5 tips for writing a Talent Playbook on the fly
(Notes from a Launchpad Newbie).
I write this, on lockdown in a work from-home pattern doing my bit to help stop the spread of COVID-19. I also have a two-year-old doing her bit to try and stop me typing on the laptop and writing this blog.
Right now, life is weird and unparalleled. It’s just over a month since I left Google, but with just a handful of weeks under the belt as a new joiner to Launchpad, I am super grateful that I had a couple of weeks with the team face-to-face.
Speaking of the team, I don’t think I could have had a warmer welcome from everyone at Launchpad as well as its resident businesses, and with the nuance of now being forced to use technology to collaborate, given the current climate, I still feel super connected to everyone. Because we work in an agile way, we also have daily stand-ups, which again, help us to stay connected as a company.
I’ve always been curious and passionate about the power of technology and having worked at some of the most iconic mission-driven companies in the tech space, I now find myself working towards a mission that plays to my passions but also (and I don’t want to sound cheesy here!), gives me the opportunity to play my part in making the world a better place for the aforementioned two-year-old.
So, everything in my career feels like a natural progression to this point — building out executive hiring capabilities, recruiting for scaling tech giants and now helping to scale smaller, more agile but equally ambitious start-ups within what is fundamentally a start-up.
We’re building everything from the ground up, so I am literally writing the playbook on how to hire effectively, building out recruitment processes that can scale and doing this whilst helping the resident businesses do the same — someone at Launchpad gave the analogy of building the plane whilst we’re flying it, whilst we’re helping build other planes while they’re flying!
I’ve always found the VC world interesting — the play on building and scaling at speed and the pressure to deliver on investor dollars has often intrigued me. But this is neither VC, PE, incubator or accelerator, rather, it’s a new model and an opportunity to go down a different path; the sense of purpose is quite frankly phenomenal.
What also really interests me about this unique business model is exactly that, it’s unique. It’s never been done in this way before in the energy sector and Launchpad has been created as BP’s way to create a new model of corporate innovation. It has aspects of private equity, feels like a start-up, but is still connected to BP, focused on accessing the unique advantages that a corporate can bring, whilst maintaining its own unique identity.
We’re literally writing the playbook on the fly; it’s scrappy, impactful, super-fast paced and I love it!
So, with that in mind, I thought I’d share five quick thoughts for any talent folks in a similar situation; building talent attraction from the ground up:
1. Walk before you can run.
I appreciate that this sounds obvious, but it’s so crucial when you’re scaling a company. By taking the time to do foundational work by deep-diving into your company’s current processes, needs, challenges, aspirations, culture — the full picture, you then have a firm starting point with which to work. You’ll avoid the mistake of rushing into things feet first and then having to scrap the plan because it doesn’t fit or changing things at vital points.
In the military we used to have a saying, “time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted”; never a truer piece of wisdom when you’re building out hiring processes.
2. Done is better than perfect.
Your investors and leadership team will want to see high standard results and so it can be easy to want to make sure that everything looks and feels perfect before you ship it. But if you’re not careful, you’ll tweak and tinker and, in the end, nothing gets shipped! This is not to say that you ever compromise the high-quality bar you have set for yourself and your business, but you have to finish it regardless, follow through and GSD (Get Sh*t Done!).
3. It shouldn’t look the same all the time.
Eric Schmidt once said that for every order of magnitude (1, 10, 100 etc), expect your processes to break; this is increasingly true for early stage start-ups that are scaling fast.
What got you to 10 hires, won’t necessarily get you to 100 hires and so it’s important to capture the data and insight to see where your process is ‘breaking’, needs adjusting or even just pre-empting the break so as to be ahead of the curve.
An example of this is Time in Assessment. There are many companies that don’t measure how long it’s taking to get a candidate through each stage of an interview process but then wonder why they’re struggling to scale at speed with blockers such as limited resources or limited interviewers.
Find the blockers and then adapt accordingly; change the process at each magnitude of scale.
4. One size does not fit all
I have been incredibly lucky enough to have worked at arguably two of the most iconic technology companies in Facebook and Google. Many companies admire and have tried to emulate Google’s ways of working in some sense; there is an argument to make from some camps that Facebook copied some of Google’s, but that’s another story! Anyway, the point being is that what works for Google, may not work for you and remember, Google was once a start-up too, so a lot iterated over time.
Build it your own way, aligned to your own culture and if you must steal with pride because it fits, then do it anyway.
5. Keep calm and carry on!
Granted, situations like COVID-19 are (hopefully!) a once in a generation phenomenon, but there will undoubtedly be other curveballs that come our way. I’m super keen to learn from this experience and once it’s over, review the learnings, any pitfalls and areas for improvement, so that we can be a stronger business going forward.
One thing is sure, if we at Launchpad can get through this treacherous virus and resulting market conditions ever-so-much closer to our mission of growing five billion-dollar unicorns, we must have the belief that we can overcome almost anything.
