IT Crafts HR – Matus Horvath from Slido

Maks has a conversation with Matus Horvath who is the Head of People Operations at Slido. Matus shares his knowledge about managing team communication at hybrid companies and tells how to create a flexible work culture based on trust. He reveals how they use their internal barometer at Slido to measure the sense of belonging and how to communicate your employer brand to attract more talent. Listen to the podcast to hear more about a recruitment process that allows finding engaged employees and what KPIs are worth tracking as well as to get to know if there is any kind of difference between remote and on-site workers.
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Maks Majer
Podcast Host
Maks Majer is a software engineer, co-founder, and CEO of ITCraftship, a company that helps both talented developers get a dream job at tech companies all over the world, and companies hire remote software developer superstars. He’s also a remote work advocate and helps startup businesses embrace the remote work culture. Maks is passionate about solving pains and removing obstacles by focusing on good software design and user experience practices. In his free time, he broadens his knowledge of business development as well as focuses on a healthy lifestyle that gives him the energy to get the most of a 24 hour day. You can catch him on LinkedIn.
Matus Horvath
Head of People Operations at Slido
Matus loves learning and always looks for the potential in other people. Coming from Bratislava, he lived and studied in Switzerland, the USA, and Iceland. From his early childhood, he has been working with a group of volunteers at various youth camps and events and he wanted to continue working with people onwards. He first gained experience in the organization AIESEC and later in bigger companies at various HR roles until he set sail into the start-up waters. Now he leads People Operations at Slido where 145+ people spread across the whole globe are transforming how meetings and events are run around the world.
Something that you wish you have known earlier
Matus: one of the learnings I had was to choose your battles because when I came in, I kind of went all-in and did many things, and I said yes to many things, but really wisely choosing channels you want to use to attract the top talent. When speaking about events I was basically saying yes to every event that was willing to have us, who was willing to have us for free or with some partnership or something like that. I went all-in into those. It makes you a bit spread thin, so it is really something. (...)
Transcript
Maks
Hello, today, my special guest is Matus Horvath who is the Head of People Operations at Slido – a software service company with over 140 employees worldwide that creates a leading Q&A and polling platform for company meetings and events. It’s great to have you here, Matus, thanks for joining.
Matus
Thank you, Maks, good day to everyone.
Maks
You’re leading People Operations at a company of over 140 people. I think that our listeners are going to be eager to hear what kind of challenges you’re dealing with. Can you start by shortly describing yourself and the positions and responsibilities that you currently hold?
Matus
Yeah, of course. Thank you very much once again for having me. I joined the company, actually, exactly 3 years ago. It was September 2016. Back then, there were 30 of us in the team. Basically, hiring became the number one priority as the business was growing very fast.
So, what our team actually does and kind of our mission of our People Operations team is to build and grow a world-class team. What we do is we try to really build the team in the way that we do the hiring so – looking for talent and attract them to come to Slido, onboarding them, and then making sure that actually, we have the right people doing the right job. Once we have the talent already inside the company, then actually making sure that people grow and develop as people and as professionals and such.
Maks
Cool. It’s really great because I think that this is actually a big challenge for everyone. I would love to hear more about that. Can you tell me what is your current team size, the People team at Slido?
Matus
Right, so there are currently 6 of us.
Maks
So 6 of you, and when you joined 3 years ago you were only 30 in the whole company. So, you were kind of responsible for growing the company for over 110 employees more, right?
Matus
Yeah, exactly. An exciting journey that I’m grateful for having the opportunity to be a part of.
Maks
Yeah, awesome, very impressive. Your team is distributed across many countries. Could you tell me where do you have your offices?
Matus
Yeah, so currently, our headquarters is actually in Bratislava where we have half of the people, and then we have people distributed all around the world, basically from San Francisco all the way to Sydney. Now, the reason why is because we really want to be close to our customers. We really want to be there where they are so that we can actually listen to their needs, and based on that actually create a product and the service, and the whole experience for them.
