There is an emerald gem in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. Nestled between the monolithic Transamerica Pyramid and the vehicular buzz of Sansome Street, 50 redwoods tower alongside the angular architecture of Transamerica Park.
Created in 1972 by Thomas Galli and heartened by the plush Bay Area fog, the man-made grove has thrived for over half a century — serving as a tranquil monument to The City’s historic spirit of growth.
The California-native Redwood, known for its unhurried growth, provides a patient contrast to the headlong expansion of San Franciscan tech, which maintains its status as the top harbinger of tech talent in the nation, according to the 2022 CBRE Scoring Tech Talent report. Among the Golden City tech companies growing their workforce are Reddit, Human Interest, Ascend.io, CodeSignal and Instawork — all of which are hiring now. Built In San Francisco sat down with the five flourishing teams to learn more.
Reddit is a community of communities with millions of users engaged in content creation and dynamic conversation across tens of thousands of topics. The social media company has its sights set on further expansion. Carla H. McIntosh, VP of global talent acquisition, shared with Built In San Francisco the merits of Reddit’s leadership — and why she feels the future is bright for the company. “We have caring and authentic leaders who value opinions and carve out space for employees to take risks in order to improve outcomes,” McIntosh said. “We are also very intentional about fostering an inclusive environment where employees can thrive and feel excited to come to work each day.”
How much will your team grow over the next 12 months?
We’re continuing our workforce growth momentum by investing further in both technical and non-technical areas — as well as creating more leadership roles to accelerate the growth of our employees. From an engineering standpoint, we will continue hiring backend, machine learning and general software engineers. We will also be hiring data scientists, program managers and those with experience in safety and security to support different areas of the company. Our roadmap includes adding numerous software engineering employees with experience in the ads platforms space.
Other areas of investment on the non-technical side include our business development organization, along with sales, marketing and finance — where we’re adding key roles for program managers and accountants. In these areas, we’re looking for awesome talent with deep market-expansion experience, stakeholder-management experience and the ability to build meaningful relationships with internal and external partners. We’re also continuing to expand our people and culture team — with a special focus on building out our talent acquisition team.
By providing more flexibility for employees, we’ve increased our ability to attract top talent and increased the diversity of our workforce.”
What’s fuelling your current growth?
As we continue to scale and reach new audiences around the world, it’s important that we invest in the critical skills and talent that will be needed to help Reddit effectively deliver against our strategic roadmap. We also want to attract talent that is reflective of the many diverse communities on Reddit.
One way we’ve done this is by introducing a flexible-first workforce model — which allows employees to choose where to do their best work: in one of our physical offices, remotely or a combination of both. By providing more flexibility for employees, we’ve increased our ability to attract top talent and increased the diversity of our workforce.
I feel really grateful to work at Reddit, personally — even during the interview process.”
What sets your company apart for potential applicants?
There are so many ways that Reddit is special. We are a values-driven company where every employee is empowered to take ownership of their work, where their voices are heard and actively sought out and where they can bring their authentic selves to work.
We’ve continued to evolve in ways that support our global workforce during the pandemic and beyond, including providing yearly stipends to support at-home work, personal activities and endeavors, and professional development opportunities. We’ve also hosted virtual interactive experiences for employees such as live fitness classes and movie days with snack boxes and swag. We offer monthly global wellness days for employees to unplug and enjoy personal time in a way that’s most meaningful to them.
I feel really grateful to work at Reddit, personally — even during the interview process.
Human Interest is a fintech company that aims to close the retirement savings gap in America. Human Interest is by Silicon Valley investors like NewView Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, Glynn Capital, Oberndorf Enterprises and Uncork Capital among others. VP of People Debbie Gunning spoke to the impact of Human Interest’s work — and how it affects its search for talent. “We believe top talent comes to us because of the potential for tremendous societal impact,” Gunning shared. “We’re building an important piece of national financial infrastructure and solving really complex challenges that few are taking on.”
How much will your team grow over the next 12 months?
We’ve been in hypergrowth mode over the past year and plan to continue growing at a nice clip. We have 700 employees today and aim to grow to around 825 by the end of 2023.
In particular, engineering and product will see the most growth — because of the significant investment we continue to make in advancing our platform, always seeking to deliver the best customer experience. Of course, we expect other areas will grow proportionally with customer growth.
What’s fuelling your current growth?
We’re being both strategic and responsible. Customer growth is an element, as well as macroeconomic factors.
Other factors include recent state-level legislation that requires employers to provide access to retirement savings, the competitive talent market and the important role that retirement benefits play in accepting a new opportunity.
Financial wellness focus has been heightened by the pandemic. Both employers and employees realize that financial security matters more now than ever.
Our day-to-day work is aimed at fixing a broken industry, which means it’s meaty, meaningful and offers exciting opportunities to learn and grow.”
What sets your company apart for potential applicants?
Our day-to-day work is aimed at fixing a broken industry, which means it’s meaty, meaningful and offers exciting opportunities to learn and grow.
One of the most effective ways to save for retirement is to take advantage of an employer-sponsored 401k. The platform and software we’re creating are helping to reduce barriers so that underserved businesses can easily and affordably offer this benefit to their employees.
We also have a focus on high performance — and rewarding it. This focus attracts a lot of highly motivated, capable and passionate builders.
