Why You Should Invest in Creating Career Ladders

To our talent community,

Hiring is a product of business performance and business performance is a product of market conditions and financial health. 

So where are we as we kick off 2024? At the end of Nov 2023, there was an all-time high of $5.8 trillion sitting in money market funds given the rise of interest rates. Private equity firms are sitting on more than $2 trillion in dry powder, uninvested capital waiting to be deployed, and public companies in the S&P 500 have a combined $2.4 trillion in cash. In addition, inflation is steadily coming down and the Fed has signaled that it will start to ‘lower’ rates this year. As a result, the S&P 500 has been near all-time highs. While all of this is true, it certainly feels like we’re still in for a bumpy ride in the talent world. There are some companies that are still under pressure and prior capital raised is starting to run thin with less appetite for investing into unprofitable businesses. Other segments of the market are on fire, looking at you AI, and flush with cash to build for the future. 

Regardless of which position your company is in, we’re anticipating that this will be a year that more recruiting opportunities start to open up — we’re already seeing it within our community. As a result, it’s important to have meaningful career and performance conversations with your team and get them excited about the work ahead, and how they can continue to grow at your company. 

But how do you conduct these conversations with success? One of the most common pitfalls we’ve seen is conducting these without clear expectations, structure and leadership alignment; leaders haven’t agreed and defined what success looks like at each level, and employees don’t understand what’s expected of them and how to grow.

For a successful outcome and to ensure you are conducting these conversations with consistency and fairness, we recommend investing in creating a career ladder: a structured framework that defines the expected level of knowledge, skill, and behavior for each job level based on set criteria.  

When combined with meaningful career and development conversations with your manager, a career ladder establishes purpose, creates clarity, provides structure, gives direction for managers and employees, and ultimately aids in retaining top performers. 

If you’re looking for a partner to either create this framework from scratch or revise an existing framework this coming year, for your people team or other org,  we’d love to help!

P.S. We’re conducting a 2024 Recruiting Learning & Development Goals Survey to see other ways this community is investing in the development of their team members this year. If you are interested in participating, we’ll share the anonymized summary with you.

— Adam, Mike, & Jill

Open Positions

Active searches we're working on with clients + Recruiting leadership openings in the market

 Client Opportunties 

• Adept - Head of Talent

• Insight Partners - VP Talent Strategy and Programs

If you are interested in learning more about any of our open roles, please reach out to applications@gbdtalent.com

 Client Spotlight

Viewport delivers activated, portable audiences, across media channels at massive scale. They make it possible for you to reach your campaign objectives in a transparent way that is targeted and relevant to the consumer, while working with a trusted partner who understands your needs.

We are hiring for their Product Manager, Web. If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to applications@gbdtalent.com.

Upcoming Events

Virtual Leadership and Development Opportunities

Upcoming Events: 

• Training: Sourcing Accelerator (February 6-15th)

  • Learn data-driven approaches to sourcing, how to write outreaches that actually get a response, and advanced search techniques that go beyond LinkedIn — with a DEI lens throughout! 

• Transform (March 12-14th)

  • Attending Transform? We’re hosting an event for our community. Please let us know if you will be at the conference by emailing us at: hello@gbdtalent.com.

• Academy: Leading a High Performing Talent Team (March 19th-28th)

  • You'll gain insights into your leadership style, develop a clear team mission and vision, and acquire effective strategies to lead your team through growth and challenges, all while learning from experienced recruiting leaders and experts from rapid-growth companies.

Playbook Offering: You Guide to Evaluating and Selecting an ATS

Our team at Growth by Design Talent has developed numerous resources and templates over the years through our own in-house experience and through the work we’ve done with our clients. We’re excited to announce that we’re going to be offering these playbooks for download.. 

We’ll be building a catalog of these playbooks over time, and we’ve started with an ATS Evaluation and Selection Guide that’s paired with a bunch of templates that we hope will save teams a ton of time. We've been a part of buy vs. build and ATS vendor selection decisions across companies of all stages from small startup teams of less than 20 to large multinational public companies. In this guide, we’ve packed it full of all of our learnings, process frameworks, and tactics to help you drive an effective ATS evaluation and selection process. We've included templates for evaluating your current system, creating a RFP, gathering feedback through a vendor selection rubric and scorecard, drafting a project plan, and planning for change with your team.

We’re excited to start offering our playbooks to the recruiting community. If you’re interested, please check out gbdtalent.com/product/recruiting-guides , and reach out if you have any questions - hello@gbdtalent.com.

Highlights I Leadership Moves I Reading List

 Placement Highlights

We are thrilled to announce Samara Crasilneck as the new Director of Recruiting Ops for Discord!

 Leadership Moves in the Market

We are tracking recruiting leadership moves in the market. Here are the ones announced this past month. 

• Courtney Avery, former Senior Leadership Recruiting Manager at Meta, has joined Xero as the Global Head of Talent for Product and Tech. 

• Marisa Liao, former Global Head of TA at Binance, has joined Ascenda as the Head of Talent Acquisition.

