00:31:35 · Guillaume Moubeche, Daniel Chait
[00:31:35] S1: Yeah. I mean, you're at the forefront of something that's, like, very new, and that's also, a societal, like, change. So obviously, as you said, you know, like, some people are gonna dislike it, but if people realize that they have better shots at finding jobs, then, you know, it becomes something obvious and people will recommend it. When you look at your business model, because you went from being a pure SaaS player to leveraging AI a lot more. So we're talking about, like, token cost, etcetera. Like, what's your vision about the price of token with AI? Do you think that we're gonna have, like, similar margin to to SaaS in the coming years and the price is going down? Or what... What's your, like, perception of it? [00:32:16] S0: I think everyone's trying to figure that out. I think, you know, maybe we'll... It's a super interesting conversation right now. I suspect that, you know, if we go back and watch this interview in in five years time, we're gonna be like, oh my gosh. Those people said to [00:32:28] S1: me, this
00:32:29 · Daniel Chait
[00:32:29] S0: not anything. Right. Exactly. It's all changing very dramatically. And I think it's part of what makes it a really interesting time is that we're in the middle of a true disruptive moment right now. It's equivalent to me to the late nineties Internet revolution, where everybody knew everything was changing. You didn't quite know where it was headed. But we very much at Greenhouse have said, internally and externally, this is a disruptive moment. We gotta disrupt ourselves before others disrupt us. And coming out of that disruption, you can either become Blockbuster or Netflix, right? It's huge opportunity and it's huge peril. And so there's a lot riding on getting it right. And so we're all trying to navigate these things as best we can. Certainly, the business models are changing, already have changed. The way our customers wanna interact with a company like ours is less about seats and users and more about usage. And I think where that's headed is, my best guess, more towards even further on that journey from users to usage to real outcomes. Like, if I have an agentic hiring platform, ultimately, can't you come to me and say, hey, Greenhouse. You're awesome at hiring. I gotta hire I need to make. Help me. And I go, great. Here you go. And as much of that, I don't think it's gonna be like a vending machine where you pop out a candy bar, but as much of that as I can make easy and successful and help it work as best I can using the power of data and AI, I think that's a huge possibility and something that our customers are gonna really want for us.
00:33:54 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:33:54] S1: I know, like, time is is flying, so I wanted to also ask you because you've been in the in the industry for quite some time now. It's... And when you look at companies, you know, between, let's say, like 20 to a 100 employees, what would be like the best tips you could give them when it comes to hiring?
00:34:11 · Daniel Chait
[00:34:11] S0: Yeah. You know, I think at that stage, one mistake I see people make is hiring people before you're ready. I think in the early stages, especially if we're talking about a venture capital backed company, you've been given money to scale. And so it becomes very easy and very tempting to solve every problem you have with money. It's like, oh, we've got a problem. Hire someone or 10 people. And I think you gotta be really careful about what problems you can and can't solve that way. And in particular, I'll give you an example, is I think a lot of folks try to hire sales leaders to figure out sales, and I don't think that's something you can really... I don't think that really works. I think figuring out the sale is really a founder job, and a sales leader is really good at scaling it. So here's the winning formula. Sales leaders know how to operationalize that in a way that I certainly didn't, and I think a lot of founders don't. Incentive plans, territories, monthly sales forecasts, it's a whole thing. And I didn't know any of that stuff. And I think hiring someone to do those things is super effective. But I think you see founders being like, I'm a product person. I don't really know. I just wanna build the product and hire a salesperson to figure out how to sell it. They're never gonna figure out, do the customer discovery and sit in there and go in with a bunch of uncertainty and figure out and crack the code on what the sale is gonna actually mean. So I worry about I worry about doing that, and that's that's painful to your point of... Yeah.
00:35:45 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:35:45] S1: To to your point of hiring, like, a head of sales when you haven't figured out sales yet, and also not knowing what's the whole role is all about. How would you like overcome the fact that you don't know everything about a specific role when actually hiring for your company? So typically like how can you evaluate, you know, the level of someone if you've never done truly the job before?
00:36:11 · Daniel Chait
[00:36:11] S0: Yes, a 100%, and a huge issue for most founders. I went through that too, and still do in a lot of ways. I'd say two things stand out about that, that everyone can do. The first, and not to overlook, is try to get as specific as you can about what you're actually hiring for. I think people sometimes skip that step and they go, I'm hiring head of marketing at startup. Google startup CMO job description and paste it into Word, you're like, Great, I'm done. No. There's a million different ways to do that job. Be very, very specific. What do you need done? Head of product. All these jobs are super dependent on the situation. And I think if you drill on, what are the three things more than anything else that you need out of this person to be able to do? You cut out a lot of the risk. And then secondly is lean on outside advisers. And so for me, you know, when we were hiring early roles that fit that dynamic, or like, I've never done marketing. I don't know what a marketing person needs, or I didn't really... You know, I hadn't worked with a of great sales leaders before. I didn't know what a sales leader did. I asked a bunch of questions of people who did it. And what you find is, again, there's a million ways to do it, and so you get a ton of input. You gotta filter that input according to your situation. It's like, Oh, thank you. But I don't need a brand person. I need a performance marketing person. Or, I don't need an enterprise seller. I need an SMB seller. So, you get a lot of input, and then you can use that to filter. And frankly, we even use those advisors to help screen talent, like give me some recommendations of people I can talk to, Even, like, could you check-in with my, you know, kind of finalist for me? And I found our advisers and early investors and board members to to be very helpful with giving you kind of perspective on those things too.