Over the last few weeks I’ve been deep in research mode looking in detail at how the best in house recruiters are finding tech talent in increasingly competitive marketplaces.
The most competitive market of all for tech talent is Silicon Valley and it is always interesting to get an insight into the strategies its most successful tech business are using to keep ahead of the pack.
My guest this week is William Uranga, Director of Technical and Corporate Recruiting at GoDaddy.
In the interview we discuss:
• Why Employer Brand should be every recruiting team’s secret weapon
• The collaboration and creativity required to craft the compelling stories the recruiting team use to engage with top talent
• What specifically motivates people to join GoDaddy
• How his team use technology as a force multiplier and the tools that are working for them.
William also gives us his future vision and discusses the pivotal role their employees social media presence is playing in GoDaddy’s success
Show Links:
How To Recruit Tech Talent Whitepaper
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:53]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 34 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Over the last few weeks I’ve been deep in research mode, looking in detail at how the best in house recruiters are finding tech talent in competitive marketplaces. My findings have been published in a free white paper this week and I’ll put a link to download it in this week’s show Notes. Continuing on the same theme, my guest for this episode is William Uranga from GoDaddy. GoDaddy are competing for tech talent in the most competitive marketplace in the world. To find out how they do it, keep listening. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. My guest this week is William Uranga from GoDaddy. William, how are you doing?
William Uranga [00:01:45]:
Very well, Matt. Thank you for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:46]:
Good stuff. And what’s the weather in sunny California looking like today?
William Uranga [00:01:53]:
Still warm. We’re kind of in our fall season, if you can believe that. We don’t have much leaves changing as we do in other parts of the world or country, but it’s still nice, it’s still home.
Matt Alder [00:02:06]:
Cool, that’s always good to hear. Could you just tell everyone a little bit about your background and what you do now at GoDaddy?
William Uranga [00:02:18]:
Certainly. So I’ve been in the talent acquisition space for a good number of years. I’m not sure if people want to carbon date me, but I’ve been with organizations, some known, some are a little bit smaller in name, so they include TiVo, Uyala, Ariba, Groupon, and currently I’m with GoDaddy.
Matt Alder [00:02:42]:
Cool. Okay. And in terms of recruiting for GoDaddy, I think most people will be familiar with familiar with the brand, but probably not familiar with the kind of scale and the recruiting challenges. What sort of scale are you recruiting on? What sort of people are you recruiting? What locations are you recruiting into?
William Uranga [00:03:06]:
That’s a good point. A lot of people don’t know that we’re an 18 year old company and particularly over the last three years, we have moved from being a mere service provider to be more technology focused in the sense of the products that we’re putting out and being more bleeding edge, if you will, from the technology stacks that we’re dealing with. So I and a colleague of mine have split up the organization. We’re about 4,500 employees here in the U.S. my colleague handles the customer care and operations. I handle all the corporate and technical hiring. We do hiring in Los Angeles, Kirkland, Sunnyvale, San Francisco, the Gilbert Tempe and Scottsdale area, which is where headquarters is in Scottsdale, Cedar Rapids and Cambridge, Massachusetts. To be super clear there, we have other development and customer care centers in Dublin as well as India. And we have about 13 million customers worldwide, 75% of which are considered to be very small businesses, which means they have less than five employees. So we are helping them with a variety of different products to help them start or grow their very small business. And that includes technology enabled commerce, building websites, being discovered from an algorithmic standpoint, as well as email marketing and tools like that. So very scalable tools built on a platform. We hire, at least on the technical side, skill sets that range from your Software engineers to Estets to DevOps to Knox and everything in between. As far as level and experience, you.
Matt Alder [00:05:01]:
Mentioned that you look at corporate recruiting and tech recruiting. Is there a difference in the challenges between the, between the two?