• Matt Wheeler, former Recruiting Lead at WorkOS, has joined Owner.com as their Staff Recruiter.

• Ben DesRoches, former Senior Recruiting Manager at Meta, has joined firsthand as the Director of Recruiting. 

• William Chinburg, former Head of Leadership Recruiting at Dandy, has joined Archer as the Head of Executive Recruiting.

• Andy Mountney, former Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Atlassian, has joined Chainlink Labs as the VP of Talent Acquisition. 

• Jeff Lu, former Recruiting Manager at Meta, has joined Motorway as the Head of Talent.

• Lauren Ipsen, former Director of Executive Talent at General Catalyst, has joined Decibel as their Talent Partner.

• Rich Cho, former Chief Recruiting Officer at Gem, has joined Alchemy as their Head of People.

• Mary Price, former VP, People at Abnormal Security, has joined OneTrust as the VP of Talent Acquisition.

• Heather Khoury, former VP, Executive Recruiting at New York Times, has joined Hanold Associates Executive Search & Leadership Advisory as a Partner. 

• Kelly Foreman, former Head of Talent at Menlo Labs, has joined the Talent team at Anthropic. 

• Michelle Tang, former Director of Recruiting at Clubhouse, has joined the Talent Team at Inflection AI. 

• Janine O’neil, former Director of Talent at Sequoia Capital, has co-founded ElevenX Talent. 

• Deb Feldman, former Co-Founder & SVP Talent Acquisition at Gray Scalable, Inc., has joined Applecart as the VP of Talent.

• Brian Robinson, former Head of Global Talent Acquisition at Juniper Networks, has joined Zscaler as the Director, GTM Talent Acquisition.

• Time Carlson, former Senior Global Recruiting Leader at Google, has joined the Recruitment team at Meta.

• Anne Foor, former Senior Manager at Square, has joined Instawork as the Director of Talent Acquisition.

• Kevin Minchella has joined Flock Safety as their Recruiting Operations Manager.

• Ashley Dutra, former Partner at True Search, is now the Founding Partner at CoCreate Talent.

• Jessica Iyer, former VP of People and Talent at Mux, is now the Founding Partner at Spruce Talent. 

• Mat Blumenthal, former Director of Technical Recruiting at Instacart, has joined Wave Talent as a Principal Talent Partner.

• Lisa Mitalas, former Director of Talent at PolicyGenius Inc., has joined Manufactured as their Head of Talent.

• Mike Peditto, former Lead Recruiter at FOSSA, has joined Teal as Director of Talent

• John Bush, former SVP, Talent Acquisition, Learning, Org Development & DEISVP, Talent Acquisition, Learning, Org Development & DEI at Zendesk, has joined Attraction at Guidewire Software as VP, Global Talent Acquisition.

• Jen Anker Kaufman, former Twilio and Wiz talent leader, is Illumio’s new Global Head of Talent Acquisition.

Did we miss your career change?  Let us know: hello@gbdtalent.com

📚 What We’re Reading, Watching, and Listening to: 

• Ensuring TA Agility for 2024 Success: Growth By Design Talent’s Mike Joyner - Time to Hire Podcast

• 2023-2024 HR & People Trends - Lightspeed

• Interview Loop Insights (LinkedIn Post) - Benjamin Sesser at BrightHire

• 2023: The year in charts - McKinsey

• The anti-DEI movement has gone from fringe to mainstream. Here’s what that means for corporate America - Fortune by Joelle Emerson

• The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2023 - First Round

• The Most Advanced Recruiting Platform: Gem’s Steven Bartel - Great Entrepreneurs Podcast with RJ Lumba

• Learn to Learn - HBR by Erika Andersen

• Little’s Law: Start-to-Finish Time = Work-In-Process * Cycle Time (LinkedIn Post) - Frances Frei

• VC Dan Portillo on being the Godfather of Talent Partners, Starting his Own Fund, + Experimentation - HR Heretics Podcast with Nolan Church and Kelli Dragovich

• The road ahead reaches a turning point in 2024 - Bill Gates

• How Prompt Guidelines for ChatGPT Mirror Effective Job Description Writing (LinkedIn Post) - Richard Rosenow

• How Apple is Organized for Innovation - HBR, Joel M. Podolny and Morten T. Hansen

• The first 6 months as a Chief People Officer: Q Hamirani (Chief People Officer, Paper) - Podcast: The Modern People Leader 

• Making Transformative Choices - Shishir Mehrotra - Podcast: Arta Spotlight: Live Long & Prosper

• Bill Gurley, Brad Gerstner, & Jason Calacanis on the state of tech markets, hosted by David Weisburd - This Week in Startups Podcast

• https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust

• HR Metrics Slide Deck Template - Lattice

• Talent Acquisition Trends 2024 - Korn Ferry 

• End of Year Pay Report 2023 - Levels.fyi

• How The CPO Of Dropbox Creates A Thriving Remote-First Culture - Forbes, Kevin Kruse

• Strengthen Your Ability to Influence People - HBR, Benjamin Laker and Charmi Patel