The future is team based - Alistair Shepherd-Cross

Guest Alistair Shepherd-Cross, Founder at Teamit, discusses team based hiring, high performance networks and recruiting in underutilized markets.

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​Nate:               
Yeah. So thanks for joining me today, Alistair. I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while now.

Alistair:           
Yeah, me too. I'm looking forward to chatting again, and it should be a fun conversation.

Nate:               
So Alistair, Teamit. I love asking founders sort of the question around why they founded a company. You often find that founders are some of the most passionate people about the space they're in. Maybe briefly, for folks who don't know, describe what Teamit is and then maybe a little bit about why you formed it, and what your interest is in the space.

Alistair:           
Yeah, absolutely. So I've been in recruiting now for over 20 years, and we started Agile Recruiting nearly 20 years ago. And that's still traditional recruiting, placing individuals with companies locally up here in Canada, and it's been a great business, continues to be a thriving business. But I always felt there was something missing with it because the recruiting business hasn't changed that much. Sure, there's new technologies out there, there's LinkedIn, people are always trying to come up with sort of creative things, but ultimately it's one person for one job, and that's how people look at hiring. And it's a huge struggle for companies trying to find talent, trying to establish if someone's going to be a good fit for an organization, and whether they are going to fit well with the team they already have on site. They go through all of these complex and detailed interview processes. It sometimes takes an exorbitant amount of time and effort to try and find good people.

Alistair:           
And I always used to think, "There's got to be a better way of doing it." I mean, it just hasn't changed forever. And everyone grumbles about how hard it is to find talent and then to establish if they're going to fit. And so we started thinking, why don't we hire in teams? Because the world is made up of high-performing teams, people that have already done all the hard work of distilling down who's going to fit well and who they're going to work well with over the years. And you talk to anybody and most people will say, "Oh, yeah. Well, these are the top 10 people that I'd love to work with again." But none of that information is recorded. It's just in people's heads. And I just don't think ... That sort of data, because it's not visible to people outside of the individuals that actually are part of that group, it's sort of lost. And I've always felt that there's got to be a way to harness and capture that information.

Alistair:           
So that really was what Teamit was all about. Rather than sort of always reinventing the wheel of building a team from scratch with a bunch of strangers, why not go out there and compile the data around high-performing groups of people that have already done all of the hard work, and then visualize that for people to actually use themselves for their own hiring purposes? So that was really what became behind the idea of Teamit.

Nate:               
That's what I was going to say; maybe it's tied into the questioning around a recruiting mindset shift and what that means, because typically your recruiters are out there doing just sort of a traditional job of recruiting or, like you said, they are tapping into the team's existing networks. So how is this different than then the way things work today?

Alistair:           
Yeah. I mean when you think about it, all the great companies ... Well all the companies, for that matter, I would say, start out in a similar fashion. It's usually a small group of people, two or three individuals, that have an idea, that know each other, and decide to say, "Hell, let's go for it. Let's do this on our own." And so they do that, and then they have some success, and then they reach into their network, the people they've worked with before, these talent pools of these high-performing groups that they trust, and they draw in these individuals. And that can sustain you up to, let's say, I don't know, 30 people, and now they really have something; they're going gangbusters and maybe they get an investment, maybe a VC comes in and gives them $5 million bucks to pour rocket fuel on their idea.

Alistair:           
Well, now they've got to hire a bunch more people, and they've used up that network. So then that's when sort of they go back to the traditional hiring techniques of hiring one person here, hiring through LinkedIn, using recruiters. And so they're bringing in strangers, people they really don't know, and then that's where the missteps started happening, partly driven out of maybe lack of experience on how to interview. People are rushed. Or sometimes they just spend an exorbitant amount of time, because they're so concerned about getting the right fit for the company, because they don't know these individuals, that that's all they do. They just spend endless hours recruiting and hiring. And so I would say that most people would say, "God, if I could only keep recruiting in the same fashion that I got my company started in in the first place, I'd do that all day long."

Alistair:           
So really, we believe that that's essentially what the Teamit model is. It's certainly giving companies access to huge, large datasets of curated data, of talent pools, and showing them how they're all connected to one another and the history that they have with one another so that you can keep recruiting and hiring in the same fashion that you started your company, no matter how big you get or how many people you need to bring in. And it's much more efficient to be able to bring in sort of three or four people in one go, than one at a time. And because I think we all agree that retention is a whole lot easier when you have groups of people that are loyal to each other already, even before they arrive, then you know you're not having to chase your tail as much with attrition, because it definitely is the glue that holds people together.

