How Revolut Made 10k Hires in Just Two Years — Jonathan Beaney (Revolut)

Hi, I'm Catherine Friend and this is hiring all cylinders. Powered by the higher community, we explore bold and fresh perspectives to help you build exceptional teams and scale with purpose. So today I am joined by Jonathan Beanie, who is head of talent acquisition and talent operations at Revolut. Jonathan brings a wealth of high stakes and high scale experience. First in the military, then Amazon and is now leading the charge of recruitment at Revolut. At Revolut, he's been driving recruitment at extraordinary pace and scale while keeping an uncompromising quality bar, which is exactly what we're going to dive into today. So Jonathan, I don't want to take too much away from your introduction. So thank you so much for joining me today. I would love to just get a little bit of an introduction of that journey and what you've been doing most recently at Revolut. Yeah, for sure. So joined the military in the UK. So from the UK originally joined, did about 10 years in the Royal Marines traveling around the world, doing some super interesting things. But there came a point where I definitely wanted a different challenge and found myself very quickly on the Amazon military pathways. So they've got this great transitionary pathways for those that have served in the military wanting to move more into the corporate world. I was based out of Spain working there. So did that for about three years and focusing on customer fulfilment. So the operation side of things that essentially gets your packages from the internet to your door, which was super interesting. And like you said in the intro, high stakes and high pressure environment, but very kind of familiar for someone that's coming from the military. And then was approached by Revolut, also based in Spain and been with them for about three and a half years now. Great. Fantastic. And I'm glad that resonated in the introduction. So I was always glad to know and I've got that right. So obviously brought in into Revolut, come from a different background as you mentioned there, which is really, really interesting. So when you landed in Revolut, what did you first see in that hiring process that needed fixing? Like what was the immediate thing that jumped out to you? When I first joined, it was definitely a transitionary period where you had to ask a lot of pretty basic and seemingly common sense questions to get for me to get an understanding of how the wider talent acquisition machine worked, but also talent acquisition specifically to Revolut worked. And I remember one of the first things I focused on when I first joined the company was product and design hiring. So for us at Revolut, we have two pillars to our success. We have the best people, we have the best product on the market. So product and design hiring kind of made those two things coalesce into one project. We need to hire the best product owners, we need to hire the best designers out there. And the first problem I very clearly saw was we had a huge focus on the quality of the candidates we were bringing into the process, but we didn't have as much of a focus on the quality of the interviewers that were doing that interview process. So there's obviously two sides, we obviously do all our interviews virtually, there's two sides to the screen. You've got the candidate and obviously we place a huge focus on how good they are and do they meet our talent bar, do they have their skills at exhibit, but then there's also the interviewer. So how effectively they're running an interview, how effectively they're assessing the skills, are there any gaps in their assessments and all that sort of stuff. So one of the first projects I worked on in the work, one of the first problems I'd like to think I solved was how do we measure interviewer performance particularly within the product and design function and then how do we continuously monitor that to ensure that the people that we've got, the people we're putting in front of those candidates are the best possible people to make those assessments. And then obviously we can come on to talk about it, loads of different ways of measuring that and measuring how interviewers are performing and how the candidates, they put who the process performed, but that was one of my initial focus areas of switching focus also on to the other side of interviewer performance. So trying to solve two really interesting challenges at the same time. How did you bring, I think it's something that we talk about in general, don't we, with them bringing the hiring teams on side and building that credibility with them and obviously to move them forward and understand that the way that they were assessing maybe needed some work. Like how did you bring them on that journey? So you've got to speak the language, so you've got to have data at the forefront of all the arguments you're using and any of the problem statements you're putting in front of people, have them backed up with kind of irrefutable data. So one of the things we looked at was segmenting employee performance into the five performance buckets we've got, Revolute and then overlaying the interview process on the performance of those individuals. So essentially trying to identify the people who were consistently not meeting our talent bar, what recruitment process do they go through? Who did they go through? Like who was the interviewer? Who assessed their skills? What skill did they assess? And at what level? And then try to identify any patterns. And then what you can do is you then go to your key stakeholders in this instance within the product and design function and say, you've got employee X or employee Y who over the last six months has interviewed a dozen people, they've come into the business. So we've said they're good enough to join the company, we've come to the business and then you as the ultimate person that measures people's performance, you've said they're not good enough. So there's a disconnect here. And the disconnect is quite clearly in the way in which the skills being assessed and the way in which we're