Blurring the Lines Between Talent and People

Key Takeaways

1. Fish thinking vs. pond thinking: when compensation and recognition systems reward title, level, and promotion over collective impact, you get employees focused on themselves rather than growing the company. Diagnose your incentives before they diagnose you.
2. Superhuman ran a voluntary salary-for-equity swap program that over 40% of the company opted into — including strong participation from international offices and sales. It was the most effective equity education program they'd ever run, because it forced employees to think like investors.
3. Equity-light compensation creates employees who are passengers, not owners. Forward-looking comp — not vested comp — is the retention lever. Every employee's future package should be more compelling than their outside alternative.
4. Re-enrollment is the practice of intentional, recurring conversations between the people team and individual employees — separate from managers — to understand engagement, explain compensation, and re-sell the vision. It's recruiting energy applied to retention.
5. Blurring the lines between TA and HR means recruiters learning to think like people partners (understanding org dynamics, re-enrolling existing employees) and HRBPs learning to sell and close like great recruiters. Both teams need the other's skill set.
6. Centralize compensation decisions away from individual managers to remove the implicit incentive for employees to become managers in order to earn more. This creates the conditions for individual contributors to stay and do their best work.
7. The people team's goal should be that every member can sell the company's vision as compellingly as the CEO — understanding product strategy, financial metrics, and what the future looks like for each individual employee.
8. Getting it right beats getting it out on time. Pausing a compensation cycle mid-rollout to fix the modeling — even when painful — builds more trust with the organization than shipping numbers that don't feel right.
9. For TA leaders wanting to close the gap with HR: find your HR business partner counterpart, build the relationship bottom-up, align on shared hiring manager challenges, and ask together how solutions can span the full employee lifecycle.

Transcript

Note: transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor inaccuracies.

Mike Clapson: I have the pleasure of Kenny and Brady joining me on stage today. I'll start with a couple of quick intros here. Brady Donaldson has spent eight years building the people function at what is now Superhuman, formerly Grammarly. Joining Grammarly as its first HR business partner when the team was 150 strong, she scaled alongside Superhuman's growth to over 1,500 employees globally.

Kenny is the chief people officer at Superhuman, where he leads the company's global people and workplace experience teams. Before Superhuman, Kenny served as chief operating officer at Coda, overseeing people, legal, ops, and finance functions. And prior to Coda, Kenny was the first recruiting hire at Box, where he built the recruiting function from the ground up.

Let's get a welcome round of applause for Brady and Kenny.

All right, so Kenny, take us back to around January of 2025. I know it was an interesting year. Uh, Grammarly has just acquired Coda. Can you set a little bit of context for the folks in the room? 

Kenny Mendes: Yeah. First off, hi everyone. Thank you all for being here at 4:45. I know it's been a long day, so you are all the troopers.

We're gonna, we're gonna finish with good energy, uh, before we all get to drinks. Um, so yeah, last year and a half, Mike, have been super, super interesting. Uh, Coda was about 200 people. Uh, there was this really interesting thing going on in the world with this AI revolution, and the founders of Coda, founders of Grammarly came together and realized the market is gonna go somewhere very, very special, and we both have similar visions. Should we go about it alone or should we go do this together? And it was a very fast decision to go make this really interesting combination of teams and culture and strategy and product. And most people know Grammarly. It's one of the most loved products out there, used by 40 million folks daily. And, uh, it's been really, really fascinating to see this experiment of bringing, so far now, three companies together under this umbrella. But I would say a lot of learning for us. How do you get a company oriented around shipping product quickly in a fast-moving environment? How do you integrate cultures and decision-making and different processes around how do you think about hiring and compensation, all that? So it's been, uh, a fun experience. Brady has been an amazing sidekick. We've gone through lots of learning and listening. Um, for me, I think the first phase of that acquisition was all about observing. Like, what, what is going on in the world today? How is our team doing? What are the situations going on as a, as a head of people? What's preventing us from getting the top talent we're looking for? If someone is leaving the company, what's causing them to leave? And a lot of, a lot of digestion through that phase. 

Mike Clapson: Yep. So you're in the CPO seat of this newly formed entity. You're starting to go through this observation phase. What were some of the things that you were seeing,the good, the bad, and the ugly?

