Josh TolanEpisode 15 – Alexandra Maas, OpenView
OpenView is a leading venture capital firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. With a focus on expansion-stage software companies, OpenView is committed to helping entrepreneurs build high-growth, scalable businesses. OpenView’s team of experienced professionals brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise in areas such as sales, marketing, and product development, providing invaluable resources to help companies navigate the challenges of scaling.
OpenView takes a meticulous and thorough approach to its recruiting process, ensuring that it identifies and attracts the most talented individuals. Throughout the process, OpenView maintains open and transparent communication, providing candidates with a clear understanding of the firm’s expectations and offering ample opportunities for them to ask questions and learn about the organization.
This episode of The Speed to Hire Show features Alexandra Maas, Director of Talent at OpenView.
Key Takeaways
- [6:21] Search for comfort with ambiguity in candidate profiles -identify candidates who know their why but are adaptable and resilient to ensure the perfect balance between fit and flexibility in new hires
- [10:56] An exclusive look at OpenView’s hiring process – find out what drives success across OpenView’s hiring team
- [12:22] Establish internal alignment with your team early – learn from hiring managers what works and doesn’t work to build an informed hiring strategy everyone aligns with
- [15:42] Lead with empathy and be mindful of the candidate’s experience – be conscious of avoiding analysis paralysis and give each candidate the best possible experience in your hiring process
- [18:16] Hold a high standard for candidate experience and time-to-hire – keep focus on an efficient hiring process to ensure a consistent candidate experience regardless of the market
- [20:29] Be diligent with follow-ups to improve speed-to-hire – encourage strong alignment on the communication process to keep candidates in the loop throughout the entire hiring process
Video Transcript
JOSH TOLAN: Alright. Well, let’s get started then. So tell me a little bit about yourself.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. So I am Alex. I live in Boston, and I work for a company called OpenView, which is a venture capital firm – we invest in early-stage startups. And what I do on the team is I work with those startups and I work with really great candidates in the market and essentially play matchmaker between awesome people and awesome companies.
Before that, I was at Drift where we were introduced as an account executive. And worked at a number of different startups before that and was actually in PR before moving into sales and then recruiting. So it took a very interesting path here.
And you know, beyond that from New Jersey have, you know, amazing family and friends still there and have been living in Boston for the last few years. And just really enjoying the study.
JOSH TOLAN: Great. Well, yeah. I think the backstory would be helpful for people. We initially got connected when you were at Drift. You were our rep as we were using Drift here at Spark Hire, and we loved working with you. And it’s been great to follow you along in your journey and moving from sales to recruiting and now at OpenView.
So that’s been awesome to see. I think that’s a great place to start. I love to learn more about that transition. Like you said, you were in PR marketing, you moved into sales, and then now you find yourself in talent acquisition. So I’m curious about how you landed here.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. I think I took a little bit of an unorthodox path into recruiting, but I think what I’ve always really recognized about myself is that I love connecting with people, and I love telling stories, and I love, you know, trying to connect stories to something that they’ll really onto and be interested in.
And I think that’s like a huge part of PR. It’s a huge part of selling and it’s a huge part of recruiting.
So, you know, was in PR, loved the aspect of pitching and telling different, you know, news organizations or different stakeholders about a product, a tool, a different initiative that was going on. And ultimately felt like that wasn’t the right place for me and found that sales would be a place where I could really connect with people and still continue to sell stories and really tone those skills more, so I moved into being a BDR at a company called Nanigans, where I was really lucky to connect with a lot of really great marketers. I don’t think I realized how lucky I was at the time.
We were an e-commerce business doing a lot of e-commerce-focused platforms for advertising. So working with huge e-commerce companies, retailers, you know, lead generation gaming businesses, and I was DDR talking to their digital folks and twenty years old and helping them to qualify their Facebook budgets, which I didn’t, like, really recognize how awesome that was.
And ultimately kinda grew out of my role and was asked to bring on Drift at that business, loved the tool, saw how powerful it was, and actually ended up moving over to the team to go do sales there. And spent a year in sales at Drift and was really lucky to be a part of, you know, the first ten people on the sales team and like, I think first thirty within the business overall.
So just got to see a lot of the growth, you know, early days at Drift was really excited to be pulled into a lot of different directions. And one of those directions was helping to interview and help to bring more people onto the sales team at Drift. And I quickly recognized that you know, that is also selling, and that is also connecting with people and sharing ideas and seeing how it resonates with them and really found a lot of interest in that and they act as, like, connecting with people and and actually helping them to move in a different direction in their career or join an organization that will really help to impact them later on you know, just the act of recruiting itself.
