Welcome to DevEx Unpacked. I'm Alan Carson, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloudsmith. We're solving the challenges of artefact management and are on the path to becoming the software supply chain itself. In this weekly podcast, we share knowledge from Cloudsmith employees, customers, and other great guests from the software industry. Along the way, we'll unpack topics like the cloud security supply chains, and of course the developer experience. Welcome to the podcast, Kerry. Super pleased to have you here today because I think HR and the challenges that you go through are some of the most important things that happens in a company. And prior to you coming into Cloudsmith, a lot of this came across my desk and since then it's been a pleasure to watch you work and a lot of it does not come across my desk anymore, so it's great. That's the end. So thank you for taking your time today to come and talk to us.

You're very welcome. Thanks for having me. It's great.

I'd love to just find out just a little bit more about you and your previous roles up until this point would be good to hear about and then just sort of how you ended up at Cloudsmith as part of your own journey.

Yeah, absolutely. So I have been living in Northern Ireland now for about 20 years and came into HR in quite a windy, convoluted way as quite a few of US HR folk do sort of land here through various paths. So I have spent the last eight years prior to Cloudsmith in another tech startup in Northern Ireland, which was fabulous experience in a standalone capacity as well. And prior to that I was in recruitment roles and even more prior to that was in more sales and marketing. So joined a programme that brought me to Northern Ireland through investor and I, which was a programme very much for helping to build out SMEs in Northern Ireland who wanted to expand internationally. So joined that because of my degree and experience in languages. So kind of not necessarily where I expected to be in my career 20 odd years ago, but couldn't be happier in the space that I found myself.
Subsequently went on to study a master's in HR management and like I say, eight years prior to Cloudsmith in another tech startup in Northern Ireland, which was a great space to be and really an opportunity to understand that kind of growth, the excitement of being within startups and all the challenges it can bring. And what brought me to Klau Smith ultimately when that journey in my previous organisation ended, I had worked there previously with two of our amazing colleagues in finance, Michael and Claire, and they'd always said to me, look, before you ever move on, give us a shout because there is an amazing place here that we know you would love because it's got all of the vibes and the culture and the excitement that we'd really enjoyed in those early years in that previous organisation. So yeah, that was all the recommendations I needed. Got speaking to you, Alan, a year and a half ago over a couple of coffees in Starbucks and the journey began and yeah, I joined officially in January last year, so 14 months in, it's flown by in many ways and yeah, that's me.

Yeah, 14 months. Yeah, it really has and there's a lot of skill has happened in that timeframe.

I joined, we were 35 people when I joined. I shared my joining day with two others, with two of our colleagues in customer success, glad and Amy. So even on my first day, I don't even think I was the newest person depending on who started first and it's just been grow, grow, grow since then. So we are currently sitting at 88 employees and a solid number of contractors supporting us in different regions as well. So we've pretty much grown 150% in that year or so. It was a really ambitious target for us to hit headcount wise and my goodness, we've really achieved a lot in that time.

And how have you found that? What's it like for you to have to manage? There wasn't a lot of formal programmes or anything in terms of when you started because at that point we were still a scrappy startup and now we're very much in scale up mode. How was that for you when you came in? Did you feel like you had to tackle everything or was there certain areas that was the most pertinent?

Yeah, I mean I felt I had to tackle everything. To me coming in, it was kind of like, okay, I need to be all over absolutely everything. And really getting that help to prioritise exactly what it was that we needed to focus on was super useful because you can come in and just feel very overwhelmed as the first formal HR person coming in. Of course there is an awful lot that can be improved on Grown, introduced, that kind of thing. But really knowing what the company's goals were for that year and very much needing to grow the headcount, it forced me to really prioritise in that way, which was great because you can't do the job that you want to do over too many plates you to be focusing on certain core ones that are spinning. So yeah, recruitment was definitely the big thing when you come in at 35 and you know that the plan is to get to 90 by the end of the year for example, that feels like a big leap from day one to a year, hence when the company is so new.
And so it was a really challenging year. There was a lot of getting to know people, understanding different priorities across the business and different hiring requirements and needing to bring in systems to support us. Doing that smoothly as well was a big part of it. So as always, whenever you project yourself too far ahead, things can seem daunting or such a huge challenge, but day by day and realising that you're not doing this, albeit my title is a standalone title, I'm not standalone in the team, the operations team, the hiring managers, the wider management team and everyone is there to support and to ensure that everyone is successful in their roles. And I wasn't separate from that. So very much with the support of the amazing ops team as well, we were able to start streamlining, excuse me, and prioritising really well to achieve some core goals, namely headcount as the example that we're talking about.

