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Let's go ahead and get started, even though my timer says to start in two and a half minutes. Those guys are cooler than me anyways.
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Everybody, thanks for coming! I actually did not expect this many people to attend.
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This is a sponsored track, and it's really just a soft talk, a very loosely prepared talk.
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By the way, I finished it around three thirty this morning, and I gave up on trying to make my slides look cool.
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That takes way longer than I thought it would. I'm just going to talk to you today about some of the things we do at Hired.
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I think they make our culture really unique and enable us to build awesome things really quickly.
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One of the things I've really admired since I joined Hired about a year and a half ago is our quick, agile process.
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As of now, we're up to about 35 engineers with multiple project managers.
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However, much of the cool stuff we've built has not come from product managers or board meetings; it has come from Hired trusting us, hiring great people, and allowing us to have fun.
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I'll show you some of the cool things we've built, which just happened to be the weeks that we get for free at Hired.
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I actually messed up on the name of this talk initially when I submitted my proposal because I didn't realize it was permanent.
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If there are any South Park fans, the joke about the underpants gnomes applies here.
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It's supposed to be Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, but I said Step 1, Step 2, Step 3.
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So if any of you are worried about semantics, I'm sorry. Next year, if my company pays for me to be up here again, I'll do it right.
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So, who am I? Nobody really, I'm just another Rails engineer. If you saw my plenary earlier, I gave a little bit of background.
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I've been doing web development and Rails for about 10 years now.
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I've tried to give back a little bit to the community and I think I've done a couple cool things along the way.
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So, has anybody here actually used Hired before? Sweet. I know you have; you hire people with it.
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Telling is my former employer, and he still likes me somehow!
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He's a nice guy; talk to him—he works for Bleacher Report, which is probably one of the biggest Rails sites in the world.
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So, in my nine years with Rails, I started at a company called SageBit.
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It was a little Rails shop in Indianapolis, Indiana.
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I got exposed to Rails back when it was version 1.1.
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The thing we were working on was essentially a way for people to chop up sports videos of their kids and share them on social media.
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This was before it lasted very long, and really, the only cool thing we actually did was brew beer in the basement.
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However, that experience got me exposed to Rails, and that's why I'm still here ten years later.
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The next company I went to was a marketing design firm, where I changed it up a little bit.
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I went from building Rails apps to just chopping up HTML for our designers in Dreamweaver.
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It felt like a step backwards, so I quit pretty much as soon as I found a better job.
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That job was at a company called IgoDigital. None of you have probably heard of it but, if you have, awesome!
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We were responsible for all of the product recommendations back-end for Amazon.com at one point.
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If you've shopped at major online retailers, you've likely used our software.
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Eventually, IgoDigital was acquired by ExactTarget, which was later acquired by Salesforce.
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I could have actually just stayed at IgoDigital and ended up in San Francisco, but instead I moved to San Francisco to work for StyleOwner.
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StyleOwner was my first big move in my career. I was the first engineer there and didn't know what I was doing.
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We basically worked out of someone's apartment and coffee shops for a couple years. We raised three million dollars, then flushed it down the toilet.
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But I learned some stuff about building cool products at StyleOwner with very small teams.
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I then moved on to Bleacher Report, which was acquired by Turner Sports just a couple days before I started.
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While there, we were doing billions of page views per month with tens of millions of unique visitors.
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Bleacher Report was on Rails 2.3, surprisingly, and still might be. But it was an awesome place to work.
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I think that experience was my leveling up. I worked with an amazing team and learned what it meant to build something stable that could scale.
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While I was at Bleacher Report, I was also starting my own company at night. A friend wanted to start a company that would deliver on-demand massage.
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I wasn't particularly interested in that, but I really wanted to build something I was proud of. So, we started working on it.
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We built it up and eventually raised $48 million, doing tens of thousands of massages per month in 26 cities across three countries.
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What I loved most about working at Soothe was having a small team that I trusted, allowing us to work on whatever we felt like.
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Because of this, we were able to build an amazing platform in our free time and turn it into a company. After Soothe, I went on to Hired.
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I quickly became the face of Hired. You may have seen my face across the internet on articles that teach you how to breastfeed.
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Hired is pretty awesome. As I said, multiple people here have used it, and I'm really proud of the culture we've built there.
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When I first started, I ended up thrown onto the cultural committee because I like to party and drink, and they wanted a more fun office. Now, we've grown from around 50 people with 10 engineers to 35 engineers and about 240 employees.
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Since I started, our valuation has increased roughly 30-fold. The reason we've been able to build something so cool is that we have awesome engineers, and the company trusts us to do whatever we want.
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Initially, I thought I was joining a behemoth company that would force me to work on whatever and follow a strict process. However, we do have some structure; we're an agile development team for the most part.
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In my first few months at Hired, I got introduced to what we call the Hired hackathon. Most of us have participated in hackathons of sorts.
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There's a nice definition from Google: it's an event that lasts several days where a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming.
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However, it often serves as a term for managers to get you to work overtime and be excited about it.
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When I heard of the Hired hackathon, I thought it meant coming into work on a Friday night or Saturday to eat pizza and pretend to enjoy it. But that wasn't what we were doing.
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What Hired actually did was take the concept of Google's 20% time and offload it to a full week or two weeks, where engineers could just work on whatever they wanted.
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It was kind of empowering and awesome, and I never really experienced anything like this before.