So I was lucky enough to be, you know, able to move into the sales recruiting or building out our sales team in San Francisco. And then got to touch a lot of different parts of the organization from there, doing some product hiring, marketing hiring, and G and A hiring. So we scaled a lot during that time, so I was able to see a lot of really interesting and cool roles.
But, yeah, that was a little bit about the path. And now I opened you, didn’t really know that, like, VCs offered this type of, you know, talent help to their portfolio companies.
Steve on my team, who’s our operating partner, reached out to me and explained what we do at OpenView and just kind of couldn’t pass up the opportunity to come over here and work with a lot of different businesses on their hiring practices.
JOSH TOLAN: That’s great. Yeah. And it’s interesting to me, you know, we hear a lot about folks that are in sales, move into recruiting. But I think your PR background is also very interesting because like you said, you had to pitch. You had to sell buzz. You had to sell excitement about whatever story you were trying to promote. And there’s a lot of that that goes into recruiting as well.
So I’m sure you bring some of that creative flair to recruiting. And then so in Drift, you were working in sales. You got exposed to the interview process. Was that as a peer interviewer?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. Yeah. So I would enter the process as a peer interviewer to kinda tell, you know, whoever was interviewing a little bit more about the team, a little bit more about culture, just kinda get a sense of who they were and kinda give them a sense of who we were and how, you know, my day to day looked like.
I didn’t do it a ton, but I when I was able to do it, it was really exciting and I loved it. Yeah. That’s great. And then, you know, as I know, you know, Drift is really fast-growing company for those that don’t know.
JOSH TOLAN: And so how much do you lean on, you know, now that you’re helping recruit for more early-stage startups how much do you lean on your experience as being part of a company, fast-growing company like Drift and help recruit for some of these early-stage companies?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Spot, like a lot. So my focus at OpenVu is I hire for our strategic roles, so that can be anywhere from, like, ahead of VP all the way down to a strategic I see, and I do that within our sales and marketing practice.
So traditionally, with my career, I think I was a salesperson who then went into hiring salespeople, And now I do that for a lot of different companies as well as marketing. And I come back to that, you know, just early stages at Drift of when we were building the team and what good looked like and the type of personalities that are really successful in early stage businesses a lot because that’s what I was exposed to.
And I think it’s it’s been really helpful to kinda see what we did at Drift and then apply that to all these other, you know, great companies that we’re seeing scale really quickly and build out amazing sales teams. Yeah. And tell me a little bit about that process ad group. How did you guys go about figuring out what good looks like, and what types of personalities you need to bring into the business when you were hiring it at such a rad scale?
I think it changed a lot with just the evolution of the business. You know, the stage of fifty people to a hundred, then a hundred to two hundred, you’re gonna be looking for different things, but I think it was always around people who know their why, why they love sales, why they’re interested in the product, why, you know, they’re driven for their own success. I think it’s people who have that history of being successful or have, you know, the type of grit that you’d be looking for in an early-stage business.
You know, a lot of things are not going to be built out already, so comfort in operating and ambiguity and, you know, the ability to kind of be a self-starter and have that mindset is definitely something that I think we looked for time and time again kind of, you know, as we scaled and moved up Mhmm.
JOSH TOLAN: And were there certain types of interviewing techniques or questions you guys would ask to screen for those types of attributes?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. So we had our leadership principles at Drift, and that’s something that we leaned on pretty heavily.
You know, I can’t remember them all in the town of my head right now because I’ve been remeasurement for the last two and a half years, but I think, you know, those were the types of things that we would look for to say like, hey, is this person going to be a great fit for the sales team, but for Drift overall as well.
Yeah. Great. And so now you’re at OpenVue.
There are a bunch of portfolio companies as if people don’t know OpenVue is they pretty well-known VC firm with a lot of cool companies in the portfolio. How many are you supporting at a time?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: So open view, we’re investing in like you said, early-stage businesses and typically what we can be most is when we invest in the business, like, about, like, a year to two years after that investment. A lot of these businesses are going to be either series I or series B, so they might not have a fully-fledged talent yet, and we can help them with those early hires that are going to be most impactful for their growth long-term.
And then as they start to think about building their own talent team were able to kind of shift those priorities back to their talent side and give them the tools that they need to be successful and they on their hiring from there.
