot of hiring managers and I know that kind of a lot of technical engineering leaders it's the first thing they'll do they'll they they don't want to see a resume frankly it's like can you send me the GitHub and they'll they'll hire kind of based on that or maybe they've contributed in a project before and kind of comes full circle and then the last thing is llm security hasn't been mentioned today other than it being a

hard a hard challenge to hire for as well so yeah you talk to someone in a deep mind that's been there for a long time he says Sasha I don't know how to solve it and you have something interesting uh so some of the topics we've covered already has been around kind of what hire managers um look for but it's also you can weave in as a candidate to go to events and use GitHub and be intentional with your job search as much as what new hireing managers kind of experienced hire managers could do I wanted to there might be some is it well raise your hand if you're a new hiring manager in the

room if you've become new to hiring in the last 18 months anybody got one at the back I won't I won't point you out but uh you're on your journey been a new hiring manager I think it's a lot of people in my network are maybe in the first like 12 to 18 months of building a team and they don't know where to start and so I think with a lot of experience at this table I wanted to ask a question around that which is what advice would you give to new leaders who are looking to build a security team and maybe it's their first hire or maybe it's their kind of I don't know that they're

building the first couple of hires what advice would you give to leaders on that Journey sorry um so I I think the the first thing that I would do and what I would advise someone to do um is to really map out what your plan is for your team because you don't want to hire just any part of your team first you want to be very strategic and very deliberate about that first hire because sometimes it'll take a little bit of time to hire the rest of your team you may lose funding during that time so the order by which you hire and the order that you select which which people you want to hire which roles to

hire for will be very very critical especially if you're building a team from scratch so really understanding what it is that you have from an expectation perspective like what are you trying to deliver for the business that you're supporting and then also which role will help make the most impact and difference in that deliverable um so that you're being intentional I see that like you've done some things on your res we've talked a little bit about what you've done like walk me through how you approach that problem walk me through how you think about solving for these things especially if a problem is large in scope and ambiguous in definition like help me understand your approach to

these because the approach is going to be uh more impactful I think than like yeah I totally did this in the past like it might have been super easy the last place here it might be super hard in comparison so how do you do the work how do you go about this it's not just the technical but like how do you work with the people that you are going to have to work with like what is it like to sit next to you or sit across from you or whatever like help me understand that it's been really really quite influential in how I think about hiring people um yeah first advice I would say is take your time uh generally take your

time get to know the the person uh also understanding the constraint that you have and also what you need to fix now for example we you you really kind of light up my head the other day about like the differences and for example you hire at Microsoft you're playing long game right there are coaching they are they will learn here and so on versus a small company uh they need to hit the ground running so you are quiring Talent you are acquiring experience you're not you don't have time to go build it right so you look with somebody that can hit the ground running right away versus uh a prospect with really good potential so

understanding these Contra these constraints but also take the time um get know the person there's a great book called uh who uh which I highly recommend gr ley's interview process is based on this book it will guide you in terms of some of the signals to actually see and some of the questions to ask to dive a little bit deeper like what was your previous job who was your manager uh what would you say you know this manager did great and what would you say this manager didn't do so great so it gets you to really get to know the person more I would say very cool so we' thank you for some of the yeah the wisdom you Shar

collectively so far we've talked about hiring um and attracting right that's so we've done we've done that let's say you've now built an org that you're very proud of there's always challenges that come with that as well and uh I don't know attrition and retaining Talent is a skill there's as much as you're very passionate about what you're building internally and the and the technical challenges that your team get to work on there's always going to be another company next door tapping on your teams and your talent so I guess what advice do you have or how do you think about going about retaining teams um in individually I I mean I was going to say

this earlier it probably could change this whole entire pan to just be about culture yeah agreed yeah I really think culture is the biggest part of retaining people if if people this is maybe with the definition of culture right I think if people feel like they are around people they like to work with working on things that are engaging interesting child leg problems uh feel like they are able to operate the way that they want to operate so they feel abounded um people will be pretty happy asking right the comp's not there people event to leave you know if the rest of the company around them is not so awesome that will also influence the

