Hiring at Exponential Scale
Naomi Trickey, CPO, Mews
Hiring requires care and skill at any organization but when you’re rapidly growing, it’s even more important. Hiring at an exponential scale touches everything – your people, the culture, operations, performance management, and more. This makes it a critical but also a mammoth task. I spoke with Naomi Trickey, CPO of Mews about what it’s like to hire 30 to 50 people a month. An experienced leader at multiple SaaS companies, Naomi offers so many insights about this particular feature of scaling organizations.
Our conversation covered:
Why planning is so critical
Deciding when to hire vs when to develop your people
How to hire at scale without eroding culture and how to evolve the culture
Factoring people development into your growth plan
The role of onboarding and performance management
Navigating fast-growing companies as a Chief People Officer
We have several people in common, especially through Griffin – James Trunk, David Jarvis, and Maria Campbell have all been on the series. They’re great.
They're great, great folks.
Before we went live you asked where I live (Brooklyn) and you told me that you live in Brighton. I love to ask people where they live and you do too.
I'm fascinated by anthropology. I'm well, what I'm fascinated by is metaphors for work and one of those is anthropology. I try to look at other contexts to understand how other people think about their work to see what we can learn and what we can adapt and adopt from those other environments. Anthropology is fascinating from a people perspective because it's the study of cultures and societies and how people interact. There are a number of different concepts that I've woven into my job.
One thing that I came across a couple of weeks ago was this idea of where you are located. In a remote world, asking that question is so relevant. It’s just absolute curiosity. I love Brooklyn. I've been there a bunch of times, including a couple of months ago. I can now situate you in my mind. Having this conversation automatically makes a connection between us and it gives me a frame of reference for you and for understanding you. Trying to understand people is what I try to do in my job.
I love that. My interest is sociology which is similar to anthropology, minus the bones. (laughs)
I think you take from these models what works for you and what you can use. Medicine is another one. I’m fascinated by the concept of compassion, and care and how that works in a People environment. Though obviously, I don’t do science. So you take what you can use from these models.
Yeah, I like to use metaphors from sports and military, mostly because my work is in leadership development and leadership teams. There are so many rich metaphors from those fields. Not that I always agree or would use those styles, but there's something fascinating about the way they think about and organize themselves and motivate themselves to do hard tasks.
Right. I think what is interesting about it, and what you’re touching on, is that these all give us a language for understanding each other. We need language to communicate. These models and metaphors are just linguistic structures and they’re so helpful.
Yep. When working with leadership teams the most important thing I can do is to give them a common language so they can talk to each other in ways that are neutral and helpful rather than negative or judgmental.
Yes. Yes. It's finding those points of commonality, isn't it? I think there is this progression that teams go through towards becoming a team. You start with a strong sense of the individual but over time what you’re hoping for is that the individuals cohere. To do that they need a common language.
100 % agree. I love this. Before we get into our topic, can you share a bit more about your background and yourself?
Yeah, sure. My name is Naomi Tricky. I'm a Chief People Officer at Mews which provides hospitality software to help hotels run themselves. I'm also on the board of Griffin, which is a banking-as-a-service platform. I've been at Mews for a year and a half and have been at Griffin for three years as the chair of the People and Governance Committee. I've worked in technology for more years than I can count, since 1997. I have an English degree. I was going to go and teach English as a foreign language and I was doing trade show work because it was a way to earn money whilst I was a student. I did some work at a big trade show for a company in London and the American team was there. I was 22, 23. At the end of the week, they offered me a job in New York. So I moved to New York to work in online ad sales.
It was in the days of selling 468 by 60 ad banners. We sent out hard-copy ad packs with envelopes and stamps, remember those? And I sort of progressed from there. I lived in the States for a few years and then moved to Budapest to work for their European headquarters and then came back to London. So I did a bunch of startups and then moved to the BBC. So from the sublime to the ridiculous really, and ended up in product management and then did more startup stuff. Then I had a child and wanted to not be working on a contract basis, which I was doing at the time so I joined my first SaaS company based in Brighton.
