Building an Intentional Hiring Process for Growth in an Async Environment

Summary

Supabase is an open-source Firebase alternative, making it easier for developers to build and scale with Postgres. With tools for databases, authentication, backend functions, and storage, Supabase takes the infrastructure headaches out of building so developers can focus on shipping great products.

In this episode of The Speed to Hire Show, Michaela Burpoe discusses the unique challenges of hiring for a remote-first, async team that values autonomy, speed, and efficiency. She also delves into best practices and strategies for this hiring environment, including transparency, structure, and highly collaborative hiring (but not necessarily in the traditional sense).

Notes

Over the past decade, Michaela has helped teams scale intentionally, designing hiring strategies and people programs that foster real growth, not just headcount. Michaela strongly believes that in hiring, transparency, trust, and impact matter.

In her current role at Supabase, Michaela is focused on fast, intentional hiring that aligns with their async culture, developer-first mission, and product-led motion as well as developing a thoughtful candidate experience and structured processes, and hiring people who move fast, think deeply, and work like owners.

JOSH TOLAN: Well, Michaela, let’s get started. Thanks so much for joining me today. Welcome to the show. To get started, it’d be great if you could give everyone some background about what led you to where you are today.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Correct. Yeah.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, so I’ve been in talent acquisition a little over 10 years now. Started off at an executive search firm, was a sourcer there as an intern in college, and then ended up snowballing into a recruiting role after then. Got to sample a couple different sectors and found that tech was really the type of environment that I liked. So ever since then, have been in recruiting for high growth software companies. started on the agency side, then kind of saw a couple of the companies I’d worked with start to grow really fast and thought, okay, now I want to go internal and see what that’s like. Um, which I’d made ticker Fauna Lounge, which is the company I was at prior to this, where they went from like 200 to 1400 people. Um, and then as things started to, I won’t say level off on the hiring side, but as things started to be built in, we’re less of the, uh, kind of build as you go phase, I got that itch to go small again, which is where a super base came into play. So I’ve always been in recruiting, which I think is different than a lot of people who may be stumbled into it, but kind of found my niche early on and, you know, I’ve been really enjoying it ever since. So yeah.

JOSH TOLAN: That’s awesome. Yeah, exec search while you’re in college is pretty intense. That’s awesome. Great way to get started and learn everything. I always like when people start on the agency side because it really helps you develop some of those best practices and principles that you can take in house because, you know, recruiting is what the business does. And so you have to do it well if the business is going to thrive. So I always find that people that come from that background can bring a lot to an in-house role.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, it was fun for me too to be able to sample different sectors and different types of companies right out of college too as we were partnering with different companies because too coming out of school you don’t necessarily know like I want to go into tech or I want to go into finance or pharmaceuticals or whatever. So it’s kind of cool to be able to see okay here’s what segment I’m most like recruiting for too.

JOSH TOLAN: That’s really interesting. I never thought about that, but yeah, like going into the agency side in the early part of your career helps you kind of dabble in all these different sectors and find out what really resonates with you. And for you, that was tech. And I like that because, you know, for some people that maybe go straight in house out of college, maybe they don’t have the best experience, but that could have nothing to do with them not liking talent acquisition. could just be the industry they were in or the company they were in, the types of candidates they were recruiting for, et cetera. So that’s a really great point you bring up. So what drew you to tech? What was so exciting about it?

MICHAELA BURPOE: I think the people you talk to and recruit for are really dynamic and also are kind of tinkers at heart, I feel like. So have different side projects and hobbies that they’ve worked on or are always kind of reading up on the newest thing that’s up and coming. I also found a lot of people in tech are both really smart but also down to earth. I think a lot of folks maybe did like a coding boot camp or kind of found themselves in tech where it wasn’t something that’s like, OK, all of my parents were in tech, so now I’m in tech or that kind of, I guess there’s less of a pedigree that comes with tech typically. So it just gives so many different types of backgrounds and profiles that you get to talk to as opposed to some other sectors that seem

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah.

MICHAELA BURPOE: seemingly a little bit more homogeneous, right? So, yeah.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, that’s interesting. And a great point again, like tech, you know, and a lot of the new tech companies, it’s more like this generation that’s coming up and those are the ones that starting these companies and growing these companies. Of course, you know, that’s not always the case, but for a lot of them it is. And so you’re right. You get a lot of people with these really unique journeys and how they found themselves in tech. so When you’re on the recruitment side and you’re talking to all these people, you get to hear all those different stories and all those backgrounds. you know, think it also gives you really unique perspective on hiring. When you hear how people come from all these different backgrounds that they found themselves, found themselves here and they’re having success or they have potential. And it kind of shows that. Like there’s not always a straight line path in a career. so, you know, to your point, like it’s. not always just about the previous companies you work for or what you did prior. It’s really about your potential and how you got to where you are today, which makes you a good fit for the role going forward.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah. And it makes it really dynamic and fun, but also challenging on the recruitment side too, because it’s not, okay, this person has X, Y, Z skillset or experience in this specific background. So it takes a lot more sifting in my opinion too, which I like. I like kind of the thrill of the chase on that side of things, but definitely makes it harder upfront, I think on the screening side. So.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, totally. And we’ll definitely get into that. So tell me about, so you’re at SupaBase now, how long have you been there?

