Handpicking the Best: What Does it Take to be a Hevoite?
My journey with Hevo Data started in June’20. For most of us, this was a very interesting but anxiety-driven phase of our professional careers. While most of us were trying to adjust to the new normal of working in a virtual environment, I became a part of a team that was starting to grow beyond its founding members. In short — I had to adapt to a virtual set-up (had never done that) with a team I’d never met in person (made me nervous) in a new organization (was clueless).
Being a part of the Talent Acquisition team, I had two priorities — getting familiar with the existing team and finding like-minded people to be part of the herd. From a new joiner perspective, it was a pleasant surprise to observe the helpfulness & patience my colleagues had (still have) to set me up for success. No questions (even the silly ones) got unanswered, and all the resources possible were extended without hesitation. It built belongingness and ownership from initial days to reciprocate for other new members joining the team.
Fast forward to Nov’21, we’ve grown 4x the team size, but the most emphasized aspect still is to bring A+ players. As we achieve new milestones, the definition of ‘A+ player’ evolves, but at the core of it, we share a lot of common traits and motivations that bind us together — we can name it culture (for simplicity) that makes us unique in many ways.
Some of the clear differentiators are:
Being Respectful, Humble & Having Empathy: The easiest way to feel related to a new environment is being with people who are respectful to your views, agree & disagree in a humble way and are open to different perspectives. At Hevo, we all show up every day at work with a lot of new experiences, first-time learnings, expertise, and different opinions, but at the same time, we are equally cognizant of the fact that everyone is equally passionate about contributing — so being respectful and humble binds us strongly.
Planning and Organizing: The word ‘hustle’ has become undeservingly cliche to many start-ups by abandoning the importance of thoughtful planning over execution. Our executions across teams & projects are a deliberate outcome of meticulous attention to details, first principle problem solving and anticipating evidence-based outcomes that enable us to have a fair understanding of the goal, success measures, risks, and alternatives involved in execution. One of the highlights is the efforts we put in crafting a hiring plan that involves creating collateral, selection process, defining minute details to give top-notch experience to all candidates.
New Ways of Doing Things: What got you here will not take you there. The easiest pitfall of the brightest individuals is to assume that a problem or situation can be solved ‘only’ in a particular approach. One of the remarkable traits I’ve observed within my peer group is — every perspective, opinion, thought, viewpoint is considered (irrespective of prior experience and expertise) and often it becomes a new learning opportunity that leads us to unconventional solutions. Learning and unlearning keep pace mutually. On the professional side, this has opened up many learning opportunities for me, e.g. building candidate persona (Marketing team’s concept) and implementing it to engage candidates. This got us positive results in candidate experience scores.
Setting Benchmarks: Every milestone and achievement for me has been an opportunity to learn ‘What I or we as a team could have done better?’. One of the key aspects to setting-up new benchmarks is being in ‘continuous improvement’ mode, and feedback plays a crucial role. While it isn’t easy to be receptive to honest feedback, over time, it plays a vital role in honing skills on the anvil. It will always be a mixed bag of positive or critical feedback; taking it at face value and winning together builds momentum.
Openness and Transparency: Growing in size and scale is important but that hasn’t led to visibility being compromised. At times, if my curiosity leads to asking questions and understanding aspects that I’m unfamiliar with, peers have been super supportive to share information and details that can give me a better understanding. At times, while building sales teams, I’ve spoken to Sales Managers and Representatives to get into details about their initiatives, challenges, and goal to get to the right people & the right hire.
As I continue to contribute to the common goal at Hevo, it has been a phenomenal journey so far. Right from understanding the impact of each right hire to setting up people for success & building a high-performing team, I’m super excited and confident that we’re setting up a stage for something big for everyone. The journey has started at Hevo.
We appreciate you reading this article till the end. Building a great product takes hard work and determination. With each of us at Hevo sharing the same passion, everyone on the team takes the effort to go the extra mile. If you’d like to be a part of our journey and work on some of these unique challenges, please do check Hevo’s careers page.
