Marcus (00:01)
Yeah, internally at Miro we called it the rocket ship. That's what we had for two years. We were the rocket ship and it was our emoji and it was us just going, like, as quick as we possibly could. So, you know, at that point we were hoping that we would get to, you know, maybe five or six hundred by the end of the year. And I think we were getting closer to about eight or nine hundred. A process might work for you with three hundred people.

it's probably not going to work for you for 700 people. Your culture changes. The people you're bringing on have not been with Miro for 10 years or 8 years or 7 years. Suddenly they've been with you for 6 weeks or 6 months. If you're spending 50 or 100 thousand dollars on a tool, you need to make sure you're getting everything back for it.

Eero (01:00)
Welcome to the Relancer podcast, where we talk about talent acquisition topics. I'm Eero, the co-founder of Relancer, the platform where employers connect with freelancer recruiters. Today, we have Marcus, and we're talking about how Miro grew from 300 to 1,500 employees, and even more in 18 months. Welcome, Marcus.

Marcus Pask (01:22)
Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here and thanks for inviting me. I'd like to get started.

Eero (01:27)
So your first job in talent acquisition was with Manpower and you also worked with Having worked with both in-house and agency how has it influenced your approach to talent acquisition?

Marcus Pask (01:43)
Yeah, good question. So indeed, I've been in TA recruitment for over 15 years now. First part was agency side. So manpower was my first role into recruitment. So I'd never even heard of recruitment. I actually went into a recruitment agency manpower and asked them if they could find me a job, any job at 18 years old. And for some reason, they saw

something in me that could go into recruitment and that was great. And I've been doing it ever since. But, I think the big experience I got from, from Hayes actually, I was there for four years was I was doing sourcing. So, my first job was an associate sourcing partner for Hayes Talent Solutions, and that was working for American Express as a client. And my role was just simply sourcing marketing individuals. So I was learning the basics of.

what good looks like, what great looks like, how to work with an internal recruiter for American Express, like big client. And at 19, 20 years old, you know, to be speaking to C-level execs. And this is before really LinkedIn. I was using job boards and that people had put up and then cold calling them. So it was...

that before you kind of had these fancy messages and networking, it was, I found your CV on, in the UK, we call it Reed or job site or Monster, looking at it and then just calling them up and saying, hey, I work for American Express and would you be interested in this job? So you kind of, you remove all your boundaries, you move all your barriers and you learn the basics of what does great look like and how do I have a conversation with

candidate and I think that scary part as 19 years old has now taken me through the whole of my career where I've never really felt too about having a conversation because those first few years were pretty scary. I heard speaking to some VP level execs at American Express and me having to justify what good looks like. So great experience, but you know, happy that I then moved away from agency and more in-house afterwards for sure.

Eero (04:00)
So in a way got some confidence with cold calling and of course you can impress the C-level people and get the job done. That definitely helps a lot.

Marcus Pask (04:11)
Yeah. And I was, I was able to make mistakes. You know, that was also it. It was, you were learning. I had someone in my team that was training me and teaching me and, you know, you weren't always going to get it right. And I think that was also a big learning as you go through TA into any job that you go into, you know, understanding what, what a job description is, what a profile they're looking for. And sometimes pitching someone that might not match it, but you had a great conversation.

I think all of that experience that I had in my early part of the career then also went through to the later part and what I've then hopefully taught other recruiters and sources along the way. So yeah, it was valuable, valuable experience for sure.

Eero (04:53)
So what was your role in Growing Let's call it a hyper growth stage.

Marcus Pask (04:56)
Yeah. Foo.

Yeah, internally at Miro, we called it the rocket ship. That's what we had for two years. We were the rocket ship and it was our emoji and it was us just going, like as quick as we possibly could. Like truth be told, I'd never heard of Miro before I joined the company. It was a 300 person company. There wasn't a lot of branding. We didn't even have...

Eero (05:04)
Rock it!

Marcus Pask (05:24)
a main office, we were sharing an office with a couple of other companies in Amsterdam. It looked like a great tool, you know, I thought it was peak pandemic, so we're going through COVID. I thought collaboration tool sounded like a good way to go. But none of us had any idea that we were going to go. I think I was number 320 at Miro and I think I was number maybe 25 in Amsterdam at the time.

So, you know, at that point, we were hoping that we would get to, you know, maybe five or 600 by the end of, by the end of the year. And I think we were getting closer to about eight or 900. So my role at the beginning, I was, I joined as a senior IC. I was asked to look after marketing, some sales roles. So I was very hands on. I was understanding what does our process look like? Does it.

match for all of these different functions that we were working on. I was looking at our tools as well, you know, anything within hyper growth as a business, you're always evaluating the tools that you use. Now, they are they benefiting us. So my role was really just hiring at that point. We had very small marketing teams, small sales teams. I remember hiring BDRs, so business development reps.

who had predominantly been call calling, you know, finding clients. And suddenly in, you know, May, June of when I started, it flipped 100% that it was all inbound sales. Everyone was coming to Miro asking them, hey, can we use your product? Can we start using this while we're going through COVID? And so our whole business and sales strategy changed. And that meant that...

