Transcript

Amy:
I had some of my really, really junior employees coming to me and saying, Can I reduce it? Because I’m really struggling to pay my rent. We live in London and it’s really challenging. So yeah, of course, I was able to reduce some of that and get them to pay a little bit more.

Sylvie:
Hi, I’m Sylvie Milverton, CEO of Lynx Educate. This is “Talent is Everywhere”. We’re here to talk about how to keep talent and how to develop talent in order to build a strong business. We’ll interview leaders to hear their best experiences of how they invested in people.

So thank you, Amy, for joining us today. Our guest is Amy Holdsworth, who is currently talent acquisition and employer branding specialist at Shadow. And today is going to talk to us mostly about her experience as senior talent acquisition manager at Zen Educate, where she was able to scale that company from very small to up to over 100 employees.

So really excited to hear about your experience. Maybe we can start by why don’t you tell us the context when you joined Zen Educate, what were you brought in to do and what was your first job?

Amy:
Yeah, of course. Well, thank you very much for having me. It’s great to be here and to be having this conversation. So, yeah, I joined Zen. It must be nearly five years ago now. And at that point, they had just closed their Series A fundraising. So they were about 22-23 people at that point, and they needed to scale up to 50 people in the first six months to be able to achieve all of the business goals that they had off the back of that funding.

So it was a whole mix of different roles. Some, in terms of product engineering, some marketing, but the vast majority of it was around sales, account managers, account executives to really be able to do a lot of business development. So that was what I was initially brought in to do. There was nothing really in place. The co-founders had done an excellent job at recruiting the first batch of people, mostly through their networks, but they really needed something that was going to be a bit more of a scalable process.

So I came in and was able to put in an applicant tracking system, redesign some of the job descriptions, look at how the teams were structured and do some little edits in terms of the efficiencies there and then design some really structured interview processes. We still wanted a bit of flow in terms of being flexible around the different types of roles and being able to assess the different things.

But it wanted something that felt fair and consistent across the organization. So yeah, putting together both different processes. The first thing that I did was really getting to know what the business did, understanding all of the different roles within it, and most importantly, building a lot of trust with all the main stakeholders to be able to understand the way that they like to recruit for their teams and what they would be looking for.

Because you have even in a company that small, you still have kind of micro-cultures. So it’s really important to get to know everyone and the way that they work really in-depth.

Sylvie:
Yeah, that’s I can completely relate. So I of course also have a start-up where you’re not quite at that scale yet, but definitely like needing to hire and one thing that has been a challenge for us is something that you think is the role you’re hiring for now, very quickly, you know, you outgrow that profile.

So either it’s during the recruitment process, you think, okay, this is the level of person I’m looking for, and then the business all of sudden something changes over a short time or you bring that person in and all of a sudden you’ve kind of moved beyond what that profile was. How did you manage? Did you see that again, first of all, and then how did you manage that kind of quick change?

Amy:
Yeah, I definitely saw that where I think that’s where it’s quite important. When a hiring manager comes to you and says that they want to recruit for a specific role, that you really take a step back with them with and bring them on that journey into what you’re actually trying to achieve and what are their priorities right now.

But where do you see this going in six months? So if you bring someone in to achieve this and they achieve it within three months, what happens next and what are they able to work on next? So really taking them backwards on their journey a little bit, understanding their thought processes. And then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with keeping a very open mind in terms of the spec that you’re looking for.

And I think once you speak to the right person, you can sort of gauge where their potential would be, what they’d be interested in doing. And you can be quite transparent with people and say, you know, with, you know, we’re interviewing a variety of levels at the moment. We’re trying to work out where the market sits versus what our priorities are. And so just having an initial conversation to see what people can offer rather than trying to design a job yourself internally and trying to understand maybe if that’s a priority right now in one team, could they actually work on a couple of different things?

So an example of that might be if you’re recruiting someone with a really strong marketing and communications background, if the work dried up for that or they achieved a big project, would they be happy to move into potentially helping the people team with internal communications as well? And kind of combining things there so that you’ve got a scope for them to be able to work on to assessing whether they would be interested and capable of doing that.

But also whether if they joined and suddenly realized that there’s way more work or things have become much bigger in terms of that person’s experience, how would they feel about sitting underneath potentially a more senior person that was brought in above them? To be able to take on a bit more of a senior project and work alongside them on it rather than the initial role that you’ve brought them into, where they’re actually at the top of that hierarchy right now.

