RWL047 Ben How Olark’s CEO Ben Congleton Champions Human-Centric Technology in the Age of AI

Chat in Growing Businesses

Speaker 1

0:00

So, hello everybody, another edition of the Remote Work Life Summit and today, yet another wonderful guest. I've got Ben Congleton of OLARC and Ben, I've been following Ben. I mean I tend to follow quite a lot of people online, but there's a certain criteria of people who I want to get online and really interview them to find out more about their business. Olark is a wonderful um software application, I guess you could say it helps to build relationships, it helps businesses to grow and, you know, obviously in keeping with the, the whole idea of remote work and distributed teams, ben is a founder and a CEO of one of those. So and a very successful one, I might add as well.

Speaker 1

0:51

So, as I said, I wanted to get him on here to find out more about Olak and to find out more about him. Ben, thank you for joining me. Yeah, alex, glad to be here, excellent. And Ben, as I said, I mean I know a bit about Olark, but there's going to be one or two people out there who may not know about Olark. So could you tell us a bit more about Olark and how you got?

Speaker 2

1:17

to where you are. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So if you visit a website recently, you've probably noticed that in the bottom right-hand corner there's often a little button that says like click here to chat. We're one of the first companies to do that. We got that thing started back in 2009. And so a lot of the websites that you visit today have a look on them. A lot of them are white-labeled, A lot of them are competitors, but more or less we got that whole craze started.

Speaker 2

1:41

We were the first company that decided, hey, chat should be on page, it shouldn't be in a pop-up window, and there should be a person there, not a robot, not someone in a call center that doesn't understand the business. It should be someone that works at your company helping to sell the product, because people have questions before they buy and it turns out that if you talk to them when they have these questions quickly and instantly, they're more likely to buy. And so we have over 12,000 businesses using us today. We've helped companies like Bonobos grow, microsoft as a customer, and even really, really small customers like little plumbing groups or real estate management companies. If you have a website and you have traffic on that website, you need chat on it. You don't have to be there 24-7. You can be there just a couple hours of the day, but you will capture more leads and you will be able to uh, you know get more value out of your website by just being there to answer questions from the people that are on your site and there's massive value in that.

Speaker 1

2:51

I mean, like you said, I saw a statistic the other day that um the drop-off rate or the bounce rate for a website is something like 80 or 90 percent for a first-time visitor.

Speaker 2

3:04

So I guess you're you're you're solving a massive problem, for I think the issue is that a lot of people aren't going to pick up the phone when they have a question, and a lot of people like leave without getting their questions answered, and so, uh, chat is a place, uh, somewhere between you know, leaving and making a phone call. So we just try to lower that barrier to communicate, and it turns out that this benefits basically any business that sells online. So we have, you know, just sort of such a wide range of customers. But if you're, if your listeners haven't haven't tried out chat, I mean we have, you know, both a free edition and a free trial edition. So my belief is basically, if you're in the business of trying to grow or help your customers, communicating with them is very important, and so chat is sort of how we got started in 2009. I've been really kind of pushing on that, trying to build a really easy, affordable way of adding that communication channel to your website.

Speaker 1

4:03

It's massive value and, like I said, we only have the best on this, on the Remote Work Life Summit, and that's, as I said, that's why I invited Ben and one of the pioneers in this whole game, so I mean, there's so many of them out now, out there now, aren't there Ben? There's so many. Chat seems to be a buzzword right now, and sort of AI and all that sort of thing.

Speaker 2

4:29

Yeah, I mean it is very interesting. I think right now we're seeing this big revolution where a lot of people think they can replace all the people that work in their organizations and customer service with some sort of AI. I personally don't believe that's actually a great idea. I think that it has a lot of bad consequences to try to just replace customer service with a bot NLP, natural language processing is not that great right now. So I think right now a lot of people just have this idea in their head that you can just magically make customer service automated and not have to pay or employ all these people.

Speaker 2

5:09

But for me, like at olark, uh, our, our philosophy is much more on. Like, hey, you have people working your company. If people working customer service, how can we, with technology, make those people 10 times as efficient or help those people, uh, you know, feel 10 times as good about, you know, doing their job every day, going to work every day, and so you know, the interesting thing about remote work, right, is it's very easy to do customer service remotely and that, if you have the right software in place, you can, you know, do that work from your house, on your couch, you know, after you take your kids to school before they come back, like it's a job that really lends itself to remote work, and it's also a job where I think the human element actually adds quite a bit of value. So, you know, if I'm trying to buy a product and I'm trying to buy a product from a bot versus a human being if I'm talking to a bot, I know I'm talking to a bot. I'm not creating a relationship with this bot. If I'm talking to a human, though, I think you have the opportunity to build a deeper relationship and create a relationship between that person at your company and that shopper. That adds brand value, it boosts word-, mouth, referral, it uh brings insight into your organization, because people are now like communicating with customers, not just, you know, a robot trying to deflect them.

Speaker 2

6:35

I'm talking to a human uh. So, um, from my standpoint, I'm I'm pro humans, I think. I think whenever we're shopping, uh, whenever we're buying something uh, we want someone who understands what it's like to be a human and uh has a range of expertise and is not just sort of a fixed script that can answer, like a like a couple couple different questions yeah, and I think you know, I think we joke about it and we laugh about it, but I think even well, I say even customers who visit websites these days, the lay person who doesn't know anything about ai, they know, don't they?

