This week, we’re joined by Shensi Ding, CEO and co-founder of Merge. Merge offers unified APIs that allow developers to integrate once to offer a full category of integrations.

Many companies have returned to the office recently or offer hybrid arrangements, but Shensi has always been a big believer in 100% in-person work. The Merge team is based in New York… and most of them were invited to be there.

In this episode, Shensi shares how sourcing remains critical to Merge’s recruiting strategy (even amidst an influx of applications) and why hiring managers own it rather than recruiters.

It’s pretty evident that Shensi is passionate about the culture at Merge. She ensures that junior team members feel comfortable to bring up ideas and everyone’s a joy to work with. There’s a “no asshole policy” — and it starts with hiring really good people.

How?

She gives us the breakdown on the Merge interview process and how they’ve approached hiring for skills AND culture fit, when the bar for both is pretty dang high.

Learn more about Merge at merge.dev.

Follow Shensi on LinkedIn to get connected: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shensiding/.

This week, we’re joined by Tigran Sloyan, CEO and co-founder of CodeSignal, for a unique conversation about skills. Tigran identifies that talent is the biggest problem humanity has to solve — and how we identify and assess skills today is broken.

He founded CodeSignal, a leading technical interview and assessment platform to help companies go “Beyond the Noise” with early-stage assessments, technical screens, and live coding interviews.

He shares how to mitigate bias in assessments, balancing hiring for demonstrated skills vs. ability to learn and grow, and the importance of anchoring to hard skills.

Tigran is also a frequent industry keynote, a TED speaker, and a thought leader in the technical hiring industry, commenting on trends in talent acquisition, diversity, and innovation. Follow Tigran on LinkedIn to follow along: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tigransloyan.

Learn more about CodeSignal at codesignal.com.

In this week’s episode, we talked to Dave Carhart. He’s a fractional HR executive and HR tech advisor who is currently the VP of People Strategy at Lattice.

He previously led the People teams at Lattice as they scaled 5x and at Branch Metrics as they scaled 3x. He led Mulesoft’s team through their IPO and acquisition by salesforce for 20x ARR. And before moving into startups, he spent several years at HP, which was over 300,000 employees at the time.

Dave has essentially seen it all. And he’s been focused on people the entire time.

We dive into the weeds of Dave’s experience across these different stages of company growth — and in the process, unlock his advice for how to build a people strategy that supports your business strategy at all stages of growth.

Whether you’re hiring your first 100 employees or preparing for an IPO, this is an episode you won’t want to skip.

Find Dave on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/davecarhart/ or reach out via email at dave@lattice.com to connect!