This week on Turpentine VC, Andy Price, a veteran executive recruiter and venture capitalist, joins Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich from HR Heretics, a Turpentine podcast, for a deep dive into the crucial aspects of hiring, retaining, and developing top talent. Andy has built leadership teams for renowned companies like Snowflake and DocuSign. Check out HR Heretics for more conversations like this one (links below)
—
🙏 Help shape our show by taking our quick listener survey at https://bit.ly/TurpentinePulse
—
SPONSORS:
📑 Discover Carta, the innovative end-to-end accounting platform revolutionizing private fund management with streamlined operations and on-demand insights. Experience the new standard at carta.com/investors.
☁️ Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds and offers one consistent price. Oracle is offering to cut your cloud bill in half. See if your company qualifies at oracle.com/turpentine
🤲🏼 GiveWell spends 50,000 hours every year doing deep-dives into different charitable programs to try to find the ways to do the most good for your dollar. GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations and only directs funding to a few of the HIGHEST-IMPACT opportunities they’ve found. Visit https://www.givewell.org to find out more or make a donation. (Select PODCAST and enter Econ 102 at checkout to support our show.)
💥 Head to Squad to access global engineering without the headache and at a fraction of the cost: head to https://choosesquad.com/ and mention “Turpentine” to skip the waitlist.
—
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
Listen and subscribe to HR Heretics:
-
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hr-heretics-how-cpos-chros-founders-and-boards-build/id1712407491
-
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1WML9AfadzaH9WCR4HHqbZ
-
Substack: https://hrheretics.substack.com/
—
LINKS:
Artisanal Ventures: https://artisanalv.com/
—
FOLLOW:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andyprice1/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nolan-church/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellidragovich/
—
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE EPISODE:
- Even at top companies like DoorDash, executive hiring only succeeds two-thirds of the time, while most firms see one-third success rates.
- To mitigate hiring failures, recruiters must deeply understand a company's problems and weaknesses, not just focus on their strengths.
- Back-channel references are crucial but must be handled carefully, with recruiters making vague inquiries without revealing specific roles or companies.
- The ideal number of references is 5-7 meaningful ones, focusing on depth of conversation rather than quantity of references.
- Founders often get attached to "shiny new" executive candidates and forget about the people who helped build the company.
- When layering an existing executive, the person needs to be involved in the interview process but with clear expectations about their role.
- The best companies like Snowflake and ServiceNow succeed through seamless executive transitions and continuity.
- To help up-and-coming executives scale, companies need to invest in advisory networks and strong board members who can provide mentorship.
- The best executives rarely actively job hunt - instead, they study industry trends in their spare time and maintain relationships with select recruiters.
- Multiple one-year executive tenures are a red flag; ideal careers show 3-6 year commitments at successful companies.
