In this episode, we are talking to Entrepreneur, Investor & CEO Andrew Swiler about his experience taking over a Ukranian company 3 months after the war started. We also get into what HRMS software is, what it can do, and why it matters – now, more than ever.
In this week’s episode, we’re talking to Entrepreneur, Investor & CEO Andrew Swiler about his experience taking over a Ukranian company 3 months after the war started. We get into the types of things they were dealing with and how they led through it, as well as what they learned.
The company, Lanteria, is a Human Resources Management System (HRMS) software so we also discuss what that is, what it can do, the opportunities that exist in that space right now, and why it matters.
“One of the unique things about HR software is that it’s one of the only pieces of software (besides email) that everyone in the company will touch at some point… HRMS is a tool. But, if it’s set up well, it could be a step towards making your company the most high-performing.”
This is a conversation about compassionate, growth-focused leadership, human resources/management, and retention. And, it really highlights leading through a crisis, like war, that affects everyone. I hope you’ll join us for this one.
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Andrew Swiler has been an entrepreneur for 10 years. Working across several software verticals. Andrew is a strategic entrepreneur and investor. He is currently the CEO of Lanteria, a leading HR software for Microsoft users headquartered in Seattle, WA.
To learn more about Lanteria visit https://www.lanteria.com/. To connect with Andrew, seek him out on Twitter (https://twitter.com/swilera) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/swiler/).
- I am Céline Williams and welcome to the Leading Through Crisis podcast, a conversation series, exploring resiliency and leadership in challenging times. My guest today is Andrew Swiler, CEO of Lanteria.com, the leading HRMS for Microsoft users. Welcome Andrew.
- Thank you, Céline. It's great to be here, thanks for having me on.
- Absolutely, it's my pleasure. Before we jump into what I'm sure is gonna be a fascinating conversation, and I already have lots of questions I'm gonna ask where the question I always start with, which is the name of the podcast is Leading Through Crisis. When you hear that pHRase, what comes up for you or what's top of mind?
- So for me, it's still top of mind. I mean, we acquired Lanteria about a year ago. The previous owners were from Ukraine. When we took over, pretty much the entire company was Ukrainian, Ukrainian employees. We had a handful of employees in North America. So we took over a company three months after the war started. The employees were very concerned about now working for somebody that was not Ukrainian. They thought we were basically in a clear house and get rid of them. And so, they were also very defensive when we took over. But we had to be essentially from day one. You know, you take over a new company, you wanna start setting the pace for what do we need to do next? What are we gonna do to grow this company? And in this case, we pretty much couldn't do that because we had to also be cognizant of all these people's situations where some people were leaving the country, some people were living in like very remote areas of the country. So basically, like hiding out. And at one point, I would say three or four months into owning the company, the electricity started going out. So the winter of of 2022, we had people just disappearing for weeks at a time. And we had to start using on Slack where people, 'cause they could still use their phones on Slack, they would put a light bulb or a plug to basically show they didn't have electricity. So we were basically playing telephone with each other saying like, who could talk, who couldn't talk, who had internet but no electricity, who had no electricity, no internet. So, we were trying to service our clients and bring on new clients while trying to be sympathetic and empathetic to the people that were what they're going through. Which for me, I have absolutely no idea what they're going through. And I don't, I can't even put myself in their shoes. But all I tried to do was if somebody said to me like, "Hey, we need to move next week to do this." I said like, take as much time as you want. Like, no, those aren't vacation days. If you have to drive to the other side of Ukraine to avoid bombings.
- I mean it, that's definitely not a vacation for anyone. So I think that, I mean I'm sure they appreciate, but I think it's a really important thing to call out is that there are crises that happen and things like war, that's a crisis that affects everyone. And that is often the time it is crises like that. I'm not saying war is the only one, but it is crises like that where we can either, and by we, I mean leaders in organizations can either kind of double down on whatever rules they have or whatever things should look like, and this is the way it has to be this way. 'cause then everyone follows the same rule or they lean into what's a compassionate thing to do in this moment that may not follow the exact rule. They may be taking too many days off. We might be dealing with whatever the case may be, but there's compassion behind it so that their experience of this crisis is as, and pleasant is not the right word, but is as navigable as possible.
