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cL's Megan Zengerle on Hiring for Growth, Being a Female Exec

tell the folks a little bit about what you do here at Creative Life. I oversee a head of talent which encompasses all of the internal talent. Recruiters ensure that we have an organizational talent team that reflects our business model and the output that we weren't in that regard. Um, I also managed the other side of that in terms of all of the people operations. So the perks that go into employing a team human resource is, uh I think controller and accounting with the payroll in terms of salary and that type of thing. So you sort of designed great teams, recruit great teams and then keep those great teams happy once they're here. That's, um, taking things in a little bit of different direction. So you this is your second company in a row where you have been in the a female executive at a Silicon Valley startup. Prior to this, you were a script. What is it? What's your personal experience? Being a female executive in a largely male dominated kind of industry and local community. So I ...

think, uh, my position dominated isn't the right word, but, well, heavily s. So I think I have a unique situation in that I spend my day looking at skill sets and trying to find the best talent for the position. I think that puts me into the mindset that the person that's doing the best job is the best fit. If I apply that to myself and to those around me, the gender card kind of becomes a neutral player. Um, I've certainly met males, counterparts and female counterparts who are the best fit for the role. So that's how I approach my role. It's how I approach my interaction in terms of executive. I do think that, um, it's a little bit different because there is still somewhat of perception, you know, that there should be not that there should be, but there is more males in a leadership capacity. Um, I have spent a lot of time surrounding myself with female leaders that I try to learn from and have mentors that have led me. So that's a great tip for any female. Even if you don't want to pursue an executive role is to surround yourself with others who are strong and confident and can present themselves in that capacity. Um, that's kind of a trend in the Valley right now. Uh, Sheryl Sandberg, famously with the recent book Lean in helping Teoh empower women. Teoh, connect with one another. Find, like, female mentors help, you know, pull. Pull everyone up. Kind of threw another. There's a glass ceiling, but talk to us a little bit about how you found mentors connected with them and advice might have for others. So I think, you know, I was actually very lucky. I, um prior to script, I was actually consulting. So I interacted with even more people because I would have multiple clients at a single time. Um and so that was, um, a big first step for me and that I had a huge network. Um, and recruiting in general. Your ableto, you know, obviously talked to a lot of people again, back to the skill set thing. I spend a lot of time matching up the right skill with the right trade. So for me, I took a lot of time to think about what are the right skills for me. What's the right match for me and where my lacking the most in terms of, you know, potential leadership skills? Um back to what I was saying. I did have the opportunity to work with several really strong and confident females from the get go. So I think I had a jump start in that capacity which account in my blessings every day. But, um, you know, I'm just relying on your own intuition in terms of you know, what is the best fit for you. What do you happy doing? Do you wake up every morning? Are you passionate doing it? Then I think you found the right fit and you just going down that path. Yeah. What air? So building the team here at creativelive not, you know, talk inside baseball or anything. But what are the challenges that you find maybe generally or specifically in building a team in running an HR function So in for creative life? Specifically, we were growing really, really quickly, so we had a really quickly, like we're talking like from 10 to 80 in less than a year, really quickly in a lot of capacity. So my job in particular was to make sure that we weren't hiring too quick and overlooking the right talent to take the right steps and ensure that who we were hiring fit with people that were already in place. And then, you know, the long term goal of the role on the team. It's certainly still a work in progress, and I've always said that it's a science. So one higher kind of changes scoping personality of the next, as you become to create personalities amongst your team. So a science and not an art not well there somewhere like, but so, yeah, and so what do you how you've been incredibly successful finding amazing people to bring in here. What are some of the key things that are important? Teoh. Actually, how you find the great people out there? There's a lot of different ways to find people. So one in particular is obviously your network. Um, as you know and creativelive, we refer everybody that's within the company to look into their own network, that first degree of separation or second degree of separation. Great that specifically you mean you send out regularly in email that goes to every employee in the company saying these are the key rules that we're hiring for. Do you know anybody act, which is. And if you dio And if you do, let me know because I'm certainly going to take a look. And, you know, it is true that, you know, most job postings get a ton of irrelevant, unfortunately, relevant profile. So you have to really scour through a lot of that. Find them. The hope is that when you have your internal network, you obviously are intimately acquainted with what's going on. Even if you're not in the team, you know the company and kind of cultures. The hope is that someone refers them knowing those traits and that that that matches their, which actually touches on a point. You know, you can review resumes, and it's impossible to fill out the culture side until you really truly meet somebody s O. There is a two step process to sourcing out some good talent. So internal networks first up tunnel networks, obviously branding of the company from a recruiting standpoint, there's different marketing platforms in terms office, the job posting. Getting it out there in terms of different outside Lincoln is a great one for, uh, you know, areas where networks tend to gravitate to for viable positions. And so that's what by that, you mean your I see you do this different job. Post things get placed into different websites, for example, into different community places. It's not just all linked in or monster dot com or CareerBuilder. You're going to specific, uh, you know, websites where the that community exists. So designer would posting would be in one place, and a production person would probably be somewhere