(00:00:05) - Welcome to The HR Tech Spotlight podcast. I'm Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded, and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up and coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new, innovative solutions available in the market. And if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot. Stay tuned for details at the end of the show.
(00:00:51) - Hello! We are back for another episode of the HR Tech Spotlight. This time we are taking a look at Symba, a platform for new hire and early career readiness that allows an organization to onboard, manage and engage their talent. From the moment a new employee accepts a job offer and fast tracks them from pre onboarding to productivity. Joining me to talk about Symba is co-founder and CEO Ahva Sadeghi. Welcome to the show, Ahva.
(00:01:19) - Hi Deanna. Thank you so much for having me. We're so excited to be here.
(00:01:24) - Yeah. So tell us about your background in the HR tech space.
(00:01:28) - So it's been a fascinating journey for us at Symba. We've been in this space for almost six years now, and it really began at the beginning of our journeys in the workforce, when we and my co-founder and I, we've done a dozen internships combined, and every single one was different than the next. And I don't know if you can think back to your first ever job, but oftentimes you have no idea what day one looks like until you're there. And so our really our passion was how do we empower people and remove the mystery and the question mark from the workforce experience and make it seamless. So that's really been our focus. And we've been so fortunate to work with amazing partners, customers and players in the space because HR tech, as you know, has had really a renaissance and a massive change over the past five, ten years.
(00:02:22) - Yeah, it is for sure a fast evolving industry. So tell us a little bit more about Symba. I know I talked about it in the introduction very, very briefly, but I know it's so much more than, you know, the couple sentences that I talked about.
(00:02:36) - Absolutely. So Symba is Symba not for The Lion King but for symbiotic relationships. And we say that because that's what we believe work should be about, right? The individual who's the employee learning, growing, gaining new skills and also the employer, um, really having an all star team to deliver on their customer's needs and drive value forward. So in order for that to really happen, we need to empower people. And so with Symba, what we do is we help the company think about all the activities that that individual might need, um, and begin to plan them from day one. It takes um, on average about 54 activities just to onboard an individual. And at Symba, we began focused on early careers and early careers.
(00:03:22) - They come in for sometimes 12 to 16 weeks. They need to learn, on average, 11 different platforms. And they're going through all these different departments and organization all at once. So it's kind of an overwhelming experience. All typically that was done through spreadsheets. So we took a few steps back and understood how do we actually scale this. And so now we work with incredible customers like CVS health, Genentech, um, Tory Burch, um, just to name a few examples of some of the partners that we're working with. And we did begin Symba as a social impact project with late Congressman John Lewis in Atlanta. So our mission is about opening up the workforce and creating more accessibility for all long term.
(00:04:05) - So you talk about early career, is Symba really focused on organizations that offer internship opportunities or does it apply to, you know, recent college grads that are new and entering the workforce and maybe only have a little bit of experience behind them?
(00:04:22) - That's a great distinction. So what we've learned is that there's great power in cohort experiences.
(00:04:29) - And so we really support all types of cohort onboarding. Whether that could be interns, apprentices, new grads, new sales hire onboarding, new customer support. We see that anyone going through really a series of group activities that can be brought in together, we support and facilitate that whole onboarding experience so it can apply to really anyone. I mean, we did our Gartner briefing not too long ago and they said, well, why could it apply to this and why couldn't apply to that? Um, you know, and as a startup, you kind of have to pick where do you focus first? Where's the greatest need that you can solve for today? And then once you master that, how do you go for the next group? So that's kind of why we focused on new grads early careers. And we're also now recently launching like sales associate roles, pharmacy training opportunities. So um, we're excited about what's ahead.
(00:05:25) - As organizations are looking at hiring the next generation of the workforce. What are the things that your team at Symba is seeing that they really should be thinking about?
(00:05:38) - So we believe that it is important that from the moment they learn about your company, you're thoughtful and intentional about every single interaction.
(00:05:49) - And that extends even before they even get onto Symba, because we get on to they get onto Symba after they accept their job offer. We even have pre onboarding so a phase before they start full time. But that means in the interview process making sure you have, um, everyone participating, trained and understood and understanding of what this role offers and mapping out what does this role offer, not just when you join, but what is the career trajectory and the promotion opportunities for them long term? How have you really thought about how they can grow with you? Because there's research out there that Gen Z could change their job up to ten times by the age of 34, and that sounds stressful to me to apply to that many jobs, but.
(00:06:29) - Right.
(00:06:30) - Yeah. The reality is, like right now, the commitment and the loyalty to retention is just very different, right? We saw employers rescinding offers and we've seen massive layoffs. So I think this generation is really being mindful of like how do they protect themselves to provide career security long term.