AI in Business Growth

Speaker 1

7:10

they know it's a robot. When, when, when, you know when, a automated sequence is sort of put before them, they already know that, don't they?

Speaker 2

7:19

I mean whether they know it or not, like if they don't know it's, it might even be worse, because they just think the person they're dealing with is an idiot like you know like, like, like.

Speaker 2

7:27

If they don't like either the, there's two outcomes. Right, the outcome is they know it's a bot, which means that they know that the company on the other end doesn't necessarily care about them enough to put a person there to talk to them, or they're fooled into thinking they're talking to a human being, and then that human being reaches a point where there's an exception in that such that, like you know, the script can't handle the questions they're asking.

Speaker 2

7:51

Yeah, and then the person, uh, then the you know the lay, the lay person is just freaking confused because they were having this conversation with this great person bot thing and all of a sudden, like it just doesn't compute and it's broken and I think, uh, you know if, for any of you who've had to try to have, like an actual conversation with siri or google now, are these like basically the best ais out there, yeah, you will know that, uh, there's still a lot of problems in that technology and it's not, it's not ready to say like replace, replace people. The the best implemented bots I've seen are just asking people a couple of questions that are and trying to qualify them for sending them to a salesperson, like it's I. I think there is a role for that sort of uh tool, but not but. But I would put put those tools more on the side of like, hey, I have more customers reaching out to me than I can possibly handle. Post-sale, pre-sale, I think you really want to put the opportunity and the time into building those relationships and creating that brand connection.

Speaker 2

8:59

Post-sale, I can understand if you just want to drive your costs down, but ultimately, I think there's a lot that you get from having those customer service teams that things are a little bit hard to attach value to.

Speaker 2

9:13

For example, if you have a customer service person on your team answering questions, that person actually is gaining quite a bit of customer empathy and there's someone that can be promoted into other roles within your organization.

Speaker 2

9:26

Remove that person, replace them with a bot and try to hire junior people that you want to bring into your organization and grow into more roles, and you may not have other entry-level positions that are going to cause them to have such a high level of customer empathy. So I think there's just a lot. There's a lot kind of like wrapped up in this bot thing. I don't need to spend the whole interview talking about it, but my general philosophy is like hey, if you're a small business, you're probably. The way that you compete in this industry is through the relationships, through your personality and the better job you can do putting your personality out there. So the people that are engaging with you on your website or meeting you on your website, uh like, build that human connection like the better off you're going to be, because you can't, you're not going to be able to compete with the amazons and the googles and the facebooks the world by out automating them.

Speaker 2

10:20

I can guarantee you that you're gonna have to out, care them and out human them, and you know that's. That's sort of where olark sits in the, in our, in our philosophy, as we sort of think about, like the, the chatbot revolution, to me just like a huge opportunity for small businesses to lose or to try to save money in a way that causes them to lose. What is special about them for their customers?

Speaker 1

10:49

No, absolutely, and I think, well, it's probably a bit of an overemphasis on the whole aspect of AI and its value from that standpoint. Even when I was speaking to I speak to derry anderson of um startup grind and he was saying literally the same thing as you that it's all about, you know, building those relationships, um, communication. That that's that's human and it's relevant and, you know, is meaningful. That's what's going to grow, grow a business, that's what's good. You know that insight that you get from those conversations right, how, I mean, you got to a point where this, this was your, this has been your big thing. Olark is your big thing. How did you get to to the point of knowing that olark is the was the direction that you wanted to take your career that's a really good question.

Speaker 2

11:42

I love that question, uh, you know, I think I I've done a lot of interviews on this, so I don't need to like go into a ton of detail. But like, if you look at like uh I don't know, like uh there's a good mixer g interview where I kind of go into a lot of detail. There's a um, I think groove hq has a pretty good interview with me talking about uh, sort of some of the the decisions there. I think I'll give you like the really short answer because I don't want to like spend the whole interview on that stuff that will help our audience out.

Building a Human-Focused Business

Speaker 2

12:11

You know, yeah, yeah, sure I mean, I think, like, for me, I am not someone who, like, sits down and says I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna put a man on the moon or something like that like I don't build these really long-term plans. I think the way that I ended up running Olark and it ended up being something that was really important to me is just a general philosophy about how I want to start a business. And right when I started this thing before it was like we might have gotten into Y Combinator maybe a little bit before Y Combinator, I wrote this post and it was basically a blog post about how, uh, what I really wanted to do was to build a company where I could hang out with my friends, building something amazing and helping people. Like that was that's sort of core to, I think, who I am as a person and like uh, and I think that prior to Olark, I had another company. It was a web hosting company, slash consulting firm and I was kind of getting a little bit of that need fulfilled. But then when we started Olark and it was just like three or four of us, yeah, it was just like a couple of friends hanging out trying to make this thing into reality. And as we scaled and grown it, I think that dream has really stayed alive into reality. And as we've scaled and grown it, I think that dream has really stayed alive.