- Yeah, yeah. And a lot of times what was hard to see, I actually became friends with another CEO at the same time that he was from Ukraine. He had escaped before the war started. And we kind of compared notes once in a while and we would chat about it. And what we found is that people really, they wanted to work and they were, ended up working more hours than they did before because it was just something that kinda closed their brain off into this. They could put on their headphones. I mean, a lot of 'em are developers put on their headphones, not think about it, but you know, if they don't have electricity, they can't do that.
- Of course.
- But we were finding guys that were, that their electricity would be off for eight hours a day and then they would work eight hours at night to make up for the work that they had missed. Because they were like, well, you know, other than that I'd be listening to like bombs dropping and all this. They said I'd rather be doing this. So, we didn't try and obligate them, but it did have this sort of like secondary effect where they ended up working more, which I tried to sometimes even have to tell them like, hey, you don't need to be working on a Saturday just because you didn't work eight hours on Wednesday. Like, take some time, breathe. Like, let your brain kind of sit in itself for a little while.
- So I think that any merger or acquisition, I like whatever this, and I don't know how big the company is, so I'm not making an assumption about the size. But any merger acquisition comes with challenges, as you know.
- Yeah.
- Often multi-layered challenges.
- Yeah.
- Let alone when you acquire company that is in an actual war zone during a time of war. And I am curious what, so if you were to look back on, and I understand that you still have a lot, a number, a lot, a significant amount of employees in the Ukraine. It's still, you know.
- Yeah, yeah.
- The war is ongoing. I'm not diminishing what is currently happening either. But in the time of the acquisition of those few, the start, all those months at the beginning when you're hoping for, to figure out culture and communication and all of the due diligence of all the things that are happening, even though due diligence happens before, what are some of the things that you learned, good or bad that might be different from other mergers or acquisitions you've done before? Or maybe not just really reinforce that it doesn't matter what the crisis is, these things are important during these times.
- That's a good question. I am, I mean frankly, I hope I never have to apply the same lessons again. I don't think I would do this. I don't think I would do this one again. We did it knowing we were getting a very good deal. We were getting a very good company and we knew the risks we were taking on. Like we went into this eyes wide open. Like there, at no point if somebody asked me this question, would I be like, oh my God, I can't believe it was like, no, no, no. I saw it all.
- Yeah.
- I knew all the things that were in front of us and we still did it because I knew this was a good opportunity for us. Now what I do think that I've noticed is that some things got clouded because of the war. Were certain decisions that I would've made very quickly, like gut feelings of saying like, this person is not gonna work. We let drag on because of the war. Because we were worried if we let go of this person, what is the domino effect this is gonna have on these other people? Because they had, their psychological safety was very thrown off because of the war.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause of the acquisition. And you throw it all together and then it's like, oh, and they're gonna fire this person that some people saw certain people as like these key pieces that had been there for eight years in the company and getting rid of those was seen as like, wait a second, if they can get rid of that person, like, I'm easily on the chopping block. But what they didn't see was certain people just weren't contributing war or not war.
- Yeah.
- And they weren't gonna be a good fit regardless. And I would've made some of those decisions much faster. And some of them I delayed for almost a year. And like I knew when I finally made the decision and pulled the trigger, it was like, I knew this 12 months ago, like from week one, you knew it and you tried to push it on for cultural, for safety reasons. And it was a mistake unfortunately like that dragged us on. I wouldn't say it cost us anything, but it was something that should have been done earlier and it got dragged on because of the war.
- Do you think that the experience of the people who might have been affected, so not the person that the individuals you're talking about who you had to make a decision about, but that the cascading effects on other people that you were talking about. Do you think that knowing what you know now about those other people, about how the culture internally was, do you think that from their perspective it would have had the impact you thought it might have had? Or you were afraid, I'm gonna call it afraid, you were afraid of it potentially having, or do you now do you say, actually I think they would've been fine with it and I just didn't know enough at the time to know that.