Also, one more important thing is that it’s also because of the talent, that obviously, great talent is not only based in Bratislava so if we want to hire amazing people we need to actually be flexible in the way of the place where they can actually work from. One is to be close to where our customers are but then again be also where the team is, and where the talent is.
So, in some locations, we actually have our officers, as I mentioned, we have the biggest office obviously in Bratislava. Then we have like bigger offices in London where we have 15 people. Then we have 7 people in New York, 3 people in San Francisco. We have also a small team in Bali, actually, like 5 people, but then, we have individuals. We have a colleague in the Philippines, in Manila. We have another person in Stockholm, so we have some people who are just individuals based in different cities.
Maks
This is very interesting. How does the time difference affect how you guys work with so many people distributed around the world?
Matus
Yeah, that is a good question. So, obviously, it’s one of the challenges, because having people around the world makes it much more difficult, makes it much more challenging. The first thing is to really keep that in mind because actually, there isn’t a time where everybody could meet everyone.
Obviously, there is, but somebody would kind of get up at 2 AM or something like that because of the time. The time difference between San Francisco, Bratislava, and Sydney is so big that, obviously, there isn’t the time. So, what we actually do, the first thing is a mission to have the awareness, to have this in mind when you are scheduling meetings. We are using Zoom as one of the tools that we might get into a later but to actually do recordings, not to have like the meetings at the same time all the time, but actually, switch times.
So, when it comes to Europe have it sometimes in the morning. The other month actually having some more company events in the afternoon, so in the morning it is more suitable for the APAC team to join in, and in the afternoon it’s more suitable for America’s team to join in, so just to keep this thing in mind.
Also, when you are writing somebody on Slack, just to make sure that you don’t expect an answer right away because from that person it can be just middle of the night, so really, keeping this in mind is kind of like the first step of providing a great experience also for the remote people.
Maks
Well, Slido is a company that helps others communicate. You already mentioned Zoom recordings, Slack, can you share a little bit more on how you communicate to your employees and what other tools do you use or maybe you have some specific practices around how you collaborate and communicate?
Matus
Yeah. So, like both Slack and Zoom are a huge help, and we’ve figured some of the things that we really used and how we use for instance. Slack is having a separate channel which is called “Remote” where people from various regions interact and share both the struggles but also the nice things about their remote work, so they don’t have like a fear of missing out. Obviously, as mentioned, we have most people over here in Bratislava, so that people outside of the headquarters are having the fear of being missed out, but they are actually being included.
Well, first of all, what we do is we have permanent Zoom rooms running in the headquarters so that actually works for our customer care team which is supporting our customers on a 24-hour basis throughout the workweek. They have a permanent Zoom link which is running here the whole time and they can actually join in, so that even if you are based in the US or actually, as mentioned, in Bali – you just join in the same Zoom call, then you have the kind of experiences as being part as actually sitting in one room because, obviously, being remote you will never have 100% the same experiences as actually being in the same room, but we really want to make it as close as possible.
Maks
Absolutely, and from what you described so far I gathered that you do have some remote employees, individuals. I want to ask if you have any specific remote work policy and how do you help your employees who are not located in one of your offices with telecommuting, like for example, do you help them with getting co-working access or any specific support for that kind of people?
Matus
Yeah, that’s a good question. We try to have the least policies as possible because at a certain point this is usually what happens to companies as they get big, they introduce more and more policies. We try to do better by introducing good judgment at the work. Because what is the kind of the foundation of this whole approach is that we try to have a lot of trust within the team, so that we do not need to have these kinds of processes and policies in place but rather actually trust each other which is like an amazing thing to work for.
But you were asking about when it comes to telecommuting and all that kind of stuff. We don’t have any policies but what we do is really, we want to offer the kind of the same level of experience to people based in offices to also those working remotely. We try and we always offer this to them, that if they want to actually work from a co-working space, we will cover the cost for that because some people actually prefer working from home. So in that case, it’s perfectly okay, but we always kind of offer this option so people can have a co-working space, and yeah, we cover the cost for that.
