Joy and Excellence in a Sh*tty Recruiting Market

Our company's (only) 2 values of joy and excellence are hard to balance. We reflect often on how do we strike balance and find it, over and over and over again? I'm picturing many wobbles on a tight rope.

As a behind-the-scenes on what it's like working at Boulevard, here was my recent message to the company. TLDR - it's brutal out there. We have to be excellent. Joy requires setting a boundary between work and personal time, and team work.

On joy & excellence - how to find joy through a sh*tty recruiting market.

Hi team,

Something I’ve been thinking about lately, when we talk about joy, it’s important to understand that we don’t have a magic wand to eliminate pain inherent to Silicon Valley. Engineering recruiting is hard, for startups is harder. They’re risky without brand recognition and less runway, lower budgets and priorities constantly changing. Working with founders is hard. They are obsessive, often inexperienced, and practically delusional by rule (see: Sam Altman blog). And, we are in a bad market. It’s neither a company nor candidate’s market. It’s an unstable one with more recruiters than demand for us. Supply/demand curves force market price down and recruiters are asked to do more while getting paid less than we’ve seen in other markets.

I went on vacation to unplug because I feel all of this. My mind circles solving challenge after challenge, continuing into my sleep because I too obsess as a founder.

My first promise to you is this. Working at Boulevard, you will learn excellence. We would not be here onboarding new client after client if it weren’t for our delivery. Our environment requires us to be strategic advisors that calibrate and iterate quickly, that move fast while efficiently with very low margin for error. We’re obsessive. We report more than most early companies. We dig very deep on developing campaigns and call sell points to attract candidates and close offers. We partner with executives and develop skills to persuade them. If you can get all this down, you will up-level to the top echelon of recruiters and Boulevard will be a bright star on your resume forever.

That’s a lot of pressure, and I don’t want to be a hypocrite. Sometimes in painful moments I imagine recruiters asking me: how can you promote #joy through all this? The way I see it is:

• We are able to create boundaries that most recruiters don’t have. We don’t (or almost never) work nights or weekends. When clients open a new role, we expand our team with a new recruiter versus ask the existing recruiter to do more for them.

• We work as a team, not in silos, and we have each others’ backs. Each account has a lead that has seen many challenges and generally has a playbook. I’m in each Slack channel to serve as the “bad cop” so you can stay “good cop” with your clients. I also cover Slack over weekends so our clients get coverage without anyone else here needing to do that. It’s important to mostly speak in the client channels so I’m able to do that.

• We offer flexibility more than you can find almost anywhere. Recruiters are able to work part time if they wish. We cover each other and go on vacation, which is hard to do in startups, after planning for it.

• We are all recruiters. We get each other. We find humor sometimes in dark moments and celebrate all the wins. This is a relationships business and we don’t take that for granted.

• We are remote first, as a founding principle before Covid. It’s in the DNA of our company. Boulevard means working from home and on the road. Also we travel to see each other!

• We see A LOT in Silicon Valley! When you rotate through multiple clients you see so many cool things and expand your network in a diversified way that a big tech company won’t offer.

• We are strategic advisors. Given we support early stage companies, our impact is enormous. We are not contract recruiters among a hundred other recruiters. We are advisors!

What’s required to do well here, and I don’t just mean performance it’s just as much mental health, is:

• Resilience and positivity through hard things, and boundaries. During work hours we action step after step to get to a stronger position, then I hope you will let go of it all in your free time, focus on your passions, self care, friends and family.

• Proactive communication. On the ground, no one else is in your exact shoes. Voice your pain to your lead, particularly inefficiencies and beyond the call challenges. Do not work more hours than budgeted. Raise the flag to your lead if we need to bill and budget more for a client.

• 100% ownership. It’s ok to make mistakes, but not if you hide them. Surface mistakes to your lead first, what you learned and what you’ll do moving forward. We may discount the client’s invoice depending on severity. We commit to charging only for quality. We build trust and retain clients much longer when we’re honest.

• Uphold the value of honesty by being consistently honest. If you want to take a break, just say it. Don’t pretend you got COVID.

• Create spaces for people to feel they can be open. Honor the flaws of humanity. Acknowledge your own mistakes and apologize when you’ve failed someone. (Also don’t OVER apologize. Statistically women do that a lot, don’t apologize for existing. That’s a whole other post!)

• Drive transparency into your work. The fastest way to influence stakeholders, and particularly technical ones, is to provide data. Eg “of X target companies I reviewed Y profiles and found Z that were a fit, here’s how long it took me, here are other pockets worth exploring.”

• All this is to summarize #excellence. Pain builds exponentially the second our work product is shitty.

All that being said, this IS a hard business. It’s not for everybody. If you prefer larger companies with a coordinator and one “client,” we get that, totally. There are tradeoffs to everything.

Personally I find a lot of growth and reward doing this interesting work. Meeting so many founders. Seeing a broader slice of Silicon Valley. Working remotely. Working with this team! I hope you’ll all look for those silver linings, and keep building this company to be joyful with me.

Please chime in with any thoughts on where you find joy here, and how we can generate more joy in the company.

💛

Anneli