MICHAELA BURPOE: So I’ve been there just three months now, but it’s funny. I feel like a candidate said to me once, like, startup years are like dog years, right? So I feel like I’m already into it. We’re already making hires, have like different processes. We’re defining all of that good stuff, so.

JOSH TOLAN: Okay.

JOSH TOLAN: Gosh, I hope not if startup years are like dog years and I’m like well into my hundreds at this point

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, that’s where like AI is good to come into play. Maybe it can like put some filters on us and like de-age from being at startups for so long.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. So what’s your exact role and what does the team look like?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, so you’ll learn as we talk, SuperBase is really flat and not big on titles. It was interesting when I left Grafana, somebody asked me, what’s your title going to be? And I was like, I don’t even know what this is. So generally talent, but right now I’m overseeing a lot of our growth and go-to-market hiring and some of those more strategic hires. But when I joined, it is a people team of three. I was the fourth person and we only have one other recruiter on the technical side. So it’s a really small but mighty group.

JOSH TOLAN: And you guys recently raised a big round of funding. I think I saw an announcement about that.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, so recently raised our series D, which is really exciting. So of course, with that kind of had some early Grafana nostalgia of, okay, here we go. We’re gonna have some big scaling, which will be fun. So yeah.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, it’s like, welcome to the team. You’re three months in. Here’s all this money. Now I got to go hire maybe a ton more people than you thought you were going to have to hire when you came on board. But that’s what makes it exciting. It’s a challenge that’s put out in front of you. it’s obviously, when a company raises around like that, it says a lot about people believing in the company. So it’s a good place to be when you’re in talent because that’s a really good narrative to have to tell candidates that are considering joining the company. So how big are you guys now from an employee standpoint?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, yeah.

MICHAELA BURPOE: So we just crossed 100 people. So we’re still kind of a small but mighty group.

JOSH TOLAN: Okay.

JOSH TOLAN: And do you have, there specific targets you guys are looking to get to from a headcount standpoint now with the new funding?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting because our co-founders also want to be really thoughtful about growth of I remember even when I was interviewing, they were like, this is not going to grow as fast as Grafana, right? And I said, in some ways, that’s good. You know, I have the playbook of, OK, some of this thoughtful growth will be awesome. So I think for us, they’re probably looking at like 170 ish by this time next year. But I think the other piece too is don’t have set headcount plans. It’s more so, hey, now we have this runway. In what departments do we want to grow? If like a product is taking off or we feel like we need more resources on a team, now there’s that flexibility to do that too, which is really nice.

JOSH TOLAN: And honestly, that aligns with everything I’ve read about the company and your culture and what you just said, flat org, async culture, which I will talk about as well. I think that’s a smart way to think about it. You just got this funding, like you’re not going to go out and hire a ton of people. Hiring people is somewhat like pouring concrete. Like it’s a big investment, both dollars wise, but also for the people coming on board, for the talent team during doing the work, for the managers that are onboarding and making those people successful. And so you want to be really sure about those plans. It can’t just be like, okay, we got funding, so let’s just throw people at the, know, people are the solution to growth. It’s really being thoughtful and methodical about how people combine with the strategies and other things you guys are going to invest in or what’s going to drive, you know, growth for the business going forward. So I really like that approach. So… You guys are 100 people now. were at Grafana when you went from 200 to 1,400. What are some of the things that you’re going to pull from the Grafana days now looking ahead to Superbase? I guess, where do you start? You’re a few months in, only one other recruiter, now you’re tasked with hiring a bunch of people, high growth company. What’s first for you?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, I think it’s always interesting joining new companies too, because of course, like one playbook that works at one place doesn’t always work at another place. But I think there’s some of those key indicators that you can start to plan for. So for example, like making sure all of our kickoffs are really tight for the roles and figuring out, hey, is everyone aligned on what we’re looking for as we scale? And what does that look like across? teams and hiring managers and interviewers. So that’s been a big part of my first couple months here is going back and saying, hey, even what you were looking for three months ago, is that the same as what you were looking for now? And then being really clear on like scorecards and focus areas for folks so that when we do press go, everybody’s aligned and kind of has those marching orders, so to speak of, okay, here’s what I’m focusing on. Here’s what good looks like so that we know what some of those things are. So that’s been a big focus, especially being async where we don’t necessarily have live debriefs. It’s tweaking what that looks like before we get to the wave coming. I think another piece too is prepping for that scale. For example, I just pulled some numbers in based on before I started.

