Multiverse Senior Director of Global Talent Veronica Salcido

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to Talk Talent to Me, a podcast featuring the most elite talent leaders on the front lines of modern recruitment. We actually want to understand the themes of someone's life. We want to understand how they make decisions. We are there willing to take risks. And what it looks like when they fail. No holds barred completely off the cuff interviews with directors of recruitment, VPs of global talent, CHR Rose, and everyone in between. Once I went through the classes and the trainings and got the certifications through diversity and inclusion, I still felt like something was missing. Talent acquisition, it's a fantastic career. You are trusted by the organization. You get to work with the C-suite and the security at the front desk and everybody in between and everybody knows you. I'm your host, Rob Stevenson. And you're about to hear the best in the biz. Talk Talent to Me. OK, here we go. Recruiters Talent Pros, HR, Peeps, Recruiting Ops, Directors of VPs of whoever you are, however you're bringing yourself to this podcast episode, I can't tell you how chuffed to my giblets I am to have you listening to the podcast. We're back again with another classic installment of the show. And I have a wonderful guest for you. She is the Senior Director of Global Talent over at Multiverse, Veronica Salsito. Veronica, welcome to the podcast. How the heck are you today? Thank you. Thanks, Rob. I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I'm happy to be here. I'm going to paint a quick picture for the folks are they're listening. And that is that your background is not AI-generated auto background. It is in fact like a vision board that you made. And I love the vision board exercise. I do one every couple of years or so. But could you tell the folks at home a little bit about your vision board? Because I feel like it really explains a lot about who you are. Yes. So there's a lot of, as you can see, from some of the visuals, there's a lot of themes around outdoors. I think also a lot around other women leaders. I think there's some Cheryl Sandberg, Rita Collo, really diverse groups of women that have inspired me and also the ring traits that I admire. And then a lot of like my life outside of recruiting and building talent at Multiverse is outdoors. I do a lot of guiding in the Grand Canyon. I've had before I did it, I was on the Spirits and War, but I've had three of the seven summits of the world. So that's somewhere in here in this nice visual. And a little bit of like aspirations around like continuing to build spiritually and mind and not just physically. Yeah. So those are some of the things and adventures that are on my vision board. I love it. Thank you for sharing with us. And there's one I can make out. It's sort of someone looks like they're on a mountain top. It says, I didn't come this far to only come this far, which is a good hiking mantra, or mountain climbing mantra, as it were. But also, I think this is a good piece of perspective to view yourself in the context of your total journey. And it's like, you wanted this job that you have now. And there was a time when this job was very, very aspirational for you. But then you get to it and say, OK, well, what's next for me? Like you can take a moment and appreciate how far you've come, but we're not done, right? Like we're not dead. Yeah. And a lot of the reasons I like outdoor adventures is because it actually is very applicable to what I do for work and how I approach life. And I think we've had some significant shifts until an acquisition, the economy, the way we're approaching things, and having built in that mental resilience around the way that you think and approach problems, especially on a mountain where there literally could be life threatening is very applicable on how you manage a lot of the things that are thrown away in talent. So that completely disconnected from what we do day-to-day in talent acquisition. Is it just like the resiliency of knowing you can do hard things, solve hard problems? Or is it also the perspective of like, OK, I've been in life or death situations on mountains, and my job is sitting in front of a keyboard going clikki-clacky. So I don't need to be that afraid. A little bit of both. It gives me a little bit of the calm within the storm sometimes of like, I've actually been in life or death situations. And this isn't that. We're not going to die. I always say to my team, we're not going to bleed or die out from this. And then the second piece is when you take that approach and one of the things I love about mountaineering climbing mountains, which most people are like, oh my gosh, no way. Good luck. That's not what I want to do with my money or my time off. But it's about really falling in love with the journey and like taking an approach of curiosity of, this is in something annoying in my work. This isn't something annoying in my day 10 of climbing a mountain. This is probably going to give me a really cool opportunity to learn something new about myself, about my teammates, about how to solve something. And on the other side of this, it's a really rewarding feeling of the outcome. And