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At Hired, we were already an agile development team with one project manager and typical two-week sprints. There was a lot of innovation because there was very little hand-holding.
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The engineering team was separated into a product cycle to support both candidate and employer sides.
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While we followed an agile process for a while, eventually, as we got more engineers, we introduced a structure that didn't necessarily work out.
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We decided to try something called the menu of opportunity. It allowed people to add things they thought were cool to a list and then pick whatever they wanted to build and test.
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Those were parts of the process we took away that were actually awesome, but having 25 engineers with no direction didn't work out so well.
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So, we returned to an agile process and decided to combine that with a hackathon model. Around the same time, we transitioned into data-informed product development.
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Initially, it was actually data-driven product development, which sounds great, but data doesn't always tell the full story.
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You don't always know how to measure properly, especially when building new things. Often, it can take longer to check if something you build will actually make a profit.
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We eventually transitioned to data-informed product development, where we now have a full data science team that measures things for us.
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This way, the engineers can build, and someone else analyzes results to see if it worked.
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As we have grown into a company with thousands of users and hundreds of employees, we need to maintain discipline and long-term focus.
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We want to continue iterating quickly and building cool products without worrying about product management cycles and board meetings.
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From my experience over the last ten years, I've learned that an effective product organization balances short-term innovation with long-term investment.
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In smaller teams, it's often challenging to do both, so one usually focuses on one aspect, but as you grow, you need to adapt.
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So, we brought back the hack week, which is an opt-in week where engineers can literally do whatever they want.
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You can build internal tools, product-facing features, and since we are an agile team, if you build something, you can deploy it to production in front of our users the same day.
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It sounds scary—sometimes there are bugs—but it works well and enables our people to build features that may not otherwise be prioritized.
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Heaton, who is actually sitting here, provided an excellent model for us. When he first started at Hired, he didn't jump into the codebase; he went to the business side and sat with people.
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He understood their problems and watched their day-to-day work, which led him to build cool features that made their jobs easier.
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We also decided to host our first business hack week on top of the engineering hack week.
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This was led by Jeremy, one of our engineers turned product manager, who realized we needed uninterrupted time to create cool solutions.
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We called for anyone in the company with ideas that weren't getting heard to pitch them, and then we’d team up to build and ship those ideas.
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Everyone in the company got involved, loved it, and we built more new features in that week for our business teams than we had in the previous year.
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Connecting people across teams worked well and allowed them to create amazing solutions.
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We introduced another unique event called Mega Week, which happens twice a year. During this week, everyone from Hired around the world flies to our main office.
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We have parties, motivational speeches, and activities that break down the barriers between engineering and business.
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Often, there's a disconnect between these departments, and this initiative creates opportunities for collaboration.
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We also created an event called Pairing with the Stars, where company members can sign up to pair program with an engineer for an hour.
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People had different interests; some wanted to learn about our application, others wanted to build new features.
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This exercise fostered collaboration and created an environment where cool stuff could be built quickly.
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I sent out a survey to everyone in the company, and it was a universal success.
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People rated it highly and expressed a desire for more opportunities to work with engineers to explore building innovative solutions.
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These activities became essential as we scaled; connections built within small teams enable operational empathy.
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Everyone loves building cool things, even those who don’t get to do it on a daily basis.
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I want to share some amazing features we've built during our hack weeks.
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One significant creation was our improved search functionality. This feature now powers our platform and involves a crucial underpinning that came out of our hack week.
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An engineer named Andrew decided to tackle our search infrastructure by building it on Elasticsearch.
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He rebuilt our entire search infrastructure in that week, creating a foundation for our company for years.
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This allowed us to create powerful search features that some people might not even know we have.
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Additionally, we implemented chat ops to manage everything through Slack, including our auto-scaling infrastructure and managing deploys.
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This has improved our development process and allowed us to create features quickly.
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Among other projects, we built a script to obfuscate sensitive candidate data during product demonstrations, ensuring we uphold our promises.
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Our bias removal feature also emerged from hack weeks, aiming to understand and address how biases affect hiring.
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We've begun to publish studies showing how this feature can alter marketability in hiring situations.
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We've also developed a sophisticated ETL pipeline to manage our backend data science.
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Everyone was actively involved in building little features that enhance user experience, leading to significant improvements.
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Our efforts have driven considerable user engagement, with positive feedback flooding in about our improvements.
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As we scaled, we recognized the importance of working cross-team with empathy, which can often diminish in larger organizations.
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Pairing engineering and business teams fostered a collaborative spirit and led to innovative features that may not have been coded otherwise.
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We've built employer pages that were redesigned during hack weeks after the previous experience faced criticism.
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We also created several other features that had a profound impact, including coding challenge updates and improvements to our email framework.
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If you'd like to check out some of our open-source contributions, visit github.com/hired to see our work.
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The success of our hack weeks reflects the need for companies to adopt a culture of innovation and empower employees.
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There was a recent quote about enabling small groups of smart people to innovate by trusting them.
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In my opinion, this has been foundational to our success at Hired.
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Implementing this culture requires hiring trustworthy and talented individuals that you believe in.
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Encouraging collaboration among employees—the business team working with engineers and vice versa—leads to great outcomes.
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Finally, establish and maintain a routine for innovation like hack weeks that fosters creativity and collaboration.
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I hope that I provided some valuable ideas on what we've done and why it works.
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If you have any questions, feel free to talk to me after this. Thank you for coming, everyone!