For the first three and a half years I ran commercial teams. [Then I got my first People role]. We’d just got to 200 people and had just hired our first Chief People Officer. He decided he didn’t want the job after being there for a couple of months. It was right for him. [As an aside: (He went on to be the assistant private secretary to the Queen which I think is fascinating.) We were at a pivot point, we were going to hire a CRO and it wasn’t going to be me. I needed to think about what I was going to do next. So I went to see the CEO and said, “I’d really love the opportunity to be the Chief People Officer.” He went away and thought about it and came back a couple of weeks later and gave me the job. That was over 10 years ago. Now I’m in my fifth SaaS company in the head of people, chief people, VP people role. I love it. It’s the kind of work that has synthesized so many different aspects of work that I've done up until now.
What was it about the Chief People Officer role that made you think you’d like to give it a go?
By that stage, I'd line-managed about half the company because I'd been there about three and a half years [from] when it was about 40 people, and it was about 200 by then. I managed quite a few of them. The kind of work that I kept getting asked to do was closer and closer to people's work.
This started back when I was at the BBC. So very early on in my career, there'd be someone who was a bit difficult and people would say, “Can you go and have a word with them?” Or there was, “We were thinking about building a team and like, what does this look like? Naomi, what are your thoughts on building this team?” I have always hustled. I have an English degree. I have no technical training whatsoever. I don't have any HR qualifications either. So my career has been pretty organic. I got brought into things. When the last Chief People Officer didn’t want to be Chief People Officer anymore he started talking to me about people-related matters. So I was like, I think this is something that everyone else can see except me. Maybe there's something in that. Then when I became a Chief People Officer, I was like, oh yeah, this is the work that I've been doing for 20 years. I just didn't call it Chief People Officer (CPO).
I thought for a few years, you know, I want to go and be a COO. That was the progression beyond CPO. Now I know I don't want to be a COO. I love being a Chief People Officer. I love being a kingmaker. I don't want to be the king. I love supporting, coaching, guiding, framing, and navigating organizations with and on behalf of other people. So all of the roles that I've done up until now had an aspect of that within them whether it's stakeholder management at the BBC, or working in central government, that's a lot of navigating complexity and bringing order to chaos. Whether it's running commercial teams where you're dealing with a lot of charged emotions. When you go into a pitch, you have to curate the energy in a room. I was never the best salesperson, but I knew who to bring into the room and I knew how to manage the room.
These are all CPO parts of the puzzle.
I love hearing how you got into your role. We often think it’s very linear but in my experience, there are so many of us who had organic paths there.
Oh, yeah. I think it brings a kind of colour and depth to the position and your experience once you get there because I am committed to not hauling up the ladder behind myself. I'm committed to developing other people and nothing gives me greater joy than seeing people that I've line-managed over the years becoming VPs and C -C-suite. I love that. What I say to people, particularly women, is never let yourself be held back by overly prescriptive job descriptions or other people, essentially. The future is what you want it to be. That ability to hustle and apply a degree of creativity to your career is one of the reasons that I work in tech, frankly.
(When hiring at scale) planning ahead is one thing you have to consider. You have to consider not only from the strategic perspective – where's the market going? What kind of profile of people do I need to hire? – but also literally, how many people do I need?
I love that. Before we talk about leading through exponential hiring can you share a bit more background about Mews to set the stage?
Mews has been around for about 13 years. It was started by a guy called Richard Valtr in Prague. He brought the current CEO, Matt on board a few months after he'd started. Richard's now the founder but he’s an executive so he's very hands-on. So I consider myself to have two bosses. The growth has been pretty pokey throughout but has taken on new momentum recently. We just got series C plus funding, which took us to unicorn status. We're growing about 60 to 80 % year on year. I'm hiring between 30 and 50 people a month. So by any metric, we're growing. I run the People team, a people and hiring team of 40 people. We just hit the thousand-people mark. We operate globally, we're remote first. Our leadership team is globally distributed, in New York, Prague, Dublin, Stockholm, Brighton, London, and Amsterdam.
I assume that the rest of the thousand are also globally distributed.