JOSH TOLAN: Hmm.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Interviews week over week have increased 163 percent, which kind of expected if you’re like doubling your recruiting team essentially, but I think that brings so many potential breaking points coming of, okay, we have this core subset of interviewers that worked before. We might need to expand that. Do we have interview training? What does that look like? And it’s not just giving somebody a template of here’s questions to ask. You know, it’s also making sure leaders feel comfortable with that handoff in what that interview training looks like. And, you know, how do we empower people to feel comfortable on interviews and all of that good stuff? So I think it’s a lot of that calm before the storm planning of figuring out, hey, what breaking points have I seen and what are we going to start to prep for on that front?

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah. And I love that you’re focused on process and building the foundation, particularly with hiring managers. And I know you mentioned, you know, just a little bit ago, you guys are a lean team on the talent side. So why is it so important to get that buy-in and participation of your hiring managers right from the start, given that you’re a lean team and you guys obviously have lofty goals.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, I think it’s a lot of that shared responsibility and hiring too, right? Of course, like recruiting is driving a lot of sourcing and alignment, but folks on the interview panels have to be really tight in what they’re looking for too, because being lean, there’s only so many hours you have to interview in addition to all of the other things that come with being a part of a startup. So making sure that like people are using their time really efficiently. is really important, right?

JOSH TOLAN: Yep. And you mentioned you had to task more people and pull them into the interviewing committees because you’re right. Once you start hiring a lot of people, maybe there was those three to four people that you could pull in as part of the committee previously. But now when interviews are up, think you said 163 % or something like that, those people aren’t full-time interviewers. So you can’t just pull them into everything. And so now you’ve got to onboard more people to that process. How do you figure out

MICHAELA BURPOE: Mm-hmm.

JOSH TOLAN: you know, who are the people to include in the process that are outside of the hiring manager? And then how do you get them to feel comfortable? know you mentioned training, but let’s unpack that a little bit in terms of like, what do you guys actually do?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, so that’s a really good question. I think it’s twofold. mean, some people, because we’re really flat, have interviewed in the past and say, ooh, I really like this. I want this to be a part of what I’m doing, which kind of speaks to the value here of being a polyglot with a broad skill set of people who like doing those things. But actually, we do performance reviews twice a year. So we’re also coming out of that too. meeting with folks and saying, who are some people who are doing really well, who might be able to take on some of this too, and kind of take the load off of you all who have done interviews up until now. So we’re going through that on the management side a little bit too of, hey, who do we want to flag to do this? But then on the flip side, it’s being really prescriptive about what good looks like. used the analogy today with some folks internally of, hey, you’re not going to connect like a user directly with a potential buyer of a product, right? And say, okay, you guys talk about SuperBase and see how it goes. And I think it’s the same with an interviewer, right? Like people might be internal at the company and know how we work, but not know kind of the broader picture and story of where we’re building to, or could be so in the weeds that aren’t thinking about some of the other cross-functional things they’re looking for on other teams. So I think it’s also getting really clear on the front end of here’s your role in the process, here’s what you’re looking for. Because going back to that efficiency piece, it’s also. You don’t want everyone asking the same questions either. If you have a really tight interview process, which I think comes as you shift as a company too, from things being a bit more conversational to, okay, now we have to hire at scale. How do we keep things really tight?

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah. And I love that, you know, given you guys are a rather flat organization, I love that you’re incorporating it into performance reviews and you’re constantly talking about who can be brought into this process. Because I think, you you even mentioned in the beginning, like when I started, I didn’t even know maybe what my title was going to be. I think this is one of those areas that’s, it’s really room for growth for somebody. Like it’s not a new job, but it’s a new responsibility as part of their job. And so if you can breed a culture in which people actually look at hey, to be incorporated into the interview process as part of a panel or a committee to evaluate for X is a sign that the company values my perspective and is now going to coach me on how to become a better interviewer that suits me well here or wherever I’m at, you know, five, 10 years down the road. So that’s a really interesting thing that you guys are doing. I love it. How do people generally respond to that? Are people excited about joining the hiring process?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, so far they have been, which is good, which hopefully keeps up as we scale as people get pulled in a whole bunch of different directions. But actually had somebody reach out today too and say, hey, I just had my first interview. What do you think of my feedback? Did it look good? Like what can I do better? So I think it’s really interesting and goes back to that like continuous improvement pace here, which has been really cool to see, especially being And somebody who joined more recently of even on the interview side, people are asking for that feedback, which I think is really cool. And honestly haven’t seen a bunch. It’s usually, okay, here’s my feedback moving on. but I like, yeah.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah.

JOSH TOLAN: Totally, yeah. Normally you like have to pry the feedback out of people. It’s like good candidate or the notes, right? So that’s really exciting. Yeah, my eyes like got real big when you said that they were asking you for feedback on their feedback. That’s something you don’t hear every day from a stakeholder in the hiring process. So that’s really, really awesome. I love that for you guys. So talk to me about like, as you think about…

MICHAELA BURPOE: Nope.

