Matt Alder talks to William Uranga from GoDaddy
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
Links from this episode:
How To Rech Tech Talent Whitepaper
Papirfly Website
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
This week's podcast is brought to you by Paperfly, brilliantly simple employer brand software that allows HR professionals to take control of their employer brand marketing. Paperfly delivers over 70% savings on global production spend whilst ensuring it is delivered authentically and consistently in every market and in any language. To find out why Paperfly are the trusted partner of companies such as BP, Ferrero, Rolls Royce, PNG and Unilever, please visit www.marketingmadebyu.com. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind at all the ages of history. 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 Durango 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 Durango from GoDaddy. William, how are you? Doing very well now, thank you for having me. Good stuff. What's the weather in sunny California looking like today? 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 of country, but it's still nice, it's still home. 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? Certainly. 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 the organizations. Some known, some were a little bit smaller in names, so they include Tivo, Yala, Reba, Groupon, and currently I'm with GoDaddy. Cool, okay. 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 the scale and the recruiting challenges. What sort of scale you're recruiting on, what sort of people you're recruiting, what locations are you recruiting into? 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 mirror 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 doing with. 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 in 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. We have about 13 million customers worldwide, 75% of which are considered to be very small businesses in which they have less than five employees. We are helping them with a variety of different products to help them start or grow their very small business. That includes technology-enabled commerce, building websites, being discovered from the 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 range from your software engineers to assets to DevOps to NOPS and everything in between as far as level and experience. You mentioned that you look at corporate recruiting and tech recruiting. Is there a difference in the challenges between the two? Well, so that always depends on the location. For example, the finance community, so people that have their CPAs and SOX 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 on 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, no, 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, be very much competing with neighboring companies for similar skill sets. So it does vary both on the level and the skill set of the population that you're going after. And you mentioned the amount of competition you have, particularly in the Bay Area Silicon Valley. 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? 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 Eddy as being a 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 was a great opportunity to see some of the partnerships that Good Eddy has with the Media Lab there in Cambridge. And to have those sort of stories, a little vignettes of stuff 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 Good Eddy. So there's just a couple of the things but requires a lot of, a lot of time, a lot of effort and certainly a lot of creativity too. 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 the main motivations are and how do you kind of get those across in those stories? 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 ambition around shifting the global GDP in favor of the very small business. And that's something you can look at in 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. And that's where we'd like to see that the measurable impact on such a great scale. Now, that's big. So for an 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. And three, that you've got a good reputation from a development standpoint. 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 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. That's very interesting. The whole kind of idea of 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 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 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? Well, that's a good question too. We always look at technology as a force multiplier and so anything that can help simplify the amount of steps that a recruiter needs to make to contact somebody is huge. So 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 from a 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 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 hacker rank 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 percent of people that apply and move forward from there. It tends to be something pretty responsive, well-responded to by applicants that are familiar with this 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. Within 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. And in terms of the applicants coming through the process, do you really focus on giving them a great experience? Is Candida experience a differentiator for you or is it something that isn't, you know, is no more important than anything else? Well, no, it is super important. In fact, you know, for things that you do care about, we measure, right? Or talk a lot about it. And we certainly do talk a lot about it. We do have a Candida Experience survey that we send out to everybody that comes on site or if they were remote and doing a more formally reprocessed, we would send it to them as well. And those are good to get the scoring and the image 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, you know, 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. 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? 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 the sense, get a rep, 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. We're able to talk about, hey, if we want to open up a dev center in Malaysia, here's where we would do it. 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 and let along with the business leaders. So first things first, we'd like to get to that operational phase and then we'll get this unique phase. I would be quite hopeful that we would be quite squarely in that operational phase by this time next year. William, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you for your time. Great talking with you. My thanks to William Yeranga. 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. This is my show. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
Matt Alder talks to William Uranga from GoDaddy
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
Links from this episode:
How To Rech Tech Talent Whitepaper
Papirfly Website
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