Sylvie:
And how did you like concretely, how did you organize yourself? Like is the most important thing. Like if you’re thinking like in six months I need to hire 25, you know, 50 people over this number of months. Concretely, was your first step. Like, let me figure out the right tool so that we’re getting the right Yes. And we’re reaching the right candidates. Or were you more focused internally, like, let me make sure I’m meeting with each hiring manager and understand the needs? Or what about like was it figure out the evaluation method, like make sure you’re organizing like case studies or tasks like how did you organize yourself to be able to quickly hire that number of candidates?

Amy:
That is a good question. A little bit of all of those things at the same time. But I think the ATS is a very good place to start. I think without having that is very complicated. And if you can have one that automates as much as possible, it makes your life so much easier. So the one that I’ve usually worked with is Lever, which I think is a very, very efficient tool.

And with that, you can do two main parts of automation. So one is that you can send out applications and responses to everybody who applied and you can select them really quickly in bulk. You can scan through and they can book into your diary. So you’re sending out effectively like an inbuilt calendly and automatically it’s moving them from applicant stage into a first-round interview stage and they have the control over the calendar for that. And you can actually block out which time slots you want and things like that. So that’s incredibly helpful, just being able to get a volume.

The second thing that it does is that it integrates with as many job boards as you want it to. So you’ve got all of your inbound applications being fed into one system. So all you need to do really is just focus on that one system. You don’t need to go into LinkedIn or Indeed or anything like that to get the application. So that I would say, is the most important tool for organizing in the beginning.

I think working with hiring managers and getting to know them is incredibly important when you’re kicking off a process, but it doesn’t actually have to take that much time out if they are already ready to recruit, then you can do what I think of as a kickoff meeting and that might take a couple of hours If you can do it all really efficiently. In that one meeting, you pretty much have all the information that you need and that can be what the assessment tools are going to be, why we’re hiring the role, what are the preferences, and how the interview process is going to run. You can do all of that in one go. So that comes as a second, a second step, but it’s also very, very important.

Sylvie:
And then how did you think about in terms of you’re overall like HR journey? Like, okay, so your first thing was I’ve got to hire all these people. I put this in place, I’ve aligned with my team members. I’m becoming a strategic support. And then, you know, how did you think about building out your team and becoming, like a true partner to the CEOs as like a HR Leader as they were scaling so quickly?

Amy:
Yeah. So I think the once you’ve done that initial recruitment drive and always when you come in after a fundraiser like that, that is there is going to be like one big priority like that. And then after that sort of initial goal is achieved and things are running a little bit more business as usual and you’ve got a system set up where you can recruit at a scalable level from all the organization that you’ve done, then that’s a chance to really look at the overall organization and say, You know, what’s working really well here?

Out of the people that we’ve recruited, who do we see as real future stars of the organization, making sure that they’re getting enough time and exposure to the leaders as well? So I think gathering as much feedback as possible from people who are working there. That could be after they’ve done the onboarding or it could be doing regular kind of HR check-ins with people and making sure that all of that information is being fed up to the CEO, Any bits of relevant information allows them to be able to see that you’re kind of like a just always think of it as kind of a bridge between the leadership team and everybody else

And that can be reporting on things that are going really well and things that people love. And I think it’s really important to have that kind of feedback to leadership teams that don’t necessarily see the impact that they’re having on everybody else in a really positive way. And it can really encourage them to do more in terms of that, invest more in training and development, and invest more in actually growing the careers of people who they’ve heard really positive things about.

But it’s also really important to be able to feed any kind of feedback improvement points to them as well, and they know that you’ll be really honest and transparent. You do have to pick and choose a little bit in terms of that and that. I think if someone is starting out in this kind of role is probably the biggest challenge. Filtering out what’s actually important information for your CEO or your leadership team to know and what is just general grumbling or people having their own issues. So a lot of it you want to kind of manage as much yourself as possible and set yourself up as a sounding board for people to come to, but really try and understand:
Whether they want you to share that information outwards? and
How relevant and how important really is it going to be and how actionable?

So I was always trying to position myself as I’ll sort out all of the problems that I can and then I’ll come to you when there’s something that I really think either you need to hear in a positive way or something, that I need your input to be able to action and that’s why I think you build this kind of really trusting relationship and you can really start to be seen as a business partner in that sense.

Sylvie:
Yeah. And also even like BE what’s the word I’m looking for, like I am thinking of the word in French to the level, like the owner of the culture, like really, you know, helping that, helping the CEOs or the leadership of a company build the kind of culture that they want. And I’m still thinking of your situation, like hiring all these people and then trying to establish like, what is the culture?