It’s an interesting dynamic because you guys almost serve your team almost serves as, like, an RPO to these businesses. Right? And then at some point, you hand it back over to them once they’re mature enough or at scale enough to take that over and have their own team.
What types of challenges though does that present for you as being this, like, outside team that’s recruiting on behalf of all these different companies at the same time?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. And we’re only working on, like, some of their highest priority roles.
So they definitely have, like, recruiting that they’re doing on their end too, we don’t totally run things.
We’ll do the most impactful roles that they feel like they need the most help on and they kind of have some other hiring practices they have running in the background. I think for me coming from being an internal recruiter to then kind of being, you know, helping people out from afar. It’s just that communication loop and then, you know, kind of trying to get a sense of what everyone needs, scheduling, next steps, getting a lot of those different things where you’re able to move really quickly.
I think probably the biggest challenge is just, like, not being fully embedded into the team and, you know, trying to just, like, drive as much communication as possible while not physically being on that team.
Yeah. And you’re coordinating with so many different people across different brands. So it’s like, you know, you’ve got different messages, different selling points, like different people.
All that requires a lot of coordination. What’s the makeup of your team at OpenView that’s doing all this?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. So we have Steve, who is our operating partner. He comes from a really strong executive search background. He was with True for many years. And then we have our executive hiring team, which is led by Mackey Crane, and we have VIV on the team as well. And they focus on all of our hiring for exec across a lot of different functions, whether that’s, you know, G and A hiring, product hiring, sales hiring, marketing hiring.
And then we have our strategic hiring, which is led by myself and Alex Carrier. Alex comes from a pretty similar background to myself. She was over at Salsify for a couple of years, Cloud Health. And she does a lot of our product CS and G and A hiring with Maeve on our team who also came from True Search.
And then Bridget and I, Bridget Snow came over from the Boden Group, and we focused on strategic hiring for sales and marketing. I mean, Katie, Katie does internal recruiting for open view and does an incredible job with that. Got it. So you yeah.
JOSH TOLAN: So you’re kinda mixed with this external recruiting and then like you just said with Katie internal recruiting for open views. So, again, a lot of people to coordinate with, can you walk me through what is like generally when you’re working with one of the portfolio companies, what does the hiring process look like? What are you guys responsible for? What are they responsible for?
How do you keep it running smoothly on both ends?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. I think it’s different with every company because everyone has a different way of doing things. I think the things that we like to do is to really be full with the sourcing upfront, then we’ll kick off a search, we’ll do a kickoff call, really get a sense of what they’re looking for, we’ll go into the market, we’ll start to really strategically map, like, what could this person look like?
We’ll bring back those profiles to the company, do a deep dive of a review, make sure we’re all on the same page of what good looks like, you know, at that time, it can change over the course of the search, and then get into the market and really start to have a lot of conversations with candidates. And I think what we typically recommend is they have a lot of great networking conversations upfront. You know, having more conversations at the start really informs what good’s gonna look like, what’s not going to work, what you like, what you don’t like, and then kinda hone in on exactly who is going to be the best bet from there.
We do a lot of just, like, connecting people. Like I said, playing that matchmaker role of, like, screening a lot of great candidates and then kinda seeing who’s going to be a fit for what based off of what we learn about those candidates. So we’re not truly, like, embedded into their hiring practices. In terms of creating the process, we’d help them think through what a good process looks like.
But we really, you know, want it to be unique to whatever every company needs and what their, you know, internal best practices are.
JOSH TOLAN: Mhmm.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: And how do you go about helping them do that? Because like you said, some of them don’t necessarily have a talent team already built out, so they might have no process when they start to work with you guys.
JOSH TOLAN: So what’s the process and what do you guys go through to help them build that out and define all those different steps and how they should be going about things?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. I think it’s it’s really about internal alignment first. Right?
Like, who do we need on this interview team? Who is going to make be impactful in making this decision for the business? Having all of those people bought in for the scorecard on that role, like making sure that everyone is in alignment of who we need, why we need this, and then having all those people involved in the interview process. And then building out just a really strong, you know, panel for that understanding who’s going to own what in the interview process in terms of questions and evaluating which areas for the role.
And then just advising them on different, you know, practices, you know, panel interviews, how many people you should have on that. Presentations? What we’ve seen be successful, not successful? Do you need a presentation for this role and then just help them kind of navigate the closing process as well in terms of compensation benchmarking, equity benchmarking, making sure that they’re going in with the strongest offer first so that they can, you know, really remove a lot of the back and forth and get the candidate they want.