Ascend.io is a big data and cloud company striving to enable organizations to innovate faster by harnessing the power of automation. Developers from a wide range of industries — healthcare, education, supply chain, internet of things and beyond — use Ascend products designed to change the world around us. Founder and CEO Sean Knapp is optimistic about Ascend’s place in the future of the data industry. “We are in an exciting stage of growth in the data industry,” he told Built in San Francisco. “From finance to healthcare, media to retail, increasingly sophisticated capabilities in data enable better products and services we all consume each and every day.”
How much will your team grow over the next 12 months?
We’re planning to double in size this year. We’re hiring for all teams, with particular emphasis on field engineering and marketing.
What’s fuelling your current growth?
As more companies move to cloud-based data technologies like Snowflake and Databricks, they turn their attention — not to how to store and process more data — but how to build more things with data. With this changing focus, demand for increasingly advanced platforms that enhance developer productivity through advanced capabilities such as automation have surged — greatly benefiting Ascend and our data automation cloud.
Across all industries, data improves the services and products we depend upon each and every day.”
What sets your company apart for potential applicants?
Our team at Ascend.io radiates passion and a deeply-rooted commitment to help our customers transform the world around us. Across all industries, data improves the services and products we depend upon each and every day. If you’re looking to join a fast-paced, high-caliber team set out to revolutionize the market, Ascend.io is your place.
As an HR tech company, CodeSignal provides interview solutions with the goal of helping the world look beyond resumes to hire high-quality and diverse technical talent. CodeSignal’s pre-screen, tech screen and interview tools provide advanced job simulation technology that facilitates fair and predictive evaluations. As an early-stage startup, CodeSignal is in a period of exciting growth, Director of Recruiting Ellen Markman shared with Built In. “It’s critical that we remain lean and adaptable to our clients’ changing needs — this makes our 12-month hiring landscape an exciting challenge,” she said.
How much will your team grow over the next 12 months?
To maintain the centralized prioritization structure and open flow of information that makes our team and platform successful, our product management department must grow proportionally to engineering — so product management will be a focus area for us in the next year.
We’ve also been lucky enough to have a new VP of sales join CodeSignal this year, and we want to expand our sales department to benefit from the added leadership capacity. We’ll be concentrating growth in management roles, like sales directors, as well as individual contributor positions like regional sales managers.
What’s fuelling your current growth?
One of the key drivers of hiring at CodeSignal is a recently-released product offering, Tech Screen. Tech Screen is a live, in-person technical screen, delivered to candidates by CodeSignal on behalf of our clients. Using Tech Screen, clients achieve their hiring goals more quickly, reduce time spent internally on first-round interviews, improve the structure, consistency and fairness of their interviews, and provide the kind of white-glove, highly personalized candidate experience that only human-to-human contact can facilitate.
On the CodeSignal side, Tech Screen is a complex product to launch and maintain. It requires cross-functional support from marketing, sales, engineering, product management, solutions engineering, customer experience, interview experience and assessment research. All of these departments have experienced growth in the past year — and many will continue to scale as demand for the new product increases.
As a flexible and remote-first environment, we have consciously built an autonomous work culture that allows us to thrive asynchronously.”
What sets your company apart for potential applicants?
CodeSignal is a particularly values-driven organization. Our company values have real practical application: They aren’t just high-minded principles. We reference them in daily discussions, use them to guide decisions and incorporate them into our evaluation process when considering new hires.
As a flexible and remote-first environment, we have consciously built an autonomous work culture that allows us to thrive asynchronously. Signalites are granted the freedom to make decisions when they’re the most qualified decision-maker, but also have a responsibility to seek diverse perspectives and ask for support to ensure the decisions they make are in the best interest of all.
Instawork is a digital marketplace that is actively working to help bridge the labor demand-supply gap that is crippling so many businesses, as the country continues to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. Instawork helps businesses in food and beverage, hospitality and warehouse/logistics industries fill temporary and permanent roles in more than 25 U.S. markets. “We’ve all seen it: There are help wanted signs everywhere,” SDR and Partnerships Manager Katie Atwater said of Instawork’s place in the changing market. “Due to the popularity of having a flexible schedule that our pros have, our app continues to grow — along with our partners’ businesses and our pros’ pockets.”
How much will your team grow over the next 12 months?
I recently moved into sales development leadership and support the sales organization as we have plans to grow by three times. Prior to moving into a leadership role, I was an account executive and supported the light industrial and hospitality verticals. As we expect market fluctuations to happen, Instawork is very excited to support our partner with a flexible labor option. During my two-and-a-half years here, I’ve noticed staffing issues will continue without a flexible labor option that works — that’s why we are successful and have staffed thousands of hospitality and light industrial spaces throughout the nation.
What’s fueling your current growth?
Instawork is helping both our partners and professionals find economic opportunity by providing flexibility to both. We find that flexibility will be the new way workers find work. Not only has the labor market shifted overall, but also has enhanced our partners and pros in many ways. Both partners and pros have realized that this option makes sense and are even agreeing this option is far better than before.
What sets your company apart for potential applicants?
Our pros and partners. We treat our pros like we would our employees, their experience and outcome of being on our platform are one of the things that matter the most to us. Without happy pros, we won’t have happy partners.
We understand this economy: Changes are happening quicker than we’d like. With that comes operational issues due to lack of staffing.