allowing these people, not allowing, but getting these people into the business then bring them in. So then using that kind of relatively logical or hyper logical and objective argument is you go, okay, yeah, now we've got a problem. And then as soon as you've identified that problem, a more collaborative approach to driving the solution. So I don't think you really need to convince people much more of the fact that ultimately your success in the business is driven by your people, you need to have the best people. So if we've agreed that these people aren't performing, we've agreed that the interview process isn't significant, isn't strong enough, sorry, to assess the right skills that we need them to have them coming to the business is only going to be a detriment to your goals and objectives. So let's work together to build a better interview process or let's work together to build a better interviewer training package or work together to identify better interviewers who can come and assess the skills that you need to be able to achieve your goals. Okay, great. And then obviously a key well function and platform within the recruiting process is the ATS. So how you know, I know that you've shared with me before that Revolute actually built our own ATS, which is really interesting. So how did that decision come about? Like, why was, why was that a key move for Revolute and what changed once Revolute owned that system from end to end? Shameless plug, Revolute people, the best product out there. So it started as a performance management tool. So this is this predates my time at Revolute. But I've worked closely with the product owner who owns to this day the Revolute people. So I know quite a lot about the history. But we used to run performance when we were a very small company, we used to run performance as lots of small companies do offline. So make sure of Google Sheets and various different kind of shared drives to measure people performance and measure their impact to the company. So the first necessity came from a performance management tool. Can we build our own product which measures performance in the manner in which we measure it? So by that, it's quantifiable quarterly impact. So KPIs, goals, projects, and how do you progress versus those and then also your skills. So each role at Revolute and each specialization at Revolute has a defined competency matrix and the skills that you're supposed to hold at the different seniorities. So we wanted to measure the company at the time wanted to measure all of that. So we built product Revolute people that then kind of grew arms and legs and turned into an HRS. So managing our onboarding, managing our off boarding, managing our payroll, managing all those different kind of supporting functions from an HR perspective. At this time, I joined the company, we were still working with Lever as our ATS. And then the final kind of piece of the jigsaw was, okay, let's build our own ATS on top of this. Why? Because you can then close the loop between skill assessments from current employees and candidates. So you make this one kind of continuous performance evaluation from skill interview X, skill interview Y, all the way through to a person's performance review in the company for those same skills. So being able to match all of that up then gives you this feedback loop that you can then use to constantly improve both your interview process but then also the way you're assessing skills in the business. Great. Okay. And I guess like looking back at that, like if a company was to implement an ATS, I've looped people otherwise. What are the top factors that they should consider when hiring at scale, in your opinion? Talentful provides flexible recruiting solutions to the world's most ambitious companies. Are you thinking about ways to add flexibility to your talent function? 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Set clear expectations and kind of tangible skills or deliverables you need to say that that person's good or bad at problem solving. And then map those to the individual job families. And then once you've got that clear of like what the skill sets and at what level you need to deliver what you need to deliver as a business, then start working on your recruitment process and then ensure that your recruitment process in a MISI manner so collectively exhaustive manages to measure all of those skills to ensure that the people you're bringing into the company hold the skill set that you now have agreed or previously agreed in the company that you need. And then only through making that connection between your recruitment process and the skills you actually need to do the job, can you identify the best candidates and then be able to also continuously improve in what you're assessing in the interview process you're bringing in place. Makes sense. And going back to your point that you said about like closing that loop and being able to see everything from like and like when did you feel that like shift when you know particularly when we talk about the problem you mentioned earlier, when did you feel that shift in what decide like what started to change once that was in place and set it up? The shift really started when we worked within a single HRS ATS because the quality of data we started to get had massively improved. So you could then take any employee within the company and you can understand through every single interview stage and every single performance review they receive within the company how they performed versus the same set of skills. So you've got that commonality. So being able to have that data set this huge data set for every single person within the company and every single candidate that's gone through our process just meant that we could then really shift our focus on improving the manner in which we're assessing skills both within the company, which is kind of my talent operations side, but then also within a recruitment process, which is the talent acquisition side and then be able to use examples in the company of exceptional performers and really understand why are they exceptional? What's