(00:06:49) - So as an employer, I think it's also really important to think about how do you communicate that through every single activity, from recruiting all the way to onboarding and long term engagement with your talent?
(00:07:03) - You make a really good point about, you know, this younger generation of being prepared for the fact that they do move jobs more often. I mean, if you look at older generations, starting with, you know, like the baby boomers down through Gen X and all the others behind them, it used to be commonplace to stay at one company for your entire career. Right. And that is becoming so much less common than it used to be in the past. And I can tell you, like when I am hiring and I see resumes, you know, the younger generations typically generally do move jobs a lot more. And, you know, as an employer, you can no longer look at it and say, well, there's a job hopper. You know, they're in a new spot every 18 months because that's just the reality of the generation that's coming into the workforce, for sure.
(00:07:53) - And it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? Like there's organizations that actually pay people to go do a rotation, learn skills and come back. Right. So, you know, I feel like it's important to like open up our minds like, oh, if someone's done all those different things, maybe they've learned a lot of different processes and a lot of different ways to do things. And so maybe, you know, we can encourage organizations to think about rather than maybe needing people to stay in their seats. How do we maybe get people ramped up faster? So like the time to productivity, the time to value might be faster because we're our workforce is potentially only going to get more fluid. Right now, we're all on social media. I can see where my friends are working. And oftentimes when you do a job shift, it comes with a pretty promotion or a great salary boost. So the incentives line up for movement. But how do we ensure that we have the infrastructure that enables that for employers?
(00:08:49) - Yeah, that makes total sense.
(00:08:50) - So how would you say Symba is different from the other options that are out there?
(00:08:55) - So one thing that I think we understand is that there are a lot of tools that employers are using, and in order to really be successful, we need to speak to those tools. We can't come in replacing everything. We have to be very intentional and thoughtful about how do we live in the ecosystem and tech stack of what they're currently doing. So we've spent a lot of time integrating and understanding how we bring things into one view. We're launching our new hub, which basically is kind of like a firestick experience, where if you're using all these different tools, you have like a main view and landing page to know, okay, this is what I got to do my my like task from this tool or pulled here. My task from there pulls here my email notifications just like a one view. So it's like your control center. You know what's going on. And then I think there's an opportunity to really, um, support engagement that we do on a global level for teams that are in different offices.
(00:09:54) - A lot of times we see that platforms might silo for a team. And, you know, even though they say they might kind of go globally or support other engagement, we really make it easy by supporting connections and many kind of, um, um, discussion board posts and activities that people can kind of connect and with each other. And, and we're seeing really great adoption with six times daily login on average per users.
(00:10:17) - What type of companies are the perfect fit to work with Symba?
(00:10:21) - So right now the perfect type of companies are a little larger. So at least around 1,000 or so employees. And they're hiring and growing by at least 10% year over year. And they're at this stage where they have tools in place like an RA or an applicant tracking. But things are a little bit fragmented, and they want to bring them into one view. A lot of times we see great success with biotech, health care, pharma and retail, and we just recently have closed a few opportunities in energy.
(00:10:59) - But those are ones where a lot of times they're bringing in new tools rather than building them in-house. And the need for talent is critical. For example, in biotech, they have specialized roles and they have, you know, very big need to keep that talent in-house and recruit them for retail. They have a lot of, um, turnover. So how do they ensure that they can really quickly move forward into onboarding and getting people prepped up and hopefully stay long term?
(00:11:30) - What are some of the features of Symba that helped bring those new early career employees on board and give them that positive experience? So they start out on the right foot?
(00:11:41) - So, um, have you played Duolingo or, like, use the app?
(00:11:45) - Yeah.
(00:11:46) - So I feel like there's just there's such an opportunity to have fun with tools and technology. Right? I think there's an opportunity to, like, paint a really great picture. And just like from the beginning, let them see what's on the horizon, because I think that's like what motivates a lot of us being able to like, see a grand prize or like a vision.
(00:12:05) - And so that's one thing that we do. It's like, right when they join, they can see like they're they're in the pre onboarding bucket. And then they can see like growth opportunities and trajectory into like what could be next. And it's a little bit more tricky for certain companies right there. Like you know we don't necessarily have it defined what takes them to the next stage. But giving them just like a visual into like what could be is something that I think is very powerful. And then another thing that we have that is kind of, um, something from my own experience. Um, I was a remote intern in college, and my, um, remote intern manager ghosted me. Um, I think, you know, I was I was in Tucson. He was in DC. And, you know, I feel like it's hard when you're not there to just, like, knock on the door, like they don't see you. And so we implemented a stuck button feature in the platform where you can just like raise hand.
