Debra Senra, Founder & CEO of Stealth Mode and former SVP of Revenue at Hireology, gave this presentation at the Chief Revenue Officer Summit in February 2021.

In this article, I’ll share with you a story of how at Hireology we made it through 2020 despite the odds, what we did to not only survive but actually thrive, and why retaining a customer focus mindset is critical to navigating the remaining uncertainty in 2021 and beyond.

My name's Debra Senra, and in this article, I'm going to tell you a story of how Hireology made it through 2020 and why retaining a customer focus mindset is critical to navigating the remaining uncertainty that we have today.

Before I dive too deep into the content, let me start by introducing myself.

About me

I'm currently the Founder & CEO of Stealth Mode, but I formerly ran the revenue organization at Hireology. For those of you who don't know, the quick headline on Hireology is that we provide hiring software to help our customers build their best teams.

I started at Hireology in early 2018, as the Vice President of Customer Success, and moved into the SVP role in January of 2020, overseeing sales, revenue operations, customer development, and essentially anything that revenue touches now sits in my org.

In January, when I moved into this role I thought my job was going to be focused on building systems and processes to allow our business to scale and to grow our organization over the next 10/15/20 years.

I thought my role was going to be focused on both accelerating our net new customer acquisition strategy as well as continuing to drive down our attrition on our customer success side.

Essentially, I thought 2020 was a year where I was going to build and execute an offensive playbook to win in the market in a way we never had before.

Insert laugh here.

Ten weeks into my role, I realized everything I thought was going to happen was not happening in 2020, and 10 weeks into my role, I had to pivot on a dime and go from building and executing an offensive playbook to creating, executing, iterating upon a defensive playbook.

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Context on Hireology

Hireology is a business that was formed in 2010, at the mid-to-tail end of the recession.

The pain point we saw in the market was there was a lot of unemployment, and businesses who were hiring had to find the needle in the haystack of applicants to build their best team.

For small business owners in particular, or medium-sized business owners, this was incredibly difficult because, for a lot of these customers and organizations, the owner of the business was also the chief recruiting officer, the chief sales officer, maybe had a side hat with the CFO title on it.

They were jack of all trades, they were expected to do everything.

When you have hundreds of applicants to sort through, you're not a full-time recruiter, yet finding the perfect person is critical for your business's success. That's a daunting task.

At the time, what was in the market was not built for this customer, there were solutions that were designed for large enterprises.

Think the Johnson and Johnson's of the world with dozens of people on a recruiting team and entire department dedicated to finding the best talent - there were solutions for those folks.

Then there were solutions for part of the recruiting process. You could post your job on the job board but that didn't help you figure out who is the best person to hire within the stack of applicants you got.

What Hireology saw an opportunity to do was to provide business owners with the technology they needed to build their best teams. So that's what we did.

Who we work with

Over time, what we found was the industries that we work for get a tonne of value from people who speak their language.

For the customers we support, people make or break their success and there are some pretty specific nuances you need to understand if you're going to help them recruit those team members. At the start of 2020, we had three named verticals:

  1. Retail automotive, which is car dealerships,
  2. Health care, but not all healthcare specifically, we were nursing homes, home care, home health care, and
  3. What we call professional services, which is franchise businesses. Think gyms and restaurants and massage parlors, I'm sure you know where I'm going with this.

In 2020, we had these three focused verticals, and our sales team and our customer success team were all specialized in these industries.

We lived and breathed healthcare and automotive and franchise professional services so that when we were there to help our customers find their best teams, and run great hiring processes, we knew their language, and we could help them in the right way.