making them so exceptional? What skill have they got or what cultural value have they got that really sets them apart from their peers? How can we assess for that in the interview process? But then also the other side of things like who doesn't do so well in the business or who doesn't do so well in the interview process? What the skills they lack, what the cultural values they perhaps don't exhibit and then using that as well to really double down on what you want to be assessing and how you want to be assessing in the recruitment process in the company. So I think the critical point was putting that all in one place and being able to have access to all of that data as opposed to when I first joined, which was you need to pull data from Lever, then translate it into your kind of terminology in the way things were working in Revolut people for the performance side of things and then trying to make the two talk to each other when it became one language. That was a shift change. Makes sense. And how I guess with that whole process, I mean it's really interesting to hear how it all interlinks, but on a day-to-day scenario, obviously with Revolut changing as quickly as what you mentioned and skills also developing really, really quickly, like how do you continuously keep that relevant and I guess up-to-date with the skills and as the business continues to develop? So we hold a Revolut, we've got a company level KPI, which we call new joiner performing plus. So what that focuses on is measuring your talent density at the six month mark of people joining the company. We take the six month mark because obviously people of depending on the jurisdiction, people have different probation periods, but the latest being six months. So if we measure everyone at the same time, at least you're measuring them all at the same point within their kind of employee journey. So that's kind of the top level KPI that we look at, how, what percentage of people at six months are promoters versus detractors? So for us on a five point scale, if you're a three, four or five, you're a promoter, if you're a one or a two, you're a detractor, which sounds pretty harsh calling someone a detractor, but from a calculation standpoint, that's how it would work. Makes sense. And then what we do is we have a team of ops managers who work with me within the talent acquisition space and also within the talent operation space who focus on optimizing and improving that KPI. So that can be anything from going back to what first is what we discussed in the first question around interviewer performance within a specific job function. Okay, so I see that the talent density within function X has decreased over the last six months. Why is it decreased? Well, actually, it's interviewer performance has decreased and they're no longer assessing skills in a way they need to be assessing. Okay, let's completely transform that. Or it could be that the job, the job's changed and the requirements for the job's changed. Okay, so let's look at the competency matrix of our product designers or our product owners. What's changed? What's the new skill we now need people to have to exceed within the role? Okay, let's update the competency matrix. And then as a result, let's update the recruitment process. So I have a team that are focused purely on optimizing for that KPI is hyper targeted. So obviously we've got 22, I think 22, 23 different job functions. We can't focus on 22, 23 different job functions at any one time. But every quarter when our data refreshes, we run quarterly performance cycles, every quarter when our data refreshes, we'll look at who are biggest promoters, who are biggest detractors. And then this team will focus in on those two areas to really understand how we can continue to optimize for that KPI. Makes sense. And with talent density, like opposite something that's discussed in a lot of business now, is there a certain like way in which you've defined that at Revolute? Is there anything in particular that you feel really stands out there for all your organization, comparison to others? So the way we measure talent density in the company is exactly the same as the one I just mentioned with NJP plus new joining performing plus is just we just call it nips. It's an individual form score. Everyone's measured against the same five point scale. So unsatisfactory developing performing exceeding exceptional one through five. And then the way we measure the talent density within the company is exactly the same as the way we measure it the six month mark. So if you're a three, four or five performing exceeding exceptional, you're a promoter. And if you're a one or two unsatisfactory developing, it's considered a detractor. And then we'd work out the percentage of and we use that percentage as an indicator of talent density within the company. That's like the top level. Use the same for all employees as NJP plus is the six month mark. We actually have a higher target within NJP plus than we do with the wider company. The rationale for that being that we should only be ever we should only ever be bringing people into the company who raised the bar. And therefore, how do we measure that? Well, they need to be better. That cohort needs to be better than the average within the company. Because that's the way you know that you're consistently improving. And then within the assessment methodology, we measure deliverables. So how people are performing versus their KPIs, their goals or the projects they need to deliver, we measure their skill competency. So exactly the same as a recruitment process like what the skills and their competency matrix and how they're performing. And that the expectations are set by a seniority. So I'm not expecting the same level of problem solving from a junior operations manager as I am from a like a lead level operations manager. So they're assessed versus their skills as per their seniority. And then we also assess for cultural values. So people's adherence to our ways of working our cultural values, which we kind of quantify through value based behaviors. So the behaviors we want to see people