This year is shaping up to be one of rapid growth for many sectors in the tech community. Companies big and small have weathered the storm of the pandemic and are ready to take their industries by storm. However, navigating this return is a delicate operation in order to ensure employees transition smoothly — whether it’s maintaining company culture, onboarding new hires or kick-starting innovative projects.
Built In LA checked in with nine local tech companies that have some major plans for the remainder of the year and beyond. Leaders shared the ways in which they’re navigating the transition, including what they’re most excited about and the challenges they’re facing along the way. Most importantly, they shared the inside scoop on the hires they’ll need to make to help them reach their ambitious goals.
By the end of 2021, accounting workflow automation company FloQast plans to double its headcount and hopes to continue that trend in 2022. Powell said that in order to kick off this growth, the company invested heavily into its talent acquisition department and implemented fully remote positions.
What do your hiring plans look like this year, and what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
Like everyone else, we adopted remote working environments due to last year’s events. Our R&D team made the decision to be remote-only going forward. For those at our headquarters in Los Angeles or at the Columbus, Ohio, office, we have adopted an employee choice policy. This means they’re able to determine what works best for them: hybrid, fully remote or fully in office. This has unlocked a large national talent pool for us and allows us to focus our recruiting efforts to be confident that FloQast listens to their employees.
At the start of 2021, we had 180 employees and plan to get to 350 by the end of the year. We have huge plans for all go-to-market functions and plan to double headcount in 2021 and continue that trend in 2022. As a company built by accountants, for accountants, a major priority has always been to help people with accounting backgrounds successfully transition into new roles at FloQast. This year, we’re doubling down on that and hope to continue to add former accountants throughout the organization.
What steps are you taking to make sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
We invested heavily in our talent acquisition team in 2020 and 2021, both in its size and its resources and supporting technologies. We have automated our entire recruiting process, eliminated administrative burdens, partnered with Crosschq on automated reference checks and leaned into allowing technology to unlock new capabilities for us. We wanted to lean into the remote workforce, virtual interviewing and this ever-changing talent landscape without losing our identity or altering our company culture.
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year, and what impact will this project have on the business?
Adopting an employee-choice approach for our entire workforce allows our employees to make the right choice for them on where they want to work. We are scaling internationally and stateside, doubling in headcount in the next 12 months. We care more about how our employees are doing their work, not where they do their work. We are building a culture of trust and high performance, one hire at a time.
In 2021, legal tech software company Ontra plans to grow its headcount by 175 percent. Black said that the company is looking to hire individuals who can add to their culture by being motivated, intellectually curious and empathetic.
What do your hiring plans look like this year, and what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
We’re in the midst of rapid expansion, and the majority of the positions we’ve been hiring for are the first ever at the company. We’ve grown from a team of 47 in March 2020 to 143 as of this month. It’s an exciting time in areas such as data, quality assurance, product marketing and human resources. We’re creating bespoke interview processes and constantly iterating on them as we learn more about the talent pool, apply new sourcing efforts and train new hiring managers. Many of our 2021 new hires are hiring managers themselves, which means we have new networks of referrals, new ideas to absorb and new people to train on our recruiting process.
Our talent team continues to scale with the company, and we now have a dedicated talent operations team that exclusively focuses on the candidate experience. They also manage all of the systems and tools to enable a smooth and efficient process for candidates. We also brought on talent acquisition managers who are both mentoring a team of sourcers and acting as true partners to all of our department heads to understand and meet their specific needs.
What steps are you taking to make sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
We plan to grow by 175 percent this year. Year to date, we already doubled our headcount and have tripled since the start of the pandemic. This means more team members have onboarded remotely than in person.
With every department growing across multiple locations, our commitment to scaling our culture is stronger than ever. We have always treated our team members as adults and trust everyone to manage their time, take the time off they need and get their work done. Everyone at Ontra needs to be able to operate with some degree of autonomy. We invest significant time in our interview process to get to know candidates as people, not just as employees. We want to add to our company culture by hiring motivated, intellectually curious and empathetic people.
What is the most interesting challenge facing your team at the moment, and how are you working to overcome it?
We’re tackling the challenges of scaling with people and technology. While we were always geographically distributed and open to remote workers, we value in-person interactions to cement our culture. At the onset of the pandemic, we had to find a substitute for the regular travel and meetups that once brought us together. We use a tool called Donut to set up weekly virtual meetings for random team members to get to know each other.
