Earlybird Welcomes a VP People, Digital West to Support Strong Teams

Jay Anna Harris-Theis kicks off a new role & shares best practices

We are thrilled to announce that as of October 1, 2021, Jay Anna Harris-Theis has joined us as VP People, Digital West. Having Jay on the team is a huge win – both for us and for our portfolio companies.

Jay brings a career dedicated to hiring people who are passionate about transformative technology. Before joining Earlybird, Jay was Global Head of People Team at NavVis, focused on supporting the geospatial revolution in Germany. Prior to that she was a Senior Talent and Recruiting Consultant and before that, she was a Human Resources Business Partner focused on global talent management, communication strategies, and corporate learning.

We’re lucky that Jay’s devotion to startups and entrepreneurship will find a great home at Earlybird. Find out more about Jay, her motivation, and culture tips!

1) What strikes you most about supporting founders and startup teams?

I have a fascination and deep respect for startup founders and team-members: nowhere else can you be your “best professional self” than at a startup. Nowhere else are the highs as high or the lows as low. Nowhere else will you have the same degrees of professional freedom to really build a process, a product, or a company. I am deeply familiar with working in a large company where hierarchies can result in weeks just to communicate around a process. So I understand the drive to operate in a more agile environment where things can get quickly accomplished!

2) What are some cool projects that you bring along to Earlybird?

I’ve been incredibly lucky in my own startup career to build a proactive cross-functional HR & Recruiting team and thought-partner with my cherished group of Munich startup HR VPs around many topics. So I can’t take credit for everything! What I can’t wait to share are high-impact ideas around employee growth and development, supporting emerging leaders, creating feedback processes, networking, growing quickly by finding and hiring the right employees. Of course, I have strong opinions on topics near and dear to all startups’ hearts: values, culture, and post-Covid hybrid working models.

3) In the spirit of connecting on a human level, what’s something personal that you would share with our readers and community?

A personal topic for me is the combination of family life with startup life. This is not something I’ve shared readily in most professional contexts. Further, I have the feeling in Germany that many working parents, especially mothers, are pretty silent on this topic versus in the US. Because of this, I’ve kept my profile as a working mom under wraps.

In smaller circles, my team has always gotten to know my family setup and kindly helped entertain my kids when the daycare was closed and they had to come to the office with me. I’ve also been incredibly lucky to have had supportive bosses. Because of these positive experiences, I’m the first advocate for working parents to take on leadership roles part-time or take a career side step while children are young. More gender diversity can be achieved if companies have more empathy for the setups that parents need, offer jobs as full and part-time, and truly commit to flexible work.

4) How would you professionally define yourself at the core?

I’m a Recruiter through and through, so I love pitching, selling, networking, and multiplying. This is super crucial if you are in a startup: you quickly learn that you must never stop explaining who you are, what your mission is, how this makes a difference to the world or to any individual, at any level, at any relationship to you.

5) What are the biggest challenges working in the tech startup industry regarding building the right teams? How can startup leaders or founders overcome these?

Being a part of a high-growth tech company comes with fast-paced everything: changes, momentum and a war-for-talent. It is always tricky to win and retain those specialized experts and it takes a certain eye for the associated profiles. This is an aptitude you develop over time, and that you must adapt to with constant changes in technology, society, and geography.

💥 Here are some best practices to help any team with sustainable growth:

• Hire, enable, and retain a strong In-house Recruiting team. Then treat this function with the same importance, budget, and influence as would a marketing team. In-house Recruiters will multiply the startup’s culture and have more external touch points to a wider variety of individuals than possibly any other function.
• Promote the right people leaders. Train these emerging leaders, and ensure upward, downward, and peer feedback on a regular basis to ensure they become strong, empathetic managers of their people.
• Communicate your people strategy, values, and goals repeatedly to keep everyone moving in the right direction (interviewers, recruiters, hiring managers, and new joiner peers.)
• Know when to hire for potential and motivation versus skill level.
• Trigger the right external headhunting firms at the right time for the right price to plug any key talent gaps.
• Understand that good people will also leave your company, and treat these leavers with grace. The best companies will turn great employee exit-ers into clients, evangelists, mentors, or even re-hires.

6) Thank you, Jay. We can’t wait to work with you. Lastly, how can people get in touch with you?

Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn and please mention why you wish to connect so I can help you best.

If this resonates, please 👏🏽 to spread the word so more people can discover the content. You can keep up with the whole Earlybird gang on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Interview edited and condensed by Elisheva Marcus.