exhibit in their day to day work. So those are the three data points we use to measure talent density or to conduct performance reviews. And then the output of the performance of users talent density within the company and within the new joint performing plus cohorts. Talking through that process of sorry, a lot of different elements that really feed into it to make sure you're bringing that quality by in revolution also scaled incredibly fast. So how have you, well, you know, I think you've mentioned in previous conversations that not only have you scared, scared with fast, you've solved that problem, qualities improved. How have you managed that balance because there's obviously a lot that's fit into that that we've that you've just ran through. But the volume of hiring that you've been doing at Revolute, particularly the last few years has been quite astronomical. So how have you managed that? So I think step number one is to have buy in across the board from the business. So this goes back to one of the things we were discussing earlier of making sure you're talking the business is language. Our language at Revolute is data and KPIs. So every single head of function who are the people who are responsible for kind of setting the bar within their job functions, they own a KPI that goes into their quarterly performance view, which is focused on not only talent density within the company, but talent density within the cohort of new joiners and also the volume of people you're bringing into the company. So they hold those three KPIs which are deliberately kind of add an element of friction because I'm measuring you on quality, but I'm also measuring you on quantity. So you need to bring in enough people to meet the business need, but you also need to make sure they're all good. So the business kind of the heads of function of the business leaders hold that. I hold both those KPIs for the whole company. So the overall volume of people we're bringing into the company, but also the overall quality of people we're bringing into the company. And then with that kind of mutual buy in and the fact that our performance reviews and the way we kind of are measured rely on that straight away and then speaking the same language and straight away you're then aligned in terms, aligned in terms of the goals. In practical terms what that means for us is we focus a lot on latency and velocity through the interview process. So how quickly can we run our interview process? So we'll work with those heads of function and saying, look, I need more and I need better interviewers because at the moment calendar delay within this interview stage is too high. And if we're going to meet our volume goals, I need to make sure that we can bring that calendar delay down by two, three days because when I extrapolate that over the number of interview stages you want to put this person through because you've agreed on the interview process that we're using. It's just going to be too long and we're not going to meet our volume goals. So the ability to kind of talk that same language and have that buy in from them is critical. Absolutely. I think like to that point that you mentioned there, because I think, you know, from just thinking of some of the challenges that often come up, like we know that quality of higher is that and quality of higher is obviously a key metric. Time tie is another one that a lot of businesses focus on, but we know there's also a lot of internal factors that really impact that with, I really like the way that you've described that there in terms of like helping hiring managers understand like that pain point of slowing things down. If there's like resistance there, like how do you and your team kind of overcome that? Or is it, or is it goes back to that buying piece you mentioned before? So in terms of when we do meet that resistance, that's when the creative problem solving starts. So to give you a real example, our sales organization is going crazy. So we've gone from Q2, we had to hire around 600, 650 people. This quarter we've hired, the goal is to hire around 1300 people. So in the space of three months, hiring demands doubled. So obviously, if you think like start then digging into that problem, you've then got everything around interview capacity, sourcing capacity, people at the top of the funnel conversion rates about the funnel talent density within the markets, because you're working in the similar sort of markets, but you're now doubling your hiring needs. So that that's a real challenge that you're facing. So you may read resistance of we can't get enough of people's time to conduct the interviews we need to commit, because obviously they've got a day job, like they aren't full time interviewers, their sales managers or account executives that needs to be out there doing their job. Okay, so if that's resistance and completely valid resistance that you're meeting, what are the other problems that you or what the other solutions you can bring to the table. So we've tried lots of things of like asynchronous interviews using different interviewer platforms to do video interviews, doing consolidated kind of assessment days. So you do back to back interviews. So you would just say to a hiring to a interviewer, I just need a five hour block from you in a whole week, manage the rest of your week to accommodate that. But within those five hours, we'll conduct as many interviews as possible. So we'll do all the background work of screening candidates, teeing everyone up so that within that consolidated period of time, you can conduct as many interviews as possible. And there's lots of other different solutions that we've implemented within this specific example to to kind of overcome the resistance, which, like I said, completely valid, but you need to do it to meet the business needs. And then also within a specific example, it's quite easy, because as in it's quite easy to articulate it to the business because an account executive, you can very easily quantify their work by revenue. So you can turn around and say, Okay, for every hundred account executives, I don't hire