Maks
Okay, I’m seeing that your company is kind of a hybrid – a lot of people are still working in the office but there are still other people who are telecommuting fully. How does that relate to the people working on-site? Do you also have generous work from home possibilities for them?
Matus
Yeah, so that’s a very good question again and once again, we don’t have any policies around that, but we try to build a culture of both, freedom and responsibility, so when it comes to a home office, we love to spend time with each other in the office, but if it works for you that you just want to spend the majority of your time at home, that is perfectly okay.
Some people work almost 100% of their time from home. For some people, it’s more like when they have this kind of project where they need to focus. They don’t want to be disturbed. They just work from home or if they need to do something, then they just take a home office. We don’t have kind of strict working hours. I mean it’s not that you need to be in the office like from 9am to 5pm or from 10am to 2pm, and the others are flexible.
This is very flexible and I mean, as mentioned, we try to build this on trust. We try to build this on common sense and it’s always about discussing it with your team, but it’s not like discussing for the sake of getting approval but more of coordinating inside the team.
And yes, there are some roles that need to have a schedule because they need to have this kind of shifts, being available to our customers or some of the roles actually require you to be at some point in the office because of cooperating with others. Although, as mentioned, we try to make sure that the experience is kind of seamless if you also work from home. Yeah, we still have a long way to go, I would say, there are still a lot of things which we can improve, but as mentioned, we try to make this work.
Maks
Yeah. I really like this approach of good judgment, trust, and empowering people to choose the way they like to work. Does it come with any challenges on your side with managing all these different preferences, so to speak?
Matus
Obviously, that creates challenges. It’s just the way how we choose that we want to work, and then we want to make this work. Although, it is obviously more challenging but the thing of freedom and responsibility – that’s just kind of part of our culture.
Maks
Sounds awesome, and since you have quite some people working on-site and quite some people also doing remote work or people who are even in the place where you have offices can work from home. Have you seen any differences in productivity or any kind of difference between remote and on-site, and do you have any idea about the differences there?
Matus
Good question. We do not have this kind of backed up by data, but as mentioned, because of the business model, because of the fact that we are a global company, we are supporting our customers worldwide. I would say that if we do not want people working at 2 and 3 am, it’s just the only way how to to do it. Obviously, the kind of sense of the belonging is a metric that we look at. When it comes to remote teams it’s more challenging in this for them to kind of make sure that they are included and they are part of the team.
So, we are working very hard to make them be part of the team and feel included, but for instance is when we look at the kind of impact they have and when it comes to their customers, they rank even higher because they are the ones out there kind of like in the trenches and having those interactions with customers.
When it comes to productivity, I would say that such a complex thing where we even might not be able to measure it because our work is just so diverse. Every role is a bit different. Then again, it’s just of and about the individual to make sure that he or she can just make it work somehow. We as People Operations team are here to support them and really kind of be the eyes and ears inside the company. Listen to actually the needs of our client’s work and the people we have at Slido and making sure we can really create an environment where everybody can actually do the best work of their lives.
Maks
And you mentioned something about measuring the sense of belonging of the team that is remote. When you said measuring, I thought that you may have some way of actually quantifying that. Do you have any specific measurements around that?
Matus
Yeah, so we use like an internal barometer which we send out every second month, and one of the questions we ask everyone in the team is what is your sense of belonging. How much do you feel part of the team? This is actually a metric that we look at very closely because Slido culture is very unique.
I would say goes kind of above what is kind of like the usual working relationships which we have and as mentioned I think that is one of the things that makes Slido so special. We just really want to make sure that this stays the way even though we are growing and even though the difference between like the physical differences is there.
Maks
Awesome. Well, this is very interesting to learn and I have also seen, getting a little bit deeper into the sense of belonging and creating a culture inside of the company, I have seen that you have #SlidoLife. How do you encourage your employees to spend their time actively together and what impact does it have on their performance, in your opinion?
