Hiring at Hypergrowth: Inside ElevenLabs | Victoria Weller, Vice President Operations

Hi, Victoria. We're so thrilled that you're here with us to have this conversation. And I personally have just loved getting to know you and work with you over the last two and a half years. But I'm just so in awe with what you and the team at 11 labs have built in such a short amount of time and continuing to build. And I think there's so many best practices there to learn. And so we'd love to maybe start there. And I know that with some of these AI native companies who that don't have traditional titles, it can be sometimes hard to know fully what you do when you wear so many different hats. And so why don't you tell us a little bit more about your role and everything that you are responsible for? I would love to and also happy to have this conversation if you'd like to be spoken so many times off camera. And I've learned so much from you as well. So it's cool to think up in some of those pieces together here today. My role at 11 labs is that I oversee operations, which includes everything talent acquisition, the people that we bring in and then people or HR. So making sure that those that have joined are successful at 11 labs and includes customer support. So making sure the end user is unblocked and using the 11 labs product and company operations, which is similar to business operations defining the operating system of the company. How do we do planning, offsides, offices and how do we work best together? And maybe for some contact setting, how big was the team the company when you first joined? I joined today almost three years ago. So it was only 10 people at the time. I was my first week was that our company went offside and we fit onto one table. We've crossed 550 employees in three years. So we're growing really rapidly. If maybe we can go back to those very early days. And if you think about, you know, the first maybe 10 or so hires that you prioritize that you thought were important as you just stepped into the business, what were those hires and what was your logic around the why and the why now, at that moment in time? The early hires generically for a tech startup and to be on the engineering side. So you need builders and just hiring more and more builders initially is a core priority. What was unique about 11 labs is that we're a research company. So we needed researchers to start at the very bottom of our stack and develop the proprietary models in the audio space before a product could be built on top of that. So the first four out of 10 employees were actually researchers. And that is something that was unique and definitely prioritized for us. And the other piece was that as soon as the product was launched, it hit product market fit immediately. So the adoption rate was so steep that the operational component became relevant much earlier compared to the size of the company than it traditionally does. And so I was ducky in the sense that there were many things for me to do when joining in the first 10 employees that wouldn't necessarily be burning fires to put out when a company is still iterating on the first version of the product and trying to find product market fit. And at what point did you guys start to think about the role scaling out the company outside of researchers? When was that kind of inflection point for you guys? The translation from the research model into a product happened pretty quickly. Matthew and Peter needed that event for the first funding rounds and getting other researchers on board in terms of showing how it operates or the power of the model. But then the product was a really simple interface. And it was just a website you got to the page there was a text box you could type something in and and hit generate and it was read out loud. And so it was just a super simple way of making the audio come to life and letting the product speak for itself. And then as soon as the adoption was so steep, we thought about investing in design to get the branding right of the product to make also increasingly complex user flows intuitive into sales as we're growing our enterprise motion into growth and marketing for the consumer base to adopt there. And then on my side of the house investing in recruiters so that we could help find those incredible people to fuel all other functions of the business. And maybe just a double down on your point around incredible people. I think 11 labs has had an amazing track record of hiring some of the best talent out there both in terms of experience operators all the way down to you know you're very high potential up in commerce right. Which arguably are much harder to source and to find. How have you guys thought about you know the leading indicators around talent and what good looks like and you know what is important to you guys as you build out the team versus maybe what traditional playbooks or traditional hiring plans and and you know success stories have looked like in the past. The bit that's interesting about the traditional playbook is that we are now looking for something that hasn't existed for a long time and in that respect experience becomes less relevant. So rather than saying we need someone with 5 to 10 years of experience in this field we actually want to hire for motivations and and ways of working much more. And so put a lot of emphasis on extracurricular projects. What does this person do to show that they are really keen and interested in AI audio or what does this person do to keep themselves up to date on what's possible with AI tooling and how do they operate in a way that's different. And we don't want to be operating and scaling and running processes in a way that they did a couple years ago. So we pay a lot more attention to those pieces in hiring. The other part that has become really important as we're scaling so quickly is filtering a lot for culture. It wouldn't be possible to double headcount every six months and expect each incoming employee and new hire to absorb the culture once they land. We need to have them bring and elevate the culture right out of the bat. And so we do a lot of filtering early on to ensure that individuals have both that really ambitious driven component that we value a lot and that defines people at 11 labs but are also really low ego and humble and hands-on to have the combination of a workplace where we can operate quickly. How do you test for that? Because those things are hard, right? And I think people show up to interviews sometimes a different version, right, of themselves. And I think culture, egos, some of these really important but ultimately softer skills are really hard to get a grasp of sometimes. Are there things that you and the team you know really look for or test for maybe use any AI to support with? Like how do you think about that? It is much harder to test for those bits than the hard skills. You can see what someone's built. They can come with a work sample and you can understand quickly are there a good developer, a good designer, etc. But then in the terms of understanding how someone operates it becomes a lot about asking the right questions and assessing the answers for the low ego component. For instance, a question I like to ask is what's the recent piece of feedback that you've received? And it shows whether someone is reflective enough to be open to feedback and to take that on board and to identify the such or to go and seek it out if it's not naturally brought forward to them. But then also has the confidence or the open-mindedness to share that in interview setting and say this is something that I haven't always done well. But this is something that I was glad was mirrored to me and something I've been working on. And then the really critical part is saying have you followed up on that feedback? How did you take it on board? And the answer is very there from saying, oh, I disagreed with it altogether and I disregarded it to this is something I was so happy to find out about and have