you. This is the impact on your KPIs. This is the impact on revenue you're going to generate. And straight away, you can find that's very incentivising, particularly for someone working in sales. Yeah, I can imagine. And I know that you've used things like ideal candidate profiles and CV scoring. So how, how did tools like that support you, particularly in these sorts of examples with being able to move faster whilst not sacrificing that quality bar? And how did you guard against risks? Great question. So ideal candidate profiles for us, they're built on the specialization level. So essentially, what we've done is, let's pick my job family, so operations manager core. So we've, we've looked at all the best operation managers across company, all the worst operations managers across company, and then defined what are the traits that we want to see and what the traits we don't want to see that then all gets built into what we call an ideal candidate profile. So it could be a target university list, it could be a target company list, it could be skills or things that they've exhibited within their CV or projects or whatever that may be. And then using AI that we've got within Revolut people, we'll then use that to, and this is the critical part, we don't use it to automatically screen people out, we use it to automatically provide people with a numerical score. So they'll get a score from one to 100, 100 being the dream candidates and one being probably not a right fit for us at Revolut. And then we use that to stack rank and focus our attention of where do we need to be screening and putting candidates through the process. So last year alone, obviously this year TBC, but last year alone, we received 1.8 million applications. And this was before we had the CV screening, this ideal candidate profile operationalized. So I'm sure that within those 1.8 million candidates, we missed out on some great candidates purely because of volume and human constraints. So now, if out of let's use 1.8 million again, if out of those 1.8 million candidates, I see there are 200,000, which based off of all the data points I've got of strong performers in the company, we're saying you're going to be brilliant hires, I'm going to be exceptional people, we can focus our attention on that. It doesn't mean we ignore everyone else, doesn't mean we kind of miss out on those really unique profiles that can add value in a different way. It just means we can be hyper focused in when we like resource constrained, we can be hyper focused on those individuals. And then obviously we measure the performance of our ideal candidate profiles throughout the interview process and throughout the business. So I'll say that this candidate was a brilliant hire, they scored a 90 out of 100. But actually, they're failing this interview round. So what's the problem? Is the problem the interview rounds poorly assessing them is the problem that the ideal candidate profile is wrong is the problem that maybe we need to be adjusting the interview or whatever it may be. So again, data measuring the performance of all those different candidates and the categorization of those candidates through the recruitment process and through the business helps us to continuously improve. So it's not that we use AI to make decisions for us is that we're using AI, particularly within those two realms to kind of hyper focus our attention because we're just working at volumes that are that are pretty crazy. Yeah, and I think, you know, suppose I was at the second part of my question, in terms of like, how do you how do you manage those risk like buy it? So it does, it does make sense. And because I think obviously with AI and stack ranking right now, I think there's a little bit of nervousness about like, how how you effectively implement that. So it's interesting to hear like, how you're looking at but then also how you're constantly teaching and improving it as well. Is there any like advice from what you've learned again from like that for the stack ranking that you've been doing and like, again, not removing the humans from the process. But how would you advise other leaders who may be thinking of doing the same. So it's exactly the same as I mentioned around coming into the business, I'm trying to challenge everything. So here, if you think through the example we're talking around of like, providing a numerical score to a CV, the foundational block of all of that is the ideal candidate profile. So there's the assumption that that is right, that what we're saying is what we want, but challenge that and consistently challenge that because if you see any of the metrics, like the downstream metrics of interview conversion rates, performance at NJP plus performance within the business, if you see any of those deviating from what you want to see, challenge that ICP and challenge, actually, do I want someone that's got STEM degree from a top 15 university? Actually, do I want someone that's come from consultancy? Do I want someone that's come from private banking? Challenge all of those kind of assumptions. Because as soon as you kind of blindly accept that something is gospel, you could only be reinforcing failure and reinforcing things that you don't want to be seeing. So is that ability to just consistently challenge in this instance, the ideal candidate profiles and what you're saying good looks like? And I just want to kind of touch on the rollout of these things. Like, you know, when you're looking at these systems, when you're looking at these processes, but you mentioned obviously getting buying at the very start, I'm going to come back to that point. How do you drive adoption in such a fast moving company where technology is constantly changing, demand is constantly growing? Like, sounds like there's a lot of that this is like a continuous process. It's not just a one and done. Like how do you bring that along? How do you bring I guess the whole team and business on that journey with you? Yeah, again, great question. So I'd say that there's two sides to it. You've got the business side of it and the TA side of it. So adoption within the