How is this reflecting the values, you know, that we want to put in? How are we hiring for the right kind of people? Did you see over your three years like that it changed that, the sort of the personalities of the sort of people, of the sort of even skills that you were looking for changed a lot over that time?

Amy:
I would say the personality trait stayed relatively the same. And when I scaled up my own team and I was training them to recruit, I was quite lucky that I was dealing with not a completely blank slate, but people who hadn’t actually got that much experience. So I was able to really, really train them into looking for the same things that I’d been looking for.

So in terms of the real skills and so their attitude and the motivations and the type of person that we want it because we needed people to be so bought into the social mission of what we were doing. And it was a very, very close-knit team. It was very important to keep that that culture. But in terms of the skills and also the skill level just naturally by the fact that we grow so quickly, you can’t necessarily always look as selectively as you did at the very beginning.

Sometimes you do just need people to be doing the job and you might need to think a little bit about whether you’ve got that real start-up mentality of, you know, wearing so many different hats, which the first 50 people I guess did. But then after that, maybe you can hire them because they’ve got one specific skill and you can actually be a bit more relaxed about what else they’re bringing to the table. You don’t necessarily need an all-rounder once you hit 100 people.

Sylvie:
Yeah, that makes sense. And then how did you start thinking about talent development, learning, and development? There’s obviously like many tools and of course, you know, when you’re going that quickly, you’re hiring people for a certain skill. I guess it’s a two-part question. One is how did you start thinking of giving, getting people new skills that they need and also, you know, giving them like a career pathway in a growing company?

Amy:
Yeah, it was definitely a challenge because we had relatively small budgets to work with in terms of what we were trying to achieve. So the first thing that we did was to leverage all of the internal experience that we had. We had people who’d worked in some amazing, amazing experiences, who had a lot to bring to the table from their own experiences and also had great networks.

So we were able to get quite a lot of lunch and learns together. We would encourage people, if they were really interested in a topic, whether that was work-related or something totally different, to be able to come and to speak about that and to put together little sharing information sessions. But that was very, very informal. In terms of more kind of career development things, we were able eventually to put together some individual budgets, but it was more on a case-to-case-by-case basis.

So for example, if we we got to the point where we needed someone who could really focus on app development, then we would have a we had already a really strong engineering team. We had people who were interested in doing it but wasn’t necessarily experts. And then we would be able to allocate a specific budget to them to be able to take some time out of their working week and to be able to go and do a course, to be able to develop that rather than bringing in someone externally.

So that was a really nice opportunity of being able to put that learning and development budget in to keep people in the team moving forward without necessarily having to yet bring it, bring people in externally. So it was kind of a balance between who have we got in the team and how much money would it cost us to turn them into the person that we need next versus what would the recruitment cost of hiring someone newbie. And in that example, that recruitment cost, it would be six months of not having someone in the job.

We look for them and then waited for their notice period, the cost to the business on that, but also potentially having to pay, you know, a 20k agency fee is very, very expensive to hire someone, very niche that’s hard to find in the market. So if you can actually put that together into a learning and development budget, then I think that’s a really positive thing that makes people feel really engaged as well. It’s a little bit harder in terms of, well, I found it harder from a perspective of sales and account management because a lot of the stuff that you need to learn for that job is just on-the-job experience and it’s less about learning by a textbook or a course. And I didn’t I didn’t get as many requests from as many requests from people for that sort of development.

They think they felt very kind of pressured in that job already. And you don’t want to force it on people, but maybe if we’d had a bit more time to have a look at different resources that we yeah, would be available, then we might have been able to find different ways that would have suited people in terms of their learning style. So that might be something more audio-related where they didn’t have to sit down and really study a course online.

Sylvie:
Now that makes sense. I’m going back to what you said. That’s like your calculation about that. It makes more sense, you know, that it’s cheaper to, you know, do the course. No to upskill, you know, versus finding a market like that. Obviously, the math of that works and everybody talks about it. But I’m interested like, do the companies make decisions in that way? Because I feel like in the moment, even though the math is correct, that we should upskill the effort of like finding the course, really training the person and having the vision of them in this new role, which every ROI says that that’s the better thing.

Like, do you have examples like concretely of where management was like, Yes, let’s do this, Let’s upskill this person and help them grow into this new role instead of going to the market and filling it from someone new?