And I mean in terms of the headcount side of things, and we are a remote first company and anybody who's listened to the podcast at this point, I'm sure we'll have realised that, but what does that mean to you in terms of the way you have to think about those hires and building out, well, maintaining the culture maybe is maybe a better thing to discuss.

It's one of those things where the world has shifted over the last five, seven years or so where it's sort of become much more normal to be expecting remote first, certainly within the tech sector as well, but making sure that you've still got the kind of systems and processes to back that up so that it feels normal and it feels logical that people can still be productive, that people can still feel part of the organisation they're working for. That's been really, really central to how we've worked and the systems that we use. All of our recruitment is done obviously remotely and getting people set up for success on day one, making sure that we're using our onboarding processes really well. We use a system, bamboo hr, so we're able to interact with candidates way before they've started for their onboarding and new hire information. We've got our ops systems is set up in such a way that laptops are provided beforehand that people get the equipment that they need to work successfully from home.
And then once they're actually here making sure that they have instant access, that the preparation is there for them to have instant access for a hit the ground running, start remotely from wherever it is that they're working. So that means trying to break down the daunting first day nerves of being presented with a hundred Slack channels and not being able to triage what's important or being invited to a bunch of meetings and just trying to find your feet when actually you don't have the person just next to you to quickly ask. So we've been really conscious about the onboarding experience for people so that the information that they get on day one and it is tailored to them. So there's core company information that's shared out that we've got that consistency of approach, but there's a lot of preparation that goes in before everyone starts to make sure that you don't feel that you are sitting in a room alone, you feel that you are instantly within the Cloudsmith community.
Slack is very central to that as well in terms of how we collaborate and then using information that we have on Notion and Bamboo and whatnot, all kind of lends to that experience of people feeling integrated straight away. It is a tough one and I'm sure everyone has had those feelings where they would love to just be in an office and be able to turn around to somebody and have the quick chats and the amount that people come away from those collaborative days, oh my goodness, I would never have spoken to that person and I've just learned X, Y, and Z, and that was really useful. So finding ways to nurture those kinds of interactions too through our non-work-related channels as well. So the banter channels that we have are really popular for. I mean we all love talking about our pets. We all love having a chat about food. We all like having a bit of a rant and sharing our weekend pictures and people really embrace that. The hobbies that are shared and the interactions that really make you feel like you do get to know people that aren't in your immediate circle of transactional day-to-day work, I think really helps too.

Yeah, no, you get to see how mad people are, and you're right, the pets channel is bonkers, but it's amazing to see. I find it interesting because get to see people's couches and people's living rooms and all through the, you do get to see the art on their walls or the posters on their walls and you do get to see a little bit more than just Kevin, the dog. I'm channelling Leanna, but yeah, no, it's really nice to see and we've done a lot around, we do a lot of preparation for those employees and each employee has an individual notion page that they get to run through. I'm very impressed with that. I think we've gotten really good feedback as well from all the people that have come in that our onboarding is actually some of the better onboarding that they've got, whether they're in an office or remotely. So that's fantastic.

It is fantastic. You're right, and it's down to the likes of our chief of staff, Lauren, who has been on the journey from such an early stage as well and can really kind of connect all of those dots as to what's going to be most useful too, because as we grow out and people become a lot more specialised in what they're doing, it becomes even more important to have those individuals that can really connect those dots at a slightly higher level. So using the expertise from people within the team and across the business to help that. It really shows and it also helps managers too. They don't have to start from scratch every time. There's that consistency of message that goes across that everyone needs to know, and then they just start building out for their individuals and it makes people feel like they're known a wee bit before they join and it's not such a hard landing on day one, which is how he wanted it to feel.

I was interviewing a candidate this morning and I was asking him about his current company and he said that they're all remote and he says he's never met them. And I was like, right, where are they based thinking he was going to say this states, Australia or whatever. And he was like, no, no, they're in the uk. I was like, and you actually haven't met them. And he was like, no, and I just thought it was amazing. So I started to tell him about our offsites. We do three offsites a year and we have a Christmas party and just the face time and being in the same physical space and how that breaks down borders and language problems. Just the think is, I don't know how you could do a remote company properly if you didn't get to meet people in person. And maybe you could just talk a little bit about the offsites and what that means for you and the preparation that goes into those.