Suddenly we had to focus on the right marketing people, the sales people, customer success, workplace, recruiting. So at that point I had a pretty diverse role. I was trying to find recruiters to come and help us scale as well. And through my whole time, my role kind of pivoted from senior IC into a manager of go to market and then where I am today, leading our global tech team. But...

I think my role in particular has been looking at what works best, not being afraid to iterate. A process might work for you at 300 people, it's probably not going to work for you at 700 people. You've got a change in culture, you've got a change in the people that have been there, you've got people that are starting remote, you've got people that are now wanting to come into an office. There was a whole change in what we were as a company.

Yeah, it was definitely hands-on and I enjoyed immensely everything that I did from it as well.

Eero (08:13)
Do you have some specific approach to assessing the still working for the company different stages you might need different tools?

Marcus Pask (08:22)
I mean, you have to look at the return on investment for some of these. So some of them you can do more straightforward. So an example, you know, we had Greenhouse as our ATS. So a great ATS for us, actually. And but every, every point through that year, you are evaluating the performance of the tool. And you are looking at.

how it's being used by our teams. You're looking at the utilization of, okay, how a candidate's going through it. So your ATS, we were evaluating purely on its functionality. What was stopping us from doing certain actions? What was preventing us from giving a great candidate experience? But you should always be reviewing your ATS. Another one we brought on board was Textio. I don't know if you've heard of Textio, but in essence Textio.

would help us with creating job descriptions that would make it more inclusive. So the language that was being used, how it was written, making sure that it was giving the right tools for us to be able to actually widen our grasp on attracting great talent. And Textio was a tool that I'd used in previous companies and I thought, let's bring that into Miro.

And it did, it worked for us during that hypergrowth stage. You know, the first six, 12 months, we managed to get all of our job descriptions written in the right way and it was the same formats and it was putting it onto the emphasis of a hiring manager to use. But actually, a year on, it wasn't really solving a purpose for us anymore. You know, we'd already written a bulk of our job descriptions. We hadn't seen a huge uplift in the type of applications we were getting.

The feedback we've got when we'd asked candidates during the process or at the end of the process, it had not so much. So then we decided to end that tool that we were using. So I think a lot of the time when you're looking at these tools is if it's solving a purpose, then great. But you need to look at all of your options and you need to not be afraid to say that something's not working anymore because maybe you can use that budget elsewhere. You know, if you're spending

$50,000, $100,000 on a tool, you need to make sure you're getting everything back for it. If I could use that money instead to help with, you know, doing an offsite with my team to think about a TA strategy for 12 months, I'd probably much rather use that money for that for my team than I would for a tool that's only being used 10, 15% of its usability. So I think with any of the tools, it's looking at

how sustainable it is, what's the cost, what are we getting in return, and just not being afraid to say that we got it wrong, or we got it right, how else can we use it to get the full exposure from it?

Eero (11:21)
Yeah, probably, the bigger you get, the higher probability is that there is tools that forgotten and then there are as a cost and then at some they might not serve the purpose

Marcus Pask (11:34)
Once you go through hyper growth and you're a company that's getting this investment, you know, money is not really as much of an issue as it is later on. You're not you're not necessarily being as challenged on it because as a recruitment team, you know, we suddenly had to double in size. We went from I think there was four of us in a mere three or four of us when I started by the end.

12 months later, there was I think 12 or 15 of us including contractors and suddenly, you know, you weren't being asked as much about what are you spending the money on because we had to kind of grow. So it was also like the reflection back on that period of where finances are a little bit more easy, because you've just had funding to where we are now. And you know, every company through the last 12 months has had to make cutbacks and to make sure that you're

you're spending wisely. So I think any time during that flow from a startup or scale up to a more experienced company, you have to be evaluating it.

Eero (12:37)
Yeah, for maybe listeners who don't know, usually the strategy with hyper growth is to get big as fast as possible. And the main logic, I think, behind that is you beat the competition. So it's very hard for the others to catch up and then at some point you have to become efficient. So that's definitely a...

Marcus Pask (12:55)
Catch up. Yeah.

Eero (13:01)
When you start to look at those costs, then some of the costs can be, of course, it can be people, but to see if we are efficient and also it's the tools that we need.

Marcus Pask (13:02)
Yeah.

exactly. And you've got that small period, you've got, you know, six, maybe 18 months, depending on what your company and the growth and we were a bit of a unicorn, because we were in peak COVID, a collaboration tool, and everyone was looking at how they can work across, you know, it was similar to a zoom, but not on the scale of zoom or you know, the video interviewing. It was exactly the same.

It was that moment where you've got a short window. You need to get ahead of your competition. You need to really work as quick and fast and as, as productive as you possibly can, because as soon as it starts to slow down, your competitors are going to be there again, waiting for you. So you've only got that minute chance of, of making it successful. And, you know, thankfully we did that through a lot of hard work and a lot of hours as well. Long days.

