Having reached 6 months of working at Lyft, it seems a good time to share why I joined and how things are going.
Back in December, as my year long consulting project at a global pharmaceutical company was scheduled to wrap up, I got a call from a Lyft recruiter, asking if I would consider taking responsibility of the company’s applicant tracking system. My independent consulting practice had focused on applicant tracking systems projects, so I appreciated the call, but would I consider a full time, in-house staff position? Normally, I would have immediately declined. Without any warm project leads in hand yet, I proceeded to interview with Lyft.
I was already aware of Lyft’s warm and fuzzy brand, but it was during my interviews that I learned how large and rapidly the company was growing in employee population size. It seemed Lyft was entering the realm of storied, emblematic Silicon Valley tech employers, particularly those of the FAANG cohort, with decades long reputations for epic hiring campaigns and respected recruiting teams. Better still, among current major tech brands, Lyft had mostly avoided controversy, especially when compared to its primary rival.
Independent consulting for over 6 years allowed me to make a satisfying impact with many clients and grow my expertise from working in so many corporate recruiting environments. Being my own boss also afforded me some personal flexibility to spend quality time with my family. Was I really ready to go back in-house?
The specified work at Lyft was on target to my expertise and I had confidence I could succeed in the role. It was when I realized that this would be a pivotal learning opportunity that my choice became clear. The chance to partner with a recruiting team an order of magnitude larger than I had ever worked with, to work closely with and learn from some of the best Workday HCM and Tableau BI analytics practitioners, and to have my expertise impact an impressively high volume and fast paced recruiting operations, were all serious considerations.
An even bigger factor was the opportunity to learn the Greenhouse platform hands-on in one of its most demanding settings, after having spent over a decade deep within the Jobvite ecosystem. (I am often asked how long I had used Greenhouse before becoming in charge of it at Lyft. Most are stunned when I say I was hired without ever having touched it!)
What sealed it for me was my onsite interview experience, which was the most organized and welcoming I had ever experienced (I’m well aware of how difficult it is to consistently deliver such a candidate experience). Meeting my potential new manager and colleagues was wholly compelling.
I started at Lyft in mid-February and appreciated the time and space given to let me ramp up with Greenhouse, Lyft’s Talent Team, and the company. My new hire orientation involved 60 other new hires and a strong emphasis on the critical importance of Lyft’s drivers to the business. Even though my role does not directly involve drivers, I was given a clear perspective of how everyone’s work affects what drivers experience and how they are central to the company’s success. Further, the first of Lyft’s three core values, Be Yourself, really resonated as someone not looking to compromise my perspective or priorities while joining a large corporation.
In taking charge of Greenhouse, I learned how its product design was very similar to other competing platforms, as well as how it differs. We all know there is no perfect system and they all have strengths and weaknesses. I also learned how it had already been implemented at Lyft to impressively support a recruiting operation that hires hundreds of new employees every month. I began to take inventory of improvements needed in the system configuration and the business practices involved.
With Lyft’s IPO in late March, I was asked to be a project’s key contributor to help prepare the company’s operations for an important process change. It felt great to provide expert advice at the beginning of the project and to execute the system changes on schedule. This was my first experience with an IPO. I had prior experience at both pre-IPO and post-IPO employers (from which my advice was based on), but never the actual IPO.
My role is on the People Analytics Technology Strategy team, which includes Workday and Tableau practitioners, and I work closely every day with stakeholders from throughout the 250+ member Talent Team. Having prior career experience as a tech recruiter, a college recruiter, and as the head of global recruiting at a handful of Bay Area software companies, I believe I bring an understanding to the business processes that Greenhouse supports, as well as an empathy to the recruiters who come with many questions and concerns, often with the urgency of a candidate offer to be made or a hiring manager who needs prompt answers.
There is much still to do with scaling up Lyft’s recruiting systems, setting up integrations between internal and third party systems, and driving user adoption and training. As we support the company’s ambitious growth plans, we also have a shot at building a world class, reknown recruiting operation with some of the most innovative systems practices.
Many thanks to my manager for offering me the job, to the Lyft recruiter who found me online, to the recruiting coordinator who organized such a welcoming onsite interview, to the TalentOps and PATS teams for ramping me up, to the entire Talent Team for putting their trust in me, and to the company as a whole for being a place of rapid growth and evolution. I am grateful for the opportunity.