Yeah, absolutely. Because I think that if you're going to be a successful remote first company, I think you need to think about the budget and the effort and the time needed to make people still feel connected. And it's not an easy thing. Organising the offsites, the last offsite is being prepared for before the one before last. It is such a long process. We have them booked in for 2026. They are such an important part of how we connect everyone. It's like recharging that collaboration battery over those couple of days. You learn so much about the business. Everyone is getting together. We often have people joining the offsite that haven't formally joined the company yet. If they're, we be working notice before joining. We make sure that there is a range of voices at that offsite. It's not just about management and passing information. It's about Lightning talks.
It's about hearing from colleagues. There is effort that goes into making sure that there is collaboration opportunities like the breakout tasks, the evening events are planned. We have awards and recognitions as part of those. So we try and have a real balance between coming away with really solid company information, the transparency of everything that's being shared, and also the good crack that goes with it as well of actually sitting with your colleagues and building those relationships with people that you know and hardly ever get to see or maybe have never met before. So they're really important. January, may and September every year, and as you've said, the Christmas party, we like to bring people over for that. And even beyond that in smaller offsites within the team. So the engineering team is very focused on having regular meetups. Customer success team do the same. Doesn't always have to be over in Belfast.
It can be where's logical for that team at that given time. But we have a great space in Belfast. Us as an ops team, we go in every Wednesday, we choose to, and it's just an enjoyable, that's not the same as the offsite you originally asked about obviously, but that team together time, it all just continues to build that relationship or that collaborative field that we hold in such high regard in Cloudsmith where we need to be able to communicate on the hoof. We need to be able to be on Slack and responding to lots of things all at once, but getting that face-to-face time with somebody can go so much further to building those relationships than any amount of Slack chat could do. So they're so important for us.

Yeah, no, the one thing that you mentioned there that I think is vitally important is being able to bring the new starts to the offsites, whether they've actually started or not has been huge I think because when they do start on day one, if they have managed to meet a lot of people in the room and know who they are and know what their job title is and reaching out over Slack is so much easier if you have shared a drink at the bar or sat at dinner with them. So yeah, no, I think that's been crucial into building out the culture that we have.

Yeah, totally agree. Absolutely.

Taking that one step further, do you think that communication internally helps with how the culture has grown and how that ultimately makes Cloudsmith better to reach out to its own customers?

Without a doubt, it can only have made it better. I think having people that have been able to sit in a room together, enjoy time together, work collaboratively, and just have that shared experience than when they separate and we all go our separate ways and work from home again, the next time something arises that requires that kind of group effort, customer issue arises or there just needs to be that team feeling. It comes across loud and clear and certainly it's been the feedback so many times that the way that Cloudsmithers rally around to a customer's, cause when required is just second to none. It's literally second to none. And that comes from the respect and the community that's built up within the Cloudsmiths employee base. I think it absolutely impacts.

Yeah, I think we're just back from CubeCon and actually one of my favourite parts of the CubeCon experience was the customer dinner that we did and that was a opportunity to get a bunch of our customers that are to come to dinner and spend some time with the team and we try to even it up so that there's the same number of customers as the same number of Cloudsmithers. And I think that really comes across when we're talking to them that obviously there is a sort of vendor customer relationship there, but actually we've done such a good job of communicating with them on Slack and we've been talking to Dan McKinney and Dave McConville in different episodes of the podcast and the relationships that they've built up. It does feel like we've blurred the lines between the vendor and the customer relationship, and so it's pretty transparent and pretty open and I think that has definitely, we've always tried to have that as part of the DNA of Cloudsmith internally, and I think that has definitely bled out into how we deal with customers. I don't think we've mentioned this yet, but we obviously have teams in the uk, Ireland, USA and India. How have you tackled that of the ability to create a unified culture across those different regions and time zones,

Culture-wise? Think we hold fast to our values and that has to be our starting point. The tower of Cloudsmith, the principles that bind us together, and if having that as the starting point and then working out from there has got to be the default position. We know what we're looking for in good Cloudsmithers. That's not to say we need clones, we want all kinds of people working here and we have such a super mix of people from all different walks of life and the regions that you've talked about are our three areas that we recruit in. It is kind of different. We do need to be looking at practical differences in terms of benefits and legislations and that kind of thing. Obviously we need to be mindful of that across the different regions, but in terms of how we bind together as a culture, as long as we're holding fast to the core principles of collaboration and transparency and mutual respect and assuming positive intent and everybody working to the best of their abilities, if you're holding fast to those, then the geographical differences become so much smaller really. And actually all we do after that is just enjoy each other's different areas and learning about where people are coming from and what's different over in Florida versus what's happening in India this week versus down in Cork. I mean, we have actually separated Cork out now in Ireland as well as a region all of its own, and they're flipping delighted to be recognised in as a growing zone as well. So it actually just provides even more talking points when we get to celebrate what's happening in all the different regions too.