Eero (14:05)
So what were some of the key milestones and challenges for Miro faced during this rapid expansion?

Marcus Pask (14:14)
I mean, from a TA perspective, it was just growing the TA team, the talent acquisition team. It was, and I'll stick with TA to begin with, but we needed to hire a certain amount of people into certain functions by a certain time in the year. And, you know, at the beginning of the year, predominantly your focus is on go to market. It's on sales, it's on

customer success teams, it's on infrastructure, because usually at the beginning of the year, you've got your budget and the sales team have their budget and they've got their targets and they need to hit them by the end of the year. So they need to get as many of their seats filled in the first few months or quarter really, so that they can hit their goals by the end of the year. And our goal was done on ARR. So, you know, what are we trying to achieve in terms of revenue? And we would have a different amount.

This is our one, two, three and four year plan. So revenue was a big part that all of us could understand and all of us could have an impact on. As you go through the year, the priorities shift as well. So maybe we're trying to expand our product range. So we're no longer just seen as a whiteboard tool but we're actually seen as a whiteboard tool that does all of these extra things. And that then changes to, okay maybe we're now gonna focus on design or on,

products and product managers, maybe we need to work on engineering and the infrastructure that comes through to it. So I think anytime that you're going through this phase is our milestones shifted completely. And for TA, that meant that we couldn't think sometimes a year ahead, we had to think one or two quarters ahead to just keep up with how the business was shifting and the pure increase that we got as a team.

But I think the big milestones for us was users as a company. I joined, we had 5 million users, I think. And then our next aim was, let's get to 10. Okay, from 10, let's get to 20. From 20, let's get to 40. And now we're at 65 million users, I think, at the moment. You know, big, big numbers from where we were three and a half years ago.

When we talk about revenue, it was going, hey, can we get to 100 million in revenue? And then it's like, can we get to a billion in revenue in 10 years time? You know, there's these milestones that you need to hit. And for a TA team, it's about how do we fit into that and how do the company's goals and objectives feed into a TA team? And that's on commits or hires. It's on how quick can we get our candidates through the process?

It's about the quality of candidates. It's about onboarding. So, you know, we could do a great team and they've signed their contract, but what happens when they've signed their contract, you know, what happens through the next part and these are the things as, as your milestones, you have to keep on thinking about how do we evaluate and change our TA team, team throughout it. and then I think the other part, which is kind of a challenge, the culture.

The culture changes constantly. We were a 300 person remote company at that point because nobody was in an office. But...

Eero (17:27)
Hmm.

Marcus Pask (17:36)
That changes things. When you start to then open up your office and your hub in Amsterdam and try to grow it, Your culture changes. The people you're bringing on have not been with Miro for 10 years or eight years or seven years. Suddenly they've been with you for six weeks or six months. And they're the people that are wanting to get onto this kind of rocket ship I said at the beginning, and they're wanting to work on things and learn and develop.

And then you're asking them to be hiring managers. You know, you're asking them to suddenly know what great looks like in your business. And they haven't done a hiring manager training or they haven't done a cultural interview before, or they haven't, they don't understand our Miro values or our behaviors. So there's also a lot of these milestones of how do we get people within Miro to be a new culture, but also work towards the same goals. And that's, that's tough.

you're going through hypergrowth, you know, it's a difficult phase to go through. But also, we're now at a great point now where, you know, our culture is so multidiverse, so many different cultures, I think we have probably 70, 80 nationalities. And just within my TA team of 20, we have, I think, maybe 12, 13 different nationalities. So, you know, that's changed what we are as a company and as a foundation.

Eero (18:59)
thinking how to ask It's quite common that the culture

Marcus Pask (19:00)
haha

Eero (19:03)
how do you make sure that you're hiring the right people for the culture that in a way maybe is just evolving on the way.

Marcus Pask (19:10)
Yeah, it's a good question. I think I know what you mean. you have to understand what great looks like. So you need to look internally to begin with, you're looking at, if we're hiring for product marketing, for example, an area that I started on with Miro, you would look internally and go, what is great right now within our business? What has made them successful within joining

You would ideally look at someone that has been with us for maybe 12 months. Then you'd look at someone that's been with us for maybe three years. And you're looking at that change. Okay. What does great look like that someone's been here that's established? What does great look like that someone's been here that's quite new? And then from there, you're kind of working backwards and you're trying to understand what do we need right now as a team and within TA that's saying, okay, we need people that are simply just going to hit the ground running. And people that are going to be.

doing what is in front of them. And we don't necessarily need a leader right now. We need people that are kind of bums in seats that are doing the work that is gonna keep on churning and getting us through to be successful. And that's a type of profile. But then you're also evaluating what's gonna take us to the next level. What are we missing within this team structure? And a lot of the time as a TA, you need to be speaking to your people partners or business partners. You need to understand

Where are the risks? What are the attrition risks? What are we seeing in terms of career development? Who are our future leaders within that team? What sets them apart from the rest? And then you tailor that back. You start bringing that into your job description. You start bringing that into your process. And I think for us as a TA, you're evaluating it from that beginning. Okay, we're gonna do a kickoff call. We're gonna speak to the hiring manager. We're gonna understand what they're looking for.