JOSH TOLAN: scorecards and getting the team aligned around what good looks like. And you’ve got people that are responsible for certain things in the process. How do you help them figure out what good does look like? You know, one of the things I’ve talked about a little bit lately on LinkedIn and some other conversations I’ve had is scorecards are great and everybody defers to scorecards as part of a structured process, but it only brings us so much structure, you know, as much as the instructions that you have for those scorecards like Yes, we want to evaluate for those things, but if I don’t know what a five looks like, if my five is different from another person’s five, how much value does that bring to the hiring process? Then we’re just in a room or talking asynchronously about our opinions and giving these ratings, which are kind of arbitrary. So how do get everybody aligned on the rating scale, if you will?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, that’s a really good question. think it’s slightly easier for specific technical skill sets of like, hey, here’s what good looks like in this coding exercise, or here’s what this looks like for this specific technical knowledge. But I think it gets a little fuzzier when you get to, for example, values and things of we’re just talking about we assess our values across the interview process. So each person takes a couple of them and digs deep on the behavioral interview side. But then it’s also figuring out, okay, well, once I dig into those questions, what are signals to look for? Like what makes somebody a four versus a one for egolessness, for example. So actually I’ve started the process of talking through with some of our leaders. One, what does this value mean to you? but then also getting prescriptive around like green, yellow, red flags. So for example, if someone says, I don’t know, hey, this was an assumption I had initially, you know, people changed my opinion on it, or hey, I don’t care about titles, you know, just some of those signals that you get through the interview process or on the red flag side of, hey, like. I need to be a VP or bust or, you know, Hey, how big is this team going to grow? Or, you know, just some of those different pieces that aren’t necessarily bad to ask, but that you start to see come up in interviews where if you’re doing them repeat, it’s really easy to spot. if you’re not, you know, listening for some of those keywords is really important. and then off of that, what we just started doing. is like some role play pieces of, here’s the scenario, like how would you rate this? And seeing what folks’ thoughts are there too.

JOSH TOLAN: Mm.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, that’s great. And I love aligning around signals because I think often where teams trip up is they’re really trying to coach people on like looking for a very specific answer, but the reality is in practice, that’s so hard. And so what ends up happening is people that are on the hiring committee that aren’t on the talent side, when they’re tasked to evaluate for behavioral competencies, it often goes back to like, did I like them? Did I get along with them in the interview? And those are the things they pick up on. And then that skews, you know, their evaluation of that person and what they’re actually looking for. And so, yeah, it’s, really the signals that you want to pick up on. And that kind of helps you triangulate around, does this person demonstrate those competencies? Because to your point earlier, like every candidate is going have a different story, different experiences. You’re never going to be able to script something for a hiring stakeholder. That’s like, These are the three sentences you look for, but instead here’s the keywords. Here’s the phrases. Here’s what a green flag would look like. Here’s what a red flag would look like. And then here’s some scenarios so we can practice that and you can fine tune your skills on identifying those signals. I feel like that really helps an interviewer check themselves on where do they really stand in their evaluation for this specific thing versus them trying to listen to a really long answer from a candidate and try and come up with some. like arbitrary score for that response to a specific question.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, exactly. And I think it’s also important to call out, like, of course, don’t always get this right up front. Like, for example, we had a candidate get to final stages recently who were like threes across the board out of our one to four scale. People liked them a lot, but also in small companies, each hire is so high impact for the role that it’s, okay, well, if they got threes, we all like them, but If it’s to a point where we’re not ready to pull the trigger, do we need to fix something on the interview process to make sure that this is a little bit more prescriptive? So actually just started talking about doing something around in scorecards. If there was a reason you wouldn’t move forward for this candidate, what would it be? And not to flag anything bad if somebody is doing really well, but also to force people to not always go to the like, yes, hire.

JOSH TOLAN: You

MICHAELA BURPOE: think people sometimes are hesitant to be that person who says no, if everyone else really likes them, because we have all feedback open to everyone. But I think making sure that we call that out, especially early on, is really important too, because maybe somebody has, maybe each interviewer has all the same flags, and then it’s, ooh, okay, maybe that’s why we don’t want to move forward. Or on the flip side, like we’re nearing end of process where, two candidates have gotten strong yeses from everyone. And then it’s, okay, now how do we distinguish who we pick, right? So I think it’s continuously refining to what that looks like, especially as you’re moving fast to make sure that you’re looking for pieces like that of, okay, everyone’s yes, but doesn’t feel 100%. How do we tweak this on the front end?

JOSH TOLAN: really like the question of asking people if there was a reason why they wouldn’t move forward. What is it? Or however you phrase that question exactly. But I really like the sentiment of that question. It’s kind of similar to like internally here at Sparkire, you know, as we think about the work that we do and we’re setting objectives and we’re figuring out what our plans are to hit those objectives, we often will ask people, what are the constraints? And those are generally, what are the things that could get in the way?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Mm-hmm.

