The last 18 months have seen colossal talent market disruption in the tech industry, with large-scale layoffs continuing as the companies attempt to rebalance after a post-pandemic hiring frenzy. So how has this ongoing disruption affected start-up and scale-up businesses in the tech sector, and what lessons could the wider talent acquisition community learn from the way talent strategies are being reshaped
My guest this week is Lorraine Buhannic, SVP & Head of Talent at VC firm Juxtapose. Lorraine advises Juxtapose’s portfolio companies on the talent strategies they need to hire, develop and retain high-performing talent in these very volatile times.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Current market challenges
• Recruiting CEOs
• Developing a board-level community of talent
• Why talent is even more critical in a downturn
• The compression of middle management
• The long-term implications of losing experienced managers
• Why the most interesting jobs are often at early-stage companies
• Removing silos in the talent function
• The impact of leadership on hiring and retention
• What does the future look like
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Transcription:
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Matt: Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 568 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. The last 18 months has seen colossal talent market disruption in the tech industry, with large scale layoffs continuing as companies attempt to rebalance after a post pandemic hiring frenzy. So, how has this ongoing disruption affected startups and scale up businesses in the tech sector? What lessons could the wider talent acquisition community learn from the way talent strategies are being reshaped? My guest this week is Lorraine Buhannic, SVP & Head of Talent at VC firm Juxtapose. Lorraine advises Juxtapose’s portfolio companies on the talent strategies they need to hire, develop, and retain high-performing talent in these very volatile times.
Hi Lorraine, and welcome to the podcast.
Lorraine: Hi Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt: An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Lorraine: Sure. I’m Lorraine Buhannic. I’m the Head of Talent at Juxtapose. We’re the largest venture fund focused on company creation and I’m based in Brooklyn, New York.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. So, tell us a bit about your background and how you got to do what you do now.
Lorraine: Yeah, I think I’m one of the rare breed that didn’t, “stumble” into a people or HR job. I think that’s the answer I hear most often. I made the wild and maybe a little crazy at the time choice to go into the talent space right out of school. I worked at the admissions office at [unintelligible 00:02:52] university and found that work really interesting. So, I started my career in recruiting first as a campus recruiter in financial services, recruiting really large classes of summer and interns and analysts. And then after about five years, I moved over into tech where I led recruiting teams for a couple of tech companies that were growing very quickly from about 150 to well into the thousands.
And then over the last 10 years or so, I’ve made a little bit of a pivot where I continue to stay very close to recruiting, but I’ve also expanded into executive coaching and the people space. So, it was most recently the chief people officer at Orchard, which is a real estate tech company based here in New York. I joined very early days when were right around our Series A and had about 80 employees and we scaled to about 1000. I recently took on my role at Juxtapose, which is actually one of our main investors. So, it was a nice way to stay close to Orchard while moving into a slightly different area.
Matt: Tell us a little bit more about the role you’re doing at the moment.
Lorraine: So, these VC talent partner roles are really interesting in that they vary wildly based on the organization that you’re a part of. Juxtapose is a company creation focused firm. So, what that means is I get to do a few really fun things. So, the first is we see CEOs as one of the really critical parts of any of our company builds. So, we only hire CEOs who are really experienced, who’ve done multiple builds before, who know how to be a great leader. So, a big part of my job is actually helping to define the ideal CEO profile and actually find those CEOs to build our organizations.
Once they join, I work really closely with them throughout the onboarding and early build process to help them build their talent infrastructure, everything from compensation and leveling to thinking about the culture and org design that they’re building towards. And then once the build is up and running, we support portfolio companies in two key ways. The first is by providing strategic partnership on all of their executive searches to make sure they build world class executive teams. And then secondly, through a lot of advisory support throughout the build. So, you can think of a few different examples, like the first time a company is thinking about, “Hey, what should I do about parental leaves or benefit selection? Or how do I manage a really tricky early employee exit or termination?” We’re there to support those leaders as they build and scale their teams.
The other thing that we do is, or that I work on is really nurturing a broad network of world class executives. So, CEOs, but also operators across a wide range of functions, making sure that they know about Juxtapose and some of our builds and that we can involve them as advisors, operators, board members, and just general friends of the firm. So, it’s a pretty wide range and it’s one of the things I really enjoy about it.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. So, tell us about the current state of hiring and the talent market in your sector. What are the current challenges that you’re facing?