William Uranga [00:05:10]:
Well, so that always depends on the location. For example, the finance community. So people that have their CPAs and SOCs experience, which is a compliance set of standards here in the US That’s a real small pool in the Phoenix Valley. So to find somebody, it is very much hunting like a needle in a haystack to get that. Or you, if you will import the talent by relocating the person to Scottsdale. That’s tough. Of course, finding people that also have experience in, know they’re quite adept in that or react. Those are also much sought after skill sets. And you could be in a very rich environment which you have lots of skill sets, but yet like here in the Bay Area, but be very much competing with neighboring companies for similar skill sets. So it, it does vary both in level and the sort of skill set of the population that you’re, you’re going after.
Matt Alder [00:06:18]:
And you mentioned there the amount of competition you have, particularly in the Bay Area Silicon Valley. What, what sort of methods do you use to differentiate yourself? Is it the employment brand? Are there any particular technologies you use or approaches to recruitment that are particularly successful for you?
William Uranga [00:06:42]:
Well, I would say everybody’s brand is their key or should be their secret weapon in my opinion. We’ve been historically not as well known here at Good Eddie as being a tech, tech brand, if you will. And so how you get that organized from a historical standpoint, how do you tell that story? There’s just nothing short of just good old fashioned hard work. And that involves collaboration with your PR team, your social media team, obviously the executives within your client group, such as engineering. If they’re not out there sharing the story or feel that there’s something worth sharing, then nothing’s going to get beyond the start line, if you will. But that has all kinds of dividends as a result. We get to, in recruiting, get to hear those stories and be part of those. Last week we were in at MIT where we had a tech talk by our CEO, really well received and it was a great opportunity to see some of the partnerships that GoDaddy has with the Media Lab there in Cambridge and to have those sort of stories, little vignettes of stuff that, that is up to me to make sure our team is armed with or aware of so that they can be sharing that with people. So you have your, not only your staff, but you have your, I guess I’ll say rank and file engineers that need to be aware of that. So helping have stories and content to share with and easy to share with is certainly one thing. Making sure that our staff have up to date presence on social media. For those that do, we’ve gone around and helped people, if you will, step up their LinkedIn profiles, their other places where they happen to frequent, so that when people go to see who they’re going to interview with or who they may know on a particular social media outpost, they’re able to see the best foot forward of people that are here at GoDaddy. So there’s just a couple of the things, but it requires a lot of time, a lot of effort and certainly a lot of creativity too.
Matt Alder [00:08:54]:
And in the stories that you’re telling about the brand and the communication that you’re having, what is it that you find motivates people the most to want to come and work for you? I mean, I’m thinking particularly of sort of, you know, the engineers that you’re talking to, where they have, you know, almost infinite choice, you know, of other kind of organizations. What do you think? What do you think the main motivations are and how do you kind of get those across in, in those stories?
William Uranga [00:09:24]:
Right, good question. Because we’re not trying to attract everybody and so as soon as you try to be all things, all people, you’ll basically stand for nothing. So you need to certainly settle on what your strong suits are. For us, we tell a story of making a huge impact around the world. We have a great ambitions around shifting the global GDP in favor of the very small business. And that’s something you can look at a GNP and the component that small businesses make. If you’re able to see an increase, which we think will take a long term period of, I don’t know, a good decade or so, that’s where we’d like to see the measurable impact on such a great scale. Now that’s big. So for engineer, they like those sort of big challenges. They also like to know that you’re using the latest, greatest technology, that you have thought leadership as far as people that can mentor them, or that they can turn around and lead others that are smart. 3. That you’ve got a good reputation from a development standpoint, that you care about the code, that you care about the iterations of being a scrum or agile environment. We find those sort of things resonate quite a bit as well as the obvious things that would be a detractor if you didn’t take care of them, paying fair in your marketplace, having a good culture and so forth. And you can certainly see people are checking those things out with various sites to make sure that those questions are answered before they sometimes even apply.
Matt Alder [00:11:05]:
That’s very interesting. The whole kind of idea of, you know, reputation and social proof and those kind of things obviously very, very important. There seems to be a kind of almost sort of bewildering array of, you know, new technologies in talent attraction and sourcing at the moment. In terms of stuff that’s coming down the pipe, is there anything that you guys are using that’s interesting or anything that you’ve got got your eye on for the future, or is it very much a case of getting on with the employer branding and the stories and everything that’s working for you at the moment?