JOSH TOLAN: of you being able to hit this objective. And maybe that’s another resource. Maybe sometime it’s just time or whatever it may be. But it makes you take a step back to think about what are the roadblocks. So when you’re planning for your objective, you can figure out a way to overcome those. You’re identifying them upfront. And I think it’s kind of similar where if you can think about the reasons you wouldn’t move forward, it helps you have a meaningful discussion as a group about that candidate. But also to your point, Maybe you evaluate the hiring process as a whole and what you’re really looking for in future candidates that you interview. So I really like that approach.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, it’s interesting too, because it gives you insight into what people think like good versus not good looks like too of, I didn’t even think that would be a flag for this role. Let’s talk more about this. Or kind of probably as you’ve seen sometimes in performance reviews too, it’s like, what can I improve on? Nothing, you’re doing great. It’s like, okay, well, everybody has stuff that they could refine, you know? So I think that helps to point that out in the interview process too.

JOSH TOLAN: Hmm.

JOSH TOLAN: Yep.

JOSH TOLAN: Totally, it’s like there’s gonna be problems or room for growth or whatever with every candidate or with every employee. It’s really like you want to improve the quality of those problems, right? You want to shrink the areas for development and sometimes that’s having a coaching plan for when that person’s on board and sometimes just hiring a different person.

MICHAELA BURPOE: is that.

JOSH TOLAN: But yeah, I really like the approach you guys are taking. All right, let’s jump to a new topic on your LinkedIn. I’m going to read this quote because you wrote this. Great companies aren’t just built on great ideas, they’re built by great people. So what does that look like in practice? What does that quote mean to you?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, I think it’s a couple different things. think it’s always exciting in tech where companies can be really fast growing and they have a really good product and a really fanatic user base. But then as you continue to scale, it’s figuring out internally what that looks like on the people side. And I think a lot of companies hit that critical point where okay, we need to hire. It’s not just this core group who founded the company. And I think once you hit that inflection point, the people you hire is so crucial to that growth because it can either help accelerate you really fast or put a ton of roadblocks in place and sound so intuitive when you say it out loud, but it’s so much harder in practice, I think, to work through.

JOSH TOLAN: Mm-hmm.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, look, we’ve made that mistake here. You know, when we were younger company, I can remember it very distinctly. We saw opportunities to grow in the business. And so we had these open positions and we were just so focused on. We need people in these positions to execute what we want to execute. And we didn’t think enough about, and, know, this was when we were smaller. mean, we’re still, you know, relatively small employer, but we didn’t think enough about like the DNA of the company and what. really mattered and the types of people that we bring in. Cause to your point at a small company, every single person you bring on is such an impactful person on the overall company success. And so we were so focused on like fill these positions, fill these positions, like find people with the skills and hire them. that we didn’t put enough thought, I think into, you know, like what is the DNA of the company? And ultimately that’s what ends up slowing you down. Cause you bring in some people, you know, some work out, but if you know, you’re not succeeding as much as you should be, that leads to turnover and ultimately that ends up slowing down your growth and causing you to miss the numbers you wanted to hit in the first place by having those open roles and bringing those people on board. So in some ways it’s like counterintuitive when you think about it to like slow down and think about all these things when you’re really high growth and you have all these open seats. But at the end of the day, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. so thinking about what great people look like specifically for your organization upfront is ultimately what’s going to be like the backbone of the business.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah. And I think touches back to like really honing in on some of those, like behavioral interview questions around values, because it seems underrated as you’re scaling kind of, as you had mentioned of, Hey, we need somebody to plug into this function who can like have all these technical skill sets or do the job where being so small, building that foundation of really good people who align with how you’re operating is so important on that front too. Which actually brings up something that was kind of a lesson learned from the Grafana side that we’re starting to do sooner here is I’m talking to folks like 90 days in, but more so from a recruitment perspective of. hey, did what I talked to you about on the front end actually match what that looked like when you came internal? Because I think at startups, things are moving so fast. So even on the recruitment side or interview side, as you’re talking to people, what you were talking about three months ago is different than what you’re talking about now. And I think spotting those potential cracks so much sooner in doing that.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah.