Speaker 2

13:34

I think, uh, building this really great team with this really great culture and tackling challenges that are important to the world and important to our customers is a really easy way to kind of stay energized and want to come to work every day. And I think, like for me anyway, there's this idea of live chat, like olark live chat, and that's to me, that is just a piece, that is a very small piece of like the total set of problems that we're interested in. Uh, it turned out that, like at the beginning, there was this big opportunity to build and kind of invent the way that chat worked on websites, right. So, like we sort of invented the way that people have grown to engage with websites, and that's awesome. It's awesome to like kind of invent something and see it taken far further than you could even take it, and I think, like that's sort of what we've seen recently, with all the new companies spawning up and their new takes on this and their new approaches.

Speaker 2

14:27

I think that our approach of being a very human centric, like kind of focusing on the agent and growing them, is going to work for like a lot of businesses, but it's not going to work for everyone. Like if you're trying to drive costs all the way down, like you're going to put some automation there and you'll figure it out, but we'll focus on the guys who want sort of the higher value from their customers, like the more valuable customers. But, that said, I think what I've realized over the years is really the thing that makes me very excited is this idea of making business human, so both the idea of sort of helping businesses connect with each other as people, as humans, and then also building software that kind of emphasizes what people do really well. So uh, uh, you know there's a lot of technologists who build software, uh, because they love technology and they love to just like build this cool tech. I think it all like we've really like the thing that we're excited about is like helping people and so like the cool tech is just like a way in which we can help people and uh, uh, you know, if you think about the org we've built and our set of values, uh, that that's sort of what I'm excited about. I'm like excited about sort of giving value systems to more businesses so they can build cultures, uh, that really care about their employees or, you know, giving value systems to make remote work easier for other people to adopt, like if we can hand you a handbook and you can take remote work and you can make it work. And you can make it work the way we did, because I think that our team feels very empowered, our team cares a ton about where they work and they feel absolutely trusted, and I think maybe Olark isn't ourselves as a business is not going to scale to employ every remote worker. But heck if we can give some guidance to to scale to employ every remote worker, but heck if we can give some guidance to those other companies employing remote workers. Uh, I think that would be a really great way to make impact and to make more businesses more human and more caring, uh. So, yeah, there's a it's, I guess, like your.

Speaker 2

16:25

Your original question how did I arrive here? I started off, uh, just wanting a place where I could hang off with my friends building cool stuff, and then I realized that I sort of wanted to figure out how you could scale that and bring that to more people who weren't just working at Olark. Our lever is we're pretty good at building products and we're pretty good at thinking big and empowering teams, and as long as I can keep doing that, I'm having a good time, so uh, sounds good to me, sounds good to me and well, I love a lot of making notes, by the way, as you're talking, so so I'm remembering all these questions I've got.

Transition to Remote Work

Speaker 1

17:03

The more you're talking, the more questions that are coming to my mind. So, but that you talk about, um, you know about the software being just a part of the actual grand scheme of things. But you mentioned remote work. Was remote work something that was putting together a remote team, something a deliberate part of that whole plan of yours?

Speaker 2

17:23

Yeah, it's funny, right, because we're known as this remote company. We get so many job applicants for our positions. It's amazing, remote company like we get like so many job applicants for our position, it's like amazing. But like, at the beginning, in the early days of this thing, I had run a remote company prior. So my web hosting company I ran prior to this was remote.

Speaker 2

17:41

And uh, for olark, we're thinking about trying something different. We're gonna, we're going to build a non-remote company. And that worked basically up until we tried to hire our first employee and we had no money. And so we, uh, we were in silicon valley, we didn't raise any money we couldn't afford to get. I guess we did have one guy working for us for a bit, but then he left because people were paying way better than we could, even though he loved us, like, but but we just like literally couldn't afford to pay people, uh, what they needed to make in that area, uh, and so we hired a college friend of mine as employee number one who was living in a much cheaper area and I knew he was solid, I knew he'd be a great teammate, um, and so we, we took away. He had like an hour commute, like maybe a two-hour commute every. He took that away. He got to work from home. Uh, changed his life and uh, and even then, even then we weren't ready to go remote.

Speaker 2

18:36

We're still like, oh well, you know, we'll make acceptance here and there, but like, we really just don't want to be remote. So we built out kind of a customer service team in house, like at like in California, uh, and then we tried to hire marketing. We're like, oh, we can't find anyone for marketing, oh, there's this guy in Toronto, we'll hire him. We're like, oh no, but we're still remote. We're still not remote. We were like, keep, kind of like. Then one co-founder moved to Ann Arbor, michigan. We're like, okay, we'll have two offices, we'll have one office in California, we'll have one office in California, one office in our mission, and we'll have these a couple of exceptions kicking around their working mode, but for the most part we're going to be an old school bricks and mortar company.

Speaker 2

19:17

And then we're trying to hire for DevOps and we were having the hardest. They were like we want DevOps in an East Coast time zone so that they'll be closer to Europe, and we want them in Ann Arbor because that's where it would make sense, based on where we are, where everyone's located, and we try to hire for this position. And by this point we had a couple of people in our Ann Arbor office, a couple of people in San Francisco. I think we may have only had. We probably had two, maybe two remote employees at that time and at that point I looked forever trying to hire someone like for DevOps in Michigan. And we found this guy in Brooklyn and he was like oh yeah, I'm thinking about moving somewhere. Maybe, maybe I can move to Michigan. We're like, oh, that's good enough, we'll hire this guy.

