Top Strategies for Securing Top Talent with Mark Porter, CTO at dbt Labs

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're wrapping up our conversation with Mark Porter, CTO at dbt Labs, about all of his strategies for hiring the best talent. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) How do you attract top talent? Let's say, you know, you've been at huge companies. You work with A players all the time. What are your tips or thoughts on attracting top talent?

(Mark Porter at 00:00:31) Oh, man. Be pickier than you even think. I have a phrase: it never gets better than the interview. And by the way, that's both ways. The employer is often on best behavior during interviews, and the employee is on best behavior. So if you have a problem during the interview, you need to dig in pretty deeply. So that's thing one. And yet we all want to talk ourselves into, oh, that thing they said in the interview trashing their current employer. Yeah, we can train them out of that. You know? Because you want to hire the person. Right? The reality is you've got to be pretty careful. So the first thing is you've got to be incredibly picky. The next thing is, and I'm actually going through this right now, you have to define the role with all the stakeholders. You have to meet with them after every candidate. You have to say, not just are we going to hire this candidate or not, but what parts of this candidate resonated with you, will be successful at our company, are what we need or not? So that's part of it. And so every candidate is like this ongoing journey where by the time you hire somebody, you're all so attuned that you're just like one team, and that makes their onboarding better. So that's thing one. Thing two is spread your net far and wide through your network. It's depressing these days that when I post a job, I will typically get between one and three thousand applicants for the job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:01) Wow. Really?

(Mark Porter at 00:02:03) And a senior job. And sorting through that is hard. We use tools to sort through it, et cetera. But the other thing is, you know, a lot of it's about networking. So what I tell people is, sure, apply to all the jobs. But the reality is find the jobs that you think you are a perfect fit for and try to create relationships with that company, because that's how you get hired these days. And so when I see someone make the effort to get to know me, when I see someone make the effort to get to know someone who reports to me, I mean, that's someone who's all in, and it raises them above the crowd, frankly. I also do back channels. So on top talent, on exec talent, you have to do back channels because—

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:54) A back channel?

(Mark Porter at 00:02:55) A back channel means talking to other people in this person's network. And I do it very controversially. I will ask the person when they give references, I would please like one to two people who are going to say not great things about you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:11) Nice.

(Mark Porter at 00:03:12) Look, we've all had places we failed or we've worked for people who think we failed or something. I'm going to be listening to this person for, did you behave with integrity? Were you mature? Did you, were you a good human in this process? I don't care if you got fired for being incompetent at coding twenty years later. How much could that matter? But were you a good human sticks with you. And so I do that. And then we do a process at the end of our interview process which is pretty intense. I will fly to see the person, and I will spend four to six hours plus dinner with the person. And I'm telling you, by the end of four to six hours plus a three-hour dinner, you know whether you want to base your success in your career and whether they will know whether they want to base their success in their career on each other.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:12) Mmm.

(Mark Porter at 00:04:13) Hiring is deeply imperfect, and all we can do is make it as least imperfect as possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:22) I like that.

(Mark Porter at 00:04:23) So what I tell people is, look, I can't tell you if you're going to succeed at this job because hiring is deeply imperfect. But I can tell you this: I and my team are going to tell you so much about the company, and we're going to be so candid about the problems we face. And we're going to tell you what's great at the company, what's crappy at the company, and then you're going to have to decide whether you're going to succeed at this company. Because and this is something which is something everyone who knows me on this podcast will know: if you are not remarkable, you will not stay working for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:01) Good. That's a good reputation to have.

(Mark Porter at 00:05:03) That's it. And I will exit you with respect. I will give you every chance to fix yourself, but the reality is I would rather you go be remarkable somewhere else than mediocre with me. And so I will help you. I will do everything I can. I will exit you with respect in every way. But at the end of the day, the bar is to be remarkable. And I tell people that at the very front of the interview process, and about a quarter of the candidates exit the interview process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:33) Whoa. Really? Oh, so they've got some self-awareness then.

(Mark Porter at 00:05:38) Yeah, which is a plus. But they say, so, Mark, you're not looking for someone to come to this job and for it to be a challenge, for them to just be right at the tippy-tip-top with the water right up to their nose. I say, no, I'm looking for someone who the water's up to their waist. The water's up to maybe their chest. The water's up to their knees. If you think this is a job where the water's going to be up to your nose, this is a bad idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:05) Interesting. Yeah. It's because that reflects on their experience, whether or not they know how to achieve the outcome. Nice.

(Mark Porter at 00:06:11) Well, and the other problem is that as execs, remember, I'm hiring mostly execs in my role or senior people, short stints on your LinkedIn profile are deeply damaging to execs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:24) We filter out, like, we don't hire people that job hop year after year after year. I look for people that stay three to five years at a place.