Kenny Mendes: Yeah. It, it was very different, right? Coda was, was much smaller, and, uh, Shishir, he's the founder of Coda. Previously he came from YouTube. Uh, actually it was Google, ran the YouTube products, 1,500 person company. So a lot of our people philosophies at, at Coda were inspired by things that Shishir did a little bit differently at YouTube to inspire the right level of execution and excitement with his team. And the analogy that we, we use a lot, um, we call this fish thinking and pond thinking. So I'm, I'm gonna, uh, start with a little bit of a visual for everyone. So, uh, if you're at Google, for example, really, really large organization, um, the impact that one individual person can have on changing the, the size of Google, the trajectory of Google is, is pretty small. So what you need to build in that sort of environment is a lot of structure and process and, and hierarchy to make that system work well. So a lot of times when you're, when you're in that environment, you have to measure yourself by things like your title- Your, your role, your level, how many people do you manage, and those are the sorts of things that lead to the right level of career progression and rewards. The, the opposite of, of, uh, Google is maybe like a five or 10 person startup. Like think about that world where no one really cares are you a senior engineer, are you a junior engineer. Everyone is thinking, "We've got this thing. We've got this small pond, and we want to be the next Google. We wanna turn it into a really, really large pond." So we talk a lot about our- the incentives and programs we're putting in place driving fish thinking, where you're at Google and you're kind of worrying about, hey, how big of a fish am I compared to the fish next to me? Or are you driving pond thinking, where everyone looks around and says, "We gotta grow the heck out of this pond as quickly as possible"? And at the, at the very earliest phases of kind of that acquisition, I looked at Grammarly, 1,500 person company, was working really hard on scaling, growing, getting ready for, for all of those big things. They put in the type of structures that work well probably when you are a large pond, but the state of the business needed us to really be focused much more on small pond to big pond. Get everyone to, to think like an owner, to feel like they can go move the needle in the company. And you have to really start to unpack, okay, what are the incentives that are driving pond thinking versus fish thinking in our, uh, in our company? So apologies in advance. There's gonna be a lot of pond and fish analogies as we go through the day. 

Mike Clapson: Got it. Um, so Brady, this one's for you. It sounds like you're starting to see how incentives are shaping behavior and decision-making. What did you perceive, what did you see as some of the issues? 

Brady Donaldson: Yeah. When we were bringing all of these organizations together, they definitely had different starting points. Uh, Kenny mentioned, you know, I came from, from Grammarly, and we had been growing really quickly, and I think we had been sort of on the growth conveyor belt of like, we were like, "We're going to the moon, baby." Uh, and so we were really trying to think about how we structure things to have a 5,000-plus person team. And I think we had this moment of realization of that's not where we're at right now in this moment, especially when we were joining with a smaller organization like Coda. And it really pushed the question for us of like, what is, what is our intention here? What are we trying to achieve as a team? And it's really stood out to the folks who were joining from Coda that a lot of folks, uh, in the organization were really promotion-focused. And so we took the step back and looked at the systems and said, "You know, we've really inadvertently incentivized that behavior." Uh, promotions were the fastest way to make significant compensation increases. We had titles that meant a certain thing in the organization that people assigned a lot of value to. And it- we were thinking about this fish versus pond world, and seeing that all of this was really reinforcing the fish thinking and what's in this for me rather than what's in this for the collective and what's in, what's in it for the group. And how do I, uh, do what I'm doing to help this... We always say grow the pond. I don't know if ponds actually grow, but it is what we talk about. So how do we grow the pond and, uh, uh, really push forward the goals of the organization? So we started to have a lot of conversations about what team members were focused on and where we wanted to shift their attention. That being really on impact, on bringing together, uh, the team. So no longer thinking as Codans or Grammarians, but thinking as folks who had this shared vision, this shared mission that we are now striving toward. 

Mike Clapson: Yeah. 

Kenny Mendes: We had, we had some situations early on where, you know, a really talented employee was gonna leave, and the number one question I had was, "Okay, what's, what's their comp situation? How's their equity? How do they feel about their stock? Are they excited?" And we'd hear back responses like, "They don't care about it. They don't value it. They don't really have that much. It's not that big of a deal." And if your wellbeing, your compensation doesn't really change that much if the company grows 100X or doesn't, like, that's kind of a problem. And we, we heard lots of variations of this, and it caused us to kinda step back and say, "Okay- What, what were the, the frameworks and structures that led us to this current compensation paradigm where I think we were paying really well on the cash side, people were well, well-rewarded, but folks were kind of much lighter than we would've liked on, on equity. And, and equity is really that thing that connects you as an employee to feel like an owner in that organization. Um, so lots of these like little things that we started to say, "Okay, how can we start to unpack and, and make some changes there?" 

Mike Clapson: Yep. So trying to prioritize impact-oriented thinking, what was the shape of the creative solution that you guys came up with?