business side of things is really helping people articulate the positive impact it's going to have. So to go, let's continue talking about ideal candidate profiles. I need the business on this one. I need the key stakeholders and the gatekeepers of engineering, product, operations, design, marketing, whatever it may be, I need the key people within those functions to give me those ideal candidate profiles. We'll make proposals, we'll say this is what we think we should be sourcing for, but ultimately it's up to them to decide. So I think it's critical to be able to articulate the positive impact it's going to have for them, i.e. bringing better people into business. How do we measure better? Well, increase the talent density, increase the skill set, increase the deliverables, whatever that may be. So again, going back to one of the things we discussed, talk their language and get buying from them. And then critically, and I think sometimes it's even harder buying from the talent acquisition function because recruiters, sources, coordinators who are kind of our three key pillars within the TA function, crazy busy people working with huge volumes, managing lots of candidates, and it's a very frenetic pace they're managing. So as soon as you bring in a change, you can invariably, you'll find that some people are resistant to that change, another change, another thing I've got to do, another thing that's going to make my life harder, which is a completely normal reaction. So there it's on me and on the ops team that work within the talent acquisition space to articulate the benefit to them. Why is this better for you? Why does this make your life easier? So actually, by stack ranking CVs and having you guys focus on people that we're saying are brilliant and good hires, you actually need to do fewer screen calls. Why? Because conversion rates go up. Therefore, you need in order to hit your 10, 15, 20 hires a quarter whatever we've set as a goal for you. With higher conversion rates, you need to put less volume into the process. You need to do fewer interviews. And straight away, as almost the light bulb moment for them of going, Oh, great, this is now a more efficient way of working. If you just push out change for change's sake, we're doing this, we're doing that. It will be met with resistance because these are exceptionally busy people. So you need to be able to show what's the personal benefit to them. How are you making their lives easier? And this is another point. If it's not making their lives easier, why are you doing it? Well, exactly. And I think being critical with yourself on why are we doing this change and ensuring that's kind of the focus. Then that's the way you get the buy-in from the TA function, which like I say, is a lot of times harder than the business. Yeah, I can imagine. We've also talked previously about like, I guess I talked about the busyness of the team. We've talked about how you've set up a capacity model to balance that supply and demand. Can you give us a little bit of a run through of how that works in practice? Yeah, cool. So the currency at Revolute that we talk about when we talk about talent acquisition is a requisition. So there is a mutually agreed business need that we need someone. Why do I say it's mutually agreed? Because when a requisition gets raised at Revolute, it goes through various layers of approval, which might sound bureaucratic, but it's critical to really understanding if it's needed and being able to keep us lean and challenge. So that's the head of department. So ultimately, the person that's going to consume that resource to deliver what they need to do. The head of function, who's the gatekeeper of quality and talent within a specific function. And then our like staff costing organization to make sure it's aligned with our projections and our budget. So as long as those three people are all aligned, a requisition gets approved. And that's now our building block is a requisition. What we then do is we work as with the rest of the business, we work on quarterly cycles. And what we'll do is we'll define what's the current backlog of requisitions that we have in the organization that have been approved and agreed. And we do that every, we obviously measure it constantly, but we kind of do a data dump every three months when we're setting targets for the next quarter. We'll then look at how many people we're expecting interviewers, sorry, recruiters to hire and how many people are expecting sources to source. And then we'll overlay the two. So we'll say this team based off the backlog has a target of hiring 100 people. I know that the individual hiring target within that team for this level seniority might be 10. Okay, simple maths, I need 10 people. However, what we then also do, because we're revolting around bishops, we'll overlay historical performance. So I'll know that people may be historically perform at 120% of the KPI. So instead of hiring 10 people, they're actually hiring 12 people. Okay, let's provide people with the runway to overachieve their KPIs because then that obviously brings with financial rewards and growth and progression. So actually what we'll do is we'll take historical performance overlay that and then ensure that we have enough people in the team to meet the business need, accommodating for historical performance, and then also providing them runway to overachieve. Because what we don't want to do is get into a position where I over staff a team, everyone hits their KPI, but they haven't got the open requisitions to continue to grow and continue to push forward. Thankfully, it's not a problem we ever have because pretty much invariably, we've got more business demand than we can service with intelligent acquisition. But that's a very good problem to have. And that's how we capacity plan. And we do that every, so we set it every three months and then we monitor it weekly and monthly to understand how we're doing versus capacity plan. And then we'll try and do it six to nine months out with greater or lesser degree of accuracy, because if I need to bring in more TA professionals into the