culture of your team but think you could ride a long way on having a good culture which is not like an easy answer it takes a lot of work to maintain a good culture within your team especially if you have to deal with headwinds external to your team uh that's that's kind my direct answer is a culture is way to retain people there A lot of work that goes lot of you want there a lot of but uh it's if you don't have that be where yeah I think building up with that obviously people culture I think that's the the number one reason people leave is because of other people right they don't like their boss or they don't like

the people that they work for um or with and so I I do think that it is why when we talked about hiring that aspect was so important because you want them to be able to work well together together and collaborate not that there won't be friction sometimes because I think that that's good it's it's good to challenge one another but it's challenging each other in a healthy way and I think as Leaders one of our responsibilities is helping people to understand how to do that and how to do that in a healthy way and so one of the things that I really focus my leadership team on is doing just that right it's it's it's helping

to build that culture but doing it in a way by which it's going to help to raise people up because at the end of the day everyone not everyone but most people want to grow in their careers so you want to understand like where are they going where do they want to go so that you can help navigate their career with them um sometimes that's going to be at your company sometimes it's not but the most effective people are the happiest people which means you want to help them grow you want to help them get to where they want to go um from a career standpoint and then also encouraging each of your team members to build each

other up is the other part of that right because you're not alone in a team a team is a team for a reason right it's not just you as a leader and so having that encouragement touching base so if you are managing a team of 10 it's a lot easier to have that oneone you're managing a team of 200 it gets a little bit more complicated but having check-ins with your skip levels becomes very very critical um because if you don't know what's going on at the root of your organization it could all fall apart right

C you is super important um let's be careful about not retention at all cost either I think sometime you have to you have to enable people to spread their wings I've had people in my team that that told me they were departing and I actually congratulated them because it was a nice leg up right one in particular became a seil somewhere else and caught me off guard hey I love to keep in touch with you congratulation and the person was very surprised so I don't believe in retention at all costs and that tend to lead people staying longer right um be a servant for your team go fight go fight right don't back down go fight pick your fight wisely I

think if they see that the leadership is actually supporting them and growing them and you've built a great culture of healthy disagreement R in trust the trust part is super important it takes time to build you have to invest time spend time outside of work and so on uh but for me I don't believe in retention at all cost so I think there's a fine line there that's hard to navigate um and you just congratulate them so you you want to you want to treat them the best and you don't want to make sure they don't feel locked down for SE yeah I think L those answers resonate with a lot of the crowd there's a lot of

nodding going on there for sure um but we talk about um trust culture we talk about collaboration uh and all these things I agree entirely add to building top teams and helping them to retain but it becomes challenging in the world that we find ourselves in it's amazing to be in rooms like this and conferences but we do work in a a distributed Workforce I my I'm distributed a lot of my team are and it's challenging so how as Leaders do you think about building a culture of trust and collaboration in a distributed Workforce I know for for us we actually have um virtual fund days um sometimes with my team um and that helps to like

get people into a more social because when we talk about getting to know people in a personal level it's not always about about work and so we we would have like these virtual happy hours um which would allow us to like have a drink at home but actually socialize virtually um I also do encourage my team to get together every year once a year um in an in-person situation even though we're we're distributed across the entire us um and that's because I do think that in-person coordination is also very helpful sometimes from a budget standpoint you can't always do that yeah so sometimes you do have to get creative um also encouraging pods right where you have

groups of people that are together in different states encourage them to get together right I think it is about when you talk about building trusts it's about trying to help with that socialization because one of the things that you miss out on when you don't have this in person is kind of like the water cooler talk and just talking about things that are not necessarily strictly work rated and backtack meetings can be exhausting so allowing some space to have some of that that water cooler talk that's not necessarily structured um is sometimes really really helpful um another idea is is um uh remote coffee chats uh so you get paired with like different people in the