Kenny Mendes: Yeah. You had to go approach it in lots, lots of different ways, um, but the, the wildest thing that, that we did is we, we looked at the data, we looked at everyone's kind of average compensation, how much goes into cash, how much goes into equity, and said, "We've got a balance issue, and we need to like really move it to, to where we're driving way more equity into our team as possible." And, um, equity's a really, you know, complicated concept. It's not super well understood by employees. Um, boards are often trying to like hold onto it, prevent, you know, this concept of dilution. They wanna minimize the number of shares that are, uh, getting split apart. Um, but for us, we, we wanted to activate the culture, and to do that, it was catalyze this feeling of ownership throughout the company. Um, so the, the bold, wacky idea that we had was, what if we could go to our employees and say, "Do you want to voluntarily trade your salary for equity?" In a time when confidence in equity might not have been super high, people didn't really have a lot of it, they didn't think about it a lot, they were not talking about it. Um, so when we first started to, to socialize this idea, um, we got a lot of pushback. No one is going to want to do this. This seems nuts. Why would you give up something that is so certain, uh, for something that's unpredictable? We don't know how it's gonna do. Um- But we, we tried to structure the program in a way, uh, where it was a pretty compelling, in our opinion, deal for our employees, right? Make it as much of a great decision where you feel like you could radically change your, your ownership. And yeah, lot, lot of surprising results. Like, pretty, pretty impactful progress along the way. 

Mike Clapson: Yep. You mentioned, you know, typically boards are concerned with dilution and things like that. How did you end up taking this to the rest of the leadership team and the board? What did that approval process for such an idea look like? 

Kenny Mendes: Yeah. Um, first off, I'm very grateful that our, our CEO, Shishir, is incredibly employee-centric. Like, for the entire journey, he was trying to push in this direction of the number one thing we can do to maximize success is to have an employee base that's super motivated, excited, vested in the interest of the company. Um, so I- it never felt like me having to convince him to do this. It was a great, great partnership. Uh, I think I had three straight board meetings where I had pictures of this pond and fish, and I had to, like, get the board to start thinking about this, of like, what happens if you change? And I had to give examples of, look, we're trying to close really, really top engineers in the market, and we're really great on cash, but look at this equity. Like, is this gonna be meaningful? Is this gonna be what draws that person in compared to what they're gonna get at, you know, hot AI startup over here down the street? Um, look at why these people are leaving. Look at the, the incentives of people that are worried they're not getting promoted fast enough. Um, and the board was similarly skeptical. They said, "We're, we're probably not gonna get people to do this, but okay, if you wanna do it, you can find it." Uh, we, we had to go work really closely with legal and finance, and we talked to so many outside lawyers that said, "No one's ever done something like this. This seems nuts. It's probably not possible." But sure enough, it is, and we kinda pushed our way through it. And everyone was just shocked by the, the kind of participation. I think the main thing that it did when we announced it to the company is it created this moment where suddenly it was all everyone could talk about. Are you gonna do it or not, and why? And for the first time ever, like, equity was the number one thing people were asking about. They were not asking about, you know, what's, what's the next path to getting promoted? They were saying, "Is this a good thing for me to do for myself?" Or, "How are you thinking about it for yourself?" And it just started this, like, yeah, I, I think momentum that we've continued to build on in lots of different ways. 

Mike Clapson: Yep. And so Brady, for the practitioners, operationally, how did talent and people teams need to show up differently? You know, there's this whole new paradigm where impact and equity are important. What's different day to day? 

Brady Donaldson: Yeah. We asked our people team, the entire team, both talent and HR sides, uh, to really think about how they play a role in re-enrolling our team on an ongoing basis. So companies obviously, and a lot of people in this room, put a lot of time and effort into getting folks in the door. Uh, but you don't necessarily have those intentional checkpoints throughout that person's time in the organization. And so we started to establish this idea of, like, re-enrolling folks and having those conversations on a consistent basis. And it really pushed, I think, everyone a little bit out of their comfort zone. So, uh, for our folks on the talent side, it was really sitting with what's happening in the organization in a way that they might not see and experience day to day, um, and understanding where team members are at mentally, what's happening within the org, and their concerns. And then for our HR business partners and on the HR side, uh, I think they were pretty skittish that they were gonna sit down and talk about comp with people. Like, usually that happens through recruiters or through the manager. And so it was a really interesting process of bringing those two groups together and sharing a bit of what each of them was comfortable with and what they knew as their world, and asking everyone to think about, like, what's the best way that we can, when our powers combine, uh, bring to the people, you know, a really compelling story and a really compelling vision that feels super authentic and, and is something that we all believe in as well. Uh, I'll say that this program, you know, I've done a lot of, like, equity education in my career and trying to get employees to understand their equity, and this was by far the most effective thing because, you know, you, you're investing in your organization, the organization you work for every day, whether or not you're thinking about it, right? So I think it's really passive for a lot of us of like, okay, I'm showing up here every day. I'm putting time and energy into this. But this was this really explicit ask of people to sit down and think about, you know, from an investor's perspective- What do you want to put into the equity? What do you want to, uh, invest there? And what could that look like for you in various outcomes? And so, you know, all of a sudden we're getting lots more questions about the strategy, and how is this gonna work, and how are we thinking about, you know, all of these different components of the product? And it, it really pushed, I think, folks who otherwise would sit, sort of sit on the sidelines to really engage with what we were trying to build collectively as Superhuman.