And then from there, you're kind of evaluating it into a job description, into what is your interview stages? How are we assessing, you know, are we assessing the right values, the right competencies at the right time, and then what questions are we doing as well? So a lot of this comes into just building the base and the foundation of, here's our structure. Where do I see issues within our structure that we've got right now? Where are we overcomplicating it?

Are we keeping some bits too simple? And where are our trade-offs as well? Because as a company, when you go through hyper growth, if you keep on looking for what's great, sometimes you hit a wall where you can't find great anymore because you've reached that point of, wow, our bar has gone really high. We're suddenly now struggling to attract or to hire great people because we're suddenly looking for this perfect unicorn.

Eero (21:48)
Hmm.

Marcus Pask (22:02)
And so that's where within TA, you have to kind of take a step back and challenge yourselves and the hiring manager and the team on really what it is they need from that role. And like I said, to your question, it's really about understanding those parts of the process and knowing that you have a voice at the table, TA, you're there for a reason, you're the expert on hiring great talent. So don't be afraid to challenge and push back and to

Eero (22:15)
Thanks for watching!

Marcus Pask (22:29)
realign on what you said at the beginning of an interview or a kickoff process. So I think just trusting yourself is a big part of this.

Eero (22:38)
So in a stakeholder management, because there's always hiring manager who have these insane requirements, and they probably get more insane in time, so they will add them to, oh, this was a great candidate, let's take something from him and then somebody from else, and then you have this, like I said, unicorn.

Marcus Pask (22:48)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Huge list. And to be honest, that's what we do at the start. So when we get a job, we get a role that's come through to us, we have kind of do the kickoff, we asked the hiring manager, we asked the old leader, okay, give us five profiles for what you think great looks like for this job. And they'll send us five LinkedIn profiles. So we asked them to do some research and we say, you know, go and look at your mark, look at your market, look at your connections, look at what you think this role

is doing and then we will look at those five profiles with them, the hiring manager in a call and we'll, you know, nine times out of 10, what they've put in front of us doesn't match what we've put on the job description. You know, they've, they've said to us in the job description, five plus years experience and you know, ideally two years management experience, something like that. Suddenly I've got a profile in front of us that is a VP of sales that's done this for 25 years.

has managed for 10 years, and you need to then, that it's a really good setting point for you to go, do you know what, what you've asked for, and what you're saying you now want, are completely different things. So let's take a step back and let's realign on what it is you really need. And it's a great moment to just flick the switch and be like, before we continue and go down this rabbit hole, we're not even gonna start on this process until we align on what you need. And so.

If you're not doing it already, I strongly suggest that you're having your hiring managers and leaders look at what great looks like as well and then challenge them on it because most of the time they're not aligned to what's available in the market. Yeah, and that's difficult.

Eero (24:39)
Yeah, I think this is super common. What I have heard is that, like you there job description and what they're actually expecting is very different. And the problem there with, I think, in the hypergrowth also, the time is, in essence, like, so you're in a hurry. You feel time pressure, but you actually should slow it down to get the.

like the fundamentals in place and then you can go otherwise you will time. So that's super easy.

Marcus Pask (25:07)
Yeah. And we actually worked, we worked on something which was like a cost analysis, which was, when candidates are in certain stages of our process, how much is it costing us within TA and how much does it cost us if we get the decision wrong at team round, at leadership round, at offer. And in that you're, you're looking at basically the time that's being used by TA, the time that's being used by your hiring manager, by stakeholders, time away from the business.

And you know, that can work out to being 10,000 euros to 30,000 euros. The time spent is, you know, 10 hours on one candidate, but maybe you've spoken to 20 candidates to get there. So in actual fact, you've spent 40 hours. So actually using some of that data as well, it's really important to go back and say to your hiring manager, we can, we need to scale quickly, but if we start off on the wrong foot, if we get this wrong at the end.

Here's what it's gonna cost you in time, here's what it's gonna cost you in money, in basically the revenue that we've lost because we've been working on the wrong hire. Suddenly there's a little mental shift and suddenly you get them on board to say, yeah, let's get this right to begin with and then we'll go quickly. Then we'll be like, we'll support you, let's get hiring. But you need to get it right from the start or else I promise you, you are opening up a whole can of worms that you don't wanna open.

Eero (26:31)
Yeah. Was there over hiring also, because like you mentioned, you have goals one or two quarters, and then you don't know what's gonna happen in one year. So there can be like a logic okay, do some prevention already that we get some kind of roles in so we fall behind it the common or?

Marcus Pask (26:41)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. It can be.