We also started streamlining new-hire start dates for groups to go through remote onboarding together. We’ve received positive feedback from recent hires who said onboarding as a class helped them feel connected right away.
Location data platform Foursquare is looking to grow its employee base by 20 percent in both 2021 and 2022. In order to meet its hiring goals, Ellenbogen said that the company has been focused on adding skilled recruiters as well as implementing onboarding cohorts to continuously improve the hiring experience for both candidates and managers.
What do your hiring plans look like this year, and what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
Foursquare is in a period of high growth and consequently has aggressive hiring goals in 2021 and beyond. Specifically, we are looking to grow our employee base by 20 percent in 2021 and looking to double our headcount from there in 2022.
Some key characteristics and traits we look for in new team members are positive, can-do attitudes; grit and resilience; collaborative drives; diverse, strong communication skills; open-mindedness; and ethics and honesty.
What steps are you taking to make sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
Scaling a company, while very exciting, also creates plenty of challenges. We try to anticipate growth and plan as much as possible so we can ensure our employees have a good experience from the day they submit their resume through their entire tenure at Foursquare. We have focused on adding skilled recruiters to our team and more onboarding cohorts to continuously improve the experience for both candidates and hiring managers.
The most important thing we can do is to listen to our employees. We currently have very active employee resource groups within the organization representing diverse viewpoints. We regularly send out pulse surveys to gather data regarding morale and then create action committees based on these results. Finally, our goal is to work as efficiently as possible, which is why having the right technology and processes in place is an area of continued focus as we strive to scale the business properly.
What is the most interesting challenge facing your team at the moment, and how are you working to overcome it?
Since March 2020, in addition to hiring a good amount of employees, we’ve also acquired two companies and have a new CEO. We are coming back to the office a much different company than we were when we left 15 months ago. For a company that historically worked in the office five days a week, we will be facing the challenge of navigating the transition to a hybrid work model. This also comes with cultural changes because many in our workforce haven’t met their teammates in person.
We will overcome this by embracing change, listening to our employees and being flexible and thoughtful in our approach. As always, we will put the health, safety and well-being of our employees at the forefront of all our decisions and are looking forward to tackling these challenges in a post-pandemic world.
This year, integrated digital agency Darkroom is looking to fill approximately 10 positions. DiPietrantonio said that they are looking for candidates who are not only ambitious and hardworking, but are also out-of-the-box thinkers and creators.
What do your hiring plans look like this year, and what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
Currently we are hovering around 40 full-time people and are looking to fill about 10 open positions. We have been very particular with our hiring process and are looking for culture fits across all of our agency departments. New team members — I like to refer to them as those looking to join the Darkside — need to be diligent, ambitious and hard-working, while also having a general light-hearted spirit.
Creativity and an ability to think outside of the box is at the heart of our work — it’s why we’ve been able to grow as quickly as we have — and those characteristics continue to define what we look for in new hires.
What steps are you taking to make sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
We have made calculated steps to make sure we are not pushing the envelope. We’ve invested in solidifying our culture and making sure it maintains its magical feeling. This has been difficult with remote work, but with offices opening back up, I think our culture will be more prevalent going forward. From a technology, team structure and onboarding perspective, those aspects of our company continue to become more robust and deliberate, which is improving our team’s happiness and productivity in meaningful ways.
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year, and what impact will this project have on the business?
The most exciting development we have in the works is the construction of our new Darkroom HQ, located in the heart of Los Angeles. We are looking to build a space that is a true reflection of our vision for the company — one that can serve as a cultural and creative hub for our people, clients, partners and brands. The opening of this space will be a defining moment for the company.
In order to support its growing product line and customer base, gaming platform PlayVS is hiring for a variety of roles across the organization. Kaplan said that they are looking for candidates who are committed to creating an unrivaled user experience, have an ability to take initiative and refuse to settle for the status quo.
What do your hiring plans look like this year, and what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
PlayVS is growing from nearly every angle of the business. Our product line is expanding, our features are becoming more complex and our customer base is increasing daily. In order to match this growth and provide gamers with the most competitions and the best competitive experiences, we need to hire the right people.
