The Total Talent Reboot — How This Startup Overhauled Its Workforce

Two years ago, Nerdwallet completely remade its staff with a new set of values, frameworks, and a fresh approach to hiring. Here's a breakdown of how they did it.

Outline

Two years ago, Tim Chen presided over a tech startup that employed mostly former Wall Street finance types (who were mostly new graduates). He’d bootstrapped his company, Nerdwallet, for over five years at that point, and they were already profitable, but he knew there was another level to be reached — another gear to shift into. They could go from making good money to impacting the finances of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. He wasn’t exactly sure what this future looked like, but he knew what it would take to get there: a total talent reboot.

While there were already 50 dedicated and passionate employees at NerdWallet, Tim knew he needed to grow exponentially, with a focus on engineering, design and product talent. There was only one problem — which, unfortunately, led to a few more. Because Nerdwallet had never raised money, it never got the buzz or the coverage that usually comes with a check. Without being able to point to prestigious investors or skilled engineers, it lacked the cache that, for better or worse, most technical talent looks for in a startup. Chen needed to find a way to somehow put Nerdwallet on the map for the best and brightest with seemingly no levers to pull.

So let’s skip to the end. Obviously, Chen prevailed but not without bringing several other heroes into the fold — namely, Florence Thinh, who built the recruiting team that was instrumental in growing Zynga from 40 to 3,000. Now as VP of Talent at Nerdwallet, she’s helped the company rethink its approach to recruiting and nail some pretty exceptional stats: a 85% offer acceptance rate in 2015 with a passive hire rate that increased by 3x from 2014 to 2015. In this exclusive interview, Chen and Thinh share how they upleveled talent while growing the company from 50 to 270+ in two short years.

LANDING YOUR TENT POLES

Before he could build out Nerdwallet’s ranks, Chen set out to make a few senior-level hires that would not only help him steer the ship, but attract the right type of attention and respect from other prospective candidates. He needed marquee names, what he calls “tent poles,” the people who could keep the multi-ring circus running and set standards and expectations for everyone else.

The first three tent poles he recruited made all the difference in the world. Thinh, brought on to lead people operations, was transformative and brought her Zynga and Khosla Ventures street cred with her. Dan Yoo, was lured out of LinkedIn, where he was VP of Business Operations and Analytics. And Bhaskar Ghosh, who later joined from LinkedIn as VP of Engineering and Operations, held tremendous prestige in the engineering community. Sounds great, but getting folks with these resumes to join a little-known startup wasn’t a walk in the park.

“In order to get senior people on board, I had to think about what social proof I had to leverage,” says Chen. “I knew I couldn’t start with an engineering leader, because no one at the company was going to be a draw for them at the time, plus I had hacked the website together myself, so engineering wasn’t a clear priority. I thought, well, the most direct route is probably biz ops because they know the value of consulting and banking, and that’s the talent I have right now.”

This is how the conversation with Yoo kicked off. When he started meeting the staff, it was clear they were world-class in their field. He was intrigued but not sold. At the same time, Chen had interviewed over 20 candidates before landing on Thinh as the perfect fit for HR.

She was also curious to learn more, but proceeded with caution. “All of my friends were asking, ‘Where are you thinking of going? What is this company I’ve never heard of?’” says Thinh. “A lot of them were even like, ‘Sure, good luck with that…’”

While it was clear Nerdwallet’s recruiting system was far from optimal, there was something that stood out to her: Chen himself was uniquely invested in the process. It was clear to Thinh that talent would be a top priority at the organization. Even as a candidate, she saw how many different people he spoke to just to benchmark what the company actually needed, and she was impressed that he had her speak with both people who had been there for years and mere weeks. He seemed to know his stuff. She knew if she joined she wouldn’t have to start from scratch or beg for support. So, like Yoo, she was open to the possibility.

“When you’re talking to people who operate at a high level, they’re very connected to other people at that level and that’s really influential in their decision making,” says Chen. “They see someone else of their caliber at your company and they know not only is the company serious about success, but they know they’ll be able to come in and do their best work with good people.”