William Uranga [00:11:47]:
Well, that’s a good question too. We always look at technology as a force multiplier. Anything that can help simplify the amount of steps that a recruiter needs to make to contact somebody is huge. There’s a lot of social aggregators out there. We’ve been playing with several of them in the sense of testing them out. And we have one or two that would seem to be helpful to us and not only just to test recruiter, but also for sourcing as well. If our Sources are able to help by leveraging those tools beyond the tried and true, if you will. That’s a very good sign. So we’re certainly looking at a couple of those. We’ve also started to get a bit smarter around the volume related positions. So our software engineering level one and level two, which tend to be interns and new grads, we continue to get hit by a volume of applicants that are interested in working with us and we simply don’t have the staff to be doing one on one follow up with all of them. So we’ve been in the process of deploying HackerRank as a tool to basically come up with a common scoring level that we will be able to focus our time on the right top 10 or top 20% of people that apply and move forward from there. And it tends to be something pretty responsive or well responded to by applicants since they’re familiar with the sort of hackathons and coding challenges and stuff like that. We’ll probably take that technology and continue to apply it also for our next level up as far as software engineers, we find if we go really with the senior folks, that tends to be a little bit of a put off. So we’re certainly not going to do that. We think the next level up, maybe the three to three year or four year experience level, would be also suitable to use this sort of calibration testing as well. So those are a couple of items that we’ve been doing.
Matt Alder [00:14:06]:
And in terms of the applicants coming through the process, do you sort of really focus on giving them a great experience? Is candidate experience a differentiator for you or is it something that is no more important than anything else?
William Uranga [00:14:24]:
Well, no, it is super important. In fact, for things that you do care about, we measure right or talk a lot about and we certainly do talk a lot about it. We do have a Canada Experience survey that we send out to everybody that comes on site or if they were remote and doing a more formal interview process, we would send it to them as well. And those are good to get the scoring and the live or open text feedback from people. And it’s a great way to hold up a mirror and see how we’re doing both in talent acquisition as well as to share that mirror with our clients that are doing ultimately the hiring for into that team to see how the interview teams are faring as well. So we have that done. We probably report on that about once a month, both at a meta level. So people know generally how we’re doing. And then if there are particular cases in which we get to call attention either to fix or in kudos. We also do that maybe more in private to let people know how we’re doing to work on it. So it is very important to us. Yes.
Matt Alder [00:15:34]:
So final question, what’s next? What do you see as the sort of trends for the future in recruiting? What are we going to be talking about if we were having this interview again in 18 months time?
William Uranga [00:15:48]:
Oh, well, I don’t know that I could quite predict out in the marketplace. We have our hands full here, if you will. When I joined the organization, my VP of talent acquisition Andrew Kargis had joined and the talent acquisition team was very reactive in a sense, get a rec fill it. And it was basically short order cooking, if you will. We’ve taken that and shifted more to be tactical in which we have a very well defined process that’s predictable, that can be expected. And right now we’re wanting to move it into the operational side, which is a very different sort of conversation. It’s not just what is happening, but how can we help you maybe up level the team on your talent? And that requires a lot more metrics, a lot more proactive positioning or identifying key talent, whether it’s for opportunistic hires or key roles within the organization. And then there’s the strategic level that we’d like to get to ultimately where we’re able to talk about, hey, if we want to open up a dev center in Malaysia, here is where we would do it if that was a scenario to discuss. And that’s a very different level of discussion for Talent acquisition to be having with the rest of people operations, let alone with the business leaders. So first things first, we’d like to get to that operational phase and then we’ll get this to unique phase. I would be quite hopeful that we would be quite squarely in that operational phase by this time next year.
Matt Alder [00:17:27]:
William, thank you very much for talking to me.
William Uranga [00:17:30]:
Thank you for your time. Great talking with you.
Matt Alder [00:17:33]:
My thanks to William Uranga. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes and on Stitcher. You can listen to past episodes, subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about me at www.rfpodcast.com. thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