JOSH TOLAN: And it’s a lot of structure, and it’s also across a wide range of companies. So what do you guys come in with, like, a predefined this is generally how our company should run their hiring process or do you each time you kick off a process with new hiring managers at different companies? Is it, like, starting on the whiteboard from scratch?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Hopefully starting on the whiteboard from scratch and hearing what’s been working for them thus far and, like, you know, really understanding what is important to them to get from an interview process and then giving them advisement on what we’ve seen be successful and helping them just trying to figure out the best path forward from there.
JOSH TOLAN: Yeah. I like that because you’re coming in with a beginner’s mind. Like, obviously, you have some preconceived notions about how the hiring process should run, and you’ll have your best practices.
But coming in and talking to the people that are gonna be involved in the hiring process and learning from them and what’s worked and what hasn’t worked.
I think allows you to build some more trust because you’re not coming in and saying, hey, we have to do x, y, and z. This is how we’re gonna run it, and you’re just kinda mandating what the process is gonna be – makes it more collaborative, which I think is even more important when you’re, like, this outside recruiting team that’s not totally embedded within the business. And so you really have to build trust. I would say even more so than, like, an internal recruiting team and the hiring managers that are part of the same company.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. And that’s the goal. Right? Like, we wanna build trust. We wanna be seen as advisors.
We never wanna be seen as, like, telling them what to do. We’re just here to support them in finding the best people possible to make them successful as possible.
JOSH TOLAN: Yeah. And so and working with all these companies, what are some of the things that you guys are focused on right now? What are the goals?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. I think it’s fluid, right, based on the needs of who has what role is coming up. I think, you know, just in the market right now, it’s been such an interesting time over this year. And I think we’ve seen sales hiring be really, you know, a hot demand.
I think we’re really gold on just getting the best people possible into these roles. And I know that’s kind of like a vague goal. Like, it’s it’s more so just about finding really great people who will help them move into their next phase of growth. Totally.
JOSH TOLAN: And are you guys seeing, you know, obviously, the market’s changed over the last twelve, twenty-four months? You know, for better and for worse, or what are some of the challenges you guys are running into today?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. I think it’s definitely been a challenging time in the market with just so many layoffs and so many, you know, things happening from an economic perspective. I think just really advising companies to lead with empathy in this market and really be mindful of, you know, candidates are going to be doing extra diligence in this market, like, making sure that you’re giving them all the, you know, information they need to make the best decision for them long-term because that’s super important.
Right? I think a lot of people saw a lot of hiring in prior years that just was go go go go go go. And now it’s about being more thoughtful about, like, what is the best decision long term. I think it’s about really learning about the product, really learning about product market fit.
People are really digging into that diligence on, like, how is the company doing? Are these sales teams hitting their targets and being really thoughtful about moving into their next step? So, we’re really advising companies to make sure that they’re providing that information and making sure that these can are comfortable and providing a really great candidate experience in that way. And also just really being mindful of candidate experience overall, like really having a tight feedback loop you know, not getting analysis paralysis thinking that, you know, there are tons of candidates in the market and really making decisions based off of who they’re speaking to now and really valuing people’s time and treating them, you know, with a lot of respect, which companies inherently already do, but it’s always a good reminder to just, like, put themselves in the candidate’s shoes.
So, yeah, I think leading with empathy, transparency, and just really being mindful of candidate experience and, you know, providing a great experience because how a candidate talks about, you know, your employee brand and how their experience was interviewing is just as important as you know, a customer talks about your product.
JOSH TOLAN: Yeah. I love the approach of leading with empathy because like you said, there are a lot of candidates on the market that might have not had the best ending with their previous employer. People are stressed out. And so the hiring process is stressful as a candidate when you’re going through it. So I think, yeah, you know, kinda putting yourself in the candidate’s shoes and leading with empathy and being transparent about the business and really giving people all the information they need.
To make a decision. Right? It’s good for you as the employer because if they decide to join, they’ve done their diligence. You’ve got somebody that’s really bought in.
You’ve done your diligence hopefully to learn about their why. Right? And to make sure they’re they’re a good fit for the business. So I think that’s a really good approach.
I like what you said about, you know, I think you touched on a tight feedback loop even though there were a ton of candidates on I think. You know, one of the things is, as we look back, you know, twelve, eighteen months ago, the market was crazy in another way in the sense that you had to so fast to get offers out because everybody was competing for talent, and it was just a race. And so I think for one, you know, candidates were jumping in offers because, you know, competition was high. The offers were really good.