Kenny Mendes: Yeah. I think, uh, one of, one of the big lessons that, that I've observed is most candidates and, and employees of companies, they're not often trained to think like investors and really value the equity and think about, you know, there's 100 different scenarios that can happen. It can go up this way and go down this way. Most people think about it just as a lotto ticket of, "Ah, maybe it's gonna be worth a lot or maybe not, but I'm just gonna focus on my salary." Um, but as, as Brady was talking about, we had to work a lot on enablement, like enabling ourselves, and then going out and enabling our employees to think about it a little bit differently. And then you got to see the, the kinda gears turning. And, and one of my favorite stories, um, one of our, our product leads came to me and she said, "You know, Kenny, you put out this, like, really silly, wacky thing, and I was pretty skeptical. And then I started thinking about it. I talked to my husband, went back and forth, and finally decided to do it. I decided to do it, and I came to work on Monday and something was different. I suddenly felt way more motivated." And she literally said, "To yell at those engineers to ship that feature, because, hey, now a lot of things are, are, are riding on it." Um, and I've had people, um, you know, in the, in the recruiting team who opted in and said, "Wow, like, I feel like this opportunity gave me the type of equity that I only saw going to engineers in the company. And now I feel like way more an owner." And something flips with people when you give them an opportunity to, to think like that. So one of the, the things we've tried to do is get people to vote with their feet many, many times during an employee life cycle. So at the recruiting stage, we don't go to a candidate and say, "Here's your offer." We actually go to them and say, "Hey, you have three choices. You can choose high, medium, low salary, high, medium, low equity, and you can think about here's, here's the economics and the impact, and I don't know what the future's gonna hold. You don't know. Do you want to, to, you know, make a bet in some way or another?" And it gets them on this process where they're, they're starting to think like owners. Then they go out and they get, you know, an employee refresh. They get a, an award. And we go to them with the same thing of, "Here's your refresh. Congratulations. But by the way, how much do you wanna skew one way with equity and not?" And the more you get employees to get to vote with their feet, the more they suddenly say, "Wow, this is the thing that can really move the economics for me, and I don't care as much about what my title is with, with this. I wanna make the company successful. I wanna grow the pond." 

Mike Clapson: Yeah. Awesome. Uh, you shared an anecdote about kinda one employee, uh, really leaning into it. Any other surprises from the kind of employee-based reaction to the program? How, how did it go overall? What do you think? 

Kenny Mendes: Oh yeah, some funny stories. 

Brady Donaldson: Yeah. Uh, there was so much skepticism, and actually that, that product leader that you're speaking about, um, is in our Berlin hub. And so one of the things that we heard was nobody in the international team was going to participate in this because folks outside of the US didn't care as much about equity. And so once we actually started to get into this program, it was this aha moment of, oh, they care. They just don't understand it, and they're not sitting in the Valley where people talk about valuations and all these things all the time, right? And so, uh, actually at one point Kenny and I were in Berlin and sat down and did like a fireside chat with the team there just to say like, "No stupid questions. Let's talk about it. Let's get it out." Um, and we actually saw really strong participation from those groups that everyone were the most skeptical about participating, so folks, um, who are early in their career, folks who were in those international locations, and all of that was really surprising and exciting to see.