- I don't know because there were a lot of examples. Like I mentioned to you before, there were examples that we tried to create some compassion. We tried to say, if somebody needed to, we weren't cost 'em vacation time because they needed to go move across the country or they were escaping the country. They saw a lot more compassion over the months. And so, we weren't like there to just put a hacksaw to every person in the company and just try and take the resources and move on. So they realized like, wait a second, these guys do want us to work with, they wanna work with us. They want to keep us on. You know, we tried to show that. And I think as we demonstrated, even some of the weaker people that they knew were weak, that stayed on, I think they saw like, hey, this is more of just this person's not pulling their weight or this person's not gonna work out. And I think if we had done it right away, it might have caused a little bit more of a rift or just complete distrust in us. So it's really hard to say 'cause we didn't do it. I mean, I think the first person that we fired was probably five or six months, five months in. We fired together. I mean he, it basically came to a point where he was gonna go across the border. He asked me for like four months of his salary upfront. 'Cause he needed to pay the border crossing people. And I said to him, "Listen, I'm gonna pay you. I'm gonna give you this money, but I'm gonna fire, this is your severance package because this just isn't, you've been two, you've disappeared for weeks at a time. I know you're going through this," but I said, "The team just isn't feeling like you're supporting us. But I wanna help you 'cause you're a good person. So we gave you money to get across the border." But we said like, that's it. So we tried to be compassionate as much as we could, but eventually you do need to push things forward.
- Of course. And I would say even in a situation like that, and I do wanna call it out, that is a very compassionate way of dealing with it, right? Like to say, here's your salary, but we're gonna consider it a severance package 'cause it's someone who you were looking at not having around anyways, that is a really compassionate thing to do. And it lets him or her them go find another opportunity with some cushion for whatever that looks like. That is a really compassionate thing to do. And I think there is, and I recognize, in asking a theoretical question that there's no solid answer. So I appreciate, the thought experiment nature of what I asked. I do appreciate it. And I think it's also something that is helpful for folks to hear about because I think oftentimes we look at the past and we look at the things that have happened and the way we, what if isn't actually helpful for a future situation. It's the right and there are ways to what if that can be helpful. So the first few months, probably to your point with all the change and people were do, were suspicious and weren't sure.
- Yeah.
- So yeah, maybe not firing, right? Not firing anyone for the first few months, probably good, five months, first person you let go. People seem to manage it okay, continue to build trust. Maybe you could have gone faster from that point. Maybe that's the what if learning, but I think both things can be true, right? Yeah, it's not a what if blow up the scenario, but a we probably did the right thing in waiting a bit and we probably could have expedited a bunch of the other people that we can putting.
- Yeah, the lower hanging fruit that was probably there. I mean this was also a unique company in the sense that for, I mean we're a technology company. There were a major, most of the people in the company had been with the company over seven years, which in technology is like, it's like dog years. That's like 50 years in a technology company when you look at people's resumes.
- Yeah.
- So there'd people had been there for a long time. There was a lot of tribal knowledge that was not documented. And so we also had this feeling of like, if I let go of this person, what happens when they disappear? So we did end up waiting a long time for some of that too. Like there were some people, sales and marketing wasn't as important, but some people on the tech side, it was like, we need to figure out how important this person is. But beyond that, like we need to get their knowledge. So, and we're still navigating this. Like we've hired a new CTO it took us almost a year to bring on a new CTO and he's still sort of navigating this to tell people like, listen guys, this company was sold over a year ago. You cannot, we're trying to document, we're trying to share knowledge. Like what if we had four or five more people in this team, how are we gonna give them that knowledge? Because it can't be just you one-on-one explaining things to them. It needs to be documented. And we're still struggling with it where people, it's like, if I give you this information, am I expendable after that? And it's really hard to get people to understand they work in a machine and not, it's just them with their, like their, their special gift to fix things. And it needs to be documented, it needs to be understood. It needs to be like a hive mind. And we're still struggling with that just because it was something that the company didn't do prior to us stepping in.
- So I have a question about this. I'm curious, and I also have comment, to be fair, but I'm curious, so what you said about a lot of people who'd been there had been there for seven years, which is 500 dog years in North America, generally speaking in tech.
- Yeah.
- Is that more typical, air quote typical of the culture of organizations? Tech or not, in the Ukraine in general? I don't know and I'm, you might not have an answer, but...
- I couldn't answer that.