organization and you can actually then meet someone new that you've never met before it encourages getting to know one another it encourages um understanding someone else's role and how they operate which then helped you in the long run love that yeah I do a lot of the kind of same thing it's really important for me that the people that are like within my organization and really external organization as well are like engaged with each other as people and that doesn't entirely revolve around the problem they're trying to solve or like the technical skills they have um it's pretty safe assumption that everybody has interests that are not work um it's also pretty safe assumption that most

people like to have fun so like I will we have a we have a channel in my organization the whole entire org and the Only Rule is no work talk it's like it's just pure [ __ ] posting all the time and it's active all the time throughout the day every single day of the week and there's LS and you can kind of tell when people get off on like okay we've been talking about you know tlor hours but like it brings it brings those people together and I agree with you on like iners thing I think in person is really really important try to do it more than once a year but budgets and

stuff um but I try to like facilitate as many of those types of situations where people can come together and be people together not necessarily try to solve problems all the time uh every Friday we have optional mandatory fun time which is uh 50% attendance but we just get in there and do whatever and talk about whatever we want to talk about no want's working after 2m on a Friday anyways so no one ask but like the idea is bring bring people together to do people things that are not revolving around work and it helps build kind of stronger bonds with your team uh also i' I've realized kind of flattens the management structure in

those in those types of situations so uh that's also very helpful I'm I'm I'm I'm part of the audience here because I I struggle with it uh we talk about Geo distribution but there's a there's a difference between uh people for example geod distributed within a particular time zone versus uh was describing leading a team in Dubai and India and UK and New York all at the same time right so I I don't know I think the what what seems to work is iners time so I happen to be working at a company that that has this remote hybrid uh where we do have actually in person time once a quarter a week everybody uh in different locations I

personally you I'm always transparent I personally think we try to squeeze too much uh meetings and so on where we should just let it breed more um and then also think through about the Geo distribution of your team and project right I I hate the single timeon pattern a single person in a region working on a project where everybody else is in a different region uh you're going to go test trust there there going to be frustration so sometime you are constrain but think also about like it may not be the best setup in in terms of skill set right but they together close they move better so think through about the the geod distribution

of your project specifically when you start dealing like Amazon was insane just heavily heavily distributed also as a manager don't kill yourself which I've made the mistake several times my wife is in the audience she she reminds me uh 5:00 a.m. meetings up to 600 7 p.m. meetings so uh focus on your health as well but generally you think through about the distribution of your project that t off one of the things that Kevin said there as well like really kind of brought it back home to like how I've tried to do it over the time because it's hard is the kind of mandatory fun thing I know was a cheeky comment but it's not always on you as a leader or or

a hireing manager or I don't know if I like run a practice to do that you want to try and other allow other people to take that mantle on and do different things and I used to try and organize something and it just felt like forced and then you start allowing the team members every new team member that comes to join the company they have to like run a quarterly event which is scary for them especially if they're like an introvert to organize something and somebody's running a Paint and Sip in a matter of weeks last week we did a like a a Health Challenge which was like most steps um as a and then we shared pictures of I

like our dogs in the channel then we started uh the on Slack the the the dogs of Code Red which started off as like a real cool thing because we're all passionate about our dogs and now it's just [ __ ] talking and and having a bit of fun uh on a different slack channel so we we also have that channel internally your point and something I do is you know if if you as a leader is not there what happens I love taking vacation and see what's broken when I come back right so for example right now I have a team in in Germany I do know they spend quite a bit of time

together even we have someone in Poland that travels to Berlin and I order approve all these expense right but I know they're spending time together organically that's a good sign of of health and Trust if that didn't happen then I would fly there more frequently and try to set this up right so even though you're a lead I don't like forcing people to spend time together that's just not me no I'll give an example so I took my all of my engineering managers to an offsite um I needed to train them on several different aspects of of their draw of their job and their role um some some things that were changing um but I

had like a an event after hours because I made them work so long and I believe in nature so I I love to get everyone out in nature um so we went and did a kayaking Excursion now it was open to everyone to go but I wasn't upset if they did not go because what happens is that some people are really into the activity and some people aren't as long as they're kind of like congregating and actually getting to know each other so half the people went on the kayaking and then the other half just kind of stayed at the hotel and hung out got to know each other played games did stuff together and to me that's still super