So he hatched a plan. He told Yoo and Thinh about each other — that they were each at the offer stage, seriously considering leadership roles at the company — and suggested they go out to dinner to talk. They hit it off, discussing their various experiences, who they knew in common (35 shared LinkedIn connections), and ideas for the company. Even though neither of them had signed, they were each impressed with Nerdwallet’s taste in talent and its ability to get the other one interested.

“At the end of dinner, he just looked at me and said, ‘Alright, are we going to do this, Flo? If I’m going, I need you there too,’” says Thinh. “It was amazing to me how influential it was to see someone with his credentials and talent joining the company. I knew I would respect his work and the team he would build. It was social proof for sure.”

They ended up starting on the same day.

The lessons: Use what you have to get tent poles in the door. Consider the social dynamics at work. Big-time talent is often your best selling point for landing more big-time talent. And, as a CEO, the best thing you can do to set yourself apart is to show how knowledgeable and invested you are in a particular functional area. People don’t join companies where they’ll have to struggle to make an impact or explain their every move. They want to feel empowered and that they can trust the CEO to be an informed thought partner.

On top of that, Chen’s offer to his first tent poles included room to grow and play. Prior, Yoo had been a VP. Nerdwallet made him COO. Thinh had been a director, now she’s VP. No matter how senior someone is, they don’t want to stop learning or expanding their capacity. They’ll gravitate toward places where they know they have built in opportunity and are bound to be challenged. So when you’re looking to recruit a tent pole, think about how to give them the highest ceiling possible.

The Ongoing Benefits of Tent Pole People

In addition to bringing expertise and seniority, the right tent pole hires will confer a number of other important advantages.

First and foremost, they usually have awesome networks. “Flo has this incredible social circle of experienced Silicon Valley leaders that she knows well. Dan was connected to all this incredible talent at LinkedIn that had since gone elsewhere,” says Chen. “That made a huge difference for us. I went from not being able to get a conversation with great engineers and PMs to having multiple candidates for every role that came up. Suddenly our lack of funding didn’t matter.”

Thinh saw how this worked first hand. “I'd be talking to some really incredible people who I knew from Zynga or before, and they'd take the meeting because they knew me and Dan and they wondered why we had decided to join.”

This is one of the biggest factors in Nerdwallet’s ability to make so many passive hires. If you’re going to pull someone amazing out of another company before they’ve even considered looking, it’s probably because of the people, not just the role, says Chen.

I would see these hires coming through that were just exceptional to the point that I was legitimately confused about what they were doing here. But I got used to it.

Second, tent pole people make it clear how others can grow at the company. “Before Dan and Flo showed up, I would constantly hear people say, ‘Hey, I’m not getting a lot of career development. I don’t know what staying here for a while looks like. I don’t think I’ll stay that long…’” he says. “Having tent poles changed things immediately. People started to say, ‘I want to be like Flo in five years,’ ‘I want to have a career like Dan’s.’”

Having a senior leadership layer people look up to and like makes working at your company an aspirational pursuit.

FIND THE BEST MATCHES FOR YOUR COMPANY — NOT ANYONE ELSE’S

“When I first started hiring for Nerdwallet, I had all these prejudices that proved to be totally untrue — I was all about pedigree and education and the names of the companies people had worked at before,” says Chen. “But soon it was clear that there was little or no correlation between where someone had worked in the past and how they were performing here. Other things made a much bigger difference.”

When Thinh joined, she worked with Chen to tease out exactly what qualities made for an ideal Nerdwallet employee. The result was overhauling the recruiting process and defining the attributes — most importantly, the central attribute — that signaled success. Since then, this framework has filtered out hundreds of candidates that looked brilliant on paper and has prompted many remarkable non-obvious hires. After you have stellar leadership in place, rebooting talent boils down to precision matchmaking.

At the heart of every match are aligned values. Yes, “values” is a squidgy term that usually means nothing. But at Nerdwallet everyone knows them, often from memory, and acts accordingly. It’s become a fundamental part of the talent reboot. A former hedge-funder, Chen was used to competing against the other five analysts in his office. Collaboration was out of the question. And when he started Nerdwallet, that culture followed him.

“It was so wrong on so many levels. We had people from different funds running different verticals in the company and there was no teamwork or dialogue or common goals,