- Okay.
- I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. It's a good question. I honestly haven't thought about it to even investigate. I know that the previous owners were well-liked, in fact, one guy at one point when we asked him like what he liked about working for the company, he said, and it's funny 'cause these guys are like Eastern European, they're like very straightforward, very rational and things. He said, "Well, I used to like the owners of the company, but I don't know you."
- That's like a gauntlet taken off and thrown down right there. I used to like who I worked for, what are you gonna do now? I love that.
- I was like, yeah, I was, it was an amazing conversation. I started laughing in the conversation. I was like, it's like, I don't know how to answer that comment, but I said, I don't know if you're being serious joking or a little bit of both, but okay.
- Yeah.
- I hear you.
- Yeah, so the part of the reason I, and totally fair that you don't have an answer to the question I asked or that's not something you thought of. Part of the reason that I'm curious about things like that is because it can create cultures and organizations where the idea that the knowledge I have is my value and I need to keep my knowledge to myself and have,. be the holder of all knowledge. It can really, really reinforce that in the culture of some organizations. And it's not a one-to-one thing. But I've seen that really often. You know, in Canada there are lots of started to change. But when I started my career a while ago, there were a lot of people who would work for a company and they were planning on being there 10, 20 years that was there. It was all about the longevity of where you were. That was more important than anything else. And as a result it was knowledge hoarding because I'm important.
- Yeah.
- When I have knowledge that you need.
- Yeah.
- And in tech organizations, especially nowadays, tech cultures, the value is in actually being able to share and disseminate and teach other people. That's how you get, then you can learn more things and then you can elevate yourself. And that's where the opportunity is. And it's a really different mentality.
- Yeah, I mean that is the definition of like scaling a company and scaling an organization is it's, like I said, it's a machine with this knowledge and if you share that knowledge, you can bring more people in under you and then you can be on top of them, helping them grow. I mean the issue is when you have people that have stuck around that long, I think that they struggle to, yeah. They struggled to see that if they haven't seen it grow. If you've seen a company, you've been at Meta since it was, there was a hundred people and you've seen it grow to what it is now, you know what's going on there. But you're also now like the VP of something or like an amazing individual contributor. I mean we're in the case of a company that was pretty much flat in sales for five or six years, they were all comfortable. I would say that everyone was underpaid. Like when we came in, we gave everyone a salary bump 'cause their salaries were ridiculously underpaid. But yeah, they just have this like, it's a hoarding mentality of information that's gonna keep me safe because you need this information from me. And even when we've moved people over to other roles, say like, hey, do you wanna do this role instead because it seems like it would be a better fit. We struggle to get that information from them even saying like, I'm gonna pay you more. I'm gonna move you over here, but I need you to train or build out a training for this. And they're like, well, just tell the person to come to me when they have questions and you're like, guys, this isn't how it works. Like it's put it on paper, put it in like we use Confluence, like get into confluence, make Loom videos, make it however you want. I'm like, I don't even care how it's documented. It just has to be documented. And we're still struggling with that mentality. And I think until you show what growth looks like, then people are like, oh, I don't want to train four people, one-on-one. I would rather just do it once and forget about it. Then we might be able to see a change. But we're still sort of at this phase where like we're adding a few people, but we haven't gotten to the point where we can really scale it much faster.
- Yeah, so I'm gonna, as we talk about some of this, I'm gonna ask you, so we are gonna, there will be people listening who will know what Lanteria is. There are gonna be people listening who do not know. And when I said HRMS, they'll be like a what now, what's a that? And so-
- An HR management system.
- There we go. So can you tell us a little bit about what that means, what that encompasses, why that's important? Because we're talking about culture and we're talking about team stuff and HR management systems often have impact on all of these things in very specific ways.
- Yeah.
- So let's talk about that. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Explain it for those listening who are like, what the what?
