James Cash Penney, who founded the department store chain J.C. Penney in 1902, once said, “Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.”
When it comes to today’s cross-collaborative startups and tech companies, Penney’s wisdom certainly rings true.
In Colorado this year, a variety of tech companies are experiencing rapid growth, which leads to exciting new strategies, new collaborative environments and lots of new hires. To learn more about what these growing companies are experiencing and who they are looking to bring on board, we sat down with some top employees at Datadog, Alteryx, Tortuga AgTech and GigSmart.
What do your hiring plans look like this year? And what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
Datadog is growing this year in a big way. We’ll be looking to add more teams across all of our major offices, with a big push in Denver where we’ll be adding two more sales development teams in Q3/Q4. We’re really excited to work with individuals who have a core set of DNA traits that we’ve found to be successful over the years. At our foundation, I believe that starts with coachability and work ethic, and people who want to work hard and get better every day.
One of the most important traits an individual can have is natural curiosity. Being a problem-solver who continually finds solutions to customer needs — while being curious about how those solutions make our customers successful — is an invaluable skillset.
Datadog At a Glance
What steps are you taking to making sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
The past year has shown that there are a lot of different ways to ensure employees feel comfortable through their company’s growth, while also dealing with natural challenges. An overlooked aspect of what makes these changes so successful is leadership enablement. Ensuring that leaders have the tools necessary to help their team members be successful, as well as being empathetic to the challenges of this past year, is something that has been a big focus for Datadog.
Our Manager Enablement Excellence Program is specifically designed to help new and senior managers alike drive results, develop people and foster a positive culture. Through an innovative combination of facilitator-led workshops, cohort sessions and leadership spotlights, leaders will learn what is expected in order to be successful as a manager at Datadog. This is especially important for new employees to feel confident that the people coaching and leading them are well prepared to enable them to learn and grow. Programs like these have been instrumental in ensuring that this period of rapid growth goes smoothly for employees.
Our Manager Enablement Excellence Program is specifically designed to help new and senior managers alike drive results, develop people and foster a positive culture.”
What is the most interesting challenge facing your team at the moment? And how are you working to overcome it?
I think the most interesting challenge of working with a rapidly growing team is maintaining the high standards you have for the individuals that made the company so successful in the first place. To do so on a much larger scale, it’s about finding the right people. As a team, we have invested heavily in campus recruiting as well as a world-class sales enablement program that allows our team members to be case studies for their own networks.
The best recruitment tool is revealing to candidates — particularly through the success stories of our team members — that the rapid career growth available to them at Datadog is something that many sellers rarely get so quickly in their careers. The key to being able to do this at scale is hiring great people who, in turn, create an amazing culture that revolves around the growth mindset and never compromising on standards for success. When everyone on the team is working together to achieve a collective goal, the workspace becomes a lot more successful and exciting.
What do your hiring plans look like this year? And what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
At Alteryx, we’re very excited about the growth we’re seeing this year and will continue to experience in the future. We continue to expand the scope of our search beyond locations with offices since we’re now offering a virtual-friendly, flexible working environment. That means that we are now hiring people in markets where we haven’t hired in the past.
Our biggest hiring needs are in sales, go-to-market, customer success, and engineering functions, but we’re excited to talk to anyone who has a growth mindset. We are looking for people who get excited about having the space to start something new or to help us improve something already in place.
Alteryx At a Glance
What steps are you taking to making sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
We’re a values-driven company, so first and foremost the key to our success will be ensuring that the people within the company are aligned to those values so we can make progress toward our goals together.
We’re also focusing on making sure that our candidate and new hire experience is the best that it can be. We’re committed to creating an amazing candidate experience through a seamless and effective hiring and onboarding process. Regardless of the outcome of the interviews, we want everyone who speaks with our teams here at Alteryx to have a positive experience. We are also making more enhancements to our onboarding program so that new employees can get up to speed as easily and quickly as possible.
We’re committed to creating an amazing candidate experience through a seamless and effective hiring and onboarding process.”
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year? And what impact will this project have on the business?