(Mark Porter at 00:06:31) Exactly. You know, there are many reasons why someone might be at a job one and a half years, and that's fine. And you ask them about it. But if someone has three jobs in a row that are between one to two years—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:44) Which is almost always the case. Like, I, it's either 80% or 20%. It's like, which one is it? Did it happen once? If so, not a big deal. Is it every single time you work anywhere you can stay there for a year? That's not a good sign.

(Mark Porter at 00:06:53) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:53) So here's something that you didn't mention that I think I'm curious if you have seen it help you. You're very articulate, and you write your ideas out, and you have your website. Plugging marklovestech.com. There we go, marklovestech.com. You got the cultural hints. You got everything on there. You got About You. You got your podcast appearances, all that good stuff. Have you noticed that helping you attract top talent? The fact that you're out there, you're leading, you take the time to manufacture the thoughts, refine the thoughts, package them, and then you take the time to come out onto shows like mine and other shows and deliver them. Does that process help you attract top talent?

(Mark Porter at 00:07:43) Yes, it does. Because what happens is when I'll do a job post, there are multiple cohorts of people. So there's many people out there who, frankly, because the job market is so difficult, just apply for a lot of things. But there are many people who are currently highly successful at their current job. And they see me post something, and they're like, I'll Google him. And they Google, and they find, oh, he cares about humans. Oh my, my blog series on safe software deployments gets a lot of views. And they say, oh, you care about operational excellence. You care about cultural hints. You care about good communication. And that's where the top talent comes from is people who say, Mark, I don't know if this is going to work out. I don't know if I should come to your company, but I do know this: I'd like to get to know you better. And so that networking occurs. And whether it turns into a job offer or not, it turns into a networking connection. And then the other thing that I'll tell you I do, and this is advice for all C-level executives out there, the Shrek, which is the five top recruiting companies, and we all know who the Shrek are, you know, Heidrick and Riviera and, you know, all of them. The Shrek, I create relationships with multiple people at every Shrek company. And do you know what I do? I help them out more than they help me out. When I need a job or when I need a vice president of engineering or when I'm looking for some senior person, sure, I reach out to all of them. But at the end of the day, when one of my friends might be thinking about bettering their life, I will reach out to these senior recruiters, and I will say, this is an amazing person. May I introduce you? So what I do is I create a relationship with about 25 exec recruiters, and I get two to three reach-outs a week. Hey, Mark, we got this job. I know you don't want it, but can you recommend anyone? And that network serves me so well when I need to hire somebody. So look, you don't get things back in life that you don't pay for, but I don't think about it that way. I think about it as creating a network of people who are all here to help marvelously talented people land at fantastic companies. And if we all work together, there's a higher chance of that happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:12) You're like a super-connector.

(Mark Porter at 00:10:15) Yeah. I love connecting with these people because, to be very clear, once you've talked to the top C-level CTO recruiter at the Shrek, you know pretty much everything that's going on in the industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:27) Yeah. I've got a relationship with Heidrick, their head of their CTO division or whatnot. He specifically was specializing in, like, founders who had exits and then would go consult with some technology companies. That was his division area. But I haven't heard of the other ones. I haven't heard that term Shrek until today. Like, I know Heidrick, but I didn't know the other companies. So if I Google Shrek, that'll come up?

(Mark Porter at 00:10:54) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:54) Okay. Cool. So we've got maintaining relationships with recruiters, be pickier than you think, it never gets better than the interview, define the role with the stakeholders, spread the net wide, right? Have a good network, back-channeling, writing and communicating your own ideas and putting them out there so people can consume your content asynchronously whenever you happen to post something. And those are some good tips, man.

(Mark Porter at 00:11:22) So my experience is that hiring has to be priority zero. And for those of you on my current staff right now, I'm really sorry to bring this up on this podcast. But that means that you must move quickly. The best people are gone. And so if you move slowly, you are Darwinianly—I don't know if that's a word. That's a word?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:46) We'll give it to you.

(Mark Porter at 00:11:47) Yeah. I just verbified Darwin. You are Darwinianly selecting for mediocre candidates in the pipeline. Now that's not always true. Someone may be just happy at a company and you have to wedge them out of there with, you know, a crowbar. But in general, you have to move fast. And so that's one thing that tells the executive or the high-performing person, wow, I like moving fast, and this company moves fast. And so here's the rule: when I'm interviewing someone and someone is in the pipe, I communicate with them every working day. A Slack, a LinkedIn, a something that says, hey, just wanted to let you know, I was thinking about you. I read this blog post you wrote. Oh my god, that's great. How are things going for you? Every day. Because what I want them to understand is what would it be like working with me? Would I be a jerk who's just trying to get things out of them, treating them like a machine? Or would I be someone who genuinely cares, like I do, about them and their worth and their ideas? And so by the time we get to the end of an interview loop, I have a very—this may come across as snarky—I want everyone I interview to want to work for me so that then I get to choose whether I want them to work for me or not. And that has to be genuine. Obviously, I'm not trying to be faking and inauthentic, but I put so much effort in that the vast majority of candidates who we put through our loops want to work for us, and then we get to choose whether or not they're the right candidate for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:22) Well, your strategy is good because it forces you to hold the line tight, like, to constantly be making yourself better and to push yourself and to be growing and to be learning. Because if that's your strategy and that's your outcome that you're looking for, to achieve that, you have to work really hard at becoming a better person.