Kenny Mendes: Yeah, I think we, we netted out with over 40% of the company choosing to do this program, which was a much higher rate. Uh, our European offices had some of the highest participation rates. Our sales team participated over 50%, which is like ridiculously exciting. They, they saw the future of the roadmap and they wanted to be more, more, more owners in it. And, and what I mentioned earlier, this was like one of many things that I think we had to operationalize to go switch the incentives over kind of what Brady was saying, like, you know, fish thinking, promotions, titles. Um, one kind of other funky thing that, that we've done is when you think about, um, compensation structures in companies, usually they're driven by managers, right? A manager on a team is the person that's setting- The cash budgets, the equity budgets for that team. And whether this is explicitly or implicitly understood, everyone realizes that manager's probably making it more than everyone else on that team. Like, they're, they're leading it. And something important to, to Shishir and I is the idea of inversions. Like, you shouldn't feel like if you're a phenomenal engineer, phenomenal designer, phenomenal recruiter, that the best thing that you can do for the company is to go become a manager. Uh, maybe the best thing for you to do is ship that amazing product or close that amazing candidate. But when your compensation incentives are skewed towards go get promoted, go increase your scope in that way, you get the wrong kind of behavior. So what we had to do is take that responsibility away from managers and move it back into the people team. You're, you're centralizing things that are typically decentralized, which enabling that in a 1,500-person org is tough, but it put all the pressure within the people team. Suddenly we're looking at this and saying, "We've gotta operationalize getting these conversations out to our entire team." And how do you upskill everyone? How do you train your recruiters to act like a people partner, to sit down and understand how's the person doing? What are they excited about? Walk them through what the future means for them. How do you train a people partner to re-enroll and sell the way our best recruiters can? One of the, the hallmarks we try to shoot for within the people team is to have as many people in our organization be as skilled at selling the vision as our CEO. Understand the product strategy, the financial metrics. Like, be, be an owner in that so that you can get that candidate, that employee that you're influencing to be really excited about that vision. And it's hard. I, I will, I will say it puts a big toll on our team carrying that, that load. But on the flip side, the, the transformation of our team where people are saying, "I don't have to do anything other than the thing that is most impactful for growing the pod," been totally worth it. 

Mike Clapson: Nice. You've each mentioned this concept of re-enrolling the existing team, so hoping we spend just a little bit more time on that. What was the kind of core idea there? Who's responsible for what? Talk to this audience about that concept. 

Brady Donaldson: Yeah. Well, re-enrollment, uh, having those intentional conversations with team members. So it's something that we've enabled, uh, our HR business partners, uh, and our recruiters to be able to go do, to sit with team members, and to, first of all, just talk to them about how things are going. And that conversation is really different when you're talking to someone from the people team versus when you're talking to your manager who's, like, in the trenches with you every day, right? It just has a different kind of flavor to it. And so asking folks to get really curious of understanding, like, what's really going on for this person in this moment, um, and then pulling that into, okay, like, we wanna talk about our appreciation for you as a member of this team and what you've delivered. And so that gets into, like, the compensation offer. And we, we even talk about it as offers, right? Because everyone's voting with their feet every day whether or not they're showing up and whether or not they're engaged, right? And so walking them through that offer, um, hopefully getting them really excited about the ownership stake that they have, what that potential upside looks like for them, and taking the time to really talk through their compensation, and also pulling back the curtain a little bit of, like, how we set compensation. So often in these conversations, people have a lot of questions about that and how we think about it and do it, um, as a structure across the organization, right? So being able to talk to folks about that and have them feel comfortable with it. It's really hard to get them, like, totally in the weeds of all the details, but if you can give them the sketch of, like, "Here's how it works, and here's how we see you and your impact," that tends to feel really good for folks and makes them really motivated. So trying to get that, like, reinforcing loop of, like, you're driving really great impact for the organization. We also really care and wanna know what's going on for you in this moment. Uh, something I think about a lot is because of how our organizations came to- came together, uh, almost no one in the company intended to join, you know, this company with this mission doing this thing and building this product and strategy with this manager in this role. Like, all of that has changed for everyone. So re-enrollment is also talking to people about this vision that we have, talking to them about how their role has evolved in that context, and then finding out the things that are breaking or, or not working for them. And it equips us better as a people team to then be able to go and support those systematic solutions. So we share out with the leadership some anonymized feedback of like, "Hey, here's what's coming up. Here's where we're seeing the trends, uh, and, you know, what folks are concerned about." And then we're also able to share some, like, really specific, like, "Hey, have you talked to so-and-so about X, Y, Z thing? That's really on their mind.” Uh, and I think our leadership has found it really helpful and impactful in that way, too, of getting, we call it the vibe check across the organization of where folks are at. 