Absolutely. We are genuinely remote first, we try to hire around entities, because obviously, taxes, laws, companies, things like that, mechanical details, as a COO, I'm sure you understand what I'm talking about. So we have people who are completely distributed from Australia to Montreal, San Francisco, Dublin, Prague, all over Europe, Berlin, Paris, and Barcelona. Yeah, so absolutely everywhere.
Great so about 1,000 employees and hiring 30 to 50 a month. You are definitely in a big growth phase. When you came in was exponential hiring the expectation?
I started in January of last year and was told we've got to hire 35ish people a month through the first half and then it’ll probably slow down the second half of the year and then it didn’t. And then we got C+ funding. So it’s like, the next year is growth too. It’s just that we’ve seen an opportunity. We track revenue per headcount and all that kind of thing [so are focussed on efficiency too] but the emphasis since last year and the remainder of this year will be on growth.
As a leader, as a leadership team, what do you have to consider when scaling 30 to 50 people a month at that scale?
(When hiring at scale) planning ahead is one thing you have to consider. You have to consider not only from the strategic perspective – where's the market going? What kind of profile of people do I need to hire? – but also literally, how many people do I need?
Ramp times mean that we need to start thinking now because I need to start hiring now for people to start in September to be ready to roll in January of next year. So planning ahead is critical. In building the employee value proposition, everyone has to contribute to hiring at that scale. Everyone has to contribute to onboarding at that scale. It is not a people team activity, or it's not solely a people team activity. It just can't be. So we're training managers on hiring. We have to ensure the quality of the hires because we want people to stay and produce. We need to think about the technicalities of onboarding.
So supply chains, that's 50 computers a month. We're just about to hit a point where we've got a big office in Prague, we've got three floors in a beautiful building in Prague, and we've always held the onboarding in that office. In June, we're gonna surpass the number of people that we can fit into that. So there are these little technicalities, but it just becomes a massive project because essentially what you're planning now is an event. You're not just bringing people in to train them using a few PowerPoint decks. It's also critical that we think about how to onboard different sorts of folks. So you're onboarding people from different countries, different languages, different nationalities, different sets of expectations, different functions. They have different needs. Ramp time needs to be taken into account.
You also need to be thinking about how to bring people into the culture of the organization. That can be simple things like setting up a buddy system, but it's also making travel easier. We fly everyone to Prague for a week for their onboarding. That's quite a lot of activity. We're also doing a, we've got what's called MewsCon, which is our all company get together in July of this year. So that's a thousand people that we're now creating an event for. We’re trying to make these off-sites and these travel experiences much more intentional. The money we save on offices enables us to redirect the money from offices to these more intentional get-togethers. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what we need to think about in terms of this kind of growth.
Mews, because of the pace that we're growing, we're often outgrowing the rate of ambition and we have a lot of ambitious people working for us. So you have to be thinking further ahead in terms of the scope and profile of the people that you need. You have to be thinking in every area, is it now time to bring in a specialist? Because maybe five years ago, person X who's been here for three years can give that a go. Whereas now we need someone that's done this before now. And that's hard for people. We try to balance that with making sure that we develop talent internally as well because that's critical and it helps us maintain the culture as well.
Yeah, there’s so much decision-making at the exec team layer – where do we put the resources? How do we allocate them? How do we think about the right kinds of roles?
Yes, absolutely. It's interesting, isn't it? I'm guessing your experience has been somewhat similar. At earlier stages, there is a more organic approach to workforce planning. As you grow, it has to become more intentional. That’s hard culturally. There’s this pain point around at what point do you professionalise, at what point do you specialise, and what that means for the types of people that you hire. One of the things that I've had in previous companies that haven't grown quite as quickly is that the ambition of the individuals within that company always overtakes the pace of growth of the company. So you're constantly having to go and look outside and find people because the people from within need to go on and do their own thing and grow and develop their careers.
Mews, because of the pace that we're growing, we're often outgrowing the rate of ambition and we have a lot of ambitious people working for us. So you have to be thinking further ahead in terms of the scope and profile of the people that you need. You have to be thinking in every area, is it now time to bring in a specialist? Because maybe five years ago, person X who's been here for three years can give that a go. Whereas now we need someone that's done this before now. And that's hard for people. We try to balance that with making sure that we develop talent internally as well because that's critical and it helps us maintain the culture as well.
