Major efforts at staffing up are in the cards for JumpCloud.
When the company announced its Series E funding late last year, the company said it hoped to bring aboard hundreds of new team members in the near future. Like other companies adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic, though, that growth will now take place in a remote-first model.
According to Director of People Attraction Katy Flatau, both employees and potential hires like the convenience afforded by the arrangement.
“Candidates appreciate that they have the flexibility to live and work in the place that works best for them,” Flatau said. “We’ve also seen a supportive response from our current employees and several of them have also made the decision to relocate over the past year. More than 30 percent of the company now works outside of Colorado. ”
Growing a remote team, though, is only successful if the adjoining hiring and onboarding process is well-thought-out, structured, and adapts to remote needs. Flatau said that the organization introduced “additional touch points” in the interviewing process, while ensuring onboarding is thoughtful enough to not overly inundate new hires with programming from the onset.
With the organization currently hiring for more than 40 open roles in areas like sales, engineering and product, Flatau shared how the remote-first process is driving growth — and how it recalibrated relevant processes as a result.
About JumpCloud
Which teams are expanding the most at your company? What proportion of your open positions are available to remote workers?
JumpCloud is expanding across the entire organization. Company size has increased by more than 80 percent since I joined in June 2020. Like many growth-stage tech companies, we’re continually hiring in engineering and product, but we’re also doing a lot of hiring in sales, customer success, operations and marketing.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, JumpCloud was almost one hundred percent Colorado-based. As we started to navigate the pandemic, we were also starting to grow more rapidly, so we made the decision to open up many of our roles to candidates across the United States. Now, more than 99 percent of the roles at JumpCloud are remote-first. The only exceptions are a few specific roles that support the day-to-day needs of our Louisville and Denver offices here in Colorado.
Candidates appreciate that they have the flexibility to live and work in the place that works best for them.”
What did you change about the hiring process to better accommodate remote applicants?
As we did this, we had to do a deep dive into our recruiting and interview processes. We needed to get our job postings in front of candidates in other markets where we didn’t historically have a brand presence. Then, we streamlined the interview process to support the virtual experience. Hiring managers determined what they really need to discover about a candidate to make their hiring decisions, as well as exactly who needs to talk to each candidate, how much time they need together and specific topics for each interviewer to discuss.
Finally, we added additional touch points that make a huge difference for candidates and teams. These include short one-on-one warm-up calls before group presentations so candidates don’t come in cold, ensuring there is scheduled time for breaks and meals; and allowing time for candidates to have a chance to reconnect with the hiring manager to ask and answer questions during the process. Some of these touch points seem straightforward, but it’s easy to forget them when you’re trying to juggle schedules and everything is happening over video. We’ve made a huge amount of progress since we took the hiring process virtual and are always looking for new areas of opportunity.
How has the onboarding process shifted to ensure offsite employees feel welcomed and engaged?
Our learning and development team has been consciously overhauling our onboarding process to optimize every new JumpCloudian’s initial experiences as we continue to scale in this remote-first model. Our new hire onboarding experience is completely virtual, but with a high degree of human touch. We consistently receive remarks that this is the best onboarding the new hire has ever been through.
We align one hundred percent around welcoming and supporting our new hires to be immediately successful and to experience early wins so they feel welcomed and part of the high-performing team from the beginning. During week one, for example, we space out the onboarding experiences and discussions so that new hires don’t feel overwhelmed. For new managers, we have a “new leader program” that supports them for their first three months so they have a safe space to learn, ask questions and practice new tools and skills.