it's kind of falling in love and being up fast with that feeling. I feel it in my biology right now. It's like, let's go. And so it's a very different-- it's tapping into a very different association with my brain around challenges. And so now there are opportunities. They're being seen as like, wow, I'm going to come out stronger with a really cool story to be on a podcast with you, Rob, to be telling it, right? Well, yeah, I mean, please see this as a challenge and an opportunity. But I'll remind you that you didn't come this far to only come this far. [LAUGHTER] That is, however, a really great way to feel about work and a great outlook to have. I feel as though many people don't feel that way about their job. Is it a matter of the company you're at now in the current opportunity, or is this just a perspective you try to bring in everywhere? I think it's both. I made a very intentional decision to join multiverse because of the people, the culture, what we do as a company. And I think at a certain point in my career, I decided to stop pursuing or taking opportunities because they came my way. And I started thinking about my values and defining my leadership style. What I wanted out of opportunities and being very intentional in the way that I said very politely know and the way that I proceeded. And so I decided I made a very intentional decision to, as I looked at the opportunity and multiverse, to make sure that I was signing up to an opportunity in a team and people that were very values aligned for me. And then on the other end, I think it also the approach and the attitude towards work and being a scientist and talent and taking it as an opportunity for always learning and seeing the opportunities and learning in my day to day and having a hat on of like, I've been doing this for 20 years, but I'm still new at this. And I'm going to take that approach. And it's about curiosity and not about, I do this job just to do it because it's a job. I think that's a mindset shift. And I think that comes with time and it comes with experience and it comes with offing into challenging yourself outside of work. And for me, it's like, if that is mountaineering, it's having really cool outdoor experiences that really connect and it's an experiential experience that then connects my brain to how I approach and how I see life and my work. So I think it's a combination of both from. I'm glad to hear you explain your job hunt process as so deliberate because a lot of the ways people find new jobs is, oh no, I've been laid off or fired or I had to quit a bad job. And now I need a new job, right? I got to get paid. I can't afford to really spend a long time looking for the perfect job. I need to pay a check. The other way is your reasonably happy at a role, but you could be happier. And when a friendly neighborhood recruiter comes along at just the right moment and you're like, OK, maybe I will change jobs and work at your company and get a nice little raise in a change of scenery. That is a fine way to get a new job. And there's reasons why that should be the way you get a job. But I do fear if that is the only way that you change jobs, it doesn't feel like you're the captain of your own fate. It feels like you're sort of reacting to other circumstances that are maybe a little out of your control. So I want to push people to be a little more deliberate about the moves they make and do it for reasons other than happenstance. Was there a moment for you when you were like, OK, I need to not merely just take the jobs that are the opportunities presented to me. I need to reflect and decide what I want and go after those specifically. Yeah, I took a deep breath in an out just now because I can tell you exactly where I was standing when that woman happened. And I was working in the Bay Area. And we had just had an IPO. We were hot in the market. I had built the entire revenue generation team globally at that company to have a very successful IPO's and ad tech at the time. And it felt like I was at a peak in my career. I felt it was a summit. of my career. And then I had so many calls, so many opportunities come my way. So many offers I remember being flown out to LA, put up on a beachfront hotel, widened diet, like it was a really cool moment in my career. And I had a couple of job offers that were very generous. And I had a moment of I'm being pulled in so many directions, there's so much noise. And I had opportunity within my company and I had a great relationship with my CEO at the time and you know the founders. And when you have an IPO journey, you're working very closely with the exact team and the founders and it's a labor, it's a labor of love, right? Getting through an IPO. And I remember just feeling like there was a lot of noise. It was everybody else's motivators and it was everybody else's agenda that was being driven and pulling me in different directions. And I wanted to shut that down so I could listen to myself and what V wanted. And where I was meant to go next, right? And who I was as a person and how I wanted to show up in my next role. I don't know how I came up with this, but I did and I love this is terrible. I love spreadsheets. That's not terrible. I love spreadsheets. So I