It was so competitive. It was definitely like a candidate-driven market, and employers are moving super, super fast to get offers out in order to compete for that talent. And now as you fast forward to today, it’s a little bit different. Right?
You post a, you know, whatever job, you’re getting hundreds and hundreds of people applying. And I think you know, sometimes that gives employers an impression of well. There’s all this talent to choose from, so we could take our time, we can over analyze, you know, we don’t maybe need to have as strong of a focus on the candidate experience because look at all these options that we have.
But I think you would touch on an important point is that no matter what the market looks like, you should always, as a hiring team, hold yourself to a certain standard from a candidate experience standpoint, from a time to hire standpoint because when the market changes, you want to have that good employer brand impression you know, that you ran a good hiring process that you got back to candidates, that everything was timely, that you gave that information.
And so I think that’s super important to consider in a market like this.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think it’s just, again, putting yourself in the candidate’s shoes. Right? Like, there was our list of the market, you wanna provide that really great experience.
And I think that also goes back to, like, knowing what you want to do before kicking off a search and really being prepped with your internal team on what good looks like so that you can make those decisions very quickly when you find it.
JOSH TOLAN: Yeah. Setting all those objective criteria upfront so you don’t have to think about it as you’re going through the process. And like you said, that causes a lot of, you know, paralysis by over-analysis right, where you’re waffling back and forth on candidates, and a lot of times that’s just because you didn’t really set clear guidelines and exactly what good looks like and what you’re looking for.
From the outset. So, you know, you guys are managing a lot across, you know, like we’ve talked about a few times, you know, a bunch of different companies, bunch of different open roles, what are some of the things in the interest of talking about, you know, time to hire and making it a smooth process for candidates? What are some of the things that you guys really focus on?
To make sure that the hiring process is moving along and people are making quick decisions and the feedback loops are tight to ensure that a company can obviously hire somebody quickly also that candidates, you know, leave with a good impression whether they get hired or not on the company.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. I think and I hate to be in force here or whatever the thing is, but I think it’s a lot that prep before kicking off a search. Like, really having the alignment on the scorecard, really having strong alignment on the with us and who is owning what and exactly what different phases are going to be important for a candidate to hit.
I think it’s also really about setting a strong sourcing strategy too of knowing where you wanna go from, you know, really mapping the market of where this can good candidate could live.
And then I think just you know, being diligent about, you know, following up with candidates. We do weekly meetings to check in on the hiring process. Check in on where candidates stand, if you have received feedback, and what is the feedback on those conversations, and help can like companies think that through as well. So just really making sure there’s a lot of touch points with both the companies and the candidates to keep things moving, you know, in the right direction.
JOSH TOLAN: And are you guys working inside the tech that they already use? Like, are you do you have to collaborate across multiple applicant tracking systems with the different companies, or how does that work? So we use Thrive, and we keep all of our hiring information in there.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: So, typically, we’re not in Greenhouse, but we can certainly hop in coming from, you know, internal recruiting teams. We do know the ATSs, so we can do that, but most often, we just kinda keep things within our own personal recruiting system.
JOSH TOLAN: Got it. And so that probably helps you keep people more aligned and you have more visibility on going on throughout all these different processes.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. Exactly.
JOSH TOLAN: Got it. Take me back to the kickoff meeting, you know, where you’re determining all these different things, how do you help a company think through all of these areas, you know, think through a scorecard if they’ve never built one, think through the objective criteria on what makes somebody good for a role that maybe they’ve never hired before.
Like, what’s the process? How do you prompt them to figure that out or work with you to figure that out?
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. I think it’s about really understanding what’s driving the need for this role.
Like, what what problem are we solving what objective are we solving by hiring this person and then really understanding what are the nice to have attributes that we’re looking for and what are the need to have attributes that we’re looking for? A lot of times, you know, they come in with a pretty strong understanding of what they need from a skill set perspective of, you know, say it’s a director of demand gen. They have to have experience with ABM or, you know, they have to have different experiences with certain programs.
And then helping them think through, like, okay, do we need someone who’s gone through, like, growth stage, you know, appropriate roles before? Have they seen companies scale and just really thinking through the different attributes that are going to make this person successful, and then putting together an ideal profile based off of that. That we can then use when we’re chatting with candidates, going through, you know, sourcing projects, and feel out who will be the best fit for the role based off of those objectives.
JOSH TOLAN: Yeah. I like that you start with the problem in mind first. Right? What are we actually trying to solve? And I think it goes most times probably a layer deeper than, you know, what the companies initially think that is.