Matus
Right, right. Yeah, so actually, last week, we spent 2 days on a company off-site. What we do twice a year, we try to bring the majority of the company together. Obviously, there weren’t like 100% of us but it was like I think 85% or 90% of the company came there. There were also people from America, from the APAC team, coming in and spending 2 full days together.
As mentioned the physical kind of connection, being in the same room with the person, that’s just something which, even though Zoom is kind of cool, is still something which cannot be kind of…you just cannot work without it. Like I said being in the same room together, it’s just priceless. So, what we do is we invest a lot into this, to bring everyone together at least twice a year, like the whole company. Then actually, regional teams have their own offsite as well.
As mentioned, the APAC team, they actually have an off-site at the end of September and they also have it twice a year. The whole APAC team which is now around 50 people, they all get together at Bali, which is a far more cooler place than Bratislava, so they can get together and actually, they get the time to spend the time physically together and there are basically I would say two reasons to do an off-site and we have two goals.
First, is to align ourselves in as the team is getting bigger. This is becoming even more and more important, and the second one is to have some fun. So, it’s about getting together, enjoying the time we spend together, yeah, just having fun but also kind of looking back on it, on what could’ve been better and actually align ourselves around our business goals, around our business priorities when it comes to the next couple of months that there will be.
Maks
Well, it looks like you are coming with this remote work style and distributed company with a very mature approach. Can you share a little bit more on how do you effectively and creatively communicate your employer brand to attract more talent?
Matus
Yeah. I mean, as mentioned, hiring was one of the first priorities when I came into the Slido, and obviously, it still is when it comes to the people function. Hiring is the most important people function you do, because if you do the hiring well, that takes care of the rest, but if you kind of screwed up at the very beginning by hiring people who just won’t fit into your team, then you’re just not able to fix it with anything else along the way.
Hiring is super important, actually, creating the right employer brands and you’re able to attract the right people is super important and what we try to do is really communicate who we are. We try to communicate our core values, as mentioned the culture, something which makes Slido very special and we try to communicate who we are and what are our beliefs, what do we stand for, how do we work and what is important for us. We try to communicate it on our social media, via blog, via the events that we are either organizing or actually participating in.
We do a lot of speaking engagements. We work a lot with the community and when it comes to employer brand, it’s really becoming an employer of choice, and for us, not everybody needs to know that Slido exists and not everybody needs to know that “Hey, I just want to work in Slido”. For us, what is really important, actually, the right people, and the talent that we are looking for is where Slido is out there and hey, I might just go and check out their career page.
Maks
Yeah, absolutely, and you mentioned about different activities that you are doing to support your employer brand. Do you have any analytics on which of the activities perform better or yield better ROI, and can you share that?
Matus
Yeah. So, I mean, we try to be as data-enabled as we are so that actually we invest our resources into what is actually working. Now hiring is a multi-channel activity. I mean, if you get to hire and that person tells you that yeah, they got to know about this job from a Facebook post, that doesn’t mean that you can cut off everything else because that person might have read the blog. They might have read about you in Forbes, like a year ago. They might have met somebody who gave them a good reference, and then actually, after all of that, kind of encounters, they’ve seen that Facebook post and based on that they decided to apply.
But if you would not do everything else, what was just mentioned, then they wouldn’t even apply if they see that Facebook post, right? So, it’s multi-channel marketing, but for us, the number one source of hires is, and I’m very very happy that it is like that, are our referrals. It’s actually around 60%, 65% which is amazing because that shows you that the company culture is amazing in a way that people are very satisfied with Slido. They love what they’re doing and they’re loving the environment, and not just that, but actually they want to share this experience with their network, so they are actually recommending other friends to join Slido which is an amazing thing.
So, like I said, we get 60%, 65% of our hires from referrals, and then it’s a combination of many things. Like I said, I mean, obviously, social media plays a lot into this but actually creating a lot of content, participating in various events, not just job fairs, but on Meetups, investing a lot into the community is actually a great way to help to build up your presence and actually build up your employer brand.