Beyond meeting the basic qualifications for the role, we look for candidates who embody our company’s core values: player experience first, all-in, teamwork and impossible is our favorite kind of possible. Employees at PlayVS model these core values through a variety of characteristics. On a daily basis, they demonstrate their commitment to an unrivaled user experience, their ability to take initiative, proclivity towards both courage and resilience, and refusal to settle for the status quo.
What steps are you taking to make sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
We must approach our work with humility. This includes being open to new ways of working, embracing a diversity of ideas, accepting that everything is iterative and never finite, and being comfortable letting go of old practices that no longer benefit us. We’re consistently assessing new technologies and considering how they can be incorporated into our environment. We empower our teams to go beyond being doers and drive toward becoming strategic builders and systems thinkers.
Employees are encouraged to take on process improvement projects in addition to their core responsibilities. We find it vital for the continued progress of PlayVS that we hire intentionally. To us, this means building cognitively diverse teams — seeking out culture-adds as opposed to culture-fits. Our goal is to design a company that promotes the expression of unique perspectives, which we believe to be the foundation of excellent products.
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year, and what impact will this project have on the business?
PlayVS is extremely proud to announce our new partnership with Nintendo, which brings Super Smash Bros., Ultimate, Splatoon 2 and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe into the world of variety sports across the U.S. and Canada.
In the year to come, with our community continuing to scale, we are committed to creating the most amount of competitions and the best competitive experiences for our existing and future players. Once this is achieved, the sky’s the limit for us!
Having already hired 40 new employees this year, Centerfield, a big data marketing and sales company, plans to make additional hires later in the year. To help ensure the process goes smoothly, Romano said that they give new hires home-office stipends and hold regular check-ins to gather feedback.
What do your hiring plans look like this year, and what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
We are scaling the business at a fast pace and our hiring plans are massive to meet the needs of our growing business. Most of our departments have new positions they are adding in during the back-half of the year, and we have already hired more than 40 new employees in the first five months of the year.
During every interview, we have potential candidates speak with someone from our culture team to ensure that this individual will complement our culture and work well in our environment. Our culture team looks for people who are adaptable, flexible, comfortable in change, and most importantly, ambitious, curious-minded individuals who want to make an impact. We love risk-takers and encourage our employees to put their bold ideas on the table.
What steps are you taking to make sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
We have implemented more programs, clubs, processes and exercises during our rapid growth phase. We need our employees to be comfortable at home, so we provided each employee with a $500 work-from-home stipend that they could use however they chose to make their home office comfortable.
Our recruiters and HR teams touch base with new employees during their first 90 days to make sure they have all the resources they need and provide us with valuable feedback on how we can make the experience even better. We send regular surveys to hear from the general population about our culture and what new ideas we can implement. Finally, we are constantly evaluating our team structures to make sure that everyone’s scope is manageable and resources are applied where necessary. Human capital is one investment we will never short-change.
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year, and what impact will this project have on the business?
As we grow organically, we also grow from acquisitions. One of the unique challenges that comes along with acquisitions is taking the best of the acquired company’s cultural offerings and massaging them into our culture to make a supercharged culture. We want our newly acquired employees to feel the love when they join us as we know how difficult change can be. So we put in place buddy systems to help with the integration and to assist in getting to know the teams. As we continue to expand, maintaining a stellar experience for newly hired and newly acquired employees will continue to be a top priority for us.
As a result of its recent acquisition, digital mortgage platform Cloudvirga has some major hiring plans. In anticipation of this rapid growth, Gentry said that they’ve begun streamlining the onboarding process, are revamping the review and feedback processes, and are rolling out a new rewards and recognition program.
What do your hiring plans look like this year, and what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
This is going to be a very exciting year for Cloudvirga. We were recently acquired by Stewart Title and the recruiting team and I have been very busy crafting the talent plan for the next few months. Several key positions across most departments have been added to the staffing model, creating an aggressive hiring road map. I am excited for the teams to grow as well as the internal opportunity this has created for our associates.
Our team has been the biggest source of qualified applicants, either referring their own network or helping the recruitment team identify exactly what is needed. It’s created a great synergy with everyone aiding the recruitment efforts and benefiting from our generous referral policy. We are a very passionate bunch and take quality seriously. We are looking for candidates who have passion and spark that can directly translate to providing our clients with a high-quality product.