Right? So a company might think we need more leads. We need a head of marketing. Right?
We need a head of marketing, and it’s like, okay. You know, certainly, in your shoes, we can help you go out to market and find that head of marketing. But that still doesn’t really tell me there are a lot of different types of heads of marketing and people specialize and have certain skill sets, they come from a certain background. So as I am head of marketing, typically, they might bring a certain specialty to the table.
So really, it’s like, yes, you need more leads, but what problems are you actually facing in the business that’s preventing you from getting more leads? Is it a demand gen thing? Is it a, you know, conversion rate optimization thing, right, where you’re getting traffic, but you’re just not converting them? Like, there’s think through what problems you’re having as a business, and that helps you really identify the person you need versus the role that you need,
So the title as a title, but ultimately, it comes down to who do you need in that seat.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Like, what type of background will help you solve for this problem, and, like, what are the skill sets that that person will bring to the table?
JOSH TOLAN: Yeah. I really, really like that approach. I think people will find a lot of value in that because I think you know, you start to recruit for a position that maybe you’ve never hired for before and you go out and your first step is like, alright.
We need I’ll just keep using that example. We need a marketing person or a salesperson, whatever it is, you go out, you Google it, you see what other companies write for all the bullet points of what this person’s gonna do, but it’s, like, that’s all dependent on what those other companies need. You have to really think through what do we need as a business and start there versus going out and just trying to find a job description for, you know, whatever role you think is going to solve that problem within the business.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Totally.
And I think that’s kind of where that networking play comes in too, like, having a lot of conversations upfront, having conversations with businesses that you admire that maybe have hired for this role for? What did they look for? What did they use for the interview process? What made them successful?
And then also having a lot of great candidates can of the conversations, you just kinda hone in on what’s working, what’s not working from a profile perspective, and just have more conversations up front as you really kind of figure out what’s going to be the best fit for your business.
JOSH TOLAN: Mhmm. And you guys have the benefit of being able to see that across a bunch of different companies you know, within the portfolio whereas, you know, a team directly sitting within the business only, you know, sees what they’re seeing in their direct line of business. And so you guys definitely have that advantage.
And I think the other thing that helps you is you’ve got this external perspective similar to, like, what an agency might have and working with a lot of different clients. But you have different motivation factors than an agency has. Right? An agency is gonna make money by hiring people for the business.
You guys are motivated to help find the right people for these businesses because you have a financial stake, you’re a company in these the success of these businesses. And so I think that, again, brings another level of trust when you’re talking with the portfolio companies versus, you know, an agency outside that’s giving them these things, hey. This is what we’re seeing across our other clients. It’s like, Okay.
Yes. But the agency also has some other motivational factors at play around comp and around all these types of things. But for you guys, you bring, like, I feel like the true pulse of the market to your companies, and that helps them make decisions and helps build trust and, you know, ultimately helps them run a better process to hire a better people.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. We just truly wanna be a value add to them and help partners so that they can be as successful as possible at the end of the day. Like, that is our true motivation.
JOSH TOLAN: Well, Alex, this has been awesome. I love learning, you know, about what you guys are up to at OpenView. It’s also, you know, a unique story, I feel like, in the market, I talked to a lot of internal talent acquisition leaders, so getting this perspective of somebody that’s working across, you know, a bunch of different companies in the tech space has been really interesting, and it’s also just been great in general catching up with you.
Like I said in the beginning, I’ve loved following your career from afar, and everywhere you’ve taken it, and sounds like you’ve been having a lot of success, so that’s been great to see.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. No. It’s so good to reconnect. Definitely have come a long way since my early days of selling to you at Drift, but it’s that full circle moment here for sure.
JOSH TOLAN: Yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting because, you know, like you said, you solid your passion, you’ve wound up where you’re meant to be.
And, you know, going back to the days that we worked together at Drift, you know, we loved working with you as a rep. And I think a lot of those skills that you demonstrated there as a rep have really carried forward in your career, and you’re kind of applying all the best parts of the experience that you’ve added to recruiting and, you know, quite frankly, that’s probably what’s led to a lot of growth in your career in recruiting and help lead you to where you are today. So that’s it’s awesome to see. Always selling. Everything sells.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Yeah. That’s for sure.
JOSH TOLAN: Alright. Well, thanks so much, Alex. It’s been great catching up, and good luck with everything.
ALEXANDRA MAAS: Awesome. Thank you. Cool.