Kenny Mendes: Yeah. Yeah. One thing that we, we've done there is, um, I can say, like, we gotta get in the field. Like, we had an amazing people partner team, but they really prior were influencing through managers. They would talk to managers and kinda coach the managers on how to do that, and we kind of flipped the model to say, "No, no, go talk to the team. Talk to every, every IC, understand what's going on with them. Go have recruiters not just worry about, how did I get the person hired and worry about the next hire." They actually think about, how can I think about this person's success a year in, two years in? How are they doing as they're having those, those re-enrollment conversations? So that, that's been amazing. And, and we've also had to change the, the math about how we've modeled compensation. And one, one thing that was, like, very worrying, we had this really phenomenal engineer, and he was leaving. He was gonna leave to go start a company. He had this amazing thing lined up, and I sat down with him and I asked why, and he's like, "Oh, I'm, I'm kinda like 85% vested. Like, I've, I've got most of my equity. Like, no big deal. I'm gonna go work on this next thing." And one, one thing we try is to make sure that employee never feels like most of their comp is already in the past. So we look at their, their equity, and we say, whatever is vested is theirs. What's their forward-looking comp, and how do they compare their forward-looking compensation in our organization compared to what are they gonna get by either starting a company, going and joining another company? And our forward-looking comp has to be more compelling than that other peer opportunity. So it basically means every single year or every two years, you have to re-enroll, re-top up. It should never feel like I can make more money in this organization by leaving and re-interviewing for a job than just staying here and doing great work. Um, so it's, it's been a lotta, a lotta hard, hard spreadsheet. A lot of Coda Docs to go get the math right, get these out into the team, but we're, we're definitely seeing that transformation. 

Mike Clapson: Yep. Tremendous. I wanna come back to this concept of kind of blurring the lines between talent and HR teams. Where do you see talent teams taking a page from HR's playbook or vice versa? Brady, do you wanna start?

Brady Donaldson: I think the concept of selling the organization was really uncomfortable for our HR business partners initially, uh, and really, like, pushed them out of their comfort zone. And so we had to have a lot of conversations and a lot of enablement around how you do that authentically. Um, we would, like, literally sit there and watch, uh, some of our most talented recruiters do their pitch and, like, walk through how they talk about the company. And you saw, like, the HR business partners, like, light up in that moment and be like, "Yeah, that's really cool. I wanna do that too." Um, so I think getting them comfortable with that was, was really important and critical. And I think the big shift for our talent team was so often there's such a silo between these two worlds, and you have folks come into the organization that you recruit in, and then you don't really have a mechanism by which you keep in touch with them, unless you're just a person who's reaching out to them and keeping tabs and checking in regularly, right? And so you can kind of lose track of that person over time, and this re-enrollment process and getting our recruiters involved in that has enabled them to have those ongoing touch points with people and to also hear about the organization in a way that they don't necessarily hear and get day to day, right? So it's just giving them a lot more data to work from when they're thinking about, like, what does this team need? What do they... What's gonna fit and really work well for them in this moment? 

Mike Clapson: Yep. Anything to add? 

Kenny Mendes: Uh, all the recruiters in this room probably know the amazing feeling you get when you close a candidate, right? That, that high, like wow, you know, beat, beat OpenAI, beat Anthropic, got this amazing hire in. And I had a people partner come to me one day and she said, "Look, I just convinced this employee that was about to leave to stay, and they're sticking around. They're so excited." And the HR side of our team never got to have that feeling of, like, winning. And so I, I do feel like in the last year you're seeing a lot of cross-pollination of learning and ideas, and the recruiters are having to think broader about many teams. They're just not focused on the area that they're recruiting. They're understanding how does the product strategy affect the engineering team, the go-to-market team, and connect that back to that employee that they're, they're connecting with. And our HR business partners have just become amazing evangelists of, like, why what we're doing right now is amazing and why you should be pumped to be here. So it's, it's been fun. 

Mike Clapson: Awesome. So Superhuman now 1,500-plus people. That's still a growth story. You've got these, uh, new incentive-based compensation programs. I'm curious, what have you been intentional about not over-engineering, uh, you know, to go too far towards big company structures? 

Brady Donaldson: Yeah. This is, uh, something I think that comes up pretty frequently. Uh, we love a spreadsheet. We love an elegant Coda solution, so sometimes walking ourselves back of like, simple might work here. Uh, so I think that's definitely something we, we push the team on every day. 