organization, obviously it doesn't happen overnight. They also need to go through a recruitment process. They also need to be on board. They also need to be upskilled on Revolute People, our ways of working. So we try and do it to six to nine months out to give me time to go, okay, I need four more recruiters within this recruitment team. I need two more sources in this team. Let's hire them, let's onboard them and let's get them operational. And I mean, which sounds like, you know, obviously very much led by data and very, very structured. I'm sure there's some surprises along the way. Yeah, for sure. How do you move and flex to that when that happens? So let's go back to one we talked about before around sales hiring. So sales hiring doubled within the space of three months, which is pretty crazy because if you're taking into account a recruitment process, a notice period, an onboarding period, realistically, you can't hire enough people within three months to account for a 200% or a 100% increase. So what we did in that instance is like viciously reprioritize within the department. And then this is where you need to work with the business of understanding within the business is strategic goals, how important is sales vis-a-vis hiring more data analysts or how important is sales vis-a-vis hiring more product designers. And then once you've got an answer and clarity around that, you can then potentially internally redistribute a certain amount of capacity from one recruitment team, accepting that you may not deliver what you needed to deliver or everything you needed to deliver within that cohort and give it to another team. And then also what are the what's a streamlined interview process you can run to bring recruitment professionals into that organization. So we within the space of three weeks, we internally ran a recruitment for recruiters sprint, we hired 19 people in three weeks. So putting them through an expedited recruitment process consolidating three interviews into kind of one day back to back interviews and making sure that we tried as much as possible to not compromise on that talent bar, but then being able to bring in that volume. And then in the time that spans between that person joining and onboarding and upskilling, you redistribute internally any capacity that might be not spare, nothing's ever spare but could be better put to better use and then backfill when those people join in. So it's just ruthless prioritization and having the buy-in from the business and the acceptance from the business that certain things might be de-prioritized, but making sure that you always got the best the business's best interests at heart. And with I guess that bringing the business again, like I really, I really like that point because I think a lot of conversations I have, there's usually competing priorities that are coming from different departments. So how have you managed to do that where you've got all the leaders in the business aligned and they know that actually, you know, sales has to take priority over here and that just and that means that it might mean a little bit longer to hire your data analysts. Like how, how do you bring them on that journey? Transparency of communication. So just getting everyone aligned. So I mean, it's probably a bad example because you wouldn't take a recruiter that's working in data to put them as a recruiter into sales, but say for example, sales and customer support, which is similar sort of high volume profiles, just making sure that your two key business stakeholders there, so within sales and within support, are aware that there are competing priorities. There is a capacity constraint. We are fixing the capacity constraint. So we're not just sat here on our hands and saying we can't do anything. Like, like I said, we've hired 19 people to just join one team. But in the interim period, we're going to need to set like de-prioritize a small element of hiring for that for the customer support organization and divert it to sales. Fine. You then work very closely with the person that's losing some capacity and say, okay, so you've got a thousand requisitions that are open within customer support. Give me the 200 lowest priority ones. What are the 200 that you'd love to have? As we'd all love to have a fully staffed team, you'd love to have, but that you can do without. So nothing's going to break. Okay, cool. I've got these 200 people where I can then kind of re-diver that capacity to another team. As long as in the background, you're showing that things are moving for you as well. So you're hiring and onboarding recruiters, you're increasing capacity, you're making recruitment processes more lean where you can. Through that really transparent conversation and communication style, make sure everyone's bought in. People will invariably default to okay, cool. It's got the business's best interests are. We talked about values quite a lot. We've talked about like the importance of the culture at Reveley and one of the things that we were talking about earlier was that focus on like hiring grads and interns that really grow within the company. Why is that strategy worked so well for Reveley? So what we tend to find is, and what the data shows is people that are six month mark, so talent density of our new joiners, the primary driver for people being a detractor, i.e. a one or two on our five point scale is culture fits. So they have the skill sets. We've assessed that they have the skill set and they can do the job that we need them to do, but their ways of working aren't aligned with Revolute. So that could be their speed. They're just not, they can't maintain the speed and they can't maintain the pace with what we expect. They're not autonomous enough. They need lots of support. They need lots of handholding. They need lots of guidance to achieve the task we need them to achieve. Or maybe they're not customer centric enough. So they're coming up with solutions, but they're overly complex. They're not very elegant. They're not very implementable. So we've identified that culture is one of the biggest barriers to people who are succeeding