(Mark Porter at 00:13:44) Yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely true. I mean, look, like I said, we're all on journeys. I am deeply imperfect. My communication is not clear. I can become agitated when I'm defensive. You know, we all have things we're working on. One of the things that I published recently was my user manual, and it's actually on a hidden link on my website right now. It'll go public once I clean it up. But I do think that most executives should publish a user manual, and that user manual talks through your strengths, how to interact with me, how not to interact with me if you want a good outcome, you know, things like that. And I think that execs on a team should share those with each other regularly, like, once every couple years, so that we can all be—remember I said earlier, be who the other person needs you to be? And so this concept of Mark's user manual or Joel's user manual. Hi, I'm a product. This is my manual. You know? And at least gives people the option to interact with you in a way that meets you in the middle. Maybe they choose to. Maybe they don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:51) We have an LLM that's trained on every episode of the podcast, speaker-identified and everything so it knows me. And I'm going to ask it to create a user manual for me.

(Mark Porter at 00:15:02) Well, that's awesome. That sounds really fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:04) Heard me talking for a thousand episodes. All right. I love what you said. I love the user manual. I heard that the first time, I don't know, five or six years ago. Somebody called it, like, a developer README. Some developers were—it was a popular, like, GitHub thing that they were doing. But the user manual thing, I think it's brilliant. And so few people do it, by the way. Great advice. I hear it from the top 0.1% of people. Still, in the wild, when I bring it up, people have never heard about it. And I'm like, all right, all right. Me personally, I've been thinking about this recently. I was on another podcast this past week, and they asked me about my source code. They're like, what's the most important thing in your source code? And I was like, well, lately for me, it's been this—and you mentioned it several times—because I usually preface it with, I'm imperfect. I will potentially let you down. But at my core, what I'm looking to do is the next right thing. Like, because I heard somebody say it. I don't know where. I can't remember exactly who I picked it up from, but they said that my main thing I try to do is the next right thing. I don't obsess about the past. I don't replay in my head everything. I don't worry about the future. I try to stay in the present and focus on what's the next right thing to do. And that's been a very expensive—that's how you can test it. You can test it when money comes into play. Like, you say you're a good person. You say you do the right thing. You say you're a man of your word. But when money is on the line, that's the real true test.

(Mark Porter at 00:16:34) Yeah. I agree completely. So my source code would be two things: respect and better every day. If people treat each other with respect and we're just trying to get better every day, which is similar to yours, right?

(Mark Porter at 00:16:49) If we treat each other with respect and we're just getting better every day, I'm going to be okay. You know? That's it. We're going to figure out—we're all going to figure it out together. It's great.

(Mark Porter at 00:16:59) And I think better every day applies to relationships. It applies to products. It applies to processes at companies. It applies to a lot of things. And then remember I said I exit non-remarkable people relatively quickly.

(Mark Porter at 00:17:14) If they're not getting better every day, I am patient for the outcome. I am deeply impatient for progress, and people feel that when they work with me. In terms of respect, that's just a ground rule. And if you treat someone else with disrespect, you should probably leave. And so to me, I will surround myself with people who can just discuss hard problems together because we treat each other with respect, and we're just trying to always get better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:45) By the way, dude, we'll kind of wrap up the episode. But, man, you're so good the way that you—when you're good at public speaking. You did your reset when there was an issue. We didn't even have to talk about it. Super smooth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:57) Great ideas. I don't know why we don't have you on the show more. I will extend an annual invitation. Once a year, we have Mark on and see what's going on in his life.

(Mark Porter at 00:18:08) That would be awesome. That would be great. I love your podcast. I love the people you have on. And, you know, though I don't get to listen to everyone, the ones I've listened to, I just like the way you handle them.

(Mark Porter at 00:18:23) I really do. So, you know, good job on that. And by the way, I guess I got to say something a little snarky, which is after this many, I'd hope you're really good at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:33) I know. Right?

(Mark Porter at 00:18:34) Didn't you say you just wanted to improve? Well, here you go. Right? There's proof.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:39) Dude, it's crazy that we're approaching a thousand episodes. I mean, that to me is, like, it's hard for me to understand. But, Mark, thank you so much for doing this episode. I really, really appreciate it. We'd love to have you back on, once a year. It'd be great.

(Mark Porter at 00:18:56) Sounds great. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I appreciate the time. And to your audience, I hope this has been useful and I hope they've learned something. And please reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have anything you'd like to say. And I love having conversations with people. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:11) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague that you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.