Now, from a TA side, we hired a lot of recruiters, permanent recruiters, but we suddenly realized quite quickly, exactly to your question, we don't want to be in a position in 12 months time that we've over hired into our team. So we actually looked at hiring contractors, looked at hiring within an RPO service, looked at...

agencies to support us with certain hiring so that as a as a TA lead you can switch on and switch on that resource but also you're kind of you're protecting your own team in case something did happen in the long haul. So we were quite lucky I think we did it right across the majority of our functions and orgs that we were supporting but within TA we definitely were a little bit more careful as well.

Eero (27:48)
you mentioned one of the strategies to support hypergrowth to use external. It can be freelance, or it can be RPO agency. It can be placement agency. Were there any other tactics that were effective that you used?

Marcus Pask (27:56)
Yeah.

Um, God, there was quite a lot to be honest. I mean, the first is you think about hiring in general, you know, the tactic was that you said agencies and contractors and, and doing what the root cause. The next was actually trying to bring our team together. You know, when you're thinking about a TA organization, and like I said, with this point,

we were kind of transitioning through COVID and transitioning through this moment of are we in an office? Are we not in an office? And a lot of our team hadn't even spent time together. So a very simple tactic was just bringing us together and making sure that we all understood what our strategy was as a team. And like I said, what great looks like. the other part was just looking at the fundamentals of expectations.

you know, what is expected of our team as well. Do we have the right training set up? Do we have external speakers coming in to talk about other companies that have gone through hyper growth or gone through that period of a rocket ship moment like we did and just learning from them and asking questions. So I think a lot of focus from our side went onto the team and making sure that they had the support that was there for them to be successful.

It's great that you can bring on a, you know, contractors and RPOs, but you also need to look at your team itself and understand what are their career aspirations. How do we have a competency framework that is set up for the team to be successful that is clearly outlined for all. Here is what you are as a recruiter. Here's how you get to senior recruiter. Here's how you get to lead and, and having that set out. And I think that gives team motivation.

it gives them direction on where they can go with their career. So I think that's super important, as a strategy or as a, as a tool, for example, I mentioned the tools itself. It's about bringing on those that can enable the team to do better work. So we use a, I won't say its name, but we use a tool that supports our ATS system with data, which is amazing. And that means that now the team is no longer spending hours on a Google doc or on a...

spreadsheet instead, it's quickly formulated for them so they can go into a hiring manager meeting and talk about previous data. And that really helps. And the next part was really just thinking about branding. If you're going through this hypergrowth period, you need to think about what your branding is doing. What are you saying to the external market? What are they saying about you? It's looking at Glassdoor. It's looking at your NPS.

It's looking at doing exit interviews. It's looking at doing onboarding interviews as well. And it's every step of the way. How can you look back and make sure you're doing the best? So as the strategy, it is thinking about customer first, your candidates first, because ultimately they will become customers in the future. So I think as a strategy, it's just always knowing you've got these different, different milestones that you have to hit.

Eero (31:18)
So you mentioned some of the things already how to set your talent acquisition team for success. Can you give us some more examples how to do that?

Marcus Pask (31:39)
Yeah. Yeah,

So at the beginning of the year, we're doing it, just done it now, we've worked with our finance team, we've worked with our people partner team, we've worked with our head of functions and org, so our LT members, and we sat down with them and we've gone through what is your head count for the year, what are your goals as a business, what is it that we are trying to get to? And I said, at the beginning of this year, it could be that we need to focus on

go to market because we have goals for revenue or sales or whatever it is. So maybe our strategy is no longer supporting the tech team is no longer supporting all of tech, maybe it's supporting some of the business team instead for a quarter or for six weeks to get through that early push that you need to do. So the first thing that you need to do is align it to your business objectives. I think the next thing is then making sure that everyone understands their goals and

reviewing that quarterly. And I mean that in terms of, for some of my engineering recruiters, their goals may be on delivery. It might be on the hires that they need to make because that's what's important for us. Whereas for another one of the team, it might be that we've just gone through a slight reorg within their team and actually they need to start building and creating rubrics or competency frameworks or interview questions, or like we were just talking about, what does great look like?

So for them it might be on that and then for another person it might be that we're getting to a period within Miro where a certain team is likely to see some attrition coming on, you know So maybe they their tenure is getting up to two and a half years and we can see from the data that okay We're getting to this bracket. We might start seeing some people that leaving so actually For my team what they need to do is start pipelining. They need to start

thinking about those risks and start speaking to external talent, even when we don't have roles available and putting that in front of a hiring team. So first one is always, what are your business objectives? Second is always looking at those clear expectations of the team. The next is celebrating success. Like, you know, you could do all of this work. If you're doing it all at the beginning, but then you get to the end of the quarter and you're like, thanks team, next quarter, let's go.