Lorraine: Yeah, I think we’re in a really interesting moment. After the boom of the recent years, I think we’ve all felt firsthand the reality of the market changing. Lots of companies are laying off. There’s much more of a premium focused on driving to profitability instead of growth at all cost. This rapid pivot is influencing the talent landscape in a lot of different ways. So, I think the first is the importance of talent has never been more critical. When you are operating in a more lean way, every single seat at your organization needs to be filled with a high impact employee.
So, whereas before you were trying to fill as many seats as possible to grow, grow, grow now companies are really focused on growing in the most profitable, thoughtful way possible, which means that each seat needs to be made up of someone who’s adding meaningful value. The second thing is it’s making all of our leaders accountable to do a lot more. I think all employees are feeling far more anxious in their seats. They’re looking for guidance and support from their leadership teams. So, the reality of the moment that we’re in is it demands really exceptional leaders, and I’d say in particular, exceptional frontline managers. So, I think there’s really an imperative to making sure that your line managers are well equipped to help employees navigate through this moment.
From a hiring perspective, it’s really interesting. I think the best talent is still in very, very high demand. And I’d say, as I mentioned, maybe even more so, because there’s a realization that if you have a high impact person, they can have an outsized impact on what you’re trying to do. But we also have a lot more talent on the market as a result of layoffs, including from large technical companies like Facebook and Google and a slew of others. That means that there’s a little bit more talent availability. One thing that I’ve noticed that I think is pretty interesting is I’m noticing that there’s quite a bit of compression in that middle layer of talent. So, think about senior managers, directors. senior directors. Those folks that are actually, in my experience, really important. Because they can help to drive department level results are getting squeezed out in a moment where we’re trying to do more with less, so there’s a bigger emphasis on senior most executives and then scrappy up and comers who can really own more. So, as a result, I think that part of the talent market maybe has a little bit fewer opportunities than they did several months ago.
Matt: And do you think there are any long-term implications of that in terms of losing that experience and that layer of management in the talent market?
Lorraine: I think the most optimistic view here is the managers that are coming out of this moment. So, say if we play things forward, five years into the future, are going to be significantly better managers. They’re going to have had to learn how to manage and operate in a much more challenging environment. So, I think that’s really good. I think they’re also getting significantly better experience than they would have before when they were layered under many more layers of management. I think to your point, though, about that middle of the funnel and those roles that are getting a little bit more compressed, I do think that has implications over the long term.
And it’s a question of how quickly the market turns around. I’m generally optimistic. I think really great companies are being born as we speak. We don’t know which ones are going to break out from the pack. I think many of them will be Juxtapose companies, assuming the market comes back, which I believe that it will, that trend will normalize. But maybe slightly less positive view would be that we end up with a little bit of a gap in that up and coming executive role for those folks and this is advice I’ve shared with a lot of people who are in those seats. I think the most exciting opportunities are at earlier stage companies. So, rather than looking for a director or senior director level role at a large organization, I think the most interesting jobs are at earlier stage companies.
So, seed to Series B, where there’s still a real need for that experience and scar tissue that you get from having been in that seat before and where you can take on a broader scope than you would in a more traditional, larger, more scaled organization.
Matt: One of the things that we’ve been discussing a lot on the podcast this year has been the knocking down of silos and the talent function between talent acquisition and talent management and various other areas. How do all those elements, talent acquisition, talent management, L&D, and employee experience, how do they fit together in startups and scale ups? And what do you think bigger companies can learn from that?
Lorraine: Yeah, I think there’s such a good question, a very astute observation. My experience from building all those functions at Orchard and a few other organizations is that when you’re in a startup environment, everyone has to be a generalist. So, you will likely have specialists in recruiting because recruiting is always an imperative at an early-stage startup, so you tend to have slightly more specialized roles. But then on your HR and people side, everyone has to be able to flex everywhere. I actually think that that’s very powerful because it means that everyone on the team has a really deep understanding of all of these different components. And what does that mean in practice?