Speaker 2

20:03

And after that hiring process we're just like screw it, like we're going to hire remote. We can get really good people remote. We're not going to care about where they're located. Uh, we spent like way too long trying to make that hire and I think, uh, that was the real moment for me where it where remote had gone from like, oh, this is kind of like a bonus, like if we find really good people and they don't want to move, we can hire them remote. It's like, no, we're just to focus remote from here on out and we may find people in offices or not, but we're not going to put that restriction on where they are.

Speaker 2

20:41

Now, for the most part, that's true. I think there was one position where we were hiring it and we wanted it to be in San Francisco because it was a design position and the person who was going to work with it really wanted to collaborate in person. That was a co-founder of mine, but he's no longer with the company. So that was the last position we posted that actually had a location on it and that was a couple of years ago and from there on out we're pre-remote. But actually this year we still have a lease on an empty office in Michigan.

Speaker 1

21:14

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2

21:18

If anyone has an empty office in Michigan, we totally got your office Huge discount on rent, excellent. But that lease runs out, I think, in March.

Speaker 1

21:27

But we basically will have no physical locations at the end of uh, by March of next year so as of March next year, would be a hundred percent remote company with well, I mean in the sense like we've all been a hundred.

Speaker 2

21:39

So we're still this lease we're paying for for an office. No one went to, but yeah, so that that's been happening for a while. I mean we've been I would argue we've probably been 100 remote, remote for many years. We just rented some empty office space that people would occasionally show up to.

Speaker 1

21:56

And you mentioned your team. You were talking about your team, Ben DevOps, customer service. What's the breakdown? Are there more elements to your team? I'm sure there are.

Speaker 2

22:06

Well, I mean, it's a standard software company, right? So you have marketing. We never really built out sales because our price point was more turnkey. You know really big customer service team. We invested very strongly in customer service. I think our belief is that customer service sort of does sales, sort of does customer success, and generally these are the people that kind of live and breathe the passion in your company all the time. So finding really good people there is excellent. And then you know engineering product team just normal, I guess. Pms, designers I don't think there's anything abnormal about the way all architecture.

Speaker 1

22:47

But yeah, I suppose you'd expect that customer service would be a an important, important part of your company yeah, I think part of that is interesting.

Speaker 2

22:55

I think part of the reason we went so hard on customer service at the beginning is that when I'd ran the web hosting company prior, we had under invested in customer service and it had caused problems and uh, what basically happened is like the owners were doing all the service and we hired staff to do customer service for us, which was just some college buddies looking for part-time jobs and those guys just really didn't do as good of a job as we had done and didn't care as much as we did. And so I think that, well, actually, in the early days of like, we all did customer service. So we did a rotation where every person on the team would do customer service, uh like one day a week or a couple hours a week or whatever. And then, uh, eventually, when we decided, uh, even when we hired a customer service team, we still kept doing that where everyone the team would go around do it.

Speaker 2

23:50

And it wasn't until until a couple years in that we decided operationally we needed to take all-hand support, which was operationally, which meant everyone on the team was doing customer service. We wanted that to no longer be a requirement. We wanted it to be so that the customer service team could handle all the customer service load and it was a bonus if other people went and did their all-hands support shifts. So that transition happened over a couple of years, probably Just sort of going from having everyone do customer service as part of their job, where it was needed for them to do it, to where everyone did customer service optionally, just because, like we had built this culture where everyone did customer service and they could hop on and, like you know, dog, through the new release they made, or just see how customers were reacting to something by hopping on to chat and just doing a support shift and you mentioned earlier that you get lots of applications, right, um, what for you?

Speaker 1

24:52

not for that? Sorry, okay, yeah, that's all right. I was just um, you're saying that you get lots of applications and well, yeah, that doesn't really surprise me. Um, what we thought with that being bombed, you know, with you being bombarded, applications, what, what really stands out for you, or what, how can somebody really stand out if they are applying to you, either to a job that is um posted or a speculative application?

Speaker 2

25:20

yeah, that's a really good question. So I used to run hiring for a while, but we hired someone, uh, who is so much, so much better than I am at it that it's fantastic. So Mandy is probably the person who could best answer that question.

Hiring Process at Olark

Speaker 2

25:35

But I could try to give you a sense for it. So to get in the door, you have to understand that it's a pretty competitive process. So, whatever position you're applying for, just assume that we're going to get a lot of applicants for it. So put in the time. You know, polish your resume. We normally ask pre-screening questions at the beginning. Put in the time, like, don't just like go to our website and just see these pre-screening questions and just kind of like knock out answers really quick. Take the time to take those pre-screening questions, put them in a Google Doc, write good answers to them, get your friends to give you feedback. You could even probably email us and ask for feedback on some of those pre-screening questions too. I bet Mandy would probably give you a little bit of time, probably a few sentences on something. Take the time. We have chat on our website. You can stop by. You can ask questions there. I think.