Kenny Mendes: Yeah, I think we, uh, we're always feeling this tension of the people team is trying to do something that just doesn't feel like it's what large companies do, and you, you can't do this. It won't scale. And I respond, "It may not work six months from now or a year from now, but the effect that it's gonna do for our employees today is meaningful. It's impactful. It's driving the business forward." It's incredibly painful when our organization, you know, does not have the ability to retain someone critical to an important feature. And when you, when you hold that back, when you get them to stay, that team can be far more successful. You won't win every single exercise like this. You will lose some people, but you're dramatically improving the odds of that team hitting goals. On the recruiting side, as people upskill their ability to sell and to close, to understand the strategy, they are moving up hiring quality. They're getting better talent in. So it's a very reinforcing thing that as we step up our game, let's not worry about is this gonna work five years from now? Let's just think about how can we serve the business and be really close to, to our leaders, our managers on what will unblock them the most. 

Brady Donaldson: We're about to go out and do this re-enrollment process today, and just today I was having this conversation of like, are we really gonna go out and have 600 one-on-ones with team members? And I was like, "Yeah, it's gonna be fun." Yeah. We're gonna learn a lot. Um, so I, I think, you know, until it breaks, that's what we're gonna do because it drives, it drives the right outcomes, and it drives so much impact for the business that we're gonna continue to make that investment. 

Mike Clapson: Yeah. 

Kenny Mendes: One of the, one of the first times, um, our people partner team was kind of doing this different model, we had this reorg in one part of our engineering and, um, we, we asked one of our people partners, "Just go check in on everyone on that team. See how they're doing. Uh, see how the reorg made them feel." And, uh, one of our awesome people partners did that. She had all these conversations, and the overwhelming positive response of, "It meant so much to me that you just reached out, that you checked in, saw how I was doing." Like, these little gestures, even if it's a 15, 30-minute conversation, matter. They matter in such a different way compared to the things that you might programatize and might feel like this is the right scaled way to do it. But at the end of the day, we're working on influencing people, making sure people feel like we care about them, that their, their work matters, that we understand the stuff that's getting in their way and we're working hard to unblock it. Um, so I think, I think that's the, the current MO for our people team right now. 

Mike Clapson: Yeah. 

Brady Donaldson: I think about this a lot too in, like, a post-COVID world. Like, I think about how I used to be a people partner before the pandemic when folks were mostly in the office. Like, Grammarly was 100% in the office, and it was super easy to just, like, see people and be like, "I don't know. That person's off. What's up with their energy?" Or run into someone in the kitchen and ask them how things are going. It was just really easy to have those sort of, like, bump into you conversations. And I think a big push for us has been having to operationalize that way more intentionally, uh, now that we're remote. We're global. We have people in the office, but it's not, uh, it's not required every day. You don't necessarily have those, like, bump into you moments with your people partner. So it's really pushed me to think differently about, about that and setting that up intentionally, even if it is awkward to be like, "Hey, I'm putting 15 minutes on your calendar and I just wanna hang out and chat."

Kenny Mendes: HR is no longer scary. Yeah. We were, we were seen before as scary, suddenly HR puts a time on the calendar. 

Mike Clapson: I wanted to draw off something you said in the green room. Thinking about getting it right versus moving quickly. You know, a startup's gotta move fast. How do you think about that trade-off in, you know, the context of compensation and re-enrollment and all that?

Kenny Mendes: Yeah, so Brady, Brady and I are, uh, in a very interesting period. So our company is going through the, the, you know, performance review growth cycle, and we're in this process of changing the entire underlying framework while we still have to keep the ship running to some degree. And we had designed a very thoughtful timeline on when does every single step of this have to happen. And we kinda got to the stage where we're about to go release all of our equity numbers, our salary numbers, and we're looking at it and we're like, "Something just feels wrong about the modeling here." And it had to do with, you know, the, the size of the budget. I felt like, I think we need to go to the board and kinda argue for a little bit more for our team. Had to really think about the distribution. Is it going to the right places? Is it gonna drive the retentive impact that we need to? And it was a painful decision, but we decided To stop, to like pause the trains for all things related to equity and leave part of the trains out the door on things related to cash, as people really care about that, like their, their, their livelihood, their, their wellbeing. Um, and it's been, it's been hard on the people team. Uh, and I've had a lot of managers say, "Hey, I'm confused. What's going on?" I have had employees wonder what's going on, and I've been incredibly apologetic, but I've said it's the most important thing we can do is to get these numbers right for our team. Like, we have one shot to go make sure these awards as m- are as meaningful, as retentive for our team members as possible. And if, if the math is not right, the structure's not right, I don't feel good about shipping it. And so we, we made the hard call about pausing it. And, and today in, in one of our, um, you know, company leadership meetings, uh, one of our leads said, "Look, the people team has had to make some very tough calls in the last year. But every time you do it, I see that you're doing it with the best interest of our employees, and it matters more that you're being thoughtful and getting it right. So we see you, we hear you, and we appreciate. Like, at the end of the day, we feel cared for." Yeah. Um, just gotta, gotta keep doing that in this competitive landscape.