MICHAELA BURPOE: is so helpful and something I thought, I wish I did this like way sooner at Grafana.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, that calibration is so important. Like you said earlier, even when you’re hiring for a position, you might’ve talked to work with a hiring manager on this role three, four five months ago, and now they’re hiring for it again. And the requirements could have changed. And so it’s very easy to be like, let’s refer to the last kickoff and let’s just get this thing moving and list the job, start getting applicants and we’re off to the races. recalibrating on what you actually need or recalibrating with people internally on what. our narrative is and what the first 90 days look like and making sure, you know, what we’re saying on the front end of the process is still holding true for employees when they come on board. Not only does it just make your process tighter and ultimately lead to better outcomes in terms of who you hire, but also from a candidate and an employee experience standpoint, like you want what you say to be accurate when you’re talking to them in the hiring process. So when they come on board, you know, there’s no surprises. And so I think that’s a really good point you bring up. One of the things you mentioned earlier, right in the beginning was talking about people in tech coming from all different types of backgrounds. How do you think about that in terms of like when you’re reviewing resumes or early in the screening process, you have people with some of these non-traditional paths. How do you factor that in when you’re trying to compare that against the requirements of the role?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think it’s a couple different things. mean, one, I think application questions are underrated as folks are filling them out because it’s even that why super base. It’s always really cool to see people’s answers if they genuinely kind of go through those. And contrary to popular belief, I always go through what those answers are. Even in our ATS, you can filter who answers those questions and who doesn’t. And I think just kind of taking that extra step is always a big differentiator. But then when I talk to folks on the phone after saying, OK, they have these core skill sets for the role, right? It’s, for me, more interesting to hear, like, why did you make this move from this company to this company? Or why did you pivot from, like, For example, one of our sales development reps went from software engineering into sales development, which I don’t typically see in figuring out, okay, why did you do that? What was interesting about this role? And I think hearing people’s story and talk track really helps to align on, okay, this makes sense, or I don’t know, are they decided on what they wanna do now? What does this look like? So I think having that… story and journey really either articulately put on your resume or having that in mind as you’re interviewing is so important in tech because some people like maybe at some of the big hyperscalers now and want to apply to super base and I always curious, okay, why? know, what is drawn, like what are you drawn to of a small company? So I think making sure folks have those stories that are not as easily accessible but are clear is helpful on the resume side. But then when you talk to folks, really digging into that I think is important.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, that’s great. mean, look, not to toot our own horn over here, but that’s ultimately like one of the reasons why I started this company in the first place when we started as an asynchronous video interview solution was I realized that you have this resume on the front end of the process, but you’re missing so much context about the story. And the problem is, especially now when the market is so saturated, if there’s 300 people applying to a role, how is the TA teams supposed to get that context? in an efficient enough manner where it’s not going to blow up the whole hiring process. So they can ultimately consider all of that in making a decision about moving that candidate forward or not. Because yes, you can see the resume and a lot of teams, take the 10 seconds to review it and they’re forced to make a lot of assumptions about that candidate. And ultimately that’s what factors in to their decision at that stage. And so that’s what I saw as an opportunity when starting this company was to allow candidates to you know, bring more life to their resume and give more context to their experiences and the decisions they’ve made and how they got to where they are. And so I want to touch back on one of the things you were saying, you mentioned some questions. I’m assuming are those questions on the application, like the why super based question. So it sounds like you leave some of those optional. Is that accurate? Interesting.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah. Or to some people, know, you can put like a dash and click enter, you know, and have that. But we do, we do leave a lot of it optional too, for folks to say, Hey, do you fill this out? Do you not? Because some, some are like mandatory skill sets for the role, Of, Hey, describe your experience with X technologies. But I think the interesting piece too that I’ve seen with AI is

JOSH TOLAN: Mm-hmm.

MICHAELA BURPOE: A lot of them look really similar. Whereas I don’t think people realize that either, because I use AI all the time for a variety of different things. But if you’re scrolling through, I don’t know, 120 resumes, everything, you start to see a lot of the parallels in that too. So I think while it’s tough, if you’re looking at multiple different jobs, it’s so important to kind of put that human touch on some of those pieces too. Yeah.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, that was going to be my next question is how many people are submitting AI generated answers. And to your point, I think it’s good when candidates are using AI in the process, but if they’re using it in an authentic way. so when it comes across and all the answers start looking the same as recruiter, you start to pattern match and say, okay, I could see what’s going on here. This is almost like, you know, asking AI to give me the answer to this question. Then I’m just copying and pasting it versus thinking about my answer and then maybe using AI to better structure it or make it more cohesive, but at least it’s my own unique perspective and thoughts. What would you say is if you had to guess what’s like the percentage you’re seeing of people using AI to like copy and paste answers in the application?

MICHAELA BURPOE: I would say maybe like 60%. There’s a big portion, especially for questions that can be more generic like that of why are you interested in SuperBase? It’s like, I love the developer backend of, and it’s like different taglines from our website. So, but I think there’s really creative ways you can use it too of we actually had a candidate recently ask like, how’d you hear about us? And they said they used, the tool proximity and put their resume in and said like, which jobs match my background. And this job at SuperBase came up and they actually ended up being a really strong fit. So I think there’s some creative ways you can use it in the job search process that isn’t so prescriptive to like the specific answers to, right?