Maks
Well, having almost 2/3 of your new hires coming from referrals, that’s very very impressive so I’ll definitely look into the culture that you are creating at Slido as an inspiration for any HR manager and to learn what to do, how to create your company and your culture so that you can get this amazing result.
With that in mind, is finding new hires still a challenge at Slido or maybe with some particular roles? Do you see worse results than with others? Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
Matus
Yeah, company culture is something which I am super passionate about, so I mean, if anybody would be more interested just add me on LinkedIn and shoot me a message or something. I’ll be more than glad to chat on that more.
Towards your question, finding new people is always a challenge. Like I’ve said, it’s the most important thing where we could do some really, and we actually elaborately invest a lot of effort into hiring the right people, so we really pay much attention into this and we try to really make sure that our bar is quite high and we actually do not go under it, even though we really need to hire somebody.
I don’t think we have particular issues when it comes to specific roles. I would say it’s more possible with the regions. I mean, Slido is already quite known over here in the local market but still, we are a global company. We are obviously hiring a lot of people outside of Central Europe, and obviously, when we go into the US, into America or we go into the UK market, or we go to Asia, obviously, Slido over there is not like a known brand.
It’s known only as an interaction tool, so in the events industry, in the internal communication, it is getting to be known more and more, but when it comes to the employer brand, it’s not so strong, right? And because of the market, it is so huge that we need to be conscious to really choose our battles because investing heavily in marketing, like hiring marketing in those markets, it might just not produce the right results, so we need to be very smart in that.
Maks
And since at ITCraftship we are very much concerned with recruiting and assessing software engineers, I want to learn a little bit more on your end because I saw that some of your open positions are also in software development. Can you share a little bit more on how your recruitment process looks like and also, for other positions as well and how does that differ in terms of software engineering? What kind of specific steps do you have?
Matus
Right, right. So, I mean, like I said, we put a lot of effort into our hiring, and then the selection process. So, in a very simple way, when somebody applies to Slido, we receive their profile, basically looking at the profile, looking at their CV or their portfolio is like the number one step. Then actually, we have this kind of initial conversation with them which somebody from our People Team has, and then to kind of assess the person, answer any questions they might have, talk a bit more about why they are interested in Slido, what kind of role that they have in mind, talk a bit more about that.
Actually, only after that we go into conversations with other people in the team, and when they are based with people who are able to interview them, so I mean, if somebody is based in London, they are definitely going to have a conversation with somebody from the London team, but it is a combination of two, three others. I wouldn’t call it interviews because we would rather call it like talks with the people. We are not kind of like assessing them, but we are trying to get to know them, so to make sure that we make the right hiring decision.
Every time, we send them also like a case study that is a part of each and every role that we have so that we also see some actual work from that person. Well, we do that not just for software engineers, we do it also for marketing people, but also for customer care people, for operations. For each and every person or role, we have a certain applicant study that we send out so that we have to look at it. But also so that actually that person has a better understanding of what the role might be like.
I think that or what I believe is super important is that not just we get to know that person but actually, the person gets to know Slido as well which is I think, very very important. And so that actually they make the right decision as well. We try to make sure that the people actually speak with various people from various teams so that in the end they have a better understanding of what pocket is, and what this might be the kind of next big thing for them.
Maks
I like the idea of using case studies to showcase the work of a candidate and this is something that we used quite heavily on both our internal recruitment processes and also the recruitment process of our clients. I like that you’re using a similar approach. Can you share a little bit more on how does that case study look like in terms of like software engineering? Is it like a small application to implement?
Matus
Yeah, so it depends if we are hiring like a Front End Developer, Back End Developer or a DevOps person, or like a QA engineer, but for each and every role, we have this kind of case study, like small homework that we send to them and it depends based on the seniority and everything but it’s also interesting to see how much time this would take them to kind of solve that, and then people in our team will have a look at that.
