I went out to Carta’s HQ in San Francisco to speak with Peter Walker, Head of Insights. You may know him from the Internet where he’s amassed more than 170,000 followers because of his expertise on startup compensation and data storytelling. Peter is truly one of one in the industry, and I wanted to have him on the show to provide recruiters with some insights around the release of Carta’s State of Startup Compensation report. Why? Because comp provides the financial context behind the decisions recruiters are being asked to execute.
Most recruiting content lives in one of three buckets:
Tactical: ”How do I source engineers?”
Emotional: ”Recruiting is hard right now.”
Vendor-driven: ”Here’s the new feature.”
Peter operates at a completely different altitude. He sits inside Carta, which means he has visibility into how 60,000+ private companies actually behave. For recruiting leaders, that’s gold.
This is also where I disclose I’m a bit of a comp nerd. Which might come as a surprise if you know how I talk about how I like to recruit. But the reality is, there’s depth behind it.
The story is this, when I got my first recruiting job it was for a post-IPO company in a pretty traditional HR department. The recruiters sat in office on the same floor with HR, and team meetings were the greater 25 person team. We were pretty understaffed at times which meant I got punted a lot of special projects the average recruiter doesn’t get exposure too, let alone say “yes” to. My manager saw my potential, and put a ton of work on my plate with very high expectations. Looking back, a lot was pressure testing. But I will be very honest. I got this job because I was a millennial who knew how to use Facebook and I was handed the keys to the kingdom on platforms to help the company execute their digital transformation.
This is the advice portion for anyone earlier career. Say yes to doing things other people don’t want to do. That’s how you get ahead. I was showing up in office 5 days a week, hanging out late bumping into the CEO at 6:30 PM, asking a ton of questions and being likable for being curious, helpful, and visible. Plus I just got sh*t done in scrappy ways. I had a chip on my shoulder and something to prove.
Comp was one of those special projects and when equal pay for equal work legislation rolled out, I had been behind the scenes running compensation research and analysis for more than 100 geographic regions, nationally. For a publicly traded company. In my 20s barely having earned a degree in English (as a first language). This might not be a big deal, but for me it was. I fell into recruiting and learned a lot of the additional HR skills to be well rounded that eventually prepared me to go on to lead a People AND Talent function at TLDR, one of the world’s most recognized tech newsletters. It was projects like these and always finding ways to make an impact in the strategic side of recruitment for private equity software and startup companies.
And when I started interacting with other recruiters, I learned that not everyone was afforded these opportunities for skills development and exposure to broader impact within HR. I’m not saying you have to find a company that has hybrid roles and special projects outside the traditional scope of recruiting to be a good recruiter. Lots of folks who came up in FAANG are good recruiters. My path was just different, and led me to where we are now. Which is to say it led me to you! So thanks for reading and following Building the Talent Machine.
So enjoy this episode with Peter. I won’t spoil any of it with takeaways, you won’t want to miss this. Peter’s own journey is pretty rad. I hope you pick up on it.
And thanks for having us out to Carta’s HQ to record in the library, Peter, you do incredible work. Keep it up!
Follow Peter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterjameswalker/
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