Jim Miller

▶0:00IntroWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶0:42HostWell, I'm excited to welcome Jim Miller to the Built by People podcast today. Jim, thanks so much for joining us.

▶0:48GuestA real pleasure. Thank you for having me.

▶0:50HostWell, hey, as a starting question, I just want to dive right into it. I always love to ask if you can share more about your career journey.

▶0:57GuestYeah, I'm a recruiter through and through. I've had 25 years in the TA space, despite now being a head of people. And it's that journey that led me into this role. I've got a, what I think is the best job in the world. So I'm the head of people at Ashby, and we build an ATS, talent technology product. And I put my first ATS in in 2003. Then I joined Google, and I was there for 15 years. And I was on the design team with their internal ATS, which they're still using today, 14 years later. So it was a natural progression eventually for me to pitch myself to a company that built TA technology that didn't have a head of people. And, and here I am doing that role 2 and a half years later. So it's been a fun journey.

▶1:38HostOh, that's great. And, you know, as a head of people, what's your top priority for this quarter?

▶1:43GuestUm, top priority for this quarter is actually quite a fun one. Uh, we take the whole company away once a year, And that's happening in about 2 weeks' time. So my team, we're all hands on deck, building out the company-wide offsite. We're an asynchronously remote company. So we invest every year on bringing everybody together from 23 different countries this year into one place. We'll be together for 5 days, all-inclusive, lots of different programming, and lots of opportunities for people to get to know each other face-to-face. Big priority, and it's a nice fun one as well.

▶2:16HostThat's amazing. Well, hey, as we look about Char in general, what's the biggest challenge you're currently facing in HR?

▶2:24GuestCompany growth. It's been fantastic. We've just closed our Series D. We'd hardly touched our Series C. The growth customer-wise, revenue-wise, all of those things are fantastic. But I'm focused on trying to keep the company right-sized and future-proofed. And that's a really fun challenge as we go through this. And I'm trying to do it in a, in a very different way to how most companies approach that.

▶2:48HostI love that. Well, hey, this is kind of a weird question. If I shadowed you for a week, where would I see you spending the most time on things that don't feel strategic?

▶2:57GuestYou'd be like, Jim, why are you meeting with so many heads of TA? And what I do is I get eyes on product. I'm in a unique position with my background and experience to showcase what Ashby can do for a head of TA. Outside of the typical sales cycle. But it's not just heads of TA at companies, it's the heads of TA who are looking for work. Ashby has so much AI functionality multithreaded through it, that I'm able to showcase that to them in a demo to help them answer the question of what's AI going to do to TA technology in an interview. So I'm kind of doing interview coaching with heads of TA at the same time as showcasing what our product can do. And it's paying dividends, but it's definitely non-strategic and fits the bill for that question.

▶3:42HostThat's great. What's keeping you up at night right now?

▶3:45GuestHeadcount planning. That's the thing I was touching on earlier with the growth. I take a very different approach to this. I feel that my job is to, first of all, future-proof the company. I never want to make a riff. Try to learn from the mistakes of many companies over the last few years and over eternity, really, to hire the right people in the right spaces at the right time. To do just-in-time hiring in effect. And we do that through multiple different mechanisms. For example, we don't have quarterly hiring plans, we anchor our hires based on business outcomes. So we will have a revenue target that will trigger the opening of a headcount. For customer success, we'll have a book value, average book value that will trigger the next hire. So instead of having to wait for a temporal moment, like that's a Q2 head, it's no, no, that headcount is already open, we're running against it because we've grown faster than what we projected. So future-proofing, but also minimizing cost at exactly the same time. If you think about an analogy, the high jump, the high jumper goes over the bar, but their center of gravity goes under the bar. That's what I'm attempting to do here. And so far, so good. The revenue growth has been far different than the people growth. And yet we're still having the achievements and not running into any customer issues or anything along those lines.

▶5:02HostWhich tools or partners are most critical to you today in your role?

▶5:06GuestI think, again, it's a pretty unique answer. The critical partners to me are internal. So it's the product team, the engineering teams who are building our product, not just the product that is known to our customers today, but all the future state products, because I am the persona that we sell to, and my team are the people who use the product. So I'm partnering them with them on sanity checking future feature sets. I do testing. I've got a stopwatch on my desk. This stuff. So it's critical for me to have that partnership, because we fully intend to use our product to the nth degree. So that's the relationship that I need to build. Outside of us, it's the multiple different comp providers that we have. You know, I mentioned the number of countries that we operate in already. We're very transparent against— with compensation, even in jurisdictions that don't require comp transparency, we do it across the board. And it's critically important for us to make sure that we're hitting that right to attract the talent. And it's pretty unique space that we're in at the moment. You can see seed companies paying far more than Series C and Series D at the moment because of the impact of the AI engineer phenomenon. And if you've got experience in that space, then you've got the premiums. So we have to really balance because we are hiring people who've got incredible AI skill set as well as more generalist engineers. So that's kind of the key external partnership I have at the moment, sourcing from multiple different datasets rather than just one provider. As most companies do.

▶6:36HostThat makes a lot of sense. That's great. If I could wave a magic wand, or if you could wave a magic wand, fix one system or process within human resources, what would it be?

▶6:45GuestFor me, it would be my feature set request list with our own internal team, because I want the things faster than they're able to build them. But that's a good and very unique problem for us to have. But yeah, as we get into what I see as my utopia system creation, that to me is magical. So that's where the magic wand comes in.

▶7:05HostOkay. If I came back in 12 months from now and we rehashed out this conversation, what would you have hoped has changed within your own HR org?

▶7:15GuestI think reaching escape velocity with the HR team is key. We're still small enough that I'm anchoring on the number of employees to add the next HRBP. Eventually, you get to that kind of critical mass in HR where you've got enough folks that you're not too worried about the, you increase in the company, you've scaled and the requests and things that are coming into the team can be handled at a volume. And you're starting to get into having specialists in the org, comp and bens, for example. And that's the transition that we're going to see over the course of the next 12 to 15 months, moving away from just having HRBPs that are handling anything to having some specialists in the team. And we've reached that escape velocity. And we're now able to get into much more systematic programmatic work downstream rather than just reactive.

▶8:07HostThat's great. I love that. Well, last question for you. What parting advice would you like to share with our community or with aspiring HR professionals?

▶8:16GuestI think the biggest impact, or thing that's had the biggest impact on my career, was being proactive about identifying my next opportunity. I knew that when I was changing jobs last that I wanted to go to a must-have product. I'd already done my due diligence on Ashby being the right ATS product, and ATS is a must-have category. I just selected Ashby and became a customer. So I pitched myself to a job that didn't exist in a company that I aspire to work for. And I remember just waiting for a long period of time to click send on that email. I polished it a dozen times, but take that leap. Go be your own— direct your own career, take control. And go after the thing that you want, build the business case, and then go after the major stakeholder who's going to make that decision. That's my advice.

▶9:08HostAwesome. Well, Jim, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure having you involved.

▶9:14GuestLikewise. Thanks.