created this spreadsheet and on one side of the spreadsheet was all of the ways that all of the things that are important for me in my life. Like these are the core things that I wanted of my life experience and it was like time with family, financial freedom, but only so that I could have time freedom as well to spend with people. I wanted to spend a certain amount of time with my parents, for example, right, that were getting older. And so like I lined up all of these things that were these are the things that I want in my life and life experience. And then at the top on the other columns, I wrote out all of the opportunities that had come my way, including my existing opportunity and how that was evolving. And I started to fill in, you know, I'm doing assessment of how these lined up against the core things that I wanted out of my life experience. And so I worked in the direction of putting front and center, what I wanted out of the experience and how these opportunities, companies, and all of the things that came along with it were either supporting it or not supporting it, right. And what came out of that is I actually decided to decline all offers. This was such a moment where I'm like, if that just come out of my mouth, because I decided to quit my job. Hell yeah. I had a one-way ticket to Machu Picchu to Peru. I had never hyped in my like, I had never count before as an adult. And my friend's reaction to me doing that was you understand you can't wear heels to Machu Picchu, right. That's why I was then and why why did I do this. I got rid of all of my belongings, everything that I owned ended up fitting into half of one of those small pods. I have a picture of it and that was a life-defining moment. I took a big huge risk. I remember so many people pulled me. You are at the height of your career. You are hot right now. Why would you quit everything that you've worked so hard to have this like ultimate peak moment in your career and now you're throwing it all away, right. That was a messaging. And what happened was better than I expected. And I did. I ended up having no inbox, no plan. I hyped Machu Picchu. I went off the grid. I had a total reset. And I launched my own business after that. And I had 26 clients within 30 days of launching my own business. I had the support of all of the great leaders that I worked with. And it was a really cool pivotal moment because I chose to get in the driver's seat of defining my life and how my career and the opportunities and what I was signing up for were going to support that. So I was not a victim of the experience. Now, I want to also call out that there's some level of privilege. You need to be able to financially be able to make those decisions. I have a lot of empathy for folks that aren't in a financial decision or have I didn't have family at the time. I didn't have a significant other. Right. So there was it was a lot of timing and it was, you know, I want to call out the privilege of having a job in Silicon Valley and IPO that just happened very successfully. And having a lot of financial freedom to be able to make those really both those decisions. But all of those things, all of those things, I moved to Silicon Valley. I bet on a, I bet on the course that I pay out, right? All of those were also intentional moves leading up to those moments. So I think sometimes taking calculated risks, not just risk, calculator risk, managing what is your risk in that given moment and acknowledging that it is for some folks, your calculator risk has been a look very different and not as glamorous. That's a big, big life moment. But again, I think the takeaway here is around defining what is really important for you in your life and how to opportunity to either support that or don't support it. Yes. And it is worthwhile to call out the privilege of being able to take that time, even though the privilege came from your own hard work and correct decisions and calculations you made, right? But if someone was in a position where they're like, well, I can only make a career choice based on the best financial option for me. That's the main lever I have to pull right now, give my life circumstances fine. But maybe the value on your spreadsheet should be, I want to get to a point where I don't have to do that. And then you can back your way to that goal, but okay, well, how much money would I need and how much personal runway before I could feel comfortable this not being the only lever. So, you know, there are ways out. I would recommend, but I am obsessed with this moment. Veronica, where you rejected all these cushy job offers and took off to Peru because that's not merely a thoughtful career change. That's kind of like a pouring carousine on your LinkedIn profile, you know, and lighting the match. So, were you just at your wits end, were you feeling burned out? Why did you feel like you need to such a dramatic change? Yeah. If I can describe it, it was, I felt like I was on a treadmill and I did not have control over the speed. And it was like from every aspect of externally, I look like I was crushing it. I was thriving in my career from every aspect externally, but how I felt was it was so noisy. I didn't know if this necessarily was making me