Speaker 2

26:41

Generally speaking, to get an interview, to just get past a resume screen one, you've got to have a resume and a set of answers to our screening questions. That makes sense, right? Like, even if you're the most passionate person in the world, you're probably like, we have enough applicants. There's lots of passionate people in that applicant pool. So, like we can't, we can't let one one passionate person who's done like all this extra work, who's not qualified, is probably not going to make it through. I mean, every once in a while we'll wildcard someone. So if you went out and did something crazy, like built something cool with our api or like create a video, or just kind of went so like kind of over the top other, over other applicants, you probably would stand out and, like you probably get interviewed. Like basically, our hiring process is kind of like standard and we'll wildcard people every once in a while just to get them into the, into the funnel, because sometimes those people can be amazing. But generally speaking, you know, having resume and the answer to our screening questions is the way to do it and if you want to, you know if you can wow us some way that we haven't seen before, you'll probably get an interview. Uh, but like during that interview, if you're not qualified to do the job, like you can spend lots of time doing something awesome and then just like bomb the interviews. You'll get found out. But, like you know, like that might help you in the future when you're applying for another job that you are qualified for, because you know we'll remember that being wild that one time. So, anyway, yeah, so that's how you get a phone call and then, once you get the phone call, mandy would probably screen to make sure that you were, like I said, generally qualified for a position, you understand what it was and could communicate clearly with us.

Speaker 2

28:30

And then for most of our positions we have homework that we give you. We'll say, hey, go do this work for us and we'll generally give you an Amazon gift card or something like that in exchange, because we know this stuff takes time. So after someone does the homework, we'll read over every single homework that comes in and if you get to homework stage, it means you get a shot getting the job. Basically we don't give. Basically at every phase we're cutting people out. We only want to basically be looking at people who could potentially be hired. There's no, oh, we're feeling nice, we don't do that at all. It's all like very, very scientific, like if you're doing work for us, you get a shot at getting it and so, um, we turn people down as early in the process as we think, uh, as we can, just so no one was wasting any other time, uh, and you know, do the homework. We'll evaluate the homework and generally have sort of a like we call them technical interviews, but they're basically like reviewing the homework plus like kind of diving into sort of technical skills required for the job. And then after that we do a culture interview, which is where, uh, you know, assuming at that point, we assume basically you can do the job, you pass the technical interview, you can do the job, you pass the technical interview, you can do the job.

Speaker 2

29:53

The culture interview, um, uh, is where we talk about our values, because olak is a very values driven company. I love that, yeah, uh, we want, we don't, we're not like looking for people that look that fit any individual mold but, uh, generally speaking, the people that get hired at Olark are engaged on some level with our values. They can't view company values as bullshit, and that would come across in the cultural interview. You have to be bought into what we're trying to do at the company and then we'll give you an opportunity to talk about the value that you feel like will be the best at exemplifying, the value you think you'd be the worst at exemplifying, and have a real conversation. If that goes well, we'll take the best couple of people from that round and we'll bring them in and have them work remotely for us, uh, for a day, and we'll pay them for the whole day, a consulting rate and, uh, you know, basically give you a day in the life working at olark and if you, you ace that, you get a job bingo.

Speaker 1

31:08

Is it easy as that? Hey, no problem. No, it's, it's good, it's great. I mean, there's quite a lot there. I mean I'd love to. Can you give us any clues as to what's in the homework at all?

Speaker 2

31:20

I mean it's gonna specifically the job role.

Speaker 2

31:22

I mean just a mat like, if you're like a director of marketing which you've recently been hiring, like your homework looked like. Here's a bunch of data that's not necessarily exactly olark's data but is like close enough to give you a sense for what the job will be like. Give us your like 90 day plan and your 180 day plan and, uh, state any assumptions that you need. Any questions you need answered like a pretty, like thoughtful kind of assignment. But that's for more of a higher level For a CS person. Actually, I'm not sure what the homework looks like there. My guess is that, if it's been iterated on a long time since I worked on the hiring process, but probably in the early days what we would do is give you a like a couple of example customer situations and have you sort of write the emails that you would write back to them and or maybe that type of thing.

Speaker 1

32:16

And you talked about the culture element of the of the interview. How do you cause it's? It's really, it's quite difficult, I think, to actually convey culture or to kind of express it so it doesn't sound contrived.

Speaker 2

32:32

You know how do you do that well, I think in our case uh, yeah, you raise a good point. I think that a lot of people's like there there's this old term or culture fits like oh, like if someone was on the in the office on friday, you'd go grab a beer with them, or something like that, and I think that that is actually like a pretty dumb, like pretty stupid way of looking at culture. I think that that's a good way of determining if someone should be in your frat, maybe, or if, like they want, or like if this person might be your friend yeah, but like you're not.

Hiring Strategies and Interview Tips

Speaker 2

33:04

You're not trying to hire for friends necessarily, right, like yeah, I mean, ideally you can get along with like most people, so like anyone can be your friend, but like you're not trying to like optimize for this is like the most likely to be my friend kind of person. So, uh, it all like our culture and views of over of uh, you have evolved over time. In the early days we cared a lot about conflict styles because when you're working remotely it's harder to assess whether you're doing all right if you are not prone to conflict. If you're a conflict avoider, it's easier for you to have conflict and not talk about it and not deal with it. So, uh, in some of our earlier interviews we would ask kind of like some conflict related questions and try to understand, uh, how, how people would deal with conflict like, uh, you know, like looking, looking at unresolved conflict was always a red flag. I don't think that's in our current batch of. We probably do that in a more indirect way now. I think I kind of alluded to this a bit.

