Unlocking growth: TheyDo's talent and retention strategies, remote first

While funding and revenue are crucial components to scale your business, these are only made possible by nurturing and growing your most valuable asset—your people. Scaling, from a people perspective, involves hiring the right talent, fostering an exceptional company culture, and supporting your team members to handle growth. 

We’ve come a long way in our own journey these past few years. Our team is now made up of more than 30 nationalities, spread across more than 20 countries. We’re honored to have won Remote’s 2024 Awards for ‘Excellence in Remote Work Culture’ and the ‘Liftoff Award for Startups’. We’re also proud to have been highly commended for ‘Excellence in Talent Strategy’ and ‘Excellence in DE&I’. This blog post is designed as a practical guide for Founders and people practitioners who are starting their journey from start-up to scale-up. Equally, it gives candidates an inside look at how we’ve been building TheyDo.

Hiring first 

There’s a school of thought which champions hiring as the single most important responsibility in any company, particularly a start-up. To quote Scaling Through Chaos: “making sure you have a concentration of truly excellent people from the start is a force-multiplier as you scale”. Mishires lead to cost in time and budget, and result in a poor experience for everyone, not least the new hire themselves. Not everyone is an ideal match, and that’s ok. 

That said, it was important for us to clearly define what makes a great ‘Theydoer’, in addition to matching the roles and responsibilities of a position to a candidate’s experience. This fits together with establishing your employer value proposition (EVP), so you can attract the perfect candidate. Our hiring strategy included the following:

1. Adopting an applicant tracking system (ATS): An ATS enables you to hire at scale, helping you to publish job adverts, review applications and move them through the hiring funnel. We chose Ashby, a smart ATS which allows you to automate the hiring process. It includes built-in analytics so you can assess time to hire, how well candidates are performing, and where you might be losing them so you can recalibrate your hiring strategy in real time. 

2. Building a robust hiring process: Too many rounds of interviews can result in diminishing returns, while too few can reduce the level of confidence you and your candidates require. We selected four: talent partner interview, hiring manager interview, practical interview, and final round interviews. Each stage assesses different criteria (using scorecards), such as domain expertise and ‘cultural add’ requirements. We hold a panel discussion meeting at the end of a candidate’s hiring loop to ensure that a hiring manager feels confident in their decision. We also share a candidate pack with every candidate to learn more about TheyDo and our hiring process.

3. Introducing values and Founder interviews: These interviews make up the final stage of our hiring process. For the values interview, our Founders selected team members they believe not only align with our values, but can assess if our candidates align with them, too (read about how we redesigned our company values in March 2023). We created situational based questions and a scoring rubric to support them in this important role. The Founders interview was established to ensure that at least one Founder would have the opportunity to meet every candidate we hired, enabling them to review feedback from previous interviews and ensure each candidate would meet and incrementally raise our hiring bar. 

4. Delivering interview training: Interviewing is an art rather than a science. It’s subjective, and mishires can and will happen. To avoid this, every interviewer at TheyDo completes a two hour workshop including the basics on how to interview without bias, ask situational questions, and how to promote a great candidate experience. Participants split into smaller groups and take part in role-plays to practice this skill in a safe environment. Equally, our values interviewers take part in an additional workshop for the values round. This details what it means to be a values interviewer, how to run a values interview and the important role a values interview can play in a panel discussion. 

5. Sourcing passive talent: The best talent is not always actively looking on job boards. LinkedIn is an obvious platform to source from, but we’ve also had success with Otta and Cord. Both include options to source for underrepresented talent. We created a referrals program with a €2,000 bonus (or local currency equivalent) to encourage exceptional referrals. Optimum hiring is composed of an equal split amongst direct applicants, referrals, and sourced candidates. By prioritizing in-house sourcing and driving our referrals program, hires made via direct applicants in 2023 decreased consecutively each quarter, from 70% (Q1) to 22% (Q4).

6. Measuring quality of hire over time: By early 2024 we had sufficient data to be able to assess if our hiring process was working. To do this we pulled interview data for each hire from Ashby in 2023 and considered probation completion rates, performance cycle results, promotions, and engagement survey questions related to how well we work with our fellow team members, including alignment with our values. Unsurprisingly, we found performance during the hiring process strongly aligned with performance in the role (albeit not exclusively). We have since launched hiring manager surveys via Ashby to gather feedback in real time.

Remote works

TheyDo was always envisioned to be a fully remote business. During and after Covid, we saw companies transform overnight from being office led to hybrid, and in many cases being fully remote. We’ve since seen a shift back towards being office led, but we feel differently about that. Being fully remote, we can access the best talent in Europe and North America. Importantly, remote work helps our team members to maintain a healthy work life balance, and offers an alternative to parents, carers and people with certain disabilities. That said, remote working requires careful thought and planning. Here are some of the steps we took to set this up successfully:

1. Partnering with an employer of record (EOR): An EOR enables you to hire remotely, acting as an employer for your team members. We partner with Remote. They take care of contract preparation and payroll, ensure local compliance, and provide support with regards to employment law. We also have a legal entity in the Netherlands, and hire our team members based there directly. Humaans is our human resource information system (HRIS). It helps us keep track of the various elements regarding employee management, including PTO, absence, contracts, compensation, role changes, etc.