happy and feeling like you're not in control of the speed on this treadmill you're locked into. It's not a, it's not going to be a good place to be in. And I think I needed, I definitely knew I needed a moment to really silence things down and understand me and understand what was going to be important for me next. And so, I am, you know what, in retrospect, I couldn't tell you in the moment, I was burned out. I was managing global time zones for nearly two years. I felt like I was only napping. I would wake up in the middle of the night and know it was 8 a.m. in London and that there was offers to be sent out. And on Sunday, I was closing offers with Singapore. You know, and so like, there was a, it was a very big output. I'm glad I did it. It's a really cool moment. I'm still friends. I still have mentors from that time and what we did together. It's a very special thing in my career and I treasure it. But it also was, there was a time and a point to say, I need a moment for me. I have created a financial ability to do that. And I'm going to take that. I'm going to choose me in this moment. And it was absolutely the right thing to do for me. What was the company? If you were able to drum up all these clients so fast, we're on a recruiting podcast. So I have a feeling I know. But when she tell me anyway, yeah. So I actually offered two things. One is traditional, mostly exact search. And because of the work that I did in AdTech and having an IPO and going through, you know, joining under 100 employees, scaling to 500 through IPO. And then actually very nicely, while I was traveling and launching this company, we were acquired by Adobe, which was a very significant moment and good night's branding. of getting and building talent and a team through that. And so I had seen, and this is, it's the second time in my career, I had this happen in my first job in recruiting, is I have seen now twice what talent acquisition does, how we do it, and how we evolve through those multiple phases of growth in a out of company. And that was very attractive to small start-ups, either pre-seed funding, Series A, B, where they can't afford to hire a me full time or an entire team full time. So what I did is I basically built a consultancy model to be able to help founders and work with founders start to think about building the foundations of a scalable, repeatable talent acquisition strategy before they even got to the point where they absolutely were behind and needed that, right? So that start built some fundamentals before they were so large. And oh yeah, we forgot, we should probably hire a head of talent to fix this, 'cause we just keep doing at the flight whenever we needed, oh, we're so behind, we should have hired this person and or you end up, which we've seen, is you over-hired and we're doing a QBR or we're beating with a board and now we're figuring out where, so before you get to those structural dysfunctions and talent is I was coming in and I was advising around how to prevent that, how to build systems, how to build foundations. And then at some point I was even replacing myself with actually bringing the head of talent and giving them the keys to this, what I was calling at the time, retreating in a box, right, that I was bringing. And I was even bringing consultants to actually execute on the actual hiring piece, but the value was me bringing infrastructure and things that they were taking away and that was being involved and evolving with the company once I was gone. So that's what we did as a company. - Sounds like it was a rousing success, right? If you were able to drum up so many clients right away and I can see from you explaining how people would want it, you know? But I feel like, yeah, we could probably spend the rest of the episode talking about that company. But I do want to make sure we catch up to where you are now. Eventually you took this role at Multiverse. So what happened to make you think, okay, I've done the entrepreneurial thing, I've done what I want to, I'm ready to go back in house. - Mm-hmm, yeah, what a weird thing, right? It makes me think of, I think I read it in Cheryl Sandberg's book around that really stuck to me, which is it's not a career ladder, it's a jungle gym. So I jungle gym back in house and why I did that, it was around 2020. And it was another reset, right? It was a life reset for all of us collectively as a globe, right? And I really started to think about, I've been doing at the time for a gosh, over a decade of for profit tech. I started thinking about what about the footprint I'm leaving behind. And this is great and I'm financially well and I'm thriving, I love what I do, but so what? So I started asking these like meaningful life, more again thoughtful questions. And I started getting curious and we were very, we're in a niche a little bit of like, add tech, more tech because of the work I had done and the network I had built in house. And I wanted to explore and I actually, I read Simon Sinek's The Infinite Game and I started getting really curious and obsessed over a double bottom line, triple bottom line and I'm like, ooh, I haven't really thought about like, this is great, it's like marrying my passion for for profit tech and all of the