No one's motivated by that. You know, you need to bring everyone together. You need to celebrate the successes within your team. As a leader, you need to celebrate it outside as well. You know, do your QBRs with the leads, do your QBRs with your exec team, have that feedback filter through to your team and celebrate the successes. I think that's super important. And just afterwards, make sure doing kind of...

calibrations, what is good look like, but also reviewing your prioritization. Like I said, at the beginning of the year, you might be focused on go to market and sales, and within six weeks, we may have done a great job. And what we thought we needed to hire in Q2 was engineering. Actually, suddenly we need to focus on product or design or on data and analytics. So I think to set up your properly, you need to keep on looking at the prioritization of the business and your team and then...

evaluate it as you go through because once you start saying that you have availability to your hiring managers to start hiring they're going to snap it up they're going to do it they're going to want to hire really quickly so you need to be careful about that messaging as well on top of it. There will be my four things I've got more but yeah that's my first four that I can think of.

Eero (35:32)
How do you take care of your team? So hyper growth definitely is a super stressful thing. very fast-paced, and as you mentioned, you get together, you celebrate, oh, we did it. We achieved it. And then there is a bigger goal ahead of you. if you don't take care of yourself, you're going to be in this rat race, and it's never ending.

Marcus Pask (35:40)
Yeah.

Burnout was a huge thing, you know, for everyone. And I think COVID really taught us that it was it was important to talk about burnout. It was important to talk about wellbeing. For me as a as a leader of a team now and you know, a large team at that. One of the first things I did was talking about my own wellbeing, you know, being vulnerable in those conversations and

And in that first meeting that I actually had with my whole team, my previous team had heard about it, but you know, I'd been through a lot in, in my time at Miro, my partner had an accident and was, was in a wheelchair and wasn't able to walk for, you know, three, four years and was in a crutches for, for a long period of that. So I was a full-time carer as well as trying to take Miro through hyper growth. And, you know, I was on calls, hiring.

probably 15 roles at any one time, doing calls from seven in the morning through to eight PM at nine, nine o'clock at night, trying to speak to people in the U S and relocate them and tell them how amazing everything is. And actually at that point I was really struggling. You know, I was, I was trying to be a carer to my partner, but also trying to get my name on the map at Miro and trying to be, you know, the best person I could be at work and I wasn't letting any of it show. And that was, that was a

downfall for me, like that was a massive struggle. And actually then, through the years, I've also had, you know, I've lost some close, close people to me and family and friends. And I think what was really important was I shared a lot of this with my team, I was able to share with them, hey, you know, this is what I've been through. This is how I've got support. This is how I noticed the signs. This is how I'm turning up every day to work and

If I will take time out myself, if I'm feeling overloaded, I'm gonna let my manager know, I'm gonna take a half day, even though I don't have the holiday. I'm gonna ask for it, but I'm gonna really focus on myself. And I think for any leader within a company, you have to be vulnerable and you have to talk from your own experiences because you set the example. And that's really important. There's no point me saying to my team, hey, take that day off. You shouldn't be working past 6 p.m.

but then suddenly I'm on Slack messaging people at 7pm, 8pm, and I'm on calls. Like you need to set that right example. So I think what was really important for me is setting up the framework for people to share as well. And by doing that, I had probably three or four people reach out to me from my team and say, I'm struggling right now. I'm in a bad place outside of work. This is what's going on. Or actually I'm overloaded with work or these are my challenges.

Everyone views wellbeing in a different way. And I think that's also really important. For some people, wellbeing is like myself. I lost a very dear friend of mine, and that was hugely impactful on me. For someone else, it may be that they try to buy a house and it's fallen through. Who am I to weigh what is important to each person? That might affect them just as much as that affects me. And I think that's really important.

Eero (38:49)
Thank you.

Marcus Pask (39:15)
when you're thinking about hyper growth, it's having that moment to have those discussions with your team and know that everybody has different examples, but you need to turn up to those conversations and just listen. Like it's not for you to necessarily offer advice. It's not for you to say, here's what I would do or say, hey, I've been there as well. This is what I did. Actually, it's just about listening.

Eero (39:31)
Thank you.

Marcus Pask (39:42)
and asking how you can help and that being there as a human being and not as a robot and just trying to help with knowing that everything will hopefully be okay. And if it continues, that we'll look into it. And I think that human approach is really, really important for any leader that is managing a team.

Eero (40:02)
Yeah, that's a super interesting topic. You definitely have to lead by example. But what I have noticed in general is it's very often the stress or problems are usually outside of the work. But you need to build a trust with the person so you would know when then they can, most of the time, they're not looking for answers.

Marcus Pask (40:10)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Eero (40:29)
looking, like you said, for people to listen and so on. And then most of the times, sometimes you can ask questions, but sometimes there is a trick you can do. You can always ask, do you want me to listen, or do you want advice? So you know what they are expecting. So this can always work.

Marcus Pask (40:34)
Yeah.

GAH

Yeah.