Speaker 2

34:17

We give people the opportunity to review our values. There's a lot written about them on our website and you can read. You know, just search the internet, olark values there's stuff that comes up all over the place and we want people who, you know, kind of take time to understand what we're about and most job candidates at that stage understand what we're about. And the way that we look at culture fit is we have our champs, core values, right, chill, uh, help each other, assume good faith, make it happen, practice empathy and speak your mind, and so, uh, we look for people that who want, who value those same attributes, and so on the culture interview, we look at how you communicate about those values and the things that you say and the questions you ask us, how you engage.

Speaker 2

35:21

Generally, I'd say most people do. Really it's not that hard of an interview to pass, but you'd be surprised at how many people like it turns out it's just not a good fit Because you know you're interviewing each other right, and you know our company's not for everyone and, uh, it's, you know it's a chance for, uh, you know there's people that are considering working at Allark to like ask questions of the people that they work at Allark, of course, and see, see how, see how it feels, you know. So, uh, I mean, um, you can think of it as kind of like a thoughtful discussion about our values. Is is a way of looking at our the culture interviews and expecting some self-reflection from the candidate.

Speaker 1

36:07

I think a lot of people struggle with that. Actually, ben, in terms of that, you mentioned that it's a conversation, that interviews are conversation, a two-way flow of information. I think a lot of people believe that you know, or struggle in some way to actually ask a question in return to something that you might have asked them. If you see what I mean, they think that they need to leave all the questions to the end and it's. You know, it's.

Speaker 2

36:29

It's kind of an old-school way of looking at it yeah, I mean I think that is a just a challenge, right, because interviews are socially constructed and people kind of have a way in which they expect them to work, and I mean I think I think that's okay. I mean, in our interviews we probably have some prompts for them to ask those questions. So like it's not like we're, it's like a conversation where we're giving you the floor right To go talk.

Speaker 2

36:53

And then those questions at the end, you know. I mean you mentioned, like a lot of people say about questions at the end. Well, certainly those questions at the end are super freaking, important in hiring. So I mean, if you are a candidate, right like, make sure you have some good questions.

Speaker 1

37:10

Of course.

Speaker 2

37:11

You can go make a list of questions before you walk into the interview, like, honestly, because, like you know who you're meeting with, you can look them up on LinkedIn. You are about like you're trying to work at this place for at least a couple of years. You better have, like this is a thoughtful process and you better have some thoughtful questions to bring into this, like even if you already know the answers, like just confirm you actually know the answer, because sometimes people don't give you the answer you're expecting.

Speaker 1

37:46

And I think on top of that, well, a lot of people it's not just, I suppose, the interview process, but even when it comes to applying you get obviously I'm sure you've seen this a lot of people are just really spraying and praying and sort of sending out their resume here and hoping that one of them will stick, and not necessarily reading what's on the website, the values, and connecting their values in their application or their interview with with yours in many ways, so they're clearly not sort of read and understood everything.

Speaker 2

38:17

Yeah, it's hard, I think it's. It's definitely hard as a candidate to uh to find the right place. I mean, I think just looking at our candidate pool right, there's probably many, many people that could do the job when 300 people apply and our process isn't perfect. We're not necessarily trying to get the best person out of the process, because to get the best person you might need a process that takes longer than is business feasible. What you're trying to get is a candidate in the top 5% or so, and so you have to imagine that hiring processes are designed both for the candidate and for the company. The company needs to fill the position at some speed, or else they wouldn't have posted the position, and so everyone's trying to come up with the optimal way of getting like sort of the best result they can in a fixed amount of time and a fixed amount of effort. And from a job candidate perspective, I think the spray and pray strategy is probably not an optimal strategy for what you're trying to do Now.

Speaker 2

39:28

There's a lot of factors at play in what the optimal strategy might be for you. I mean, if you have a killer resume, for example, then probably you can just pick a couple of companies and reach out to them and talk to them and they'll more or less interview you and you can interview them. If you don't have a killer resume, then you're in a tougher situation and you have to. You know, I think one thing that good hiring managers will do is when you reach out to a company and just figure out who their HR recruiter people are, just set up an they're called informational interviews. Just talk to those people and understand what they're looking for and if your set of skills is not great or not perfect for that job and that's in your mind, this is like the perfect job for you.

Speaker 2

40:19

I think a good thing to do is to ask the hiring manager like hey, I know I eventually want to end. Is to ask the hiring manager like, hey, like you know, I know I eventually want to end up here, but like, what do you think I should be doing at this point in my career? That's going to help me get here, get there in the future, and I think that if you can build that plan a few steps out, it makes it more tractable to, you know, end up at those places that you're really excited to end up at, rather than just like, oh, I'm going to spray and pray and I'm just going to end up at, rather than just like, oh, I'm going to spray and pray and I'm just going to end up like wherever I can right now. I think if you had a little bit more intentionality around it, you could be like you know what I should be doing right now.