at Revolute. So if you actually invest in emerging talent and people that are on their first or second job out of university, they're still very malleable in terms of their ways of working. They've not picked up good habits, but they've also not picked up bad habits. So actually if you hire people that are 10, 15, 20 years into professional career, they'll have their ways of working that work for them. That doesn't necessarily mean that their ways of working will work for Revolute. But if I get a young grad who's hyper smart, shows the skill set that I need them to have in terms of hard skills, but they haven't had, they haven't been imprinted with ways of working in DNA from other companies. We can help them develop that. We can help them adjust to Revolute ways of working. And invariably, you've then got someone who is fully aligned with our cultural values, fully aligned with our ways of working, and then they've got the skill set and everything else just catches up. And those are the people that will grow with the business. And those are the people that will rise through the ranks. And that's why we're, for us, it's such an important kind of area to invest in is emerging talent that's at that stage one, two jobs into their career and still super hungry and super driven. How do you balance that? Not trade off, because I think obviously there's a lot of value that it brings to the business. But if you're trying to grow at scale, you're bringing in junior talent who can also develop. But there's also things that you need to ship out and deliver now. Like how, how do you balance that? So I think all the teams we run at Revolute, we try to keep them as lean as possible. And one of the ways in which we do it is we don't expect people only need to be managers. So you'll bring in more experienced individuals who will need to lead teams, fine. But they'll still also be expected to deliver value themselves. So I think just being a manager for a manager's sake and upwards reporting or downwards reporting is something we like, we really try and avoid and actively discourage at Revolute. So you can offset potentially for an experience gap that someone that a grad or a recent junior will have within your company, but the fact that they've got a manager who can provide them the guidance and the mentorship they need to grow. But then that person can also deliver maybe the higher complexity or the high complexity projects or the projects that require a bit more experience or a bit more kind of streetwise. We still expect them to deliver that themselves. So we've not just got people who are just coordinating teams. And I think that's how we, well, I know that's how we offset for it. No, it makes sense. It's really interesting to hear, because I know there's obviously a real big focus for you. So it's just interesting to hear how you manage that, particularly when grown at the scale that you are. So thank you for giving us. And that's why, and that's why for us, it's a lot of times it's almost more challenging to hire more senior roles into the company, because again, ways of working coach for some people, they've become accustomed to a certain way of working. They become accustomed to having a large team that will deliver things for them. And they're kind of more on the coordination and project management side of things. But we hold that very real expectation that just because you're a manager, just because you've got a team underneath you, I still need you to deliver things yourself as well. Yeah, great. And then finally, what's next for TA at Revolute that you can share? First and foremost, it's no secret. We're super ambitious at Revolute. We've got the goal of expanding into 100 different markets in the not too distant future. So TA is going to be critical to that, to be able to enable that expansion, hiring the best people within these new markets, hiring people that have got a local regulatory or operational experience working in these markets, but they'll also meet the Revolute talent bar. So I say that's number one. Number two is graduate hiring, graduate and internship hiring. So looking at that emerging talent to really continue to grow that cohort, we started out with around 30 individuals back in 2023. This year alone, we're going to be around 300 and hoping for next year will be around 500. And the North Star there is if you graduate from one of our one of the world's top 50 universities, wherever that may be, the number one employer you're thinking about trying to join is Revolute. And that's where we really want to be positioning ourselves over the next couple of years. And then finally doing all of that. So doing the expansion, doing the emerging talent without compromising on both the quality bar, which is something we've talked about quite a lot, but then also the experience and the experience we're offering to two people. So the experience we're offering to candidates that are coming through our process, we hope they're all engaged throughout the whole process, that it's well coordinated, relatively quick, and they receive that kind of consistent and constructive feedback throughout the process. But then also our internal stakeholders in the business. So we need to be not only delivering well for our candidates, but also delivering well for our business stakeholders and making sure that their needs of service that we're keeping up with the velocity of their growth plans and making sure that TA doesn't become a blocker for the business expanding into either new markets or new products or whatever that may be. Great. Thank you. I could sit and talk about the rest of this with you all day, but I'm afraid that's all we've got time for. But thank you so much for joining me today and sharing a little bit more about how hiring works at Revolute. Thanks a lot for having me. That's all we've got time for today on hiring all cylinders. If you haven't joined her already, it's completely free to join. You can head on over to www.hirehq.com. And to our audience, thank you so much for tuning in to hiring all cylinders. 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