Yeah. It's something I did actually whilst we were going through this hyper growth moment, especially with a new team and even the existing team was, you know, once a month, it was a what we would, I would do a weekly one-to-one with the team. That was, that was normal. But once a month as a minimum, we would always do this just, we're not going to talk about work. We're going to either do a call or we're going to go for a walk. And luckily in Amsterdam, where we are, we've got

Vondel park that's basically on our doorstep like it's you know, five minute walk away and I would just ask the team Hey, do you want to go for a walk instead and actually bringing? People outside of the work environment and outside of this we're gonna go into a room and we're gonna have this Intense or deep conversation actually that's take us outside of that environment. Let's go for a walk around the park Let's just grab a coffee or grab a hot dog or you know, even at the end of the day

Hey, do you want to do it now? Or do you want to do it at the end of the day and we go and grab a drink or just grab some lunch or something and just change the environment to be an environment where they feel more comfortable to talk about these things. Because sometimes as a manager, you know, it can be also intimidating when you say, let's have a, let's have a catch up, you know, in, in meeting room A. And so, you know, the team was like, Oh God, why are we having a catch up? Whereas if I say, yeah, yeah.

Eero (42:12)
And then you say, let's do it tomorrow.

Marcus Pask (42:16)
Yeah, that's also it. And actually that's a really valid point. It's actually really important for you to understand that this is a big deal and not changing what you have put in place. Someone might be apprehensive and stressed about that Friday meeting at 10 o'clock, like I said, in floor four meeting room A. And then for you, it's like, well, I just thought we were gonna have a catch up. But if you don't have an agenda or anything beforehand and then you move it to Monday,

Eero (42:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Marcus Pask (42:45)
suddenly they've got the whole weekend to stress about it. So it's also on that communication piece, but you brought up a great point. I mean, how often have you had that done to yourself or done it to other people and just gone, why? Like, you know?

Eero (42:47)
Yeah.

Thanks.

I'm going to jump from here for another took, like, I don't know if it was a career break or you were traveling to Southeast Asia and South America. You can probably tell a little bit about that also. But the point that I was thinking to discuss with you is that I see very often that recruiters and also hiring take a career break or something like that, like, as a negative.

Marcus Pask (43:07)
Yeah.

Eero (43:25)
They want to see that there is no breaks, you're always working and if there is break, like why did you take a break? And then you get this like a bad mark. What do you think and how often you see that?

Marcus Pask (43:37)
Yeah, there's actually there's a lot of bias that goes on in recruiting. I think we all know this anyway, you know There's unconscious bias and then there's Conscious bias as well. You know people want to hire people like themselves that have had followed the same trajectory as themselves I've not done that, you know in my career. I didn't go to university so I left school at 18 years old and I Didn't have the chance to explore the world. I went straight into recruitment and

and talent acquisition at 18. So for me, I went traveling so that I could go and get that experience of meeting new people and exploring new cultures and getting away from, I come from a town in Leicester, called Leicester, sorry, and not many people have heard of it. There's not a lot going on apart from the greatest football team in the world. But apart from that, I needed to go and explore the rest of the world. And so for me, it was really important to do first when I was 19, 20 years old.

Southeast Asia. Now the next point you clicked on was I also went to South America, but I did this. I did five years at Hays. And I was getting to that point where I needed something fresh, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. And so I asked to do a sabbatical. And I actually took a three month sabbatical approved from my work to say, I need to go off, but I want to come back, I just don't know what I want to come back into. And it was the first sabbatical the company had ever done, I think, in

Eero (45:03)
Mmm.

Marcus Pask (45:05)
the UK. And it was kind of this business case of why do you need it? Why should we support this? And I explained my case, you know, it's unpaid. I want to come back. I think it's great for me to leave and I will hopefully come back with more energy and rejuvenated, you know, passion for it. So for me, it was about those new cultures. Now, onto your point on hiring managers and recruiters.

I think it is its bias opinion. You know, some people and recruiters, unfortunately, and hiring managers and interviewers will look at what university did that person go to? What companies did they work for? How quickly did they move up within that company? For me, you're taking a career break. I put it in my LinkedIn profile because of also that bias that you've just clicked on. If they saw a gap of six months, what was that person doing?

Eero (45:57)
Hmm.

Marcus Pask (45:57)
So I didn't want to do it as a gap of, I left Hayes to go to somewhere else. Hey, what did I do? I needed to fill it. And that was me just being very conscious like you picked up on, how will this be viewed by someone else? I think now, I see companies are shifting and I see people that are seeing and understanding that career breaks are really important. I think people are starting to see the education is less important. There's less focus on.

The degree or where you came from. and even within Miro at the beginning of our hyper growth, there was definitely this profile that we were looking at. It was entrepreneurial had gone to a great university, had maybe had a startup or work for a startup. You know, it was this very particular profile that we looked for. And it took a while to change that, but we did in time. And I think sometimes companies are.

are too fixed on this type of person that they need and not understanding that actually people that have gone out and done different things will actually have a completely different perspective and that will actually help you as a company or help you as a team. So for me, when I hire, I never look for someone that's like me. I actually look for the complete opposite because I think they're going to be able to, I hope they're going to challenge us. They're hopefully going to bring up new ideas and they're hopefully going to push us in a new direction.