In a typical week, Carrie, what are the individual things that happen to keep the company together?

We have a number of placeholders every week that we all come together for shared information, and the main one for that is our All Hands every Monday. So it's in everybody's calendar. It's non movable. It happens pretty much every week, maybe one or two weeks a year where it doesn't, and it's a really kind of set agenda as well of what we're covering in that. So people are coming to get updates from Glen, get updates across the business on where we are against Target. We welcome new starters, we celebrate anniversaries and birthdays, and then there's a chunk of information from various areas of the business, whether that's about the product roadmap or cycle updates, cycle review or whatever it may be, customer spotlight. And then there's always a recognition of three individuals that have been given recognition on Cheers for Peers, which is one of our channels on Slack for acknowledging and being grateful for each other.
So Glen will always pick three of those out to call out. Very specifically, it links back to the Tower of Cloudsmith, so people that have done something that represents just better or sustainable pace or automation or whatever it may have been that they've done. So it's a really nice marker in everybody's week where we're all together cameras on, we see each other's faces. There's a chat channel off the side where there's commentary and a little bit of crack or support if we are welcoming new starters or if somebody's been acknowledged. So that is a really good place marker. We all have to our own team meetings of course as well. And then beyond that, even things like the Roundup that's provided by Glenn at the end of every week. It's five minutes with Glenn at the end of the week. Everybody watches it. There was a few weeks ago, Alan, I don't know if you remember, but Glenn was really late posting this and it was about eight o'clock on a Friday night and Slack was going crazy like, where's Glenn? What's happened? Where's his five minutes? Have I missed it? People wait for that to, and it's done Async people join and watch that, but making sure that we've got these markers where everybody is feeling as Cloudsmithy as possible with the information they're getting and the links that they're jumping on, it brings everybody back together again on those occasions.

Yeah, you mentioned the Cheers for Peers channel. Honestly, I think that's one of the best things that we ever did was create that channel and provide and give shout outs to people. Working in a startup is not easy at times, and to have a kind of positive place where you can kind of go and read only positive messages is pretty powerful, and you always feel good giving somebody a shout out and giving them the recognition. So it's nice that then gets carried over into all hands. I think that that's a nice little feedback loop that because I mean everybody can see everything in Cheers repairs, so you could almost take bets on who was going to make it to the three that get selected at all hands. So it's great.

I was going to say, what's great about it that I really liked too is how detailed people are in that. It's not just a, oh, thanks Alan, you were great today. There's a real specific outline as to what that person's done, what it's meant to you. And I think it also gives other people across the business more insight into what people's skill sets are and how they might be really helpful for something else and how they could link in and the amount of acknowledgement to all of the cheers for peers as well. It just goes to show how often all of us are on that channel where emoji tastic here and acknowledging it with all kinds of emojis, even just to kind of go well done. That was really great. That was the fact that all eyes are on that and it's not just a place to go, oh, it's just the same person again and again. Getting acknowledged I think has made it an extra special channel as well.

Yeah, I mean particularly like it when a new start gets called out for something they've done in their first week or two. I always think it's a pretty positive statement for the Cloudsmith culture to be able to, for somebody new to come in, do something great and get acknowledged very early. So it has been amazing.

Yeah, I agree.

Let's change tact a little bit. Let's talk about scaling. Ultimately, you've come in position 35 or whatever roughly it was, and we've obviously added, I mean if it's seven, you start last Monday or Monday before, which is unheard of. Normally it's only two or three, which is scary in itself in that we're sort of scaling that quickly. How have you managed to keep up with bringing that many people on in terms of how do you scale your function? Is it with tools, is it with help? How do you think about that?