JOSH TOLAN: That is interesting

JOSH TOLAN: Totally. That example is excellent because I think the reality is, you know, unless your company has some policy against it, you’re going to use AI in your job. And so that’s a really good way to show how you’ve responsibly used AI in an authentic way and in a resourceful way to get you to ultimately some outcome or some decision. And so I think that’s a really good tip for candidates is using it in ways that are similar to how you use it on the job. you’re not going to come on the job and just use AI to generate copy that you’re going to copy and paste. And, you know, your company’s copy looks like every other company’s copy that’s trying to write the same thing. And so, yeah, I think that’s, that’s some really good insight there for people. How do you also look at, so you mentioned like the different paths people take in decisions between employment, you know, where they’re employed, of how they, why they went from this place to this place or switch careers and things like that. How do you look at like gaps on the resume? somebody was out of work for 12 months, or maybe they had a couple of short stints back to back. A lot of people make assumptions about those things as soon as they see them. How do you approach it?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, so I think it’s really interesting in the startup space too where you kind of want somebody who’s less risk averse in some ways. So I think actually sometimes I do look for a couple short stints to see, hey, you know, is this person always going with the safe choice? Are they maybe jumping into something that they thought would work out but didn’t? But I think it also leaves a lot of room to look at that like self-reflectiveness piece, another one of those intangibles of, do they say, hey, this is something unfortunate that happened and like, maybe I would have done things this way. Or is it, hey, I had like a family member I had to take care of. Or, you know, some of those different context pieces. And I think as long as folks have, that story behind it. Now, I think there’s also other instances too where it can be, well, I had a manager who treated me poorly and then this company was really bad from this perspective and then you can start to see kind of a pattern there too. But I think honestly, nobody’s gonna have a perfect background or resume. So I think the more honesty can be from that front of. Hey, I thought I vetted this really well, but I didn’t. And here’s where like the wheels fell off. And so then when I looked at this next job, I was extra diligent about this or, you know, just some of those pieces. think the more honest you can be from that perspective, the better, because I think there’s going to be so many of those types of things that come up in a day to day to start up that are not going to go as you planned. So I think it’s having that similar mentality of, okay. What did you learn from it? But I think the problem comes where if folks don’t learn from it, then it’s more of a flag. But if they do, then it’s actually a plus on my end.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, and to your point, that goes back to looking for certain signals, those green, yellow, and red signals more so than the perfect story. Or if they had a short stint, here’s exactly what we want to hear them say. No, you have to listen to the story. You have to listen to the context, and then you have to triangulate around those signals to help you make a decision. Okay, last topic I want to jump to. We’ve talked about it a couple of times throughout this episode, your async culture.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, exactly.

JOSH TOLAN: Can you share more about that for people that are unfamiliar with the way that you guys work? What’s the environment like?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, I always make sure to mention this in interviews because it is really different, I think, than say remote, which you’re not in an office. Whereas async is you’re not expected to be on the same time as everyone else. And to be honest, coming in as like a go to market recruiter, I was a little bit speculative of, okay, go to market really fast. People are generally on at the same times. Is this actually async? But it’s really cool to see that like moving fast and scaling quickly doesn’t necessarily translate to chaotic, which I think sometimes are synonymous. Whereas here, like our two co-founders are from Singapore. We have folks across 10 plus different time zones. So you have to be really diligent about communication because when you’re online, it doesn’t mean other people are online. So I think that’s one piece is getting used to that rhythm of knowing when different people will be on, feeling comfortable, of leaving questions out in the open for people to answer, like maybe when you’re sleeping. And to also be comfortable being really autonomous, because that’s another piece that comes with async work of there aren’t five different people on to say, hey, should I press go on this? Does this look okay? It’s a lot of that self ownership of, okay, I’m gonna run with this. If it works, awesome. If not, maybe when somebody logs on, they say, don’t do it this way. But I think that’s a responsibility. Some people really like, or others say, hey, Michaela, call me when you’re like double the size. And we have people in each region that I can lean on and know what that looks like. Because if you’re used to back to back meetings and folks being on all the time, that’s definitely not the rhythm here.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, fair enough. So how do you assess for that in the hiring process? Like you just mentioned the ability to work autonomously. How is that something you can evaluate when you’re talking to different candidates?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, think it’s a couple different things. One is that growth mindset and figuring out where have people improved processes or driven things on their own. Or a lot of times people will come to and say, hey, I’ve done this in the past with a team. I really want to see how I do on my own. like, Just making my own decisions and see what that looks like. So actually a good portion of our team right now are ex-founders, which is interesting. Cause I think a lot of that autonomy comes from kind of being able to do that on your own. But I think also folks you see it in the interview process too. You have to have like really clear written communication and what that looks like. Cause you’re not online all the time or. people who have, maybe it’s even on the hobby side, set goals for themselves. Maybe they’ve run marathons or taught themselves a new type of code or just different things that you’re driving yourself that people aren’t telling you to do. So I think there are a lot of those, going back to that signal piece that you look for of people who are used to running things by themselves, right?

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, totally. Like there’s the examples from their personal life of systems or processes or organizational things they put in place to help them, you know, live a more productive life or they’ve set these goals for themselves and they’ve had to hold themselves accountable. There’s no coach, there’s no employer. It’s something they’re doing on their own. Like you said, running a marathon could be a good example of that. Take me through that whole process. How did you decide to do this? How did you figure out the training plan? So there’s a lot you can derive just from a personal experience. has nothing to do with a previous employment experience, but it can speak to the competency of being able to work autonomously. So you mentioned the importance of written communication. I imagine that’s immensely important in the hiring process when you’re working with stakeholders who may stretch different time zones or who may just work different times of the day. How do you guys collaborate in an environment that’s async where somebody’s not just a slack message away? You might have to wait a day for somebody’s feedback or for an answer to your question. How do you keep the process moving quickly when you’re working with stakeholders in that type of environment?