powerful right you don't have to make them hang out together in a forced way but you should allow for the time for them to be able to get together in a way by which allows them to grow now some people went on the kayak and were like I thought I was going to hate it I loved it so I do encourage people to get outside of their their uh comfort zone sometimes um but I think that that goes to show like you can always do little things some people will join some people won't and I think that's okay right because it allows for the opportunity like I came to Seattle you don't have a building in Seattle but I have team

members here I open it up for a hike in the morning and dinner at night I had people go on a hike with me in the morning some people join me for dinner and so I think that it just gives the opportunity it open opens it up and I think that's part of it right it's it's allowing the opportunity for people to actually get to know one each other which then helps to build out that Happ and build that fost well Foster that kind of nature where they all what like Sasha was talking about as well which is when you're not in the room or when you're on PTO that they're doing these things because they want to right yeah

cool well thank you all for sharing your experiences a lot of wisdom uh we actually do have some time time um left to ask um some questions to our panel um so I'd like to throw out is there anybody else in the crowd that would have a question we've got one one over there you're gonna have to speak up unfortunately we don't have a physical oh may maybe we do I'll or or if you wouldn't mind asking the question loud would be able to do it I can do that my question around like retaining Talent is what is what do you think about the effectiveness of counter offers because people are generally leaving a company

sometimes it's for money but sometimes it's because a burnout it's because you know they're working with jerks or something else making a counter offer giving them more money maybe a different title doesn't always fix the problem why they were going to leave so they probably leave another year later when you know the extra money isn't yeah so the the question that I heard was um counter offers how does that play into to retention and and generally how would I hire managers approach councel offers well how effective do you think they really are okay long run I mean again because people are probably leaving the company not just because of money there's probably something else going on and if

you offer them more money that doesn't necessarily fix the underlying reason they were leaving yeah well I'll I'll take a stab at that to start with if you if you don't mind I've been in Staffing for 15 years um and there is a pretty well-known industry stat that the chances of somebody staying past a year of receiving a counter offer and accepting it um the higher percentages that person's gone anyway because it's not money right they can maybe get an extra five 10% on salary but what it is is you've already covered most of these tracks which is culture and values and being respected by your team members and your colleagues so just from a I I

haven't Built My Own um security teams but I've got a lot of experience in recruiting and that stat is wonderful because it really does tell a truth about counter offers you're looking externally because you want to leave not for an extra 5 or 10% yeah it's very rare that they actually are super highly effective generally speaking it is usually like a year and if you don't solve that underlying problem which typically you probably can't because it's probably culture or it's probably who they work with right cuz again I go back to most of the time people don't leave a company because of money most of the time they leave because of culture or people or something that just doesn't

feel right about the role itself yeah yeah yeah counter offers are not effective in my opinion but you're you're assuming the counter offer is only money base some counter offers is scope too and title yeah so don't forget that um I actually uh mentioned an EVP one time as I was leaving and they gave me a counter I wasn't leaving for another company I was just like I'm going to go surfing for like whatever eight months I'm burned out right um and they made they put money down and they actually transfer it directly to my account even before I knew right and the person said like do you feel overpaid I was like that's extremely generous right he's like at

least we got that out of the way I like it doesn't solve the problem right so I I ask every candidate the same question um what are you not getting where you're at now that you're looking for right sometime it's money I I work with uh a company for a long time where I was being offered twice as much money as elsewhere it was tempting but I still stuck around for a couple years why because you know I love the toys I was playing with and I had my own single office with a nice Mountain View right for a long time you and I were briefly discussing about that earlier so sometimes a little bit about money but I