2. Establishing ‘Ways of Working’ (WoW): In a remote environment, ‘how’ you work is crucial. We document everything on Notion, and set up a hub which includes guidelines with regards to how we manage communications, meetings and our software tools. We chose Gather as our virtual office, and Slack for async communications. We’re thoughtful about asynchronous work, employing tactical meeting formats to be intentful and action led. Wednesday is a ‘no meeting day’ to allow time for creative thinking and project work (customer calls and interviews excluded). Naturally, we use our own product, TheyDo, to map out our journeys and collaborate cross-functionally. 

3. Promoting an inclusive culture. Our customers are diverse, and we believe we should be, too. We dedicate time to acting upon initiatives related to diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging (DEIB). We set up a DEIB committee to partner with us on a range of topics, whether it’s improving the diversity mix of our teams, getting feedback on how we’re doing, running unconscious bias training, etc. You can read more about our efforts here. 

4. Designating time to meet up, in person: Although we champion remote first, we recognize the importance of taking time in person to foster genuine relationships. In addition to weekly all-hands meetings and virtual events, we get together company wide twice per year. Individual teams can also meet up in-between. We use these opportunities to strategize and have fun, spending time to enjoy destinations such as Amsterdam, Barcelona and Lisbon to date.

5. Assessing engagement. Engagement surveys give us insight into our company's health. They let us know how our team members feel about TheyDo and their work. Positive engagement can translate to increased morale, productivity, and lower attrition. We use Culture Amp to measure engagement. Team members can anonymously submit feedback on topics related to goal alignment, ways of working, people leaders support, recognition, growth, and rewards. Our most recent survey’s result was 86%, indicating that we’re on the right track. We ran focus groups to deep dive into some of our opportunistic areas and actions required.

People matter

If hiring is the most important responsibility in any company, retaining your talent follows closely behind. Your team members understandably want to feel appreciated and supported, so they can grow long term with you. In addition to our cultural initiatives, we’ve been taking a handful of additional measures this past year:

1. Providing feedback on performance: Performance reviews provide us with an opportunity to celebrate our impact and consider what we can learn. We run two cycles per year, during Spring and Autumn. Both cycles play an important role in determining annual compensation review. Participants write their own self-reflection and receive feedback from their peers and stakeholders. Upwards feedback is provided to our people leaders from their team, and vice versa. We work with Culture Amp to manage this process. One important consideration in our review cycle is not only what was delivered, but how it was delivered (linked to our company values). 

2. Designing a compensation philosophy: Establishing a compensation philosophy enables you to be market competitive, transparent, and equitable. We partner with established compensation providers Ravio in Europe and Pave in North America. We created salary bands for each level and role, to inform our compensation decisions when hiring and during our annual compensation review cycle. Pay transparency is an emerging trend and in our most recent cycle we informed team members where they sit on their salary band. In the coming months we will share our team members’ respective salary band directly with them.

3. Introducing benefits and perks. Benefits and perks are an integral part of any compensation package, but we recommend rolling these out slowly to ensure scalability. Recent history has shown us that hyper-growth and increased operating costs can put your team at risk, leading to redundancies. This is something we’ve been thoughtful about. That said, as we’ve progressed through successive funding rounds, we’ve been expanding these further. Our benefits and perks include healthcare, flexible leave, parental leave, well being/mental health support, home office/co-working space support and stock incentive plans. We also include additional leave types for team members, including compassionate, sick childcare, jury leave, etc. 

4. Rolling out career leveling. Career levels describe the general degree of expectations required to be successful in your role, providing a pathway to move to other levels or a different track. We established two tracks, one for individual contributors and another for leadership. Not every team member wishes to become a people leader, nor should they be expected to do so. Each track encompasses different roles and skillsets, and individual contributors can progress in seniority without the need to become a people leader. Levels consider scope of influence, autonomy, and ability to problem solve.

5. Embracing learning and development (L&D). As you expand, your team members will look for opportunities to develop alongside your business, helping you to fill more senior or specialist roles in the future. Investing in L&D early on does not need to be an expensive endeavor. When you consider benefits such as increased morale, performance, and long term capability it’s a win-win scenario. We set up growth plans for every team member. This is driven by them but supported by their people leader with monthly check-ins, ranging from development needs to aspirational. We ran leadership coaching circles to help our people leaders connect on a range of topics and knowledge share in a safe space. More recently we introduced our L&D budget, which encourages our team members to buy books, attend conferences, and further their educational studies.

Attracting and retaining the best talent is not easy. Hiring practices, remote culture, and retention are key topics driven by our people team, but require engagement from everyone. No company is perfect (TheyDo included), but we’re prepared for challenges and bumps along the journey. By prioritizing our people, we can continue to innovate and evolve, paving the way for sustained success in an ever-competitive business landscape. 

TheyDo is not just a product; it's a community of dedicated individuals working together to redefine the future of business tools and practices.