Amy:
I have an example of someone who decided that they wanted a career change, actually, and it was a role that we were going to hire for, and we ended up moving this person from a job where they were’nt very happy, to be honest. They were performing really, really well, but I could tell they weren’t enjoying it and they’d taken time to go and do a course in something totally, totally different and next step was to leave the company.

And we were actually hiring for the same job, but we were looking for someone with ideally 7 to 10 years of experience and we decided that given that this person already knew the business so well and that they were really good former, actually it was worth having someone with a lower kind of experience level, but who really knew the business inside out. If we could move into that job and then it would be much cheaper for us to replace that person in that previous job as well because that had been quite a junior position as well. So that’s an example of it working really, really nicely.

And we didn’t end up having to spend a fortune on someone without that much experience to do the same job and have to train them up in the business.

Sylvie:
Yeah, that’s a great story. I can imagine also for HR that’s like that’s like your dream, right, is to be able to tell people like to be able to go to someone in the business, say, I’m going to help you build your career. Like we all talk about that in companies. We’re helping people grow or offering them opportunities.

But the reality is in a lot of companies, you know, there is only one head of X, you know, there’s one boss, there’s some level of turnover, but not so much. And so to be able to really show people that they’re growing it, they’re getting opportunities, it must be like a joy as an HR leader to be able to provide it.

Amy:
It now it really is and I think yeah, it can be a bit frustrating when you’ve got so many really talented people and you haven’t got anywhere for them to go. So if they’re taking the initiative and saying to you that yet they’d like to look at something in a slightly different area, then that’s wonderful. But I think it really is your responsibility as an HR person as well to be asking those questions.

I think a lot of people would be quite scared to go to their employer and say, I don’t really enjoy my job, and particularly especially if they can’t see the progression in front of them to be able to say, Yeah, I think this might not be the place for me forever. If I’m going to be a nurse, if you can be the person proactively sitting down with people, finding out how well they’re enjoying their job and whether they’ve got any interests outside of it.

You know, people learn about stuff I think all the time that catches their interest. And the person that you hired two years ago might not necessarily be the person sitting in front of you during that conversation. So it’s so important that you, whilst you find out what people’s motivations are during the interview process, you keep checking in with that and say, you know, two years ago you told me that you wanted to be head of an account management team.

Is that still the case? And you never know. They might turn around and say, actually, you know what, I’ve been reading all about coding and actually, I really want to go in and do a development course. Is that something I can do? And I did have another example actually, of someone who went and did that and they went to do a boot camp. Then they took three months go traveling, and then we hired them back again and they joined our tech team, which was amazing because again, someone who really knows the business, you know, is a good culture fit and you’re able to to bring them back in, but in a completely different capacity. But you wouldn’t have known that unless you kept asking the question, you know, are you happy here? And if not, what can we do to change that? And where would you like to go?

Sylvie:
Yeah. I love that. And the other thing I love about it is realizing like that there’s an arc. Like we’re all in an arc. And so whereas if you’re offering different benefits, different learning, you know, maybe you have a good parental leave policy, but of course, you know, one’s only having, you know, one or two, three babies. They’re only taking advantage of that one point. You’re only going to do a coding bootcamp, you know, once.

And so maybe like not everyone is using everything at the same time, but it just reminds us of like the arc of benefits and that you’ve got to as you have to offer a lot of things because everyone’s in a different situation of their life, of their career, of what they’re passionate about and how nice to be able to adjust everybody is, you know, needs.

Amy:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think a really good example of that actually is when we had a really, really competitive pension plan and that was something that a lot of people were really, really excited by. And it was, it was really, really competitive on the market. But then I had some of my really, really junior employees coming to me and saying, Can I reduce it? Because I’m really struggling to pay my rent. We live in London and it’s really challenging.

So yeah, of course I was able to reduce some of that and to get it to pay them a little bit more. That wasn’t necessarily something that was on a job description. But again, unless you have that really open, transparent relationship with people and keep asking them, how are you doing? How are you doing surviving in London on the first year of your job salary, How are you doing in terms of all these areas of your life and do these benefits work for you? Having a tailored package around that?

It’s really important to understand that, yeah, people are individuals and I think this is really coming to light. I think with like remote policies and hybrid policies where everyone’s very, very comfortable. We’re talking about, you know, flexible work environments, but they’re not looking at the whole package of what flexibility means really

Sylvie:
You know, that makes sense. And I imagine also, again, like Zen, you joined it at that amazing moment of just the Series A, you know, you’ve got a lot of like natural branding, like probably you had lots of applicants and that your problem was maybe more like, you know, filtering that, making it more attractive.

