StartUp Hiring

Daragh Kan has been the first product manager at not one but two fast-growing startups — Me&U (formerly Mr Yum) and Cuttable. He’s built products under pressure, scaled alongside founders, and brought a deep sense of user empathy from years running his own hospitality venues.

What I like about Daragh’s perspective is how much of it comes from actually doing the job, not in theory, but in the mess of real-world complexity. He’s m...

Navigating Startups: Insights from Moving to Apple at 17 and Founding a BusinessIn this conversation, James Dale shares his journey from a 17-year-old intern at Apple to founding his own business. He dives deep into the challenges of being a young founder, the importance of quality hiring, and the sheer amount of work required beyond one's main discipline. James reflects on the excitement and stress that comes with startups, offeri...

When Ben Mostafa joined MessageMedia, he didn’t know what a CTO was. By the time he left, he’d been one. Over nearly ten years, he helped grow the company through different phases of scale, infrastructure-heavy tech, product-led SaaS, major user growth, and acquisitions. Along the way, he hired ICs and engineering leaders, built high-performing teams, and adapted his own leadership style.What I like about Ben’s perspective is how g...

$3bn +. That's the deal value that Paul Perrett has overseen as a leader, making him without doubt one of Australia's most successful B2B SaaS leaders. In this video, you'll learn how Paul thinks about the power of hiring the right people, why he still thinks that people are the number one asset of any business and how his approach to hiring and leading has evolved over the years.Paul’s perspective is built on reflectio...

Welcome to Start, Scale, Grow - the ultimate destination for technology companies looking to level up their hiring game. Whether you're just starting out or well on your way to becoming a major player in your industry, we've got you covered. In each episode we'll bring you insights and actionable tips from the people who’ve done it, to help you find, hire and retain the best talent possible in the competitive world of tech. We've a...

In all walks of life, trends drift in and out of popularity. Recruiting is no different. For years, personality profiling was a large part of many companies hiring processes. As the battle for talent got fiercer, hiring time became more important. Companies needed to move quickly for in-demand talent that had plenty of options. Personality profiling started to become seen as a friction point, something that slowed competitive proce...

In this episode, Jason Atkins the Co-Founder and President of Cake Equity shares his insights and demystifies the world of staff equity. From tax breaks to staff engagement, there are so many benefits to doing this, and it's not as difficult as you may think.Cake is 5 years old and has over 150k equity holders on the platform in 80 different countries. They're the definition of an Aussie tech success story. The big ticket items 👇�...

In this episode, Alana Bennett discusses the challenges of building and maintaining connections in a remote/distributed workforce. We’re all humans. And like most other mammals we are social beats. We thrive on and need connection. Covid, Post Covid hiring blitzes, tech sector layoffs, workers feeling commoditised, how do employers manage this?Alana describes this in two ways.1 - Connection intensity. The depth of connection we hav...

Meqa is the owner/founder of the Unforgettable agency. She's on a mission to help companies stop employing people and start enrolling them. In this episode, we discuss how we all want to feel part of a tribe, how to inspire people to go the extra mile, leadership's role in hiring and the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.Big ticket items: 1:00 Employment mindset VS Enrolment mindset 1:50: Why is it so hard to re...

»»» Matt Woodard is a mainstay of the Australian Talent Acquisition community. With close to 2 decades of experience hiring for leading technology companies and now running his own business, Scalr, we thought he might be the best person to ask, What The F&@k is a Talent Strategy?It's a catchphrase we hear used a lot but like a lot of them, there's some ambiguity around what it actually is. Luckily Matt was able to help decipher...

With over a decade of software engineering exp Adam has been through interview processes with several big-name tech companies. He’s got some great thoughts and opinions on what things stand out as really positive and what could be done better. If you’re an engineer who’s thinking of the next role or someone who hires software engineers, you’ll find something useful in this discussion. The big ticket items:02.00 Why do you think eve...

Matthew Clements is a "responsible steward of capital" ™️ AKA VP of Growth at Budgetly. Ker-ching 💰With 12 years of sales and 6 years of leadership experience, Matthew brings a wealth of experience in the tech space. He's grown sales teams in the B2B & B2C space and in this episode, he shares thoughts on early-stage hiring and sales in general.Matthew mentions the book Drive by Daniel PinkBig Ticket items:4:30 When growing the...

Catherine Toms is one half (some would say the best half) of The Toms, a digital marketing consultancy that helps marketing teams to cut through all the noise in an evolving and shifting market.As an ex-recruiter she brings a unique insight into both worlds and actually works with agencies to think like marketers. “When a business takes a product or service to market, they are trying to clarify who their target market is and how th...

Engineering Leader Lauren Grimes talk to us about the challenges and fun of early-stage hiring The Melbourne success story that is Xplor was the first role where she was responsible for hiring and not just a participant. Now she’s in a new start-up, and she’s applying the lessons she’s learnt from early stage, fast growth hiring and sharing them with us.4:54 Outside of tech skills, we looked for people who could go on a journey. Pe...

When we say that Sam Robb is a StartUp hiring veteran we don't mean that he's 65, we mean that he's been through several fast-growth StartUp journeys. His experience with organisations such as A Cloud Guru, My Yum and now EQL mean that he's got solid operational knowledge to share and some real-world lessons we can learn from.In this discussion, he shares his thoughts on blending pragmatism and the desire to move quickly with the n...

In this episode, Talent Acquisition leader Mitch King shares his insights into StartUp hiring. When he joined a scrappy startup called Linktree that had a simple yet big idea, he couldn't have imagined growing the business from a handful of people to over 300. And that along the way, Linktree would raise ~$165m and go on to unicorn status. We talked to Mitch and got his opinion on several topics, including;

• On transparency in h...

Welcome to today's episode (the first!) of Start, Scale. Grow, where we delve into the crucial aspect of hiring for startups and businesses of all sizes. Interviewing is a vital aspect of building a strong team, but it can be challenging, especially when starting out. How do you know what to look for in a candidate? How do you determine a good fit quickly? 

In this episode, we sit down with Caitlin Fairchild, who has extensive exper...