Based on that, we actually make the decision if we want to meet that person or not, and also, during the next talk they have together they also go through the case study and they share feedback, they ask obviously the questions, so why did you choose this type of code or software.
Maks
I wanted to also ask you about KPIs that you are tracking. Can you share a little bit more on how do you measure success within your hiring efforts?
Matus
Yeah, sure. So, the number one thing is the quality of the hire that we look at so what we do is we ask a question “How excited would you be if this person joins the team, from 1 to 10?”. We ask this question to each and every person who has a conversation with the candidate. We have this kind of hiring reviews every week where we go through the pipeline of active candidates and we actually calibrate and challenge ourselves so that the kind of result is as objective as we actually can be.
We use this so the quality of hire…so to make sure that we hire people at a certain level and we actually ask that same question already when that person is part of the team and see if there are any discrepancies. So, if we have hired somebody on an 8 but they became a 10 after a couple of months, so how come we did not spot that at the very beginning? Or actually, the other way around, right? That we hired somebody as a 9 and after a couple of months, they are like a 7, so it might be that it wasn’t the right role for them. Maybe they just need some feedback. So, this is very, very important.
While we are already talking about the metric. It’s obvious they look at the sources for hires so we know what works and what does not work. We look at candidate satisfaction, so both like the successful ones and also the rejected ones so we actually asked them if they were satisfied with the whole thing, the interaction. We look at the time to offer. We don’t actually measure time to fail which is a common metric. We don’t do that because that kind of pushes the recruiters to hire fast and actually hire people and persuade hiring managers to hire people even though that’s not the candidate we are looking for. If that’s your metric you want it to be kind of met and to be improved.
So, rather than that, we actually look at time to hire or time to offer which means tracking the time from kind of when that person applies until when that person actually receives an offer from us and this is something which we really want to improve because we believe that what shapes the candidate experience, one of the most important things that actually shape the candidate experience, is your ability to move quickly and the ability for them to actually better reply or respond.
We have this kind of internal role, like the SLA that we communicate the next step, as a maximum of three working days, so that the candidate knows where they are, where they stand, so it doesn’t happen that, okay, I applied and I did not get a response in two weeks or something like that. Something that just won’t happen and we really want to make sure that they also have a great candidate experience.
Maks
I’m very passionate about automation continuous improvement. I see that on the latter you are very strong and you are actually taking a look and having kind of retrospective to say from the software engineer’s perspective on the process that you had. You also mentioned having 3 working days between communication, like communicating the next steps to the candidates which is really, really amazing to have and to keep it as a metric, and try to keep the candidate experience at such a high-level.
I want to ask if you have any tools or automation that helps you keep it up metric, things that for example remind you to give that specific candidate a reply on a specific day? What are you using to help your team keep to that promise?
Matus
Right, so at this moment actually, this is something which can be definitely improved because, obviously, at the beginning, when we were not working with such a scale of candidates, then we kind of needed these things. Currently, we are already on a level that we need, so actually, we are exploring some ATS or some applicant tracking systems which can very much help us automate many things or actually really make sure that people that are included in the hiring process and talent acquisition are spending their energy and effort on things that are bringing value. Not on the manual work. This means that if we can automate things if we can, as you mentioned, set automatic reminders, then yeah, we want to definitely do something like that.
Maks
Well, that sounds great and this is something that we are always trying to improve, so that as you said, people can spend time on things that matter, that they don’t have to keep at the back of their head that they have to do something or they really need to go through all the lists of candidates and make sure that everyone has gotten a response within the last 3 days which I think on our team is also quite time-consuming and could be spent more productively elsewhere. I like that you’re looking into that and into improving it.
I wanted to ask you especially from the perspective of the 3 years of such rapid growth. Is there anything that you wish you had known earlier, and if there are any tips that you can share for other HR departments that could improve their work before they get into it and learn it themselves?