I mean, of course, you had to make it basically attractive, but it probably was fundamentally attractive, which might be different from a lot of other businesses that might have maybe more trouble actually even filling up the pipeline of can’t I imagine?

Amy:
Yeah, definitely. So from an employer brand perspective, it’s a very it was very interesting business because it has such a strong value proposition by itself. It really sells itself and that I think the yeah, we did have a lot of internal applications and the thing that you, that I was really having to focus on was how do you work out who’s looking for a job and how do you look out who’s looking for a job with us? Because in that kind of environment, it just doesn’t fit everybody.

So you might have a lot of applications, but if I take, for example, all the people who are looking at the early morning supply teaching delivery, they have to be there at like six in the morning. They have to deal with people who, you know, had teachers who is a person, has called in sick for the day. They also stressed it’s not always the most enjoyable job.

You do have to be quite resilient. And so I think there were a lot of people who applied. Yeah, thought it would be interesting to work for a start-up or thought that it would be nice to work for something with a social mission. But unless they really, really were attached to it, it wasn’t necessary. They weren’t necessarily going to push through all of those really tough moments.

And the same with being a, you know, a startup with low budgets and things like that. So trying to actually assess rather than push the employer brand was more of the challenge and finding people who had a really personal connection to the mission that would allow them to be able to really see the benefits beyond.

Sylvie:
Yeah. And that’s and then in contrasting that so your current job, part of your title is employer branding. So talent acquisition. Employer branding. I’m interested just in how your company thinks about that. Like first of all, I would not have known that those two roles could come together, but of course that makes perfect sense. Like, how is how are you thinking about it now, the link between talent acquisition and employer branding?

Amy:
Yeah, I think typically it’s in especially a larger company. It’s employer branding is more something that comes on to marketing. But for me, because I’m the one on the phone with the candidates and I’m getting the live feedback about why they applied, what’s interesting to them, what they’re looking for. I’m the one with the real market insight into what the market looks like. And so to be able to differentiate your brand and to make it stand out on the market, the best person to do that really is the one who is like in the market listening to everyone and finding out what they’re looking for.

So the biggest way that you find that out is by asking people, you know, why are you looking to leave your company? What are you not getting there? Why are you looking for a new opportunity at the moment? And that might be something around learning of progression. It could be a number of different circumstances, why they’re looking, but a lot of it comes up to, yeah, I’ve hit a ceiling. There’s no there’s no kind of learning opportunity. So then you can use that and you can highlight the learning opportunity that you have, for example.

So it also depends a little bit on different teams as well. So it might be that tech teams were saying to me constantly, tech candidates are saying to me constantly, I want something fully remote.
I don’t want to come to the office. They want someone who’s going to be much more part of the team, and I really want to be an individual contributor. So then you can start highlighting in those kind of job descriptions and the social media campaigns that go alongside it, the options for remote working for kind of being autonomous within your team, people working in different time zones and not necessarily having a lot of meetings, things like that.

So it just having that market view really allows you to tailor your employer brand into what people are looking for. So I think it works really, really well as a hybrid job and it’s really nice to have in this role a focus specifically like 50% of my role is focused on our employer brand and it’s quite nice to have something that is measurable like that, where you’re actually looking at the results of it rather than thinking of it as a secondary priority to the recruitment, which I think naturally comes as a lot of in a lot of companies.

So the way that I think of it is a few different things. So it will be social media presents so all across that, yeah, LinkedIn and things like that. And then it will be all of our different career sites or all of the different job boards. So how are we making sure that we optimize for the number of applicants and that they’re saying the right things? And then finally, it will be partnerships with schools, with universities, and with industry leaders who are putting on a lot of events to be able to attract talent in that way as well. And then how you make yourself stand out from the crowd with that.

Sylvie:
Yeah, that’s amazing. I love that. And, you know, to kind of become the kind of place where people love to work, but then having already determined like, you know, what kind of people, you know, not every kind of people, what’s our culture? Who are we looking for and being able to, you know, attract those kinds of, you know, those kind of people? It sounds like a, you know, a dream situation for HR where you can really like on the one hand focus on individuals and also have an impact on the overall positioning of the company.

Amy:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think it’s very interesting when you’ve got a company like that, we’ve got just so many different types of people and they’re all looking for so many different types of things to be able to really tailor that content individually to each one and put examples of, of events that you’ve been to where people can really see, Yeah, we’re investing and sending people on conferences, for example, where they can learn from, from what they’re being sent on.