(00:12:52) - It's almost like phone a friend. If you've ever seen like Who Wants to Be a millionaire? You can phone a friend, get help. And it's great because you can also phone a friend that's not your manager. And we find that oftentimes people want to actually ask their peers, but they just don't have the infrastructure and the know of like how to I ask up here, but that's more ideal to ask appear for everyone, including your manager. So we just try to make that easy.
(00:13:20) - Yeah, I love that because I think, you know, back to the interns that I've had in my day. And even when I was long, long time ago, an intern myself, it's like you have so many questions. You're new to the workforce. You know, things that your manager might take for granted that are just easy to figure out, that you know aren't necessarily the case. If you're new to this and you've got to learn in order to become really good at your job and efficient.
(00:13:45) - So it's great to have those tools where you can easily raise your hand and ask and where it's somewhat encouraged, you know, like, yes, if you have a question we want you to ask, we don't want you to sit there and, and, you know, either struggle to figure it out or just kind of gloss, pass it because you don't know what to do or what the expectations are.
(00:14:07) - Absolutely. I mean, I feel like, you know, if you always think back to your first role, like just how nervous you felt and then being like, I'm sure they told me this, but I have no idea where to find it. And, um, right now, with the kind of workforce we're in, some companies are hybrid, some are remote. It's not like you can just swing by someone's door and say like, hey, um, question or like, you know, just like you're walking to grab water, like, you know, it's just it's a little bit more intimidating.
(00:14:31) - You have to draft a full email. You have to really explain what you're confused on. And then then you have to hopefully, you know, wait for them to respond. And I think there's just a lot of opportunity to really bridge that. Um, for, for everyone. Um, especially when you think about like upskilling and reskilling. Right? If you're learning a whole new segment, you, you know, there's a little bit of, you know, imposter syndrome that might come with that, right? You want to make sure people feel confident and empowered to do the work they need to do.
(00:15:01) - What impact have you seen organizations that are working with Symba Experience?
(00:15:07) - So we've seen quite a few things. One, that is very clear is efficiency. The fact that we are able to help some teams with we've had some success, like over 50% in onboarding activity, and time saved, for driving efficiency because basically using Symba, we can sequence all the activities for an onboarding and they can set it and let it run and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
(00:15:35) - Um, the second thing is really around data collection. A lot of teams, as I mentioned, were using like spreadsheets and SharePoint and piecing things together. When you are piecing things together. And I get it, trust me, I'm scrappy. We're startup like we piece things together all the time. But you can't learn, right? You don't have an understanding of like what's going on in each stage and how to optimize it. Right? If I learned that, oh, everyone gets stuck here or at this stage there's turnover, and that's because they don't know what their next promotion is. But we give our pay increases a month after. And maybe if we let them know, you know. So we really want to, you know, build that narrative. And the last piece I would say is scalability. Um, we've helped teams, um, scale their programs by over 500% because now they can really facilitate cohort onboarding and run, um, talent through very quickly. So almost like a um, build versus buy model and engine in-house.
(00:16:34) - So that's something that we're really excited about when we think about open up the workforce and our mission, that's where we really want to spend a lot more effort as we grow.
(00:16:44) - Speaking of as you grow, what is the future vision for the company? I know you've alluded to a couple of things that, you know, I'm sure big picture. There's more to it.
(00:16:54) - So we want to empower organizations to build career pathing experiences. We don't want to stop at the first step in with Pre-boarding. We want to be your first and your second promotion and a part of that. We're excited to be expanding next year, to do a little bit more work with frontline workers and to empower them and their experience, because we believe that there's a really exciting opportunity for individuals from frontline to go to managerial roles or to go to corporate. We have some of our, um, folks that I also have a podcast myself called Open Up the Workforce. And, um, I'm preparing to interview, um, the chief people officer at, um, Taco Bell.
(00:17:40) - And he said that, you know, 70% of their workforce comes from within. Um, and I think that, you know, we see that with literally large organizations that have frontline workers that are doing a great job when they bring those folks up to leadership with them because they're in the know. They know how it it's like to do so many aspects of the business, and they can really build for that. So we want to be the system that helps organizations deploy that at scale.
(00:18:12) - As you work with companies out in the market, what are some of the biggest hesitations that you see prospects have when they are evaluating whether they would want to implement a solution like Symba?
(00:18:25) - I would say, um, a few things. I think that one is adoption, because change in general is hard, right? Changing the way you do things. And if you're working on spreadsheets, um, you might be okay with subsisting in that world. And I think the challenge with that is a lot of HR folks are, um, overburdened right now.