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, I think it’s a couple things. mean, one, it’s setting kind of best practices, right, of, you need to get your feedback in before the end of your day. Because if not, then it’s potentially a day and a half, two days before we can move to the next step. So I think it’s setting expectations upfront. But then another thing we do is work really out in the open. So we have different hiring channels and things where We keep everything, all interview notes open in our system so that as people are logging on, they can look at your really detailed feedback as opposed to you syncing and talking to them about it and making sure that you’re really detailed in what that looks like. So you can hand the baton without being there. but I think the other thing too is, you know, making sure that folks know their role in the process, because I think even initially as we were setting up some of these, it’s Oh, I didn’t realize if I didn’t put my feedback in or give as much specificity around what the next person should look for. That delayed things 48, 72 hours, which is a really long time in startup world. Or as people are actively looking to, right? Because then you have the scheduling piece and all of those other things that play into an interview process.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, absolutely. I think the built in deadline of like, Hey, I have to get this in because Michaela is going to be online in six hours and she’s going to need my feedback and my feedback has to be good. So Michaela can take some action on it because if she has to come back to me and with, you know, follow ups about my feedback, and then I have to go back in there on my next working day and then she’s back on later. Like to your point, all of a sudden your 48 hours have gone by and that candidate may have gotten another offer. Who knows what could happen. That’s like, to use your term earlier, that’s like dog years in the hiring process, right? Cool. That makes a lot of sense. All right. And then my last question is when you’re speaking to candidates, how do you, you know, make sure they’re aligned with this type of environment? You know, there’s a lot of candidates that might say like, yeah, that sounds great. You know, when they’re trying to get the job, but how do you really make sure that they have all the information they need about the environment so they can make a good decision. So ultimately, if you hire them, you know it’s somebody that is going to work out and stick around long term and it’s aligned with what they’re looking for.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, I think it’s being really honest about what that looks like. So for example, you know, we don’t have any internal meetings on Mondays and Fridays. Folks are also only required to go to two meetings a week. So that’s, you know, your team meeting, which is actually open to the entire company. So anybody could join and then your one-on-one. And other than that, that schedule is really up to you. I thought it was really interesting in one of his talks, one of our co-founder said, like, you tell us what you’re doing, we don’t tell you what to do. And I thought that was really interesting. But you have to make sure that folks are comfortable with that because I think sometimes you’re used to getting a list of, okay, here’s all the tasks you have to complete. But here it’s, hey, here are these guiding principles. We’re going to be super open about. what we talked about in the board meeting last week. You can go through those in the announcements channel. So you have that direction, but you have to feel really comfortable framing up what that looks like for your specific role, which is good. Some people will say, that’s too much ambiguity for me. I need like a clear checklist to work off of. Or like I mentioned before, say, hey, call me when you get bigger. And this is a little bit more prescriptive. But I think knowing that for people and saying to them, hey, if you’re used to being on meetings and getting a lot of FaceTime, that might not be what you get here. So think about it. And I give people that space too. You don’t have to say if you’re comfortable with it now on the call, I’m not going to put you on the spot, but go back, think about it and say, hey, working fully remote, do I have enough other things like socially that I could also kind of do on the side that… where work might not fill that need? Or am I cool sending it in our water cooler channel and having that interaction through memes and those written communications, right? And some people it’s not for them, which I think is the beauty of in-person versus remote versus async. I think there’s a style that fits with everyone. So if async isn’t for you, that’s totally okay.

JOSH TOLAN: Totally.

JOSH TOLAN: Yeah, totally. There’s no wrong answer or wrong decision from the candidate standpoint. Ultimately, it’s about being honest with yourself as a candidate and for you guys on the company side, being honest about what it’s like and transparent about what it’s like to work there. The goods and the things that some people might see as challenges and then you empower a candidate to make their own decision, they can’t ask to be honest with themselves about if that’s an environment they can see themselves working in. And that’s how you ultimately get alignment and you get long-term buy-in from candidates who become your employees.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Exactly. Yeah.

JOSH TOLAN: Well, Michaela, this has been awesome. We ripped through a lot of different questions, a lot of topics. This was so insightful. It was great to learn about what you’ve done in your career, what you’re up to now, and congrats on all of your success and good luck with all the exciting things happening at SubaBase coming up.

MICHAELA BURPOE: Yeah, well, thank you. This is really fun too. I feel like with lean teams, you operate and build, you know, kind of in your core groups. So it’s always fun to talk to other people about building and what they’ve seen and all that good stuff too. So thanks for having me, Josh.