I I tend to agree um the counters are not there I think there's two cases where a counter did work but it wasn't about that is the person was extremely hungry and frustrated so go fix that right also counter offics are temporary right it fix a compensation for a brief time not longterm usually it's not a long-term benefit and therefore it leaves a desire to want them again in some other form of fashion and so but I do agree it is interesting about the scope one um you're right you could offer it with a scope but the question is is why didn't you offer it before yeah well and then are you putting them in in a position by which they won't be

successful I I had a recent case where it was pretty obvious the the other company just threw the kitchen sink but the person told me they weren't joining because of the scope we never discussed about money because he we shook hand on the on the on the financial side of things um and U I actually congratulated him I was like I don't mind losing to that that's a great counter and it was all about scope yeah um got time for maybe one more question sure so I really enjoyed the discussion about trust and culture and passion these are things that are the Bedrock of high performance themes but the sometimes ineds right and it challenges

us with layoffs with impacts from company culture external teams from things that we fight for but then we lose right we have to disagree and commit so how are you intentional about retention in the face of that kind ofial action on your team comp it's interesting and I and I think that Kevin was actually alluding to this there's culture for the company that you work for and then there's culture within your team yeah and the reason why I'm I'm clarifying that is because you're absolutely right sometime there's outside factors that make it really really hard to have your team team trust you or to trust that they are going to be productive in their roles whether

that is because of a layoff whether that is because of some other factor that the company is kind of like pushing into the organization but it still always comes back to building that trust and I find being transparent talking about it not hiding from it right hitting it straight on because at the end of the day they're all people that work for you right if you cannot be transparent obviously you can't tell everything sometimes as a leader sometimes you know information before another part of the team and that's that is what it is but being as transparent as possible and being um just genuine like I think that when you are genuine with your team that shows

through when you're not that also shows through and that helps to combat some of the things that you can't control um although what's interesting is when we talk about culture if you start to feel like that culture is not good then the question is really should you still be there too right so I think that there is the culture change as long as you're feeling good about that culture you should be able to sell that culture to the rest of the company even if there's things that happen like from a the way our our our industry is now right there's been a lot of challenges likely off with many many many companies that is almost everywhere there's just

financially like like hardships right um but I think you can pull your team through that by just talking to them yeah I agree with one minute up great um the uh I think thing I would have there is my approach to managing my teams is like to be very genuine to be very transparent to be very C with these people like they're tring by other adults you treat them like kids think you're going of in a weird position if you do and so throughout the course of working with these other professionals and treating them like professionals all the time when the external things happen and you can't control happen it's not you don't have to then turn around and be like

we'll totally not do one of these trust me like just doesn't work so if something like that happens and you can kind of consume it and figure out what's the path forward through this and give people some some sense of cility as you're navigating like very tulous thing like uh for a lay off or something like that um you already have some built-in credibility and not everybody is you know has that sort of luxury people land there's immediately lay off it's like oh you just have to kind of trust that I'm G to you know be transparent with you but like I sort of like plan for worst case scenario hope for the best case

scenario like when I'm managing my teams I think that really helps because then when the uncertainties do come people and at least say like well I trust the person I'm working for it might have been affected by you know leadership about them but there's at least somebody I can hold on to while we're navigating these things and just feels like a responsibility of to people for me it's yeah it's I just build a culture of transparency and honesty um also in the case of layoff um I'm a direct guy so I went to perhaps a CEO and said hey I think this is the right decision uh let's make sure people that that are still around don't think

the reward is keeping their job right and be very blunt there um and what what are we going to go do because they see the they see the wave of more work we have less people more work harder problems what are we doing about this the reward is not keeping their job every single person in my team can go find a job anywhere else right so just treat it the same way as well um just to address like the the counter mentioned I've worked in organization where um perhaps compensation needed to be Revisited or globally and that takes time so uncomfortable you know risky situation as a manager but I did ask the person I need you to help me help you

what does that mean I need you to help me with more data so I can help you and the others so you send out your folks out there and get they get counter office right you build a lot of trust that way sorry it's it's disruptive but you build long-term trust like that good stuff well I think we all feel well I personally feel very fortunate to have shared a panel this afternoon with u so much thought leadership experience uh and wisdom but also kind of delivered in a candid approach I think it's really refreshing so would you mind uh raising a round of applause for our wonderful panelists this afternoon thank you thank you all for listening really

appreciate itk you