absolutely taken on board and implemented in the way that I operate now. When you think about the sheer scale of headcount growth, what are your plans for this year? Can you remind me? It keeps increasing and increasing. We've doubled headcount every six months to date. We thought that that would slow down over time. But we're consistently building so much that it warrants increasing at the same rate. So when you're optimizing for potential culture fit, versus experience, which is obviously the easier thing to kind of screen. I mean, you probably have thousands of applications that come inbound, right? How do you kind of structure your team in terms of where they spend time and how they keep up with the sheer volume that you're kind of bringing in and across so many different geos? How do you think about that just tactically? It's changed a lot over time as well. I always thought it's interesting how initially we didn't believe in inbound as much. And the inbound qualities shifts where at the very beginning stage, there are very few people that know about the company. And so the volume is very low in finding the high density talent in the inbound volume is much harder to a point where 11 labs has become an employer brand across Europe. and the U.S. in the world and so we get super high volumes of inbound but it is also a successful hiring funnel. So a third of our employees or a third of our hires are from inbound, a third from referrals and then a third from sourcing, roughly. The referral piece is one that's really helping us double down on talent because extra people know more extra people and so we really incentivize every person that comes on board to point out the best people that they've worked with and bringing them on as well. And if you were giving advice to a founder around metrics that they should care about to compete for the best talent out there, like what would you say that is and like where do you spend your time with, you know, time to close, offer acceptance, like what are some of the data that you kind of lean on? In the early stages, I think speed is really important as you're competing against larger tech companies that might operate slower but then at the end of the process will have a very enticing comp package. The way that you can win is by the mission, the impact, but also showing that we operate really quickly. We really want you making the employee feel valued but also showing kind of reflecting the mode of operating of the company in the screening process or in the interview process. So being very fast with candidates and always responding back, booking in the next meeting quickly, I think can make all the difference and in that respect the time in process or time to close is a big one. We now also pay attention to offer acceptance rates and the past three rates of all the different stages. When we find that increasing or too many are declined at the final stages, that's something that tends to be very expensive because so many people have spent time on this candidate previously, but also often has a pattern of something that we could be testing further up in the pipeline. Then the offer acceptance rate is a good indicator of how is our funnel functioning overall, what our offers like is an enticing. Have we told our story well? That is the final stage where it's most painful to lose a candidate. We've also gone through a learning journey there where our offer acceptance rate is at around 84% and that is very strong and the initial response is always to want to close more like make it be better and better and get to 100% offer acceptance rate, but that's also not an admiral place to be. There will always be candidates that at that stage are still not the right fit and can self-select out. You don't want to pay above market and have everyone accept the offer for compensation reasons, but not really be bought into the mission. And so finding where the healthy place is in your KPI is not just the default best place from what you might think is at 100% is a good thing to pay attention to also. Yeah, I fully agree with that and I think it's one of those metrics that you can often fall into the trap of the higher it is, the better, but fundamentally, if you are going after the top tier candidates, you should expect to lose because you want to be in the room, you want to earn the right to give them an offer, but you also have to expect that you're competing with the best and sometimes you do lose. And I think if you are sitting anywhere in the 90% of offer acceptance, I question, are you actually going after the best of the best? Because I do think if you're playing with some of the hottest companies out there hiring and attracting the best talent, the expectation is that sometimes you do lose out. And I think that's a healthy metric, right? I think you want to see that. Maybe one last question. Whilst we have a bit of time, hindsight obviously is an amazing thing. What's one of the biggest lessons you've learned in your role so far? I would have loved to bring in dedicated recruiting and people talent earlier. It is very tempting to think that you're going through a transitory surge. And once you've hired the 30 open headcount that you have right now, you will have where you need to build a product, but being optimistic and realistic in the sense that once you hire that, if all goes well, you will need 30 more and you need 60 more and then you need 100 more. And so building the team to support that growth early on is really critical. And therefore my lesson would be to not shy away from saying, if all goes right, what is the recruiting and people team that we need to support that growth? And it takes time to build that incredible recruiting and people team. So let's invest in that early. Yeah. And I think you have to pretend and sort of envision yourself as the 1000 plus person company, right? And do you have the team to support you to get you there already? Yeah, I often think about that these days. I say like when we reinvent a process because we constantly we iterating on things that don't work anymore at the current scale. And then rather than catching it up to the current size, we ask ourselves, what does this look like at a thousand employees or 2000 or 5,000 or 10,000? And are there foundations that we can lay right now to set ourselves up for success then so that we don't need to constantly reiterate on every single process every few months, but are ahead in a few and hide in a few so that it's a healthy amount of reinventing that we're doing at all times. What's one of the biggest things that you're changing right now to be ready for that next phase? The onboarding process is a big one for us. It's coming simultaneously from the cohort's growing a lot. We onboard between 40 and 50 people in a single cohort so that has changed a lot. Almost feels like we're adding in the entire company's worth of employees at a given time, but we are also continuously investing into our main offices. So we have offices in Warsaw, London, New York and San Francisco and want to leverage those in the onboarding experience. And rather than having everyone ship the laptop and say, okay, here's your portal into the lemon loves world. Say, okay, come to the lemon loves office for a week. You will meet the other people that are joining on the same day. You get to form your network across different teams and make make friends in a remote environment so that you onboard to the culture much faster, but also have that as a as a great first experience and touchpoint. Thank you so much. I know we're out of time and I could ask you a thousand more questions, but you know, really appreciate this. And I think you've done an incredible job. And I think it's such a success story. And it's still obviously ongoing, but I think it's one that you've navigated really well to a men's scale already. And so thank you for sharing your learnings with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you to and thank you for your help and all of that.