Alistair:           
And that's what we've found with all our clients. Over the last two years, of the 120 people we've placed, we have had five people that have left, which is actually staggering when I say it, but it's true. And I think a lot of it ... And it's not because all the projects were amazing and smooth-running and it was sort of nirvana. It was because they were prepared to stick through the tough times with each other because they didn't want to let their friends down; they didn't want to leave their friends in the lurch. Whereas as an individual contributor and you don't really know people, there's a lot less loyalty there, and it's hard to overstate how key that is.

Nate:               
Yeah. And I would think that also it's a much easier from a manager's perspective, from an HR perspective, to deal with teams of people who already know the idiosyncrasies of each other. You don't have that feeling-out phase of discovery about maybe some things you don't like about your new team member that's been hired in, or what have you. From a manager perspective, this team is high-performing and I really shouldn't have to get involved in any sort of the HR-ish type issues that typically occur when you add new people to the team one by one by one. So I would think that that's a big advantage as well of having a already functioning, high-performing team.

Alistair:           
Yeah, it's true. Absolutely. And I have a quick question for you around culture, actually, because with your time with Tesla ... And I know you've got a lot of experience with how to build culture within an organization, but I've had some people say, "Well, if you bring a team in, how do you get them to mold into the culture of the organization? When you have one person and you bring them in, it's much easier to sort of turn them into whatever you want them to be, and to fit the culture. When you bring in a team, they have their own culture already."

Alistair:           
And so my view is, well that's true. And I think that's what you want. You want what they bring because clearly it's awesome. That's why you're hiring them. So don't try and sort of smooth that over and put your own culture onto them. I think you should embrace them ... I don't know what I'd call it, the micro cultures that these teams bring to your overall culture as an organization.

Nate:               
Yeah, and I would say I think I totally agree with that. And I think culture is just a distillation of everybody in your company, and the larger you get, the more your culture changes and the more divergent it becomes, with satellite offices and everything else. So I think sometimes that question of culture is a little bit misguided because people assume they're going to be able to control the culture, and you're not. You can have guiding principles around what you stand for as a company and as an organization and as a product, and all of those sorts of things. But your culture is going to be what it's going to be. And I would say the best thing that any person can do within a company is try to encourage the positive behaviors you see around you, and your culture is going to come out of that. But it's extremely tied to your company's mission and product, in my opinion.

Alistair:           
Yeah, I agree 100%, totally. It's a question I get asked quite a bit, and I also get asked, "Well, what happens if the whole team leaves? Then it leaves a huge hole."

Nate:               
That happens anyways, though.

Alistair:           
I said, "That's going to happen anyway." I said, "So, maybe ... I don't think that should be a concern. If the whole team leaves, then you've got real problems. You need to probably look inwardly and go, 'Okay, so what are we doing wrong here?'" Yeah. So anyway ...

Nate:               
You didn't integrate them very well if that happens.

Nate:               
Yeah, that's really interesting, like you said, around the high-performing teams that we all know in our heads. And when you take a new job or when you're recruiting for a new role, one of the things that people always ask is, "Who's your recommendation for the role? Do you know anybody who would fit this role?" Because it is that sort of personal experience that trumps all, if you will.

Nate:               
So this is a really fascinating idea around capturing that in data, and being able to see what these teams are from the outside, and then sort of deploy them on issues. Talk me through that process of you identifying and building a high-performing team. It's fascinating the skills and the relationship side of it, how that could be distilled down to data and geography, and some of the other things you're doing that I'm sure are beyond my knowledge base.

Alistair:           
Well it is and it isn't, actually, because the key is to establish who the A players are in a given market. And then we basically go to them and explain our model, and pretty much to a person they go, "Love it. It makes so much sense. If I ever wanted to work with a team again, it would be these 10 people," and they tell us who they are. And then we ask them why and what it is about the individual that makes them so great to work with, and some of the more specifics around their skillsets that may be a little bit harder to learn or know from their resume: whether they work well on big teams, small teams, startups, companies, structured environments, unstructured environments, that sort of stuff. And then we call those people and ask them the same question.