I’m excited by the opportunity we have to drive diversity, equality and inclusion at Alteryx. This year, we anticipate continued growth, and we’re offering a flexible working environment. Together, these factors give us the opportunity to grow in an equitable way, doubling down on our commitment to equality as a value.
One growing initiative that is driving diversity and inclusion within Alteryx is our internship program. Our 2021 intern class is six times bigger than our 2020 cohort, and a majority of the class self-identify as persons of color, with gender parity as well. We’re looking to offer full-time roles to standout interns, so we’re really excited by the new perspectives that this next generation of talent offers.
What do your hiring plans look like this year? And what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
We are growing fast due to our $20 million Series A funding in March of this year. We’ve doubled our employee count between February and June and will be close to triple in size by year-end. The majority of our hires are engineers (both software and hardware), but we are also adding to our data and machine learning, field operations, production, and business and admin teams.
We look for people who are very mission and values-aligned, have a passion for what we do, and who will add something new or unique to our team’s culture. We do this by involving a cross-functional team in the interview process to allow for a complete and multi-faceted evaluation in both directions.
Tortuga AgTech At a Glance
What steps are you taking to making sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
We have a lot of people support processes and channels for communication that were well established before we began this period of growth, so we’re staying focused on continuing to do what has worked in the past. For example, we have a town hall every two weeks where anyone can ask any question of the founders. We have a quarterly all-company pulse survey and deep discussion where we address how well we’re working together as a team, how well we’re living our values, what behaviors and patterns are contributing positively, and what we might need to tweak or change significantly.
We’ve matured our onboarding process to ensure people hit the ground running, receive clear expectations, integrate into their team, and learn how we live our values. As a company, we invest in one-on-ones to check in and see how things are going — by the founders, the people ops team and within each working team. We continually solicit feedback from our new hires to our longest-tenured employees on what is going well and what could improve. We also have activities to help everyone get to know one another, including a weekly social hour on Thursday afternoons and all-company social events.
We’ve matured our onboarding process to ensure people hit the ground running, receive clear expectations, integrate into their team, and learn how we live our values.”
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year? And what impact will this project have on the business?
Luckily for us, our company’s mission and vision are quite stable. The project we’re tackling this year is how to scale and support multiple commercial farm deployments at once. This challenge touches every part of the business — from the production team building and shipping the robots, to the hardware and software design teams improving our robot fleet performance, through to the operations team who is on the ground running the show, and of course the people ops and admin team who support everyone’s success. Being able to show that we can scale multiple farm deployments at once will give our farmer customers confidence that we can grow this company effectively and rapidly to help solve their biggest problems. Helping our customers’ farms succeed is, of course, our main business goal.
What do your hiring plans look like this year? And what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
In 2020, we were fortunate enough to grow our team and are proud to have added 20 new employees. This year we plan to continue this growth and are focused on expanding our sales team. We have added new roles to increase our business operations coverage, including support personnel to cover evenings and weekends. Key characteristics we look for in new team members include passion, collaboration and ambition.
GigSmart At a Glance
What steps are you taking to making sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
From our inception, we invested in tools to foster employee collaboration. Fortunately, we’ve experienced such significant growth as a company that scaling our processes, culture and teams have been challenging and rewarding. When the circumstances of last year took our in-person team remote, we used tools like Slack and Zoom to connect, develop employee relationships and facilitate clear communication.
Our development team opened an “always on” Zoom session called Coffee Chat where members of the team were encouraged to meet with each other, just like they would in a physical office. We also launched biweekly Zoom trivia to ensure the company had some lighthearted time to connect.
As we grow, we’ve added a new role to support onboarding, developing a program that is consistent, measurable and tailored to specific teams to ensure new employees are successful.
From our inception, we invested in tools to foster employee collaboration.”
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year? And what impact will this project have on the business?
This year we are focused on doing everything we can do to support getting people back to work — full-time, part-time or on a flexible basis. We are tackling bid-based home project work next, making Get Workers a single solution to source all types of labor. This will allow businesses and homeowners to connect with skilled workers across any type of work they need help with and maximize the number of opportunities for work available for job seekers.
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