cool stuff that I built in my career that I still love. But then it brings in the meaningful piece, the mission driven, the how am I connecting this to the footprint I'm leaving in the world and it kind of marries those two things and I am absolutely fascinated and curious. So I set out to look for like health tech companies, ed tech companies, green technology companies and started to play with those within my own company and build out an extended portfolio beyond add tech to ed tech. Now, right on what I did, but one of the clients made an introduction, they were deeply interested in the work that I was doing and they were like, will you come in house, right? But a couple of the people, it was very, very general and then eventually was so curious and because of my DNA, because I've been on the teams that I have built and have gone through the journey of these pre-IPOs and acquisitions and all of that, I was like what a cool moment to be a part of the team and built it in house again and see what this double bottom line is all about. So I ended up in ed tech and eventually ended up at multiverse and really fell in love with the journey of how we were creating a net alternate route to education, I'm first generation in this country. We came here, my parents made great sacrifices to come to this country for us to have better opportunity. And in the US, that means going to a really top university, an education, education was really driven in my household. Whereas now multiverse is coming in and creating this access, this equitable access to multiple communities, to be able to create this net new route to university and college. And for me, that spoke deeply and closely to my own experience and why my parents have made great sacrifices to be in this country. So it's married like this really deep identity piece, values piece, and then all of the work that I have done in my career leading up to this point. - Can you quickly move on, explain what the double triple line thing you were talking about is? - Yeah, so usually when we think of for profit, it's the bottom line. There's only one bottom line, right? What is it? Revenue. A double triple bottom line means that there is revenue so for profit. And then a double bottom line means there is an equally important and probably tied to revenue, mission or social component to the organization. And then the triple might be that at the same time, there's for example, a green kind of, or be corp, right? Something that is a third component of how there's either circular economy, contribution or a social contribution that is a byproduct of both the for profit and the mission driven tech, right? So that's what a double triple bottom line company. - Got it. Okay, that's helpful, thank you. So you decide that multiverse is gonna be a double or triple line opportunity for you. And you join the team and I imagine because you have seen this one before, right? You know the playbook for setting up a TAT team and what it kind of takes, but bearing in mind that that got you to this point of feeling very burned out. You probably didn't wanna do things exactly the same. So when you get to multiverse, did you wanna like reinvent the playbook and do things differently or were you like, I know what works and I'll stick to that. - Yeah, I wanted to build a different experience. I did not wanna build the playbook of the last 20 years. I also knew that wasn't gonna work because of the timing we're at, we are at the precipice of a reset in tech in general, but for talent acquisition specifically, we, it is no secret, generative AI like, oh my gosh, like we hear it everywhere, it's kind of, you know, the way that I said it is accurate. But it is no secret that our world is shifting period. But in talent acquisition, we're gonna experience a deep shift. So almost two years ago when I joined multiverse, I wanted to embrace that versus have a level of resistance around that because I wanted to be prepared with having intentionality around how we were gonna approach AI, how we were gonna embed it in our strategy, how we were gonna rethink our org structure, knowing that, how we were gonna think about systems and processes and to have some level of agility and predictability around the way that we were gonna think about embracing AI and being the scientist of talent again, like I keep saying scientists because I'm not an expert in AI, I actually never wanna be an expert in AI. I wanna be an expert on how AI can apply to doing our job even better and have better level of fulfillment in the experience. So I am experimenting with AI all the time and learning a lot through it and getting your wrong sometimes and that's part of experimenting. So that's what I wanted to do. When you say that you knew it wouldn't work because of the timing, what specifically, where you like, hey, this is old hat, like the game has changed, it won't work. So thinking about, this was an early on, but like thinking about our ratios of like even people to outcomes in talent acquisition. And this is like not new, like we've been around the block, other than showing hires like in the most simplistic and sorry talent acquisition people listen to this. This is so annoying, but like the most baseline of