Hiring At Scale: Insights From OneStudyTeam’s Head Of Talent

Danny cut his teeth as an agency-side tech recruiter, before leading talent acquisition at Circle, an innovative and disruptive fintech firm recently valued at $9 billion. He also worked as a Technical Talent Manager at DraftKings, where his “streamlined, efficient and repeatable” recruitment process saw the team grow from 25 to more than 125 engineers.

In a recent episode of Hiring On All Cylinders, our founder and CEO, Chris Abbass, sat down with Danny to explore his extensive experience in talent acquisition and hear how he has led ambitious teams through challenging times.

To hear Danny’s practical solutions and best practices for hiring at pace, listen to episode 12 of Hiring On All Cylinders “Navigating Recruitment In A High-Growth Environment.”

Short on time? Read on for five key takeaways from the podcast session. 

All too often, “high growth” also means “high risk.” How can you maintain a steady stream of high-quality candidates when you’re hiring at pace?

The answer, reckons Danny, is to cut the guesswork out of the equation. Forget your gut instinct. Make everything quantifiable, process-driven, and absolute – at least until you have room to breathe.

“I want to get to the point where we can make a hiring decision without the ‘I thinks’ and ‘I feel’, so it’s quantifiable,” Danny explains.

And it all starts at the interview stage.

“What we do is to really start with the basic interview process. We create an interview process that the entire company can adhere to.

“The question should be: ‘what’s two plus two?’,” he adds. “They either get the answer ‘four’ or they don’t, right?

“Let’s say it’s an engineer. We want to create a coding assessment. We shouldn’t say, ‘yeah, I think this person did really well. They were a little off on this or a little off on that, but I think they generally got it.’

“I don’t want that. We want ‘they got the most efficient solution or they didn’t.'”

Danny stresses the importance of evaluating your approach. In the high-pressure world of high-growth hiring, you don’t have time to stop and take stock. So you should treat every process as a work-in-progress – an iterative step on the never-ending journey to perfection.

Your hires are your case studies. As Danny explains, “what we’ll do is – 30, 60, 90 days after they start – we’ll evaluate a new hire. And at day 90, if we’ve got a top performer, let’s look at their interview process.

“Were they a top performer in the interview process? Great! If they weren’t, where did we miss? If we said someone’s great and they’re not doing so great, where did we miss and how do we change?

“We just iterate on that, always. I don’t think there’s ever an end. We’re always trying to make that better.”

We’ve all been there. You pass on a hire because they didn’t quite meet the criteria, only for them to excel someplace else.

Top-quality candidates are not always terrific interviewees. Should you take a chance on them, just in case? Is there room for risk-taking in high-growth recruitment? 

Danny sees the value in taking risks, but only when you have space to push the brakes. After all, when a business is experiencing rapid growth, it often lacks the resources to help risky hires deliver on their potential.

“I think, for the most part, when we’re scaling quickly, we don’t have the bandwidth to be able to take risks,” he says.

“Even if someone’s super high-potential – OK, great. But they need coaching. Who’s going to coach them when we’re all running around like crazy?

“So I think those sorts of hires are a little bit for when we’re… I wouldn’t say ‘slow.’ But when we’re under more control.”

And when a risky hire doesn’t work out, it’s not just a case of lost time or wasted resources. As Danny notes, it’s often the candidate who suffers most.

“We’re really doing that person a disservice if we hire them with this amazing potential – if someone can teach them – and we don’t teach them.”

To succeed in a high-growth business, talent teams must break out of their silos and start building strong, fruitful relationships across all levels of their business.

But getting buy-in is often easier said than done. As Danny says, “so many times, internal recruiters are treated like an agency or customer service. For example, ‘go find me this profile.’ We’re not partners in those scenarios.”

The solution? Take pride in your own talents, and don’t be shy about sharing them.

Danny explains: “The way I say it to our engineering leaders, to our data leaders, to our customer success leaders is, ‘you guys are the experts in your space. We are the experts in hiring. When we come to a meeting with you, we want to learn everything we can about your space so that we can be better recruiters for you. But also, we’re going to teach you everything we know about hiring to make you guys better hirers.’

“With that knowledge transfer, there’s ultimately buy-in from them. It’s no longer ‘hey, we’re engineering. You’re recruiting.’ It’s, ‘we’re trying to hire for engineering.’”

Talent acquisition is a trial by fire. As Chris points out, “there’s no degree for recruiting.” We learn through observation, grit, and good old-fashioned trial and error.

And this means we don’t always have the answers – especially in situations like hyper-scale recruiting, where unwritten rules often go out the window.

Danny’s view is simple: we shouldn’t struggle alone. If a recruiter hits a roadblock, they should feel ready to ask for help – preferably from someone who’s been there, done it, and learned from the experience.

“I would encourage them to reach out to people whose backgrounds show that they’re successful in those areas,” Danny says.

“For me, if there’s someone who’s junior and wants to learn, I’m always willing to talk about this stuff. I’m passionate about it. It is my life’s work.

“So I would say reach out to people. Find a mentor and pick their brain, whether it be over a drink, over lunch, over coffee, over Zoom… If you find somebody willing, take their little knowledge and then make it your own.”

After all, we’re in this together. And when we help other recruitment professionals succeed, we add value to the industry as a whole.

“There’s no training. There’s no degree. You’re thrown out there and you sink or swim, right?

“So I guess my whole point is that I want my profession to be something that’s wildly respected. And if there’s another talent leader who might be struggling, I’d love to see them be successful because that means what I do is respected. And it’s successful. And people are good at it.”

Ready to learn more? Listen to the full podcast below.