else. Yeah, I'm and engineers are very specific in terms of even technology. There's some great open source communities that they tend to gravitate to, and then other is their meet ups again, back to the community meet ups in the office so that people can actually come into and see the environment that they may potentially be working in university recruiting. We go through the alumni networks and or new grad networks a lot of different avenues, and it again, it depends again. What the role is with the team is and with the level of experiences that you're looking for. Sure, what are some of the key hires that you're looking for right now? So we way are growing very quickly. We have built out some of our teams pretty quickly in terms of where we're going to stay through 2013. The ones that are still the most needed for also engineers software engineers are technology. Stack is in the open source of No Js um mongo db for some of the database work. We're also continuing to build our production team primarily because we just open to more studios down here. And, um so we've hired some core production members and continue to grow both Seattle and San Francisco, another area that's continuing to grow with our content team. So as we fill in four studios and said the two were obviously going to be building a lot more content, interacting with a lot more instructors so content producers content specialist contact corners is what we call them we're looking for. And then the jobs page always tends to have a few, um, positions. So right now we're looking for a designer, a user experience designer for a product team. Um, where is the jobs page? I forget creativelive dot com backslash seems like a logical, and there's also a link at the bottom of the page called dubs. Terrific. That's pretty pretty terrible. You mentioned earlier about it. Company brand and building like the right culture. Uh, how how do you think about How do you think? How do you enforce the local culture that we have here and how executives So for, um, I mean, the brand could be used in different capacities. So am I. And where I work with it, the brand is the people. So I think the brand becomes some of the culture, how people interact, how they exude what creativelive ist others that they interact with. So when we started, the team was very small, so there was a very core group of people producing a product, and that was the brand. As we have grown, our culture has become much more dynamic with some incredibly great people, added Teoh. The great people that existed from the beginning. And so the brand from a people standpoint has continued to evolve. Um, and it's different than the online the product brand cracked. The product brand is like what you created put out into the world. The people brand is how they work together, united a basis. How did they treat one another around around the office, like Michael? Is that our team? Any time someone interacts with us, they walk away, and they're like, That's a great place to work. That's a great place to be. That's a great place to interact, and our people do that. We repeatedly get that. The interview process is another great opportunity toe Have the brand of a company whether you hire the candidate or not. You always want to make sure that they have a great experience with your people, that they walk away knowing that that's a good company. And they felt good about the process. Often times we don't hire someone or we don't identify them as a fit, and we continue to get referrals, which goes from that person from that person from their network. You know, I talked to so and so are interactive soon. So their favorite way to recruit. Yeah, there's some famous companies in the Valley who have terrible reputations for their recruiting process. Incredibly painful. Andi, I think we've been able Teoh avoid that pretty quickly. Being small helps. You can put people through the process faster with greater focus. I'm actually very mindful of acts. I've actually interact with some of those companies and as a recruiter myself. But certainly an experience I don't wanna have. So it's not one that I want someone interacting with me to have. So I try to stay mindful that there's the human capacity to what we do from an interview. I think sometimes that gets lost in the word process. Sure becomes process. So it feels like we've sort of, uh, finished kind of like phase two of our of our team growth. Phase one was that initial core folks? Well, it's face to was the initial core folks after the round of funding from Greylock Mika his one downs the support team after that? Then you know Stage Three is really building to about 75 80 people where we're at now. What do you see as the challenges for us over the next? You know, say, six months to a year from a perspective. So, um, we're in a really unique situation and that we had a very small team in an operating product, so we had to hire a team to keep up with our product. That's unusual in the Valley in particular. A lot of times people higher because they have an idea and they need people to build the idea so that in itself, But it's in a unique situation. Fast forward to where we are now. We spent a lot of time hiring people in to create process and procedure around their product. Uh, now I think that we've got a core team in place and we have, you know, pretty well oiled machine going forward. You know, how do you make it specialized in the areas that need to be specialized? How do you scale in the areas that need scaling? Um, from a company where everyone kind of did everything with a really, really small team to now we have individual product individual with specialization, where people do just one job and they need Teoh move projects across costumes. So it's a lot of focus on interface like which rolls have the dotted line to each other in which rolls report upward down. And, um, you know, how did the different parts work together so that it is a seamless process that that's the most output? And it is always a challenge when it you go from a generalised where everyone kind of does everything and you know, one person owns all of it Teoh. You know, they don't have the same responsibilities that they had before. They have a narrower set of responsibilities that you know are just as important. But we have a broader set of people around them who can take parts of what they used to dio separately. It's hard to make that transition for any organization. I saw that YouTube that we're going through something like that here. But it is the ability to make that transition seems largely to go to the culture of the people culture. Do we enjoy working to one another? Can we resolve differences of opinion in a, uh, professional and amicable way without, you know, getting territorial or political? To that end, I think you've done an amazing job. Thank you. Yes. Um, we're going, Teoh. Send it back. Teoh, The main stage Big round of applause for