Matus
Right. Yeah, so for me, it’s really about – one of the learnings I had was to choose your battles because when I came in, I kind of went all-in and did many things, and I said yes to many things, but really wisely choosing channels you want to use to attract the top talent. When speaking about events I was basically saying yes to every event that was willing to have us, who was willing to have us for free or with some partnership or something like that. I went all-in into those. It makes you a bit spread thin, so it is really something.
Another one was that before we didn’t even have a careers page or something like that so it’s really going, and obviously, I couldn’t code it in myself, so I needed the help of software engineers and that was a challenging thing to actually get the buy-in from them because, obviously, I needed their time and effort to help me build one. So I had to explain that, okay, if you actually give me your time, it will really help free up yours, and in the end, I really made sure that I speak with the project managers to able to allocate the time for that.
Once again, also, what is very important, and it took us some time, was that before Slido did not really have a strong brand when it comes to the IT community and really starting a blog and starting to speak at some smaller events or Meetups, but then actually getting invited into bigger conferences, that was a challenging journey, let’s call it like that. It took some time. I know that this was something that helped us very much.
From the very beginning, I would actually do this earlier than when we did it so actually look at, okay, so guys, just tell me what are the exciting things you are working or like the challenges you are working on? Why are you actually in the company? What makes you come to work each day and okay? Let’s just write about it. Let’s just write a blog post about it. If not, then I’ll do an interview with you so I’m just going to prepare some kind of questions. Make it as easy as possible and you will just need to have this kind of breaking the ice and it gets much easier along the way.
I mean, the first blog post it was such a pain at the very beginning, like it took so much time but now, we are kind of producing one, two, three blog posts every month and they are already kind of driving it inside the engineering team, so we just have been kind of posting all over in social media and kind of take care of the spreading but the creation is already in their hands which is great.
Maks
Yeah, that sounds like a great effort to have your employees contribute to the employer branding and to create value from within your tech team and that way, showcase how great it can be working with you and how interesting challenges you may encounter.
I have one last question for you about your sources of inspiration. Do you know any good HR materials or blogs, podcasts that helped you shape the professional that you are right now?
Matus
Yeah. I love the learning process. I really love to read and to listen to audiobooks or podcasts. When it comes to books, I think I have my two all-time favorite HR books.
Number one is a book from Laszlo Bock, Work Rules. He was the SVP of People Operations at Google and kind of…when he actually came there he had the same thing in the way that hiring was the number one priority, so he came to Google one day with 3000 people and left when there were 50,000. So, really kind of started this huge hiring machine that Google has, obviously. His book is amazing. He kind of walks you through all the kind of people functions and hiring is actually one of them and kind of reveals all the kind of secrets of Google, so that’s a very, very handy book.
Another very powerful book is actually called Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord. She was, again, Chief People Officer at Netflix for 12 years, and that’s again, an amazing book on HR but also on recruitment, but I will recommend to read that book also to non-HR people because it’s just amazing.
I read and I follow a couple of blogs. I really like one from Matěj Matolín. He’s actually from the Czech Republic, so his blogs are very practical although most of them are actually in the Czech language. But that’s very, very practical.
Then again, I really love business-oriented things, not just HR, but I read a lot of when it comes to blogs. I read a lot of Harvard Business Review. They are a great source of inspiration, and when it comes to podcasts, I’ll just share one of my favorite ones, it’s How I Built This. It’s a show for entrepreneurs and innovators who founded their companies and actually talking about their kind of early beginnings and obviously HR and hiring are usually part of those early beginnings somehow.
Maks
Matus, that’s all the questions that I had for you and I really had a great time talking to you. You’ve shared some amazing insights into the culture, the operations at Slido. I think that our listeners will hugely benefit from that information. I want to thank you very much for joining me today.
Matus
You’re welcome, thank you very much for inviting me, for having me, thank you very much.
Maks
Absolutely. It was a pleasure. Have a great day then and I will look forward to connecting with you again.
Want to listen more? Check out the IT Crafts HR podcast episode with Fareen Shaikh, Director of Talent at acework.