- HR management systems. One of the interesting parts about HR software is it's one of the few pieces of software besides email that everyone in the company will touch at some point. So you need to develop the software where everyone can use it because accounting systems get used usually by the accounting team. Maybe you send in an invoice, you know, CRMs, those get used by different parts of the company. But HR is the only one where you're doing time and attendance. You're doing, getting all your documents there, everything that's about your payslips, about your pay stubs, about pretty much all the information lives inside of the HRMS. So it is one of the few pieces of software that touches the whole organization. So it is a valuable piece of infrastructure for companies. Now, the way you would market an HRMS as most companies say it's a hire to retire system. And everything in between that HR needs is managed inside of our system. Now the question is, what does that mean? Because that's a very wide span of time. But let's say, I mean you can start with like core HR, which is the middle, like the core piece of the product where if you are the HR manager, the direct manager of somebody, or the direct report like the employee, everybody can see all of the documentation for that employee from their hiring. Even before that, like the, what's it called, like predictive index as an example. We can have their predictive index score from when they came into the company, all the interview information that came in from the ATS inside of that core HR. So you can see sort of how they got in there. Then you can see all their pay stubs, payroll information, but all their contract information and then all their time and attendance, everything that has to do with their vacation time when they were sick, all their information about their health benefits. And then from there, you can also get into, if companies implement performance management, everything that has to do with their one-on-ones with their 360 reviews. Anything that has to do with employee engagement survey. So if that employee filled out an employee engagement survey, all of this can live inside of their one profile. Just as an example. Like, so a manager can see like, what has this employee, what have they done inside of our organization? What has been their progress? What is the weekly progress? Even if the enter, if they're very well set up where they're doing one-on-ones weekly, like you can see the documentation of those one-on-ones and the one-on-one should be about their goals, their objectives, their growth inside of the company. So you can follow that whole trajectory inside of the HRMS. And then beyond that, you can get into learning management. So onboarding people, offboarding people where you're getting all of their training inside one place. You can see what they've done, excuse me. The learning management can also be inside of, as they go through the, a lot of our companies that we work with, maybe trucking companies or oil and gas companies, they have certain certifications that their employees need.
- Right?
- You can build out your LMS with that specific information and specific teachings that they need to keep their certifications and run it specifically through their NC, the HR manager can see like, this person completed their entire program, now they can go do the examination. That examination is done. Okay, now it's inside the system. So it really is a system that can handle anything around document repository, information about the employee, information about your entire system of employment. And depending on the company as well. I mean you can run your payroll through there, you can run your benefits through there. There's even now employee engage, employee engagement systems where you can be doing, like companies have have these very cool ways of doing, like offering things to their employees for to go to restaurants, to go on vacation, to get hotel rooms for at discounts where it all runs through the RMS. So it's really anything that has, that might touch with an HR, but like that em, employees need to know about their employment and what their employer can offer them.
- So I appreciate that explanation. And I'm really curious, we were chatting before we hit record about how challenged some HR teams are, no offense to any HR teams listening, but how challenged some HR teams are to think outside of whatever they're currently doing or system they're using or their current experiences or what they're familiar with when it comes to things like this and how, oh, I forgot the word I was gonna use, but how a lot of HR that is being done is really focused on the rules and regulations of things on compliance is one of the words that you used more than engagement, more than growth, more than the experience of the people in the organization. And it sounds like a lot of, some of the things you're talking about, the opportunity, there's an opportunity for this system, for systems, for software to actually help the experience, help with engagement, help with growth. It can actually gross with growth. I just, I'm making up words here. Help with growth rather than just being like this thing in the background that no one thinks about or the one way that we use this is for payroll. We know this one thing.
- Yeah.
- And I'm curious if you can, and also tell me if I have, and I'm way off base, very comfortable being way off base. And if not, or if so, like what could that look like? What are there trends you're seeing? How does that work? What does that, what is that?
- I mean, the ultimate pain point that HR teams have right now is exactly what they say. They wanna move away from the compliance. Like I hate, if you go into like an HR Facebook group, which I spend a a lot of time as the CEO.
- Amazing.
- I spend, I mean, I'm not from the HR world, so I've basically thrown myself into it and just like we have our own podcast where I just invite real HR people on to explain to me what they do. Like I'm an idiot from the outside. I'm like, hey, I run this company but I, we wanna make it better for you.
- Yeah.
- So I have 'em come on, explain what they do, what they like, what they don't like. And then I sit in Facebook groups and chat with people. That's my important work. So I'll hear people's that.
