Recruiting and Onboarding During WFH

My son has just been recruited into a new job in New York. He told me that it is a weird experience being recruited and starting in a company during the work-from-home (WFH) era. He doesn't know anyone, he hasn't met any of his colleagues face-to-face, and his company has a big office in Manhattan that he has never been to (coincidentally, a couple of blocks from the big office that my daughter is not going to). It is especially hard to pick up the company culture and norms.

I figured it would be interesting to find out what people's experience was being recruited and onboarded here at Cadence during the WFH era.

Craig Myers

I started by talking to Craig Myers, who heads up recruiting. I began by revealing my ignorance by suggesting that since recruiters all worked out of home offices, they would not be experiencing much change. But, unlike last time I worked at Cadence twenty years ago, before WFH most of our recruiters actually worked on-site, either in HR or physically co-located with the businesses they support. Having said that, Craig told me that virtual recruiting hasn't been a problem. Some things are actually easier. For example, when interviews are on-site, it is hard to schedule them. You need to get all the interviewers lined up on the same day (but not at the same hour). The candidate has to come up with an excuse to be out of the office. As Craig put it:

There are only so many doctor's and dentist's appointments a candidate can fake.

Virtual interviews don't even all need to be done on the same day, which is also a lot less exhausting for the candidate who is often frazzled by the end of several hours of interviews.

The only issue Craig told me we have found is that sometimes candidates can be reluctant to commit since they have never met anyone in person, so there can be more apprehension about making the change than normal. But we have overcome that with additional virtual meetings with the team. Craig says "we've not lost an offer due to this, that I know of".

Because setting up a day of interviews is tricky logistically from both sides, virtual processes have actually improved our own efficiency, reducing the average time it takes to fill an open position. We have developed some best practices that we will continue with even when Cadence reopens its offices.

Two New Employees

It was suggested that I talk to an employee who had recently rejoined Cadence but had worked here before, so they could compare onboarding today during work-from-home to their previous time. And to someone brand new. As it happened, the first name I was given was Ketan Joshi. He joined Cadence last time on the same day as me. That's not quite as weird as it sounds. Ketan had worked with me at Ambit Design Systems and we got acquired (you can read about that on a post Ambit Design Systems that I wrote on the 20th anniversary of the acquisition).

The second name I was given was Elizabeth Paiva, who is a brand manager working in Corporate Marketing. I am also in Corporate Marketing, which is probably why HR picked her as the second name. In fact, I expect she has an office somewhere near mine...except she's never been there!

Ketan Joshi

Ketan worked with me at Ambit Design Systems, though not directly since he was in product management and I ran the engineering group that developed the code. One of the things that BuildGates could do that other synthesis tools could not do was run large designs (for the time, say a milliion gates) flat. During evaluations, people would have elaborate scripts to cope with this. Ketan would throw them all away and just run the design with the top-level constraints. When it finished overnight, the evaluation was effectively over.

Ambit was acquired by Cadence in 1998, so all of us ended up in Cadence, although there was an extended period before the acquisition closed where I remember we remained in our old building over on Augustine Parkway (it is now condos). Although we went through all the paperwork, mostly we were working in the same Ambit team we already knew, so it wasn't really the same type of challenge as you get starting work with a boss you don't know on a team where you know nobody.

Ketan remained at Cadence until 2010, ending up as director of product management in charge of the digital front-end. Since then he worked mostly in SaaS (software-as-a-service) with a four-year stint at AtHoc (acquired by Blackberry), then two years at each of Atheer and Ellie Mae.

He rejoined Cadence a month or so again, working in our cloud business unit. Having a lot of experience in EDA and in SaaS is a perfect combination. He had worked with Craig, who runs the group, and kept in contact with him. But he wasn't a shoo-in:

When the role came up Craig wanted to make sure I went through the regular interview channel. He wanted it to be a fair process to all applicants (there were internal and external candidates). So, I did all interviews over Webex just like other candidates and, went through the regular vetting along with other candidates. Clearly, interviewing over Webex was a unique experience..

But he told me he has had to make an effort to set up dozens of 1:1 Webex meetings to introduce himself to the people he has to work with. Onboarding by Webex, too.

Elizabeth Paiva

Like Ketan, Elizabeth aka Liza was recruited entirely online and the entire process took place over WebEx, including all her interviews. She said it all went smoothly and she started at Cadence at the start of May.

As for starting, she told me:

New hires naturally bump around and clearly bump around more when not in the office. It was a bit "hunt and peck" about who to talk to. Obviously I'd have loved to have met everyone in person. But lots of people reached out to me and introduced themselves.

Liza lives in Gilroy so would have a one-hour commute each way if we were all in the office. But in another sense that gives her two hours extra per day, very useful in the first few months when it always feels like you are drinking from a firehose.

HR

Our HR group recently contributed to a piece for business publication builtin on this issue, How Going Fully Remote Made the Hiring Process More Efficient at 3 Companies. Obviously Cadence is one of the companies, but you can see the experience of LivePerson and Broadridge, too.

The bottom line, articulated by Annamarie Dunn, Cadence's VP of Culture and Talent, in the article:

Our new recruiting and onboarding processes are 100 percent virtual. The virtual processes have improved our overall efficiency and reduced the average time it takes to fill an open position.
...
Video conferencing has streamlined the interview process, and we’ve seen more engagement with candidates using this service. Rather than spending time traveling and scheduling a full-day onsite interview, candidates can schedule interviews sooner and when it’s most convenient. Quicker scheduling has shortened the total duration of the interview process, allowing newly hired employees to start working sooner while saving company resources on travel.

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