metrics, right, hires, everybody. That's what every founder or, you know, executive is going to care about, think about, but thinking already about like, how do we optimize? How do we start to think about automation and how does that going to impact the skill set of people on a talent acquisition team? And how is that going to make the art org structure and the way we think about how many people we need on the team and what type of skill set we need on the team? Like those were all pieces that I started to really think about pretty early on. A great example of that is the, you know, recruiting coordinator role, for example, which near and dear to my heart, I started as a recruiting coordinator, went into the sourcing piece and then ended up in a talent partnership role or recruiter role. And we started to rethink about, do we need this many coordinators in order to do scheduling, for example, one of the things that both recruiters and eventually coordinators don't want to do, right? So we knew that we were going to go with the system that was going to completely automate this component and no, we didn't bring on a team of coordinators. We don't have a formal which I had in the past, right? And a lot of teams have had in the past of having entire coordination team because we have really clunky or no systems around the way that we do really complex scheduling. And it's so annoying. It's time consuming. Somebody has to do it. We have automated all of that. You know, when we spoke about how AI made display some talent in the TA function in a live show we did last summer, I asked my guest who runs the sourcing team at Dropbox. If AI was coming for a career jobs and he was like, if you love scheduling, then probably. But the joke is like, no one loves scheduling, right? To the point I'm trying to get it is like, there are these parts of basically everyone's roles that AI is coming for and we should not be scared as my take. I would love to know from you Veronica, like for the folks out there who are in recruitment, how can they look at their roles and try to understand the things that can be automated that they can use technology to do and then put off with their plate so that they are seeing as someone who is lever in technology, not someone who can be replaced by technology. Yeah, yeah. I love that framing by the way and that's exactly right. And that's a lot of what we are upscaling for on my team. And just in general, like embedded into the multiverse CNA is like the upscaling, re-skilling component. That's what we do. It's about, I think it would be one, it's very easy to think about the things that we don't want to do. If you, I'm going to assume that you are in this industry because you're an engaged individual and really care about some of the really cool things that we love in recruiting, which is, you know, making human connections, learning about someone you and I Rob talked about, like how cool it is to your so fascinating and curious about people like that. Those are the areas that are probably really engaging about your role and why you love your role. Those are the quarters that's the art of recruitment, right? Like that is it takes a human being, it takes human connections and interactions to create that piece of what we do in recruitment. Now, when you remove that, what are all of the pieces that are left? It's likely the other piece is pretty administrative and those are the pieces that are not meaningful interactions that are going to make a significant difference in building a relationship or having someone say yes to joining the opportunity because of the experience they had with you personally, but it is the administrative things that takes us hours to do that does, isn't rocket science for us to do and that are sincerely negative affecting the engagement of us and our teams. And so those are the areas that we want to figure out how we leveraging technology to be able to automate those pieces. And that's really exciting. That should be exciting to all of us because that means that we're going to be doing way more meaningful work and if we automate some of those pieces, that's creating a significant amount of our time and energy and brain power and juices to be able to innovate and that's where I want to get to, right? Like that is the leading juicy part of why we do what we do, especially as a leader in talent acquisition, innovation. And I think we're going to find a better book into this episode than that Veronica. Normally, I ask the guests to share some parting advice as we wind the episode down, but you're kind of a advice dispensing machine. So this episode is full of it. So at this point of Veronica, I would just say thank you for being here. This has been a really great conversation. I must have you back for around to it at some point because I feel like there's lots more for us to talk about, but for now, thank you so much for being here. This has been a pleasure. Really cool. I really appreciate you having me here. Thank you, Rob. Really enjoyed it. Talk Talent to Me is brought to you by Hired. Hired empowers connections by matching the world's most innovative companies with ambitious tech and sales candidates. 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