Alistair:           
So, we're not cutting any corners. We're not trying to scale the data as quickly as we possibly can. Because to me, scalability is typically the death knell for quality. And everyone is always trying to scale quickly. How can we ramp ourselves up to a billion dollar company? The VCs, they want to see an aggressive growth model. And sometimes it can be, I think, at the expense of quality. So when I look at what we're building, it's a very curated dataset that is 100% accurate because it comes straight from the people themselves. We're not making any assumptions here on whether this person is going to be a good fit or this person's going to be a good fit with one another. We rely on the individuals themselves. And who's to argue with the top, let's say, software developer or one of the top soft developers in Calgary when he says, "These are the top 10 people that I'd love to work with"? You know they're going to be great. And so I think that is sort of how we're building it.

Nate:               
Yeah, that's great. And I want to dive into a little bit what you were talking about in the Calgary market, because I think we've spoken about this in the past. And in any major city, and then certainly even in other areas, there are talent who could help some of these areas where recruiting is extremely difficult because you're competing with folks like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever it is. Yet there's sort of a hesitancy to have remote workers or workers who are not in your office. What's that mindset shift that has to occur to get people to realize that there are very good folks who for one reason or another choose not to live in Silicon Valley, New York, or name your hot city?

Alistair:           
Right. Well I think sometimes you live in a major center, let's say San Francisco or New York, I think it's easy to sort of convince yourself that the very best people live and work in those cities, and then elsewhere, maybe the talent is sort of tier two. And it's just simply not true. There is amazing talent everywhere. And I think you have to ... I look at the companies that we work with where the model works great, and it's sort of complete trust and acceptance that this is the right thing to do and that these resources are not secondary in any way. They are every bit as good as the resources they have at the head office, and that they're every bit as committed and they are key, key players in the organization. Even if they're contractors, they're looked upon as being critical and they should be treated as equals to people that they have, let's say, in New York or San Francisco.

Nate:               
I think the case could be made that some of these folks are actually superior in some really interesting ways to the talent you might be able to attract in a San Francisco area or in a Toronto area. And one of the ways that I see that's really interesting is some of these people are established, they've got families, they enjoy the lifestyle of where they live, a smaller city rather than a larger city. In many cases that means they've reached a certain level of maturity, I guess, in their careers, in their lives. And even being the best coder or the best engineer or whatever, they're not willing to uproot their family and move. So there's a set of values and maturity and sort of just having your roots that a lot of these people, I think, have. Is that something you find as well? And that if we're only hiring the brightest of the brightest who are willing to uproot or are able to uproot and come to San Francisco or L.A. or Toronto, are we missing out on a little bit of diversity and maybe a stabilizing factor in some of these companies?

Alistair:           
Oh, I would agree 100%. I mean, again, the whole idea of remote is it just increases the talent pool that you can pick from. Really, there is no barrier, all of a sudden, whereas only hiring resources that are in San Francisco or wherever it may be, or that they have to move and come to your given city, immediately reduces the talent base that you can pick from. And I think you could argue that if you do require that, then finding resources that are more experienced and senior, the chances are those folks have families and kids in school. And as you said, a little bit more rooted wherever they live. So it's much harder for them to leave.

Alistair:           
In some of these, I guess you could call them tier two or lesser known centers, there's a lot less ego, too. And I think we would all agree that there's a lot of very smart people out there, but the ones that are humble and have less ego often make the very best resources. And I know when I look at Calgary, for example, they are humble and they also are very broad in their experience levels because they probably haven't been able to rely on one technology or one particular skill to get them through. They have to be much more versatile in the opportunities they look for because there aren't as many opportunities on offer. And so I think that creates a broader spectrum of skills and a more rounded approach to problem solving and just technology as a whole.

Nate:               
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think there's the different job markets, too, and is there an obvious savings of this kind of a model? Not that anybody would necessarily lead with that, but there's two problems in these big centers, and one is that it's really expensive for high quality talent. Two, if you can even find that high quality talent that's willing to move to your company. So the job market is different in Calgary and other cities. So is it a big savings? Is it easier to find people? What's that look like?