We've all got a narrative that we tell to explain what culture is. The most helpful narrative that I have found is taken from anthropology, which is that culture is what happens when people come together. Stories help us to articulate that culture.
How do you decide to hire versus develop? How do you figure that out and factor that into your hiring?
It's a really important question and it's impossible to get absolutely right. What I try to do in every organisation, regardless of size or state, is to ensure there’s some kind of consideration of performance and build it into the cadence of the organization as early as possible. Some organisations culturally don't like performance reviews. Some really love the structure. You have to navigate that as a Chief People Officer and determine what works in the environment that you find yourself in. At Mews, there was no consistently applied performance management process at all so we use a platform called Culture Amp. We have built a cadence of six-monthly performance reviews. That enables you at least to start assessing the individuals and understanding where people are at, and where people want to go because you can apply this kind of logic and say, right, we need three salespeople with this amount of experience. But if they don't want to do it, you've got to go somewhere else to find it. It has to be founded in dialogue with your people. And for me, a performance management process of whatever flavor you decide to adopt is the basis for that dialogue. The organization gets to say what they need. They can apply competency frameworks, they can apply formal job descriptions. There are different ways of doing it but the individual also gets to contribute to that process and is a participant in that process. That's when it gets exciting because you've got this living development culture.
I come from performance management, I’m a former Director of Career Development, so I’ve built lots of career ladders, and leadership competencies models so obviously I enjoy it. It’s hard to get right and there are lots of problems with it but what I like best about it is that it starts a conversation. It forces the conversation to happen about the expectations, how you are doing, and where you want to go.
Absolutely. It carves out time in organizations where there is rarely [any time available], no one has time in these sorts of organizations. It helps you to spot gaps and also helps you spot opportunities for people. One of the things that we've just done at Mews is launch a remarkable managers program. We also have a future managers program because you have to be thinking about the future. In these sorts of organisations, people are constantly catapulted into situations that they've never done before. That starts right at the top. Matt and Richard have never done this before. They bring in people like me who kind of have done it before but throughout the organization, that problem is perpetuated, right? So we’ve started to build training programs to anticipate that need. But until you have a performance management framework, you can't identify who those people are going to be. The other really exciting area is of course key talent.
Everyone gets in a twist about performance management because they feel that it's a stick rather than a carrot. But when performance management gets really powerful is when it becomes a carrot as well. So, here are our key talent. What are we going to do for them? Where are they going? We've got lots of opportunities because we're so fast growing. There are lots of different ways in which you can develop those people, but you have to know about them to do so.
I understand that people feel like performance management is a stick but I’d argue that’s the execution of it – don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. When people say they want no performance management…you’re about to hit an iceberg because you’re not having the conversation and people don’t understand the expectations. So I’d say that’s an implementation problem.
I absolutely agree with you. I try to build into management enablement programmes that support the ability to have an adult to adult conversations about performance and development. If you focus people on that future goal, you ask them to stick their heads above the parapet and say, “Right, where do you want to be in 10 years?” It starts to get exciting and you inject that excitement into the conversation. Managers sometimes get nervous about that because they think that what they're going to be asked is for a pay rise or when am I going to get a promotion. And the conversations are very transactional. If you frame it correctly, if you train the managers correctly and you encourage them to think about development as the context for the performance conversations, suddenly things open up and get quite fun.
It’s interesting when people say they’re worried people will ask for money or a promotion, I think that happens when you haven’t done all the other work. So they do not feel valued, feel appreciated, and they don’t understand the expectations, or where they can go. You and I can have a long conversation about performance management but let’s go back to the topic. How do you hire at scale without eroding the culture or how do you evolve it because it can’t stay 100% the same? I think you have some principles but it has to evolve.
I couldn't agree with you more. As a Chief People Officer, I'm asked to talk about values and to help create values and culture.
We've all got a narrative that we tell to explain what culture is. The most helpful narrative that I have found is taken from anthropology, which is that culture is what happens when people come together. Stories help us to articulate that culture.