It means that the person who in a larger organization might only be responsible for onboarding new hires also understands how we’re training managers and what the performance and engagement programs look like at that organization, and they can connect the dots in a way that makes them more impactful. So, I always encourage heads of people when they’re scaling their teams from maybe a very early startup stage to a slightly more scaled organization to try to maintain as much of that generalist DNA as possible because it has really good implication in terms of all of your employee’s ability to connect the dots and be more impactful. With that being said, at a certain point you do need to bring that more skilled, specific expertise. But if those people join your team on a foundation where the whole team is able to flex and cover for each other and has a really good understanding of the overall people strategy, it’s been my experience that you end up building more impactful people programs.
Matt: You spoke earlier about the work you do to hire the right CEOs for the companies that you’re serving. What impact does leadership have on hiring and retention and how do you make sure you have those right leaders in place?
Lorraine: I think leadership is probably the single biggest critical factor in hiring and retention. And so, if we take one at a time on the hiring front, most of the time when folks are on the market, one of their key requirements is working for a leader that they feel like they can be motivated by, that they can learn from, and whose strategic vision is really compelling at this stage in their career. So, leaders are incredibly important. Most of the time people join a leader, I would argue even more than an organization. So, in getting very tactical as a leader in any organization, really prioritizing recruiting and making sure that you’re making the time to meet with candidates, tell them about the opportunity, and also to really define upfront what is the hire that I’m looking for here. How will I assess it in a way that ensures that you’re maintaining a really unbiased and thoughtful hiring process is really critical.
From an engagement perspective, I would argue leaders have an even more outsized impact. It’s been said many, many times that people don’t leave organizations, they leave managers. I think that there’s a lot of truth to that. When folks are looking to build their careers and being reached out to on LinkedIn constantly about different opportunities, one of the key things that can make the difference between someone staying or going is the degree to which they feel closely connected and aligned with their manager, how much that manager and leader in general has invested in their own development.
If they feel like they have a department head or an executive who really sees them and understands where they’re going and is strategic about carving out time to think through with them what’s next in their career at their organization, the odds of people staying are significantly greater. So, I don’t think it’s possible to underscore enough how critical leadership is in both bringing in and retaining great people in the organization. It’s a matter of making the time, but it’s also a matter of being really intentional about maintaining the integrity of the processes that allow employees to want to join and stay.
Matt: Final question, what does the future look like? How are we going to be thinking about talent in five years’ time do you think?
Lorraine: It’s hard to predict. I think there’s a lot of interesting trends at the moment and part of those are driven by generational changes. As more and more employees from generation Z enter their workforce, they’re putting their own stamp on what workplaces look like. I think generally speaking, they’re looking for relatively more flexibility. They’re much more motivated by feeling like they’re part of a community in addition to an organization than previous generations before. They care a lot about balancing work and life. Part of that is due to COVID, but part of that is also just some of their generational traits. So, I’m really curious to see what that does in terms of employee’s expectations of their employers and as a result how organizations have to shift.
The other really interesting trend that I think will have a big impact on talent over the next five years is technology. Everyone’s talking about AI and I remember being at a conference a few years ago where someone really pitched AI as an amazing solution to essentially ensure that everyone could do their role more efficiently. Time will tell if that’s actually how it shapes out. What’s very clear to me is that AI means that some of the skills that artificial intelligence cannot have. Empathy, relationship building skills, all of the stuff that talent people are working on that can make organizations really efficient are going to become more and more critical because those are hard to replace with technology. So, I think over time we’ll see that there’s more of a premium for those things.
So, off the top of my head, I think those are two of my predictions, but I’m really excited to see what the future holds.
Matt: Lorraine, thank you very much for talking to me.
Lorraine: My pleasure. Thank you.
Matt: My thanks to Lorraine. If you’re a fan of the Recruiting Future Podcast, then you will absolutely love our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast. Not only does it give you the inside track on what’s coming up on the show, you can also find everything from book recommendations, to insightful episodes from the archives and get first access to new content that will help you understand where our industry is heading. For a limited time, subscribe to the Recruiting Future Feast newsletter and get instant access to the video recording of the recent remixed webinar on AI and talent acquisition, featuring some of the smartest thinkers in the industry. Just go to mattalder.me/webinar to sign up. That’s mattalder.me/webinar. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice.
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The post Ep 568: Reshaping Talent Strategies appeared first on The Recruiting Future Podcast.