The last half-century of Colorado history has been a story of prodigious growth. Between 1980 and 2020, the state more than doubled its population, according to the Colorado Sun. The 1990s and 2000s marked a particularly accelerated period of growth for the Centennial State — with suburban growth exploding along the Front Range. And by the early 2010s, financial news outlets like The Street were calling Colorado “a new Silicon Valley.”
Colorado, the story went, was sloughing off its reputation as a rural state without significance beyond agriculture, tourism and natural resources. The tech industry was drawn in by the state’s extremely well-educated workforce. Likewise, workers poured into Colorado to realize the promise of sunshine, snow sports and natural wonders like the Rockies.
This narrative is incomplete, though, without crediting the individuals and organizations that built and continue to build out Colorado’s thriving tech ecosystem. The reason Colorado grew so prolifically? Its people and organizations bet on scaling up their businesses in the state — and succeeded.
Built In Colorado spoke to leaders from three companies that are currently preparing for rapid growth. Learn more about how these organizations are setting themselves up for big futures ahead, and how you can join them.
AirDNA is a provider of data and business intelligence for the travel and vacation rental industry. The company tracks the daily performance of more than 10 million Airbnb and Vrbo properties across 120,000 global markets and equips Airbnb hosts with insights into the short-term rental landscape.
What do your hiring plans look like in 2023?
Talented people are the backbone of our data and software business, and we’re investing in research and development by bolstering our product and engineering organization. We’ve also brought on a new chief product officer, James Malcolm, whose expertise in scaling technologies will be invaluable as we gain the right talent to produce the best solutions.
Talented people are the backbone of our data and software business.’’
What steps are you taking to making sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
Due to our high growth, employee experience is a core focus area for our leadership team. As a data company, we naturally take an empirical approach, starting with benchmarking the health of employee engagement via surveys. They are conducted bi-annually and serve as a way to measure our culture and productivity and identify improvement opportunities.
An example of such an opportunity was better communicating business priorities to the entire organization. We’ve instituted one-page plans, allowing us to share our goals in a structured framework and communication cadence, including quarterly and monthly team meetings. Another opportunity was investing in our current employees while cultivating new talent. When employees requested more support in their growth, we developed a learning and development program.
Finally, we’ve empowered “culture-keepers” to strengthen our sense of community. This group has done a fantastic job spearheading activities that unite us across our Barcelona and Denver offices. We’re currently hosting book clubs, Spanish-language lessons, give-back events and sustainability initiatives.
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year, and what impact will this project have on the business?
Being and continuing to be the best provider of critical data and insights for the short-term rental industry is what excites us as a group. We’re doubling down on our advantage by building our data teams, enhancing our proven processes and expanding our data architecture so that we can continue to deliver depth, breadth and accuracy in our data, which is at the core of every product we provide.
The company behind popular brands including DISH TV, Sling TV, Boost Mobile, DISH Wireless, OnTech and Gen Mobile, DISH’s business reach encapsulates satellite television services, live-streaming and on-demand programming, mobile plans and products and smart home installation services.
What do your hiring plans look like in 2023?
DISH Network has been on a steady growth path since late 2020 as we embark upon building the nation’s first virtualized O-RAN 5G broadband network. 5G will be the lifeblood of a new-world economy, improving quality of life, economic growth and sustainability for all. Over the next 10 years, we’ll be strategically positioned to power the smart cities of the future — smart homes, factories, driverless cars and artificial intelligence — plus the millions upon millions of wearables, sensors, devices and robots that will support them.
With this ambitious company goal, we find ourselves competing for talent in new markets and industries in Denver and across the country.
We continue to invest in the growth of the company and hire for key roles in engineering, technology, digital, cloud, wireless, network development and deployment, marketing, programming, HR, facilities, customer service, installation technicians, sales and more.
We know every candidate could be a customer and vice versa.’’
What steps are you taking to making sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
Customer, candidate and employee experience is of the utmost importance to our organization because we know every candidate could be a customer and vice versa. DISH is proud of being named number one in customer satisfaction for the fifth year in a row by J.D. Power. We are laser-focused on our customers, and we apply the same customer-first principle to our hiring and onboarding approach.
We continue to expand and improve our processes and underlying technologies to deliver a quality candidate experience. We’re revamping our career website to better inform candidates about our organization and opportunities. We’ve simplified our application and decreased the time to apply by three minutes. In addition, we have a cross-functional team in place to create a “wow” onboarding experience for our new hires, help them understand our culture and values and set them up for success.
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year, and what impact will this project have on the business?
Revamping our interview and selection approach within the hiring process. Driving quality in talent and hiring outcomes is a critical initiative for the new year, and as a part of that, we have a plan to create a more value-driven interview and selection process to better enable and educate hiring managers and interviewers, improve the overall experience for candidates and establish processes that enable a higher predictability of success in our selection decisions.
DAT Freight & Analytics is a 44 year old, market leading software company whose mission is to remove the uncertainty from freight. DAT operates the largest truckload freight marketplace in North America. Transportation brokers, carriers, news organizations and industry analysts rely on DAT for market trends and data insights based on 500 million freight matches and a database of $137 billion in annual market transactions.
What do your hiring plans look like in 2023?
We will maintain our 2022 trend of rapid thoughtful growth with plans to increase our total headcount by more than 25 percent in 2023. Our most significant growth will occur on our technology, product and sales teams, which are slated to expand by 40 to 50 percent.
Our most significant growth will occur on our technology, product and sales teams.’’
What steps are you taking to making sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
We know that continuous innovation of our people operations infrastructure is of paramount importance in achieving our mission to be a destination for top talent. We have invested in a number of efforts to ensure top talent thrives at all stages of their employee experience.
We work to set up new hires for success well before they start through a robust pre-onboarding program that connects future DAT’ers with swag and company information. Behind the scenes, we are partnering closely with their future manager to prime our onboarding program and make certain they have the support, tools and knowledge to achieve their best from the moment their MacBook lights up. Our recently revamped onboarding program includes live introductions to our executive team, including our CEO, so that new hires can cement their understanding of DAT’s entrepreneurial origin and how, together, we know no bounds.
We have also doubled the size of our people operations team in the last year. We now have ample resources and domain experts that are eager to drive thoughtful maturation of our people ops infrastructure and provide a personalized, high-impact employee experience for all.
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year, and what impact will this project have on the business?
DAT is a tech company that fully embraces the importance of adopting innovative tech to accelerate our growth trajectory. We eagerly apply this creed to our people ops team and are very excited to assess and deploy streamlined solutions to enhance our ability to attract, select and retain outstanding talent.
We are near implementation phase for a standardized talent selection rubric that will drive efficient, data-driven and objective hiring decisions. We are in request for proposal phase for several off-the-shelf, predictive talent selection augmentation tools that will take the guesswork out of assessment.
We are deploying a new technology platform to embed objective and key results and enable effective performance management across the organization. This technology will greatly help our teams to align with and measure their contributions towards achieving DAT’s top priorities in 2023 and beyond.
2023 will be a year focused on supporting our growth plans through novel exploration, development and implementation of innovative solutions that scale.