What steps are you taking to make sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
Having spent 12 years in the hospitality industry, I have an intrinsic motivation to provide great experiences to candidates and associates. Pivoting our onboarding experience to be 100 percent remote has provided us with an opportunity to revamp the entire process with improvement in each iteration. We have made it as fun as possible with a mix of online trainings and Zoom meet-and-greet parties. In anticipation of rapid growth, we have started streamlining the onboarding process, currently revamping the review and feedback processes and rolling out an entirely new rewards and recognition program based on employee feedback.
What is the most interesting challenge facing your team at the moment, and how are you working to overcome it?
Our team has been through a lot of change recently, and with change comes the unknown. We have been a 50-person fintech start-up for five years, and now are a part of a 6,000-employee company. To me, it is important that employees feel that their questions surrounding the change are addressed and that these changes are communicated promptly and thoroughly. I maintain an open-door policy and personally reach out to employees to check in with them during one-on-ones, providing open forums to answer questions and rally the troops for group communication when needed. I find that more questions are answered and decisions are made to move the company forward when people feel connected and comfortable.
By the end of the year, music software company Output plans to increase its headcount by approximately 27 people. In order to ensure this growth period goes smoothly, Salazar said that the company implemented a new onboarding program and optimized its team structure to help each department achieve their specific goals.
What do your hiring plans look like this year, and what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
We currently sit at 78 employees and anticipate having more than 105 by end of year. Marketing, finance, product and HR will all see new headcount. Engineering will see growth across the entire business, both in existing teams and building out new ones. Growth will span across different experience levels and encompass data, front- and back-end, audio and digital signal processing, and web development. We focus on key characteristics of leadership, self-motivated problem solving, technical excellence, creativity and the desire to make an impact.
What steps are you taking to make sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
We recently implemented a new onboarding program to get employees acclimated as quickly and seamlessly as possible. We have also spent a considerable amount of time optimizing our team structures. Teams are based on cross-functional, mission-driven squads, where product leadership, engineering experts and design practitioners work together to achieve their given product-oriented goals. This structure ensures that we can scale existing teams or build new ones to accommodate our long-term company goals for business growth.
What’s a project you’re really excited to tackle this year, and what impact will this project have on the business?
Creating tools to accommodate people who are entirely new to making music is the most exciting project we are starting to undertake. Technology democratized the creation process for video and photos. It makes sense that technology adoption will transition to making music. We are working to inspire a new generation of music makers with easy-to-use tools that bring the power of a studio to anyone, wherever they are.
Over the course of the pandemic, defense technology company Anduril has scaled its team immensely and plans to continue that momentum in the future. Radzieta said that as they grow, it’s really important that they provide consistent communication opportunities to each new hire to help them dive into the company's products and culture.
What do your hiring plans look like this year, and what are some of the key characteristics or traits you look for in new team members?
We put a huge emphasis on hiring at the end of 2020 and throughout 2021 to ensure that we would be well positioned to hit our hiring goals and support our teams. We have scaled tremendously throughout the course of the pandemic and continue to have lofty hiring goals. Luckily, we have a versatile recruiting team that is able support a variety of engineering and business needs as our company requirements continue to grow and shift throughout the year.
What steps are you taking to make sure this period of rapid growth goes smoothly from an employee experience perspective?
Being on the talent acquisition side, we are often the first point of contact for a new employee. As we grow, it is really important that we are providing consistent communication to facilitate introductions and conversations that will provide valuable information as someone starts at Anduril. Our onboarding program includes all new hires and provides a three- or four-day deep-dive into products, history and customers, as well as meeting with the founding team. As we are starting to transition back to offices, our facilities and HR teams are working to provide safe and impactful events for people to learn more about their colleagues and their contributions.
What is the most interesting challenge facing your team at the moment, and how are you working to overcome it?
Transitioning back to the office in a post COVID-19 world is a challenge we share with many other companies. Given the stage we are at, and the pace in which we move, it is nearly impossible to replace in-person interaction or collaboration. Anyone who visits our headquarters, attends a product roadmap meeting or visits our test site immediately sees the value of being together. Nothing can replace running into an engineer on a Hoverboard after they finished a successful customer demo and getting to hear about it in real time. We have missed these office interactions and are so looking forward to having everyone back together. The company, product lines and employee counts have grown. But what has stayed the same is the buzz and excitement you get from your colleagues around the office.