When you are starting a company, the culture is formed off the back of the identity that the founders inject into the organization through the stories that they tell about themselves and the birth of the organization. Those stories are really great. But if you work on the assumption that culture is organic and living, then you're absolutely right. It will have to continue to evolve. So what I do is look for leaders who have the humility to understand that at some point they're going to have to distribute the ownership of culture. And they do that by allowing other people to tell their stories. Now you can frame the kind of context in which those stories are told, culture can be framed by the identities of the founders and often is because people who founded companies tend to have big personalities of one flavor or another. And that's great. We love these people. They're brilliant and charismatic and exciting to be around. The best and the most durable of those founders find a way to allow other stories to emerge through a variety of different ways.
One of the ways we do that at Mews is we have a really emerging but quite strong communication architecture. We're building assets that allow us to communicate in a variety of different ways. So one of those assets is something called the bouche. (The bouche is a play on words. It's an a-mews-e bouche.) And our bouche is our weekly all hands. It is one hour every Friday afternoon. Every other week we invite a client, a customer who is interviewed for precisely 15 minutes. Then we also have something at the end of it called hammer time when anyone can ask any question of anyone. And it is really interesting. Sometimes it can be a bit pokey, a bit spicy. But what Matt and Richard have done so cleverly, is they've created an environment in which those stories emerge. So people ask about something that matters to them and they can expect an answer. But it's also an environment in which it's also safe to answer. Because of course, it's hard answering spicy questions in front of 500 people. But there is such an enjoyment of the bouche. It's funny, it's lively, it's vibrant, it's part of our culture and contributes to our culture. The other thing we’re starting to do more is expand on the concept of employee resource groups. These have historically been about minority groups, establishing ways of communicating with each other, ways of sharing, and ways of advocating, which is incredible and important. We're trying to build on that to have everyone, anyone can create a community around that area of activity. It remains to be seen how that works out. But if you've got an environment in which the bouche can happen and people can ask difficult questions and challenge each other and be very open, the environment in which communities can grow and develop and expand in theory I think it should work. It remains to be seen but those are two things that we do.
Is there anything else we haven't covered or advice you might offer to people who are going through exponential hiring growth?
The thing I love most about my job is that it’s hilarious because people are hilarious and trying. I don’t mean to be flippant because sometimes we deal with the most serious issues that our business has and I take that seriously.
The way you create a safe environment in which people want to stay and people want to contribute is that you don’t pull up the ladder behind you, you bring people to the table with you. But you also have to have fun and find what is funny because these companies are absolute chaos. Stuff emerges, and pops up like whack-a-mole all over the place.
Every day it’s like what are we doing now? When did that happen? They said what? Why did they do that? The only way to stay sane is to find enjoyment and humor in these situations. So that's what I would say, try and find the enjoyment in what you do. If you don't or can't, then it's probably not the right place for you. We have one life, right? It’s a gift to work with people that make you laugh. It’s an absolute gift.
The way you create a safe environment in which people want to stay and people want to contribute is that you don’t pull up the ladder behind you, you bring people to the table with you. But you also have to have fun and find what is funny because these companies are absolute chaos. Stuff emerges, and pops up like whack-a-mole all over the place.
Yeah, I think about finding the balance between being serious and lighthearted in my work because (working with leadership teams) is very serious. When you find enjoyment, it makes the ride much better.
Yeah, because it absolutely does. I also think it helps us come up with more creative solutions. If we take ourselves super seriously, we're just none of us are above that. None of us are perfect. I'm a big believer in vulnerability, trust based on vulnerability and humor is a way of sensitively surfacing vulnerability, and bringing it to the table enables you to build that sort of relationship of trust. We are in this together, right?
If you don't have that relationship where you can tease each other, where you can find enjoyment in the same things, then it's going to be a tough journey. Why would you want it to be a tough journey? The fact that we get to do this work is an extraordinary thing. I talked to my 16-year-old daughter, she's thinking about changing the world. I want her to understand that it's possible to change the bit of the world that you have control over.