Eero (47:02)
But now, we want to take a few questions. Thank you.

Marcus Pask (47:22)
I'm glad you picked up on it. Not many people notice the breaks and what I've done. I put it in there on purpose to see that it's okay to have those breaks.

Eero (47:34)
Yeah, I need to update also. I was in Australia actually, I did in a way a similar thing. I was thinking, okay, I need to change the industry and then have to figure out what I'm going to do next. But in general, I hope this understanding or thinking will change because for me it gave a lot of perspective what's going on in the world. And I would actually...

I would recommend all the young people before they go to university, for example, that they go travel to see the world, they try different jobs. Usually you do a lot of smaller jobs when you're backpacking or something like that, and then that gives you basically a whole new perspective, the world looks like and what you can do. I see it definitely as a positive thing, but I have noticed that...

there is this conception of you have to work 40 years in the straight until you retire and that doesn't make sense at all. In a way, we shouldn't.

Marcus Pask (48:26)
Yeah.

No, I think maybe in 10 years, things because of our generation and where it's gone and people have traveled more and the way the world is maybe in 10 years time as well, maybe even sooner, it would have shifted. You know, now the hiring managers are those people that went traveling or people that took time out and they're actually looking for it. So I think it will change in time. We have to change the perspective.

Eero (48:55)
So I'm going to do a last question. I'm thinking what I'm going to do. So maybe you can talk about was the strategy to expand to new markets.

Marcus Pask (49:05)
I think whenever you're looking at new markets, you have to you have to look at the reason why, you know, are you doing it because you need to be closer to customers? Are you doing it because and the reason I focus on your customers as a business is, you know, there's a lot of companies will open up offices in Germany, for example, or France, or one location in

Prague, you know, in Czech Republic or Hungary. And it's all about what is this trying to solve? So when we opened up or looked to open up in Germany, it was so that we could be closer to our customers. You know, when you're trying to sell the product of Miro, it actually helps if you are in that country and speaking the same language, you understand the cultural differences of how you pitch a product, the life cycle. You know, Germany is a 12 month cycle

the UK that could be a three month cycle. So you need to be closer to them. They need to know that you're invested in that hub as well. So one, it's understanding your customers. Like what are you trying to solve by opening into a new hub? The next is the costs for doing so. You know, workplace, what is your hub going to look like? Are you gonna do it in a WeWork? Are you gonna do it in a, have your own office and have a small one? You need to look at the compensation. You need to look at

HR, the legality of it, you know, the HR side is very different if you're doing UK to Germany, and you need to be aware of those differences as well. It's then looking at if you open up a hub there from a TA side, do we need to have a recruiter that's based there as well? And if you are going to have a recruiter based there, who are they going to interact with? You don't want to silo someone out and just have...

one person from the overall people team who is a recruiter based in that hub. You know, do you set up a team around them where you have two or three recruiters plus someone from people partners, plus someone from a rewards team, plus a person from workplace and create this kind of unity of a people function so that they're not siloed from the rest of the team. Um, so there's a lot that you have to look into it, but you need to make sure that it makes a business case.

for who you're trying to attract with new customers and new clients. And then from there, work backwards to, okay, if we spend $500,000, a million dollars on doing this, what's our return going to look like? And if we actually did this from the hubs we're currently set within, what are the risks? And which outweighs the most? Do we stop ourselves from growing in a new market because we're not there? Or...

Eero (51:45)
What is it?

Thanks.

Marcus Pask (51:54)
Is this just the perception that is there still and we need to change that perception? So there's a lot of things you need to think about and it's understanding you might get it wrong. And if you do get it wrong, a thing that I went onto earlier, it's iterating on it. And it's not going too big too soon where you suddenly go from zero to a hundred person hub. It's going from zero to 10, to 20, to 30 and seeing it in stages and reevaluating it. And then...

Eero (52:14)
Thank you.

Thank you.

Marcus Pask (52:23)
Also reevaluating, can you do this within the hubs again that you'll already set up in? And that's super important when you're going through hyper growth or any type of growth that you're constantly reverting back and think saying to yourself Does this still make sense? And if it does great if it doesn't Don't be afraid to make decisions That are the benefit of the company but also look at doing it in a very like slow way, you know So it's a lot that you have to consider

Eero (52:53)
Yeah. So iterate, learn from the things.

Marcus Pask (52:58)
Every day, iterate, revert back. Iteration is king with us and A-B testing, not being afraid to fail, not being afraid to say that you made a mistake and looking at how you can make improvements for the future. As long as you're able to do that, I think you'll do well as a business.

Eero (53:16)
Yeah, I'm sad to say, but we need to wrap up. So that's it for episode seven of Relancer podcast. If you liked this episode, feel free to subscribe and share it. Thank you for tuning in and hope to see you in the next one. Thank you, Marcus.

Marcus Pask (53:33)
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Bye.