Alistair:           
Yeah. So I mean right off the bat with the Canadian dollar versus the U.S. dollar, it's a 30% saving before you even look at salaries. And so if you compare a salary from San Francisco to an equivalent resource up here in Calgary ... I mean, if you're looking at employee-to-employee, you're looking at about a ... certainly a 50% to 60% saving, right there, which is significant. And I think contractors are the same. You're looking at about a 30% to 40% saving. And so we look at sort of the Canadian option and say, "Well, it's really just an extension of your U.S. office." And it's essentially the same time zone. I mean, we're obviously on mountain time. It's a two-and-a-half hour flight from San Francisco, so it's really easy to get here. We're all North American-speaking, culturally aligned. Plus you put on top of that the fact that we're putting groupings of people together that have already worked together before. So you've got this sort of core group of resources that is known to one another and essentially getting the band back together. It's powerful. And I mean I would say nothing's bulletproof, but it almost is bulletproof. I mean, we have had a pretty much a 100% success rate on the teams we've put together.

Alistair:           
And the other part that I think is really key and sometimes gets overlooked is retention, because it's one thing to find people, but it's another thing to keep them. And if you're a company looking to come to, let's say, Calgary, for example, you can be a 30-person software company and make a real noise by coming to Calgary. It's news up here. It's easy to get people's attention that there's a tech company from San Francisco looking to hire in Calgary. And so the chances are the opportunities and the compensation will be greater than what the local companies can offer. So you can really make a noise, which you simply can't do, or it's very hard to do, when you're down in the Bay area. And then once you've got these individuals, it's much easier to keep them because there's less opportunity for them up here. And the work's interesting, and there's a certain cachet about working for a company out of San Francisco or New York. It makes people sort of sit up and go, "Wow, that's cool. Tell me more."

Nate:               
Yeah. Well, and not only that, but if you decided to expand operations into Calgary, there's, I believe, millions of empty office space, square footage wise. I mean, the city has really been hit hard by some of the changes in economy around the oil and gas industry. So I mean, there's no shortage of options. And I think just from a lifestyle, outdoor sports and everything else, what a great place to go visit and to live.

Alistair:           
Yeah. I mean, I would say for individuals that don't know much about Calgary, I would say the best way to describe it is it's sort of a mini Denver. It's 1.4 million people. It's right in the foot of the Rockies. So very similar. It's got a western kind of culture, obviously ranching country. And of course we've just got up the road, we've got Edmonton, which is another 1.1 million, I think. So in a sort of a three-hour corridor, you've got close to three to three-and-a-half million people, which is not insignificant.

Nate:               
Yup. So what's the next step for you and Teamit? Are there some big dreams and some interesting things that you can share, or is that all under wraps?

Alistair:           
Oh, I don't know. I mean, I'm someone who likes to share rather than keeping it under wraps. I mean, we're just continuing to build the Teamit model, really. So what we're doing now is we've been building this sort of manually over the last two years, really testing out the market, and we've placed over 120 technical resources here in Calgary with U.S.-based tech companies. After two years of building this, we're now actually scaling it and building a team-based hiring platform, which is really, as I said, mapping the whole Calgary geo zone. We're going to be doing the same for Toronto and Vancouver as well. And again, it's this idea of visualizing ... allowing people to be able to see all the resources and how ... the top 20 percentile of a geo zone has actually self-organized itself into teams over the last 10 years.

Alistair:           
So now you can see a clear, targeted recruiting pathway. When you look at a resource and go, "Wow, this person looks amazing," you can see all the individuals that surround that person that they've worked with before, and all these people have said they would love to work with each other again. So you can almost now ... you can hire a whole team, if there's a team available. Or people have a funny knack of becoming available when two or three of their friends get hired at a place and say how fantastic it is. Suddenly it's like, "Well actually, I want to be a part of that." And so availability suddenly ... It's amazing how people suddenly become available.

Alistair:           
But these referral programs that companies had, you would hire somebody and then you would ask them, "By the way, who do you know?" Now with this platform, you can actually know that before you hire them because you can see their entire network of resources that they would want to refer for opportunities potentially within your organization. So you can actually start planning and be really targeted in your approach. Rather than always having to reinvent the wheel every time you build a team, you can actually target one and pick away at the resource pool to essentially allow you to get the band back together.

Nate:               
Yeah. Fascinating stuff. Well, thank you. Thanks for joining me today, and go Flames.

Alistair:           
Go Flames. Yes. Saturday night.