We could, they can really see that we’re caring about their career development. Whereas if you’re looking for maybe junior salespeople, you might want more pictures of them doing team drinks and team lunches and competitions and things like that. So it’s really interesting to see where you can make different tweaks to different parts of it and see what the impact is on a very tailored approach.

Sylvie:
Yeah, that’s great. And then yeah, maybe just to finish up, I mean, I know, you know, United have spoken a few times about what we love about HR and people development. But I love you know, you’ve had a lot of different jobs and you’re obviously, like, really passionate. Like, what’s your favorite thing about HR? How did you get into it? And what, like when you have a great day and you think, my gosh, I love my job. Like, what are the kinds of things that make you feel like that?

Amy:
And, well, I guess the way that I got into it was completely by accident, as everyone does who starts in recruitment. I think anyone wakes up when they’re at school and thinks they want to go and work in recruitment agencies and it’s just not something that’s really pushed as a career. It’s either, you know, banking law or medicine, and no one ever says go back in a recruitment agency, I think is the best place in the world to start because it teaches you so much about how every element of a business comes together.

It teaches you negotiation skills. It teaches you so much about how to just be confident, pick up the phone, speak to anyone. So I think the skills that you got from that is really interesting, but it doesn’t have as much of a focus on the HR side. So when I moved into that Zen was my first role doing that. And I think the point that I got to was recruitment from an agency point of view is fantastic, especially if you work for a boutique agency where you really have strong relationships with your clients and you hire a candidate and then six months later they become they come back to you based on the job that you did for them and finding their job and they come back to you as a client.

But what you really miss is being there on the first day for that person to get their job. So you might take them out for a celebration lunch and stay in touch with them every few months and see how things are going. But you’re not actually really seeing what they’re doing in that job. So you kind of it is it’s a lot of variety, but you are constantly moving on to the next.

And what I really wanted was yet to get that job, be really happy for them, give them the offer, congratulate them, and then be there on day one to say. Hey, welcome to the team. This is what you’re going to be doing. So that for me, I love the things that make me really, really happy in this job are when I see people who I saw like a spark on the phone and they weren’t sure what they were looking for exactly. And they weren’t that confident or they were completely, completely sold on exactly where their experience was.

They just didn’t hadn’t got the confidence to do it. And then you kind of guide them in a bit of a coaching method and say, you know, you applied for this job. Actually, given what you’ve told me is really important to you, I think maybe we have something else that could be even more suited to you. Are you open to hearing about that? And then they say, Yes, I actually applied for this job, but I wasn’t really sure if I was going to be good enough. But that one I didn’t see and it sounds amazing.

And then they go into the job and you really see them that grow in confidence and thrive in that. So having been part of that kind of initial coaching thing, you’re not as an internal talent person or HR person not selling someone a job because you need to be able to fill the job. You are actually really looking for someone who is going to stay with you and that involves a little bit of a coaching process to be able to eke that out.

And then when you actually see the connections that people build internally as well, I remember going to the first party that we had our guest, we were over 100 people and walking into the room and being like, all of these people are friends and they didn’t know each other before. We had an initial conversation and some of them live together, some of them go on holidays together, and that’s just such an incredible feeling when you see them all really working well together as a team, but also being friends and having fun and making connections that they just wouldn’t have had unless they were in that place that you put them into from the first call.

Sylvie:
Yeah. I love that. And I can totally relate. Like, I loved it when I was the manager of teams that were awesome. You’d see all these people like, you know, that they create, you know, you set up the conditions for it, and then it, you know, on its own created all these relationships and growth. And now building my own start-up up it’s even more that feeling so I can totally totally relate you to see I feel so proud to have impact on people’s lives and you know you know, directly with your teams.

And then I said that, you know, learners who go through our program, yeah, it’s definitely an inspiration. You know, I worked in finance a long time and I always thought, you know, in a different life I would have worked at human resources and now I have the chance to record all these things and it’s just, yeah, not just such a great opportunity, but this was so excellent to have you as a guest and to hear of your experience.

And I am like in awe of your ability to grow a team of 25 to 140 people. And I dream of the day that we on our startup get to that point. But congratulations on everything and thanks so much for having joined us.

Amy:
Thank you so much for having me. And I’m sure you will get to the 140 people definitely.

Sylvie:
Great. And I’ll call you and I get there.

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