- I love that for the record, I love that. I think that's amazing.
- I think it's actually kind of fun. I like the HR space 'cause you do meet people that they care about people which is, you know, rare in companies. Like these are the people that actually care about the people working there. Which if you get into the finance department, that's not gonna be the case. Which is usually where I come from. So HR is like a welcome, fun community for me. So the, when you talk to them, the thing is always like, oh I hate compliance. I don't wanna be dealing with compliance, get this off my plate. I wanna deal with the people I got into this to coach people to help them grow, to help me get better. And, but they end up spending 90% of their time on compliance. So the ideal HRMS is something that you can automate the workflows for that compliance. I mean just the example I was using for a trucking company or an oil and gas company, you need to make sure that everyone's following, sexual harassment training, whatever, there certain states have certain trainings that are needs. So you wanna make sure this person lives in Florida, okay, they need this, this and this training. Put it into the LMS and forget about it. So like all of our Florida people get this, this person needs certain licensing to be able to operate our equipment, put it into the LMS or put it into their core HR. So we know this is, their license is expiring in X May month in 2025. It'll send them an email. They have to go to the whatever DMV let's say and get that fixed. So the ideal HRMS deals with all that for you so you don't have to deal with it. And what you're dealing with is in performance management and making sure that your managers are actually doing the correct performance management and the one-on-ones and the follow-ups. Because that's also where this can step in is, I mean this is also where HR kind of breaks down is HR will put these like great plans in place, but where everything breaks down is in the managers. Like you can come up with the best plan in the world and if you go tell Tim, the manager in finance to go implement it and he's like, screw that, I don't wanna do that. The only way to be able to see that Tim's doing that is inside the HMS, you see that Tim is doing his performance management and his one-on-ones with his employees. He's recording them, he's going through each step and each survey and making sure that everything's filled out correctly and that you can review it and not just like box checking. You wanna make sure that it's like what we encourage people to do is like, don't make this just a box checking exercise. Make sure this is something that like Tim wants to do and he's actually gonna get real useful information out of it. 'Cause otherwise it's just gonna be another compliance thing that he does. And he doesn't want to do it. So we try, like we have our own implementation manager and we try and show them like, okay this might be something that could get you that information or get you the, because what you wanna know is like, how is this person, like how are they growing in the company? How are they, how would they like the company and get that information up to the HR. But it always breaks down sort of in middle management. Like, I mean we're usually dealing with companies that are 500 to 5,000 employees. It always breaks down sort of in that area because you might get one department that's great because you know, Karen is awesome at doing her performance management and then another department that doesn't care. And so a good HRMS is helpful in the sense that it lets you kind of walk through those easy steps of doing whatever OKRs, one-on-ones weekly meetings and then making sure that everyone from the CEO to the HR, VP of HR and the middle managers can all see what's going on with the team under them. Because in the end, performance management is what people want to be dealing with or they should be dealing with on a day-to-day basis. And I like, frankly, I think a lot of companies, once they hit a certain level, like when you're a small company, people are the most important part of any company. Like without the people, you can't go anywhere. But at even bigger level, like the bigger companies, they have systems, they have brands or they have whatever and the company could function, but people are still the reason why a company grows or doesn't grow like, I have friends that are investors on Wall Street and they look at Glassdoor as ways to get information on companies that could be good investments in the future. Or like companies that are undervalued. Because if their Glassdoor reviews are very high and their, the valuation is lower than what they would expect, they invest in those companies. 'cause they know that the people that are happiest are gonna be the ones that drive sort of these outsized returns in the future. And I think a lot of like middle market companies kind of forget about that. They're like, like whatever, we can just plug a new person in. And it really is the people, so the HR people get that, but they also only have so much power at their hands. And like an HRMS, I think is just a tool. Like I don't think our software is gonna make your company like the most high performance company, but if you set it up well, it could like be a step towards doing that.
- Well to what I hear inside of what you just said is, and I appreciate you saying that your software is not the thing that's gonna make a company the most high performing. If only there was one thing that would do that for every company, life would be so much easier. We would be billionaires and you know, laughing all of.
- Yeah.
- Sadly it's, there's not just one thing.
- Yeah.