Speaker 2

40:51

I should be going back to school because, like I need to have like X and a Y, or I need to go find like a company that has a really good training program or something like that, so that I can add that to my resume, so that when I show up for the next interview, like I will have really great answers for those four questions that I'm you know, just literally, I just didn't know those things and do you tend, ben to hire um more experienced candidates, or do you like to nurture, or is it just a mixture of it's?

Speaker 2

41:21

it's such a it's. I like hiring for uh, aptitude. I like smart people, I like people who show that they can learn, and we basically do our best to ignore resume after you pass resume screen, so like we tend to not show people people's resume later in the process because, from our standpoint, once you pass resume screen, you've passed resume screen, so we feel like you can do the job.

Speaker 2

41:50

Once you pass technical interview, you pass, like you know, your technical skills are good enough, and now it's just how you perform during the interviews. Like that's. That's the way that we sort of do it like, and, like I said, we try to narrow that down as you go through the process because, like, we don't, we don't want, like, a lot of people hanging out in the process and limbo, who couldn't, who wouldn't get the job if they didn't, like excel at the next step, and so, uh, yeah, we have a lot of like really. I mean, we're a relatively small company, right, but we have, uh, you know, there's an engineer who works at olark who has a master's degree in social work. Uh, we have a lot of people who, uh, either don't have like, who have non-standard college degrees some people didn't graduate from college like we try to uh, uh, you know other other experiences substitute for schooling. Like, we have a lot of smart people. We have some smart people who have really frigging good resumes. We have some smart people who have horrible resumes.

Speaker 2

42:56

After you add Oleg on there, their resume is fantastic. When hired, their resume might not have looked that great for some of the positions we were going, so, at least for us, we were always willing to look a little bit past what school you went to or what degree your college was in, or if you went to college and stuff like that. I love that. And on the position basis, I mean it just depends on the position basis. Uh, I mean it just depends on the position. I mean, if we're hiring for a senior position, it's more. We're more likely to look at experience. Or, like you know, if you're have less experience and you're applying for a junior position, you're gonna have to work harder to prove to us that you have the expertise. But you're gonna be asked because you're gonna be asked the exact same question as a person who has more experience.

Speaker 1

43:47

Do you have? Like I mean, obviously the core of your business is communication and you know, like I said before, like you said before, building relationships. How do you, I don't know, how do you, I don't know? Obviously the interview will give you a good steer as to sort of how the person listens, et cetera, and that sort of thing. But are there any other indicators to you of somebody who could be really good in your customer service team, for example?

Future Plans for Olark

Speaker 2

44:16

Well, I think the interesting thing about the interview right is remote communication, Like, for example, homework is written, the application is written, the communication with Mandy who runs hiring is all written. So we're evaluating your communication as well as throughout the interview, right, it's a mix of written and verbal communication throughout the whole process and so that does tell us stuff. Especially when we do a day-in-the-life working day, We'll understand how people are going to engage with their coworkers and their communication styles. And the interesting thing is we have a mix of extroverts and introverts at Olark. I would think more people are probably more introverted, a little bit more quiet on average, and you know, some of these situations are hard for those people, or and uh uh, well, it can be hard for those people and we try to do our best to build like a a pretty inclusive process.

Speaker 2

45:17

I mean, you know, for for any position, right, the modern day, modern day society requires kind of this face-to-face interview as part of the hiring process.

Speaker 2

45:29

I mean WordPress, I think, has a chat back-and-forth hiring process, more or less. That sounds pretty awesome, but it's not something we've tried ourselves, because we do end up doing a lot of verbal communication at Olark, because we do end up doing a lot of verbal communication at Olark. So when we're having an interview like this, it's not just for fun, it's because we need verbal communication as an important skill at Olark, given the way that our company is organized, and so I guess yeah, I mean I don't really have any great advice for how to stand out during that process. I think that probably taking a little bit of extra time to polish written communication is always a good step, Just because, like I think, typically it's easier. Like you can polish written communication, you can't really polish verbal communication. You can take a few more seconds to think about your thoughts, but you just have the opportunity to spend a little bit more time making sure you're communicating clearly when it's written.

Speaker 1

46:35

Any particular peak periods when you're hiring? Is there any particular times a year when you hire most?

Speaker 2

46:41

Yeah, that's a good question, year when you hire most. And yeah, that's a good question. Uh, I don't think there's a particular period of time when we hire the most. I mean generally when we have a position, we post it, we promote it and uh, you know a small business, we're like roughly 30 people, so like we're not going to be able to hire like tons and tons of of people. I mean that would be when we are bootstrapped. So one thing that would be kind of cool for raising money is you could go hire lots of people. I mean that would be. And we are bootstrapped. So one thing that would be kind of cool for raising money is you could go hire lots of people. But that's not really like our, our MO. Yeah, I don't, I don't.

Speaker 2

47:11

Generally speaking, like our quarters are a little bit, they're a little offset. So like our Q1 starts in February and so like you can just kind of follow that calendar around the year and kind of assume that most hiring decisions are going to be made before the start of the quarter, before you post the job. So like you can think like okay, well, it's probably more likely that we're going to post a job and say march than post a job in january, because january is the end of the quarter and March is the beginning. The first month, or February, is the beginning of the quarter. So it's much more likely that the jobs are going to be posted at the beginning of the quarter beginning of an OLAQ quarter than the end of an OLAQ quarter, just because that's, generally speaking, the pacing. But probably if you go look at our historical job listings, it could be interesting to know how well that matches up it varies right okay so um, somebody's got through the interview process.

