Grow Talent

Rob Goodman:

Hiring great people is one of the biggest challenges that growing organizations face. So how do you do it better? And how do you recruit and nurture the talent you need in order to succeed? Hi everyone, and welcome to Ready For Takeoff, the new micro podcast series from Wix, all about hyper growth. I'm your host, Rob Goodman, ExecutivePproducer for content at Wix.

Rob Goodman:

In each episode, we go deep on one single topic in under 15 minutes. Sharing insights and lessons learned from the leaders that build Wix as we talk about everything it takes to build a world class global organization. Today, we've got General Manager and Head of Partners, Michal Bignitz. Over her more than nine years at Wix, Michal has led a slew of teams and hired and nurtured a countless array of people here at the company. In today's episode, she's sharing her top insights on how to attract and grow great talent. I started off asking Michal about the most important part of the recruiting process. Her answer just might surprise you. Here's Michal.

Michal Bignitz:

Candidate experience, I think it's one of the most important things that you should think of when you are building a recruitment process. It's not just about who you will hire, it's also about what the candidate will feel once you will reject them, or once you'll tell them that currently we don't have anything that is relevant for them, but you might want to call them one day and offer them something. So I think that this should be in mind as well. You also want each step in the process of the recruitment process to discover something else about the candidate. If it's the same set of questions being asked by different people, it is not helping you to get a better decision or a better understanding of who is in front of you, but also from the candidate perspective, it seems useless and also a bit boring.

Michal Bignitz:

So again, try to really define what are these steps and what are the kinds of questions or things that you want to discover in each of these steps. And according to that, build the recruitment funnel. I think another thing is that you don't want the process to be too long, right? The star candidates are probably interviewing in other places as well, and probably companies are fighting over them. So you don't want to lose them just because you weren't fast enough or your process was too slow or you didn't discover them early in the process. And this is another thing that you want to have. You want to be able to mark the stars and to make sure they're getting a faster line. You don't want to lose them. These are the candidates that you want to catch and if your process would be too slow, you will end up with, sorry for saying it, but the mediocre candidates and not the star quality that you want to have in your company.

Michal Bignitz:

I would say one last thing, which I think that every person who is hiring should remember. First of all, a candidate is a person and treat every candidate like they were yourself. And I think that again, it's the candidate experience and it's making sure that everyone is leaving the process, whether they got hired or whether they were rejected with a good feeling about themself. But also you should be flexible. You don't want to recruit duplicates. At the end of the day, every candidate brings their own benefits or their own concern. And now you need to see how this candidate can fit one of your team. And it's both about the personality and the professional benefit that they're bringing.

Michal Bignitz:

At the end of the day each team has different strengths and weaknesses, and you want to see how someone that you are bringing will help you create a full working team that can collaborate and work together and complete each other. So I think that also being flexible within the recruitment process, even if it's a huge, large scale recruitment process, you want to be able to do that and you need to have this kind of flexibility.

Rob Goodman:

It really is about knowing your team and finding the people who are going to be like those missing puzzle pieces that help complete the picture. One of the ways that we do that here at Wix is by nurturing new talent. So I asked Michal to tell me a bit about the student program she built here at Wix and the benefits and challenges of training folks with less experience.

Michal Bignitz:

So the idea actually came from the fact that I was a student who worked in different companies. So, like, while I was a student, I experienced in the industry, in the real life. And I think that for me, it was amazing because it allowed me to understand where do I want to direct my career? So it started from my own experience and I knew how motivated I was, how passionate I was for what the startup that I joined. And I think that at the end of the day, it was an amazing added value for me as a student. So it started from there and I think that at the end of the day, both sides can have a great impact out of a student program.

Michal Bignitz:

First of all, as I mentioned, it's great opportunities for the students themselves to experience, to see how they are putting in action the things that they have learned. This is on one hand and the other side, the side of the company hiring super talented people at the beginning of their career, teaching them your company way of doing things. In our case, it was how to do product, enjoying their super, super high motivation, dedication, and of course at the end of the day, appreciation – it's priceless. So I think that at the end of the day, it's really a win-win both for the students and for the companies that are doing that.

Michal Bignitz:

But I can also tell you that some of the best heads of product in Wix today were students in the first few rounds I did six years ago. So again, the best talents out of these programs. But I can say that for this to succeed you need to have the capacity. You need to have the right people that can support it and you need to have patience because for a student that is joining your company, it will take between six to 12 months until they will start really contributing to what you are doing. So it takes time.

Rob Goodman:

We all love a win-win, but like Michal said, it takes time and patience to train junior talent. And we all know speed is of the essence, especially at a hyper growth company. So how do you find that balance, that right mix between fresh ideas and depth of experience that's so crucial to building a strong team?

Michal Bignitz:

Yeah. So as you all know, I'm all up for the less experienced people that are joining to the team. But I think that at the end of the day, you need to ask yourself, can my team support it right now? Because at the end of the day, you want to have a good blend of seniors, juniors, people that can teach and learn from each other. And you want together as a team that they will be able to achieve the goals that we set to ourselves. So having only juniors or only seniors would never work, but you also need to find the right balance and the right time to do that or to hire juniors. And I can tell you that now when I'm building the team for Partners, the company of Partners, so I started with building the management. Management obviously are senior people, strong people, mostly people that you can trust that you may be familiar with from before and know what they're bringing and how strong they are.

Michal Bignitz:

And now when we have few strong from each of the fields, from the dev team, from the product team, from the UX designer team, now we can afford to hire also the juniors or the one with less experience because we have a way to support it. But before that, it's not something that you can actually do. So I think that you should aim to that because you want to have a diversity in your team. And at the end of the day, these super talented juniors are the leaders of tomorrow. And they will be like super experts in a few years and you want to be part of their path and part of their growth, but you also need to understand what it takes and you need to be able to support that because if you won't do it, it will be a loss for both sides. It can be a massive success for both sides or a loss. And it's all depends on the capacity that you have to support it.

Rob Goodman:

Yeah, that mix is so critical because if you have amazing talent with burgeoning skillset, they need to have the right direction in order to grow, in order to flourish, in order to kind of like focus their lasers, focus their superpowers in the right direction to move forward. And senior leadership needs that right mix of people setting that vision, executing it, but also the people who have that early career fire and motivation and malleability to fit in these different pieces and different areas and make the vision come to life.

Rob Goodman:

One of the main takeaways from this episode is that it's so important to create that right blend of talent for your team. Mixing more tenured staff with junior talent so that growth and mentorship can happen across the entire team. And how building a talent onboarding program like the one Michal discussed for students can be an incredible way to both attract and train your next generation of leaders.

Rob Goodman:

Ready for Takeoff is brought to you by Wix. Now, if you don't know about Wix, we're the all-in-one platform for running your business online, trusted by over 210 million people around the world. With Wix, you get incredible security, reliability, performance and SEO, no matter the kind of business you run or the size. With Wix, anything is possible. So visit wix.com to start building and growing your business today.

Rob Goodman:

Thanks so much for listening. You can find more episodes and information on our website at wix.com/readyfortakeoff. Ready for Takeoff is hosted and produced by me, Rob Goodman, at Wix. With production by Lindsay Jean Thomson at Wix. Audio engineering and editing is by Brian Pake at Pacific Audio. Music is composed and performed by Kimo Muraki. Our Executive Producers from Wix are Susan Kaplow and me, Rob Goodman. We'll see you next time.