Mike Clapson: Yeah. 

Brady Donaldson: As part of our equity swap program, too, like basically we made a, a last-minute decision based on feedback from the team where they were asking if we could structure it slightly, slightly differently. And, you know, at first we were like, "No, no, no, we don't think that's possible." And then we went back to the lawyers, bless the lawyers, and said like, "Are we sure? Are we sure we can't do this?" Um, and we figured out a way to do it, but it meant that we had to pause this swap program right before we were gonna lock it in, um, and explain to the team like, "Hey, we're doing this because we think it's gonna be a better outcome for you. So like, we could do it on time, we could do it on the schedule, or we could do it right and get to the right outcomes for the team." And that's a tension we feel all the time 'cause no one likes to... I mean, I'm a very process-oriented person. I love a schedule, and so it like kills me to be like, "Oh, no." Uh, but I, I do think that overarching principle of is what you're letting out the door the right thing, that's really critical. 

Mike Clapson: Yeah. So if you're sitting in the audience today, and many of these folks are probably from talent acquisition teams, and they feel that they're maybe a degree removed from their HR business partner operations, what ideas or advice might you have if they want to try and bring TA and HR closer together?

Brady Donaldson: Yeah. Uh, I think you can definitely start this just from, like, a bottoms-up approach of who are the HR business partners that are supporting the hiring managers that you're working with, and how can you all gang up on your hiring managers? How can you be on the same side of understanding what are the issues and challenges for that organization, and how, how do we work together to coach those, those managers and leaders and teams towards better outcomes? Uh, so I think, you know, when someone's hearing that unified message from multiple folks, it starts to be that, like, reinforcing loop. So I think that's, like, the easiest piece that you can tackle first of, like, go find those HR business partners and start that relationship with them. Meet with them regularly. Tell them about the challenges that you're having. Talk about who's a prickly manager and why they never say, like, "Yes, let's go make an offer." Like, work through that in partnership with them. And then I think the, the flip side of that is looking at, like, what are the biggest problems that you're trying to solve as a people team? And again, I think the default is to be really siloed between these teams. And we try as much as possible to push ourselves to say, like, how do we get all the perspectives in the room? Um, and how do we think about a solution that really ties throughout the entire employee experience, going all the way fr- from those first interactions that happen through the recruiting process, all the way through their lived experience in the organization? And I, I think that that's really leading to those interesting outcomes of, you know, mixing skills, mixing focus points, uh, and getting to better solutions. 

Mike Clapson: And that's, anything to add? 

Kenny Mendes: Can I give two aloud? Okay. Uh, first, I, I think the question we should always be asking is, is incentives, right? What are the incentives every step of our process are driving, and are those incentives we want to drive or not? And if not, like, just be willing to change them. I think the incentives are very, very powerful for people. The second point, um, for me, once a recruiter, always a recruiter, right? I think recruiters have one of the hardest jobs. They have to be really, really top of their game at understanding what's going on in the business. How do I tell this story in a compelling way? How can I make sure I'm, I'm one of the most, you know, thoughtful people in this company about everything that's going on? And that's a really, really powerful skill set that can be very powerful in lots of different roles across companies. So as you master that skill set and gain more and more business context, push yourself to have impact beyond just the lines of closing that candidate. And some of my favorite, you know, HRBPs that I worked in many places in, in my career were folks that started through, through talent and moved into saying, "Okay, now I wanna solve the next phase of this problem," whether that's moving into compensation, whether that's moving into the people partner world. But it's an amazing foundation, and I, I am seeing now a whole new crop of, you know, heads of people that really kind of grew through the recruiting world, which I, I love to see. 

Mike Clapson: Awesome. So today, what we've heard isn't a story of just compensation design. It's about fundamentally rethinking the roles of HR and talent in the organization and how they can create value together. Uh, this is recruiters thinking like people partners, HR re-enrolling employees like candidates. Um, and so if you are thinking, hey, maybe our talent and people teams are still going through a handoff mode, maybe they can find that forcing function. Maybe it's not M&A, but something else that's going on is a critical, uh, business outcome and align around that problem and opportunity to come together. So Brady and Kenny, I wanna say thank you so much for joining us on the stage today. Really appreciate your time. This has been fun. 

Kenny Mendes: Thank you, Mike. Great emceeing. Thanks, all.