Speaker 1

48:14

They you know you've got an onboarding process you put.

Speaker 2

48:18

You pull that into place as well, and tools that you use as well yeah, yeah, I mean we put just as much work in the. I mean, interviewing is just the beginning of the process, right, you bring, you're bringing remote people. You need them to feel like they're part of the team and our onboarding process takes, for most positions, at least two weeks of just very, very onboarding focused work. So you know, meeting your team, understanding the tools, tools, understanding how to work at olark, how to work remotely, uh. But you know, in a way, we're always, we're all always onboarding, right, you're always like kind of learning and growing and upping your game and so that that doesn't really, uh, stop okay, and for you, I, we're coming close to the end.

Speaker 1

49:05

Now we are. Now. You've given us a lot of time. Thank you, ben. What do you see? What's the future for Olark? And you know how do you see? Yeah, what's the? Where's your future lie?

Speaker 2

49:18

Yeah, sure, well, I think you know the beginning of this call. I can talk about this a little bit. I think, if you look at Olark's mission, our mission is to make business human, and we have this live chat product right now that exists in a world where a lot of competition, I think, is very focused on automation and AI, and so I think what you'll see is Olark really, really championing the automation side that really helps humans perform better. I think where we're trying to focus is how do we help you bring your full self to work every day? How do we make sure that you are in a position where you can grow, so you're incentivized to do a good job every day, right? So we're, we're going to be the live chat company that sort of takes some of the values we've built internally and encode them into our product in a way that makes our product quite a bit different from what some other competitors are building. So that's sort of the future of the live chat product. At the same time, we have this broader mission and we see our mission as sort of this championing this idea of business humanity. So you'll see us launch a couple of new products that are designed to kind of help people sort of be the best that they can be, so, like you know, really looking at things that people do well and help them do it even better.

Speaker 2

50:45

An example of this is a product that we're about to launch, probably in January. It's called Dyno Insights. It's a product that helps you pull insight out of interviews. For example, a lot of product managers, journalists, podcasters do interviews constantly as part of their job, and a lot of people inside product organizations and software companies actually avoid doing interviews. All the people could get more insight and learn more from those interviews if they had tools that helped them structure their thinking, and so the first product here is just a product that helps you conduct verbal, remote interviews and pull insights out of it and store those insights for later consumption to share within your org, because another thing that often happens with interviews is that, uh, they get lost or they exist like just in a user researcher's, like local computer or like spread out around google drive, and they're just, they're messy, and you might end up with a report here and there, but it's really hard to go back to the source materials. So a lot of uh, one product helping people do better interviews to get better insight, to build better products, to just sort of generally learn faster. And I think it's one product that will be launched in January.

Speaker 2

52:16

And then another product that we're working on is taking a lot of our philosophy around customer service and turning it into a set of courses that people can use to learn and think about customer service, the way that we think about customer service and the way it's helped us build this successful company. We think this is great for a couple of reasons. One reason is, quite honestly, a lot of customer service training out there is crap. It's just not modernized for what it means to be an enlightened customer service person. If you think about call center jobs, they're basically set up for you handle rote stuff. If you're really good, maybe you get promoted to manage a bunch of other people handling rote stuff. And we want to help people reframe that role of customer service into something that really helps produce insight. It helps produce employees that can move up and grow within that organization, who really understand that company's customer. And in many ways customer service can be a profit center and I think a lot of times it's framed as a cost center. So it's sort of courses that help reframe the philosophy of customer service and not just like here's how you deal with an unhappy customer or whatever. There are elements of how do you take care of yourself as someone whose main job is expressing empathy all the time. So we've launched that course kind of internally. We've done a beta with a couple of other companies and they've found it to be really good. So that'll be cleaned up a little bit and relaunched probably in 2019. So that'll be really cool too.

Speaker 2

54:06

So I think you can think of Olark and the way that I like to think about Olark is if Fog Creek was sort of this developer-centric incubator for all these great ideas. They helped spun out Trello. They helped spun out Stack Overflow.

Inspiring Growth Through Innovation

Speaker 2

54:21

Many people have never heard of Fog Creek. That's one of sack overflow. Yeah, many people have never heard of fog creek, and I want olark to sort of be like the fog creek of human-centered business, focusing on, like the problems, the areas where humans are really good at helping humans doing those, doing those jobs even better. And so I think where we're trying to go is to be able to take that core business of olark live chat and grow it, but also spin out these really interesting solutions to other problems and hopefully inspire more entrepreneurs to. You know, take AI and figure out how it can make humans like a ton better rather than just replace humans, cause I feel like, uh, one is a lot more fun for all of us.

Speaker 1

54:59

Well, ben, you're inspiring me, You've inspired me to even be on this call with you today and I just want to say thank you so much for your time. You've given so much yourself today. Thank you, and yeah, we'll be keeping a lookout for uh, for dino insight and um your, your other product, um later in the year as well.

Speaker 2

55:19

So, thank you for sure, alex, it's been fun.