- But I think it's an important acknowledgement that there are tools, there are systems, this type of software is one that frees up time and capacity for the people who can spend time on the people on the performance. Which ultimately is one of the most, if not most important thing for the growth of a company because-
- Yeah.
- You know, I could not agree with what you stated more what you were talking about more. Systems and I always say like, you know, profits, processes, these things are, they are super important. They matter, but none of it matters if the people aren't engaged, if they aren't growing, if they aren't there, if they like none of it. 'cause that can't run without the people and it matters.
- Yeah.
- But you need to have the right people and the best people for a variety of things in the right. You know, right people, right seat, that needs to, that matters. That makes a huge difference.
- And you need to keep them. I mean it, it's a huge investment. I was, I have a good friend of mine that works at Spotify and they spend a fortune recruiting people and trying to retain them because he was saying like it takes almost six months to really get somebody up to speed. And so we've, if we've invested all this money to get them in, then we invested six months to get them here and they only stay for 18 months. Like we're not gonna get an ROI on that person. And unfortunately in especially like you said, North America, 18 months is sort of like a normal tour of duty right now for people inside of companies. I get like right now we're hiring people and I tell people upfront, I say, "I'm not gonna hire you because you haven't kept a job for more than 18 months for the past whatever, eight years." And that for me is like, some people will push back. I say this on Twitter, sometimes people push back like, "Oh you're just an employer, you don't get what's really going on." I said, "Listen, if somebody changed companies six times in eight years, that's not the company, that's the person." Like you can't blame the company if somebody's changed jobs that many times. And unfortunately that's kind of the market that we're in right now or we're, so I don't know if that's gonna change.
- Well that, yeah, that's a whole other thing. So I have a question about that because I think there's a balance to be had personally. Like I, this is just an opinion. I think there's a balance to be had. I agree with you generally speaking, if someone has changed jobs six times in eight years, that's not a company thing. And I do also think that if someone has changed jobs six times in eight years and you can see real progression in what they were doing or the responsibility or whatever the case may be because you know, this company didn't have the money to pay them or to offer them that, but this company did or there was a specific opportunity from a growth perspective that you can really clearly see. And that would be more of a con. To me, I think there are exceptions to that and I wanna, I'm calling that out because I'm curious if you would, and you could disagree with that, but I would see that as being like, I think there are some exceptions overall I would tend to agree and there are exceptions. And I'm curious if you would say, yeah, I agree with that or no, you know what, I actually, I still don't think that that is, you know, a reflection on the.
- I think in the example I gave is an extreme case of that. I see it a lot. I mean, I would say it's extreme, but I see it with salespeople like, oh the amount of salespeople that apply to jobs for us, like account executives, senior account executives that haven't kept a job for over 18 months in since 2010 is insane. Like, I don't know how they keep getting these jobs, but more power to them 'cause they make good money just taking those 18 months of base salaries and moving on. But I agree and I think, I mean in startup companies and technology companies, you can definitely see people that especially those types of companies where the onboarding process is just, you get thrown into the pit and figure it out and they go from product manager to product owner to CPO to VP of product and like the next company. I can see that, I think a lot of times companies like I do this in our co, like titles can be a little bit inflated. Like, I'm not gonna pay you a lot, but I can give you this great title that will help you get your next role and you can kind of sell that. And so, I do see that happen in that kind of progression. I don't know how much value was actually added in some of those cases or where it was just, hey, this person, like I, we've hired people just because I know they got great experience in that previous role, even if they were only there for 18 months. Where it breaks down for me is when you've gone from like big company to big company to big company in that way because then you've just made some good base salaries.
- Yeah.
- You know, got out once they got to their performance cycle, once the performance cycle hit one certain area, you just jumped out and you were looking for the next one. And you can see that pattern pretty quickly in a lot of people. And I think seeing somebody do five years in a company, I think shows a dedication and like a desire to kind of build something that you need. And like a company like ours, like our vision is we're five years thinking out and we want people that want to be there for five years.
- Yeah.
- Because that's what we need. I don't want to be, you know, adding a dozen new people in each role over the next five years. I want one person that I can trust that they can build a team under them and we'll let them grow. So, I mean that's kind of what, that's the way I see it. I could see what you're saying but I think having that dedication shows something.
