Hiring Technical Talent with Kathy Copic and Lindsay Pettingill

Hey, everybody. This is Ben Kesnoka, cofounder and partner at Village Global, a network driven venture firm. And this is our podcast where we go deep on all things business and technology with world leading experts. I heard we have a lot of, first timers on on this call. We're so we're really glad you're here, and excited to share, learnings with you. So just to get started, you know, Cathy, this we don't wanna take this for granted in terms of, like, understanding what technical role actually means. So can you just kick us off with an explanation there? What do we mean by hiring for technical roles? Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Sometimes people don't even like the word technical. But I think here, just to kind of set the stage, we're talking about roles where there's some code or data component to them. So it'd be engineering, could be data, AI machine learning, folks where people are touching keyboard, thinking building out models where people are building part of the product. I think, there's a lot in common with hiring for technical and nontechnical roles. I'm happy to talk about what's what's the same, what's different, I think. Yeah. I think that'd be great. Let's get right into that. Right? What is the same, when you're hiring for technical and nontechnical and and when you're not? Yeah. So I think, actually, all most of it is the same. So for folks who are coming from a nontechnical background, they don't consider themselves software engineers or data folks. There might be a lot of, like, imposter syndrome worry about hiring for folks coming from these technical backgrounds. But, actually, I would say, I think a lot of the hiring and scoping of the roles is very, very similar, especially as the tools and techniques used to do things like sales, marketing, product, operations are also changing a lot. So maybe five, ten years ago, folks in sales or marketing were or product were not using a lot of complicated tools. But now it's like the tool landscape for every kind of role has really exploded. And so if you're hiring folks into whatever roles in background that you've come from, probably they ended up using a lot of different you know, even for things like product confluence, there's notion. There's lots of different things out there for tracking things, for building stuff. And so I think when you're assessing folks for their skills, there's a lot in common about how you assess for technical skills or skills for other roles. And, when you're assessing people for their, like, interest and ability to be productive in the start up environment, there's a lot that's the same. And I think when you're assessing folks for culture, for how much they're gonna fit into your team, what they're gonna add to your team, there's a lot that's the same. Really interesting. I I I'm I think that last …