(00:18:47) - You know, they're overworked and they have a lot of activities. So in order to make some of these strategic change, you need to have sometimes space to, um, take a step back, reevaluate, and then, um, kind of innovate and reconsider together. So I would say bandwidth and, you know, willingness to kind of take a step back to change and make the effort. So we do a lot of ROI examples and time to value on Symba, um, to demonstrate that for customers. Um, and then I think the second thing that would be also kind of challenging is, um, when we think about, um, time to productivity and career pathing, a lot of times for career pathing, organizations haven't spent the time to actually design and map that out. So before even using a technology like Symba, we would need them to understand what does that look like? They're right, and they can break up job families and understand okay, for our new analyst role, we have a clear path and we can go step one, step two, step three.
(00:19:48) - Or we have a rotational program that has a very clear outline. But unless they don't like if unless they have that, then, you know, there's a little bit of pre-work that needs to go into collaborating with us, which is very, you know, we designed a few ways of breaking that up. But, you know, I would say those are, you know, some of the top two challenges that we're facing and still working through.
(00:20:10) - Other. What final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with?
(00:20:13) - Well, I want to say how grateful I am to be on this show with you, Deanna, and I appreciate that you are elevating a lot of innovation and opportunities. I would want to leave the audience with the opportunity to just take a moment, you know, in this period, thinking of the new year in 2024, how do you want to imagine, how it is to welcome individuals to your organization? Sometimes I share imagine that you're welcoming friends to a warm party and invitation.
(00:20:45) - How do you want them to feel when they walk in? Do you want them to feel like you're running around handing them appetizers and you know things are a mess? Or do you want to feel very like, you know, welcomed that, you know, there's an experience, there's warm people they can get connected to and meet so that they have a great time and hopefully, um, invite you to their party afterwards. Uh, just I love that. Yeah, it's a fun thought.
(00:21:08) - That is fun. So where can our listeners go to learn more about Symba?
(00:21:13) - They can learn more about Symba on our website at Symba.io and we're also very active on LinkedIn, and so I'd love to personally connect and love to hear your thoughts. And, you know, if I might ask a question to you before we wrap up, I'd love to just get your thoughts on what you're seeing in this new higher onboarding space. And you know what's top of mind for you when you're thinking of HR tech for 2024?
(00:21:39) - Yeah.
(00:21:39) - You know, it's one of those things I feel like the HR tech space has been through a crazy few years with Covid and the HR companies. You know, there's it's such a crowded market, right. And it's hard to know, like what is the right HR tech stack to build for an organization. And there are so many great HR technologies out there. You know, what I see is. HR tech buyers. You know, they don't always know what options are out there. There's a lot of innovation that happens in this market, and everybody knows who the big name brands are because they have the budgets and they're well established, you know, and and they show up everywhere. Right. And it's really hard to compete against that sometimes. But the reality is these smaller tech companies a lot of times may be a better fit depending on the. The HR leaders needs. And so, you know, what I see from a hiring perspective is this is really good to know the options. And that's part of the reason why I started this podcast, is just to help elevate these smaller companies like Symba out there that are doing really great things and can really help move an organization forward, but don't have the ADP, UKG and Workday budgets, right?
(00:22:59) - Yes.
(00:23:00) - I appreciate you for doing that so much. And one thing I'll add that may open folks minds to using something like a startup, because, you know, it makes sense, right? A startup is a risk, right? They don't have as much, you know, use as many use cases to back it. But on the flip side, you as an HR leader working with a startup can actually directly impact the product roadmap and the strategy. And startups are agile, right? When our customers ask for a feature, we go back and we're like, can we build it and report back right away? Because right now we don't have 1,000 or 2,000 customers to be really shifting through all of the insights. We can build pretty quickly and enable our customers to have a direct voice and impact on our roadmap. So it's such a partnership and it's so much fun to work with a startup, because then, you know, you're not only advising a team, but you're able to create impact that can impact your entire industry by working with a startup that hopefully scales.
(00:24:04) - Yeah, that's a really good point because it's not like you're going to come into, you know, one of these fortune 500 hr tech companies as one customer and be able to influence their roadmap. You know, unless you're you're like their largest client and it's a different story when you're working with smaller companies that are still building up brand awareness in the market. And they want to support the way that prospects out there need to buy. So I think that's an excellent point and thank you so much. So that does it for today's show. I will drop the links in the show notes for those of you that are interested in learning more about Symba and connecting with Ahva. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight.
(00:24:46) - Wonderful. Thank you Deanna. Thank you so much for having me. Excited to connect with your audience.
(00:24:58) - Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight podcast, where we showcase some of the best up and coming HR technology options in the market.
(00:25:08) - If you are an HR tech company leader who would like to be considered for a guest spot on this program, please contact me via GrowthModeMarketing.Com. Or reach out to me, Deanna Shimota, on LinkedIn. And if you found this show informative, subscribe. Connect with us on social media and leave a review.
(00:25:27) - This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time.