- Yeah.
- That others can't.
- I appreciate and I listen, I appreciate it and that's why I said push back. I'm not saying that I always, I'm all about the let's share differences of opinions and different experiences because we're going to have them.
- Yeah.
- And there's someone who's gonna listen to this, who's like, I've only ever hired people who jumped from job to job and managed and they've always stayed here for this reason. I've had great results. Like there's gonna, it's all about the different perspectives that I think are really valuable. So I appreciate you sharing.
- And for certain companies, they look for that. Like I have a friend that runs an HR software company here and their sales team, they don't expect anyone to stay over 18 months. And so they hire people that want to just churn and burn and just hit the phones as hard as they can, get paid a decent amount of money, they can put it on their resume and they can move on to the next place.
- Yeah.
- There's shops for everything.
- There's something for everyone. That's what we say about other things and it works here too.
- Yeah.
- Andrew, before we wrap up, I wanna give you the opportunity to either you if there's something that we didn't get to that you wanted to talk about to bring it up, if there's something that we talked about that you wanted to emphasize as kind of a wrap up point. 'Cause I know we, my favorite conversations are like this, where they're a little bit meandering and all over the place.
- Yeah.
- And also you can say, "No, I'm good, I'm happy with everything we, I don't wanna add anything else at this point."
- No, I can, I mean if you follow me on Twitter, you know that I could talk about account executives and sales people's compensation for days and inflated startup.
- Inflated startup.
- Employees and like job titles. I could talk about these things for a long period of time. So I don't think we need to dive further into that. But I think we've covered a lot of things around crisis and I mean I'm happy to continue the conversation with anyone that maybe has gone through a crisis is dealing with like people in Ukraine right now. I do get people that reach out to me like when they've heard my story to say like, hey, we have a team in Ukraine, like how would you deal with this or this? I'm happy to share experiences with people, so feel free to reach out to me if they want to get into more details in private, happy to discuss.
- I love that offer. So I'm gonna ask a question. Is Twitter X whatever we call it these days, is that the best way to reach you? What would be the best? If someone's listening, they're like, I would actually really like to talk about this.
- I'd say LinkedIn and Twitter. I spend Twitter's like the only, besides Facebook groups of HR people, it's pretty much the only social network I really use regularly. A little bit less since it's become X, not as valuable as it used to be, but-
- Got it.
- LinkedIn or Twitter, feel free to reach out to me. I'm easy to find. It's on Twitter, it's SwilerA and on LinkedIn it's my name, Andrew Swiler and they can send, there's no other Andrew Swiler in the world, so I'm easy to find.
- Congratulations.
- They can send me a message. It makes life easier. So they can send me LinkedIn message. I get a lot of them. So if I miss it, you might have to send me a second one because my LinkedIn inbox is a dumpster fire of people trying to sell me on courses or-
- Mine too.
- Outbound email and things like that. It's crazy.
- Yeah, everyone wants to automate my LinkedIn for me in some way, shape or form, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you post like three things on LinkedIn, you get like a hundred ghost writers reaching out to you instantly.
- Yeah.
- Like do you want to grow your LinkedIn audience and you're like, oh my God, please stop.
- Yes, I feel that. And we will have those links in the show notes for any anyone who's listening as well. So you can connect with Andrew and I or you know, go find some HR Facebook groups and hang out until you find Andrew. 'Cause apparently he's gonna be in there at some point as well.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, Evil HR Lady. I spend a lot of time in there listening to people their life.
- Oh, I love that so much. Thank you so much for your time today. This was a really valuable conversation and I appreciate your perspective and your experience with Ukraine. While it is specific in that it's a war in Ukraine, I also think it's a really, it's valuable for people to hear and it can be applied in a lot of other situations that are not just that.
- Yeah.
- So thank you very much for sharing this openly as you did. I really appreciate it and I know it'll be of great value to the folks listening.
- Thanks Céline, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
- My pleasure. Thanks for joining me today on the Leading Through Crisis podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a minute to rate and review us on your podcast app. If you're interested in learning more about any of our guests, you can find us online at www.leadingthroughcrisis.ca.