What are some of the top considerations for today’s global workforce when it comes to ensuring everyone across the hierarchy is always aligned to a common business goal despite work challenges surrounding the ongoing pandemic? Daniel Weisblat, R&D HRBP and Recruitment Lead at monday.com talks about their team’s journey through 2020 while sharing a few thoughts on what HR needs more of in 2021:
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Please tell us a little more about you Daniel…we’d love to know about what is monday.com’s core company culture and hiring processes, how have these initiatives evolved over the years at the company?
I am an HRBP for the R&D and Recruitment Lead at monday.com, my sole focus is on hiring best in class people for engineering and the R&D team.
It is my responsibility to make sure that the recruitment and onboarding process showcases monday.com’s culture, hiring qualified employees using data and an efficient, egoless interview process.
In order to meet the growing demand for flexible workflows and software, we have grown quite remarkably. Specifically, when everyone started settling into working from home, we could see a huge demand for a work OS to help the teams manage their day-to-day work. We are happy that we are able to provide that for people. In the first few months after COVID-19 took its hold we recruited 30 new employees on the R&D team, and over 200 as a company.
As the company keeps growing, we are able to stay true to our core values of honesty and putting our people first – this is equally reflected in our interviewing process as it is throughout an employee’s time at the company.
How do you see businesses’ needs for HR Tech have changed this year – what are some of the ways in which you feel HR tech innovators can enhance their offerings to suit these changing needs in 2021 and beyond.
With the shift to working remotely, it’s extremely important to communicate with your team in a manner that we all stand on the same page. We use our own platform to track candidates – it helps us to easily see the candidates’ location, what stage of the process they’re in, and contact details. It is going to be extremely important while working in a remote or hybrid work environment, to have a seamless way to easily view information and share it across the entire HR team.
We’ve also found that this year and specially for the year to come, leading with compassion and empowering leaders with more tools for awareness is incredibly important for the entire HR team. Similarly, we need to put more emphasis on intrinsic motivation and providing mental support to employees.
Tell us about the tools your team has relied on during this time.
We use Comeet, which is an incredible collaborative recruiting software to align our team. It has helped us a lot in finding better candidates, automating processes and growing our team faster. We use Zoom for meetings in order to make sure our team is aligned, and bob for HR. Of course, monday.com being our own platform is being used for managing all steps of the recruiting process and conveying information in a transparent way to the whole team.
What top tech trends and in-demand skills you think can rule HR and tech hiring practices in the near-future?
Remote hiring and virtual interviews are those tech trends which we implemented during COVID that we would like to continue doing in the near future. About remote hiring I think it helps shortening the ‘time to hire’ since interviews are conducted online and do not require an in-person presence, which has proven to be beneficial. It is less complicated to schedule time for an interview – candidates used to be available only before or after a workday which really narrows down the availability of the hiring manager and candidate. Virtual interviews have helped increase the speed so that we are able to move faster and get to know candidates quicker. In the near future, we would like to keep aspects of our remote process across our teams.
Talking about 2020, we’d love to know a little about what were your highlights from the unusual year (employee culture initiatives taken during Covid-19, special initiatives for partners and customers, etc)!
When COVID-19 hit, monday.com hit the ground running to make sure our internal teams and customers alike were equipped with remote work strategies. So, we decided to create a remote work hub where we would share stories, tips and tricks. The company made sure everyone had the tools that were required to work from home. monday.com also offered free and complete use of the platform to any non-profit organization working to fight the coronavirus outbreak, and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to areas affected by the outbreak.
As we got used to working from home every day, monday.com made sure that we continue to keep up our culture with happy hours and at-home deliveries of fun surprises. We held our annual Elevate conference, which brings together the global monday.com community where we share best practices and innovation and this time it was held virtually which I definitely count as a highlight. This year we were completely focused on the rapidly evolving nature of work, reflecting on the significant changes + what’s ahead. We had amazing speakers including Magic Johnson (fmr. NBA star) and Leslie Odom Jr. (Hamilton) + execs at The New York Times, NHL, HSBC, Mars Wrigley, Zippo and more.
Wrapping up, tell us about some of your biggest takeaways and tips on working effectively from anywhere….and adjusting to the new normal through the year.
I would say, working with tools that help with efficient teamwork is a must, tools that sync across all devices and can be used by anyone at the company to ensure there is full transparency, even when work is remote.
It’s also important to not forget that everyone is going through a difficult time. Zoom meetings can be tactical and professional, lacking the small talk and little moments of connection you get from working with your co-workers in an office. That is why I feel its better to dedicate the beginning of certain meetings to checking in with people on a personal level, to make sure they are doing okay. We can even schedule evening happy hours or a virtual cooking class to spend quality time with co-workers.
It’s easy to forget that we’re all working towards a common goal when we are not working next to other people in an office like we normally would, hence it is easy to lose perspective. So, as a manager or someone who can see the full picture, it is extremely important to make sure everyone is effectively connected.
Thanks a lot Daniel! That was fun, we hope to see you back on V3Media soon.