Yeah, all the above. It was very immediately apparent that the HR system that we use, whilst it's got its place for people management, HR wise, it didn't have a robust enough a TS applicant tracking system in the background to help us get where we needed to get in the kind of collaborative way that we wanted to do it. So one of my early projects was bringing on board a new system, which we called Team Taylor. We don't call it Team Taylor, sorry, it's called Team Taylor. And Team Taylor is a really comprehensive a TS that we have used and rolled out across the company to make hiring that number of people as smooth as possible. We're talking about landing seven people a week. If you go back a few steps to how many people that would've been requiring an interview and how many people that would've been required to shortlist and how many applications in the beginning, it's really quite a machine.
So bringing in that tool was really important. Making sure that from an operational point of view, how my role interconnects with the chief of staff and finance and IT as well, and putting in places, even just going back to good old spreadsheet now and again, to actually be able to track and onboard that way and make sure that the communication between us as slick as possible. And then this year, building out the team as well and bringing in our first dedicated recruitment operations specialist. Naomi has been really crucial as well. In order to give me back part of my HR role, which has a core HR, let's say. It's all kind of integrated, but for her to be able to bring her recruitment expertise in and really grow that out even more and be a dedicated point of contact for all things, recruitment has been a game changer as well. So without those systems and without a Naomi, I would almost say that it would be impossible to get to where we want to get, and certainly to have been able to do it in a way that every employee joining felt like there was the requisite preparation and attention to detail that goes into every interview, the way that they're planned and scheduled and scored. Even that there is that kind of really good process in the background to make sure that that applicant experience is second to none, let alone employee experience down the line.

Yeah, no, you have done a great job of bringing in those processes and those people. Naomi has kept me right on numerous occasions as my ad hoc style for recruitment that serve me very well in the beginning, obviously does not scale.

It's a very different kettle of fish hiring people to be part early stage startup where you want those people that can roll up the seeds, get their hands dirty and jump into five different roles at any given moment, and it's a very different kind of landscape. And now very much getting into that scaling up where we're trying to focus on some really niche roles, the first of their client within the company, across the business, it takes a different kind of focus or a different kind of process because those people know exactly what they are doing. They know what they're kind of expecting coming into a role as well. So it means that everybody just has to step up and raise their game. And I think that that's one of the big shifts really as we're moving into that scaling up is recognising that we have these SMEs across the business and making sure that we don't have any one person sitting with three or four hats on that we can keep that underpinning the sustainable pace, I suppose, of what we're doing by bringing in those experts and really scaling it out mindfully like that.

Yeah, no, it's an important distinction. How have you, I mean, and that does create some friction because the people that do wear many hats, I mean sometimes they're happy to give the hats up and sometimes they're not, but how do you deal with that type of environment and scenario where, or maybe you find it easy enough that we actually haven't seen that in Cloudsmith's place where people are happy to make it easy?

Yeah, the main thing is I think if we've always got an eye on the future, not talking about a year, hence I'm talking about maybe over the next quarter or the next two quarters and you're kind of looking at the people around you and you're doing these things intentionally about growing out the team, I think that becomes more welcome. What we don't want is to get anybody to the point of being burnt out and they've got too many plates spinning and they're wearing too many hats and they're all rammed down on their head at the same time, and that's not sustainable for anybody. And then bringing more people into the team at that kind of point does invariably lead to more friction doing these things in a really planned way. When we are looking at our headcount planning from September for the following year, it's done very much with the intention of giving people space to grow in their own areas of expertise and adding to the team.
And sometimes absolutely it can be an adjustment, even on a very personal level, bringing Naomi in and thinking, oh, I'm not going to be doing too much of the recruitment anymore. That's going to feel very strange. It wasn't a point of friction per se, but it was definitely something that I needed to acknowledge in a shift in my own role that had been so focused on that area of the business for the previous year. So yeah, it depends on the person, of course, it depends on what parts, which hats of theirs that they're giving away, but I think there is something very quickly that turns into a huge relief and gratitude for the expertise that you're bringing in that brings something completely new to the party when you've got somebody coming in that is absolutely top of their game and they can dedicate all of their time and focus. My God, how lovely is that when you are then able to redirect your own activities? We've seen that across the business a number of times, and I'm thinking about the growth particularly within the sales function and the growth within product and our brand and comms team. There's been some huge growth in there over the last year, and it's been so wonderful to see how much more can be done with the subject matter experts that we have coming in in those teams.

Yeah, no, amazing. You briefly mentioned burnout there, which I think if you ask all the original sort of ogers, I think we've all had periods where we've gone through a period of burnout talking about mental health and remote working and the blurred lines between sitting at a desk in your own home and having to spend eight hours a day. In this other world where you're talking to people in Slack and having Zoom calls and everything, maybe you could give us a bit of understanding of how we tackle that at Cloudsmith from a sort of an HR point of view.

Absolutely. I mean, we have flexibility underpinning how we work. We very much make it clear from the get go that we know life carries on for everybody. It a very specific part of the induction. We don't expect people to be sitting there as machines for their eight hours a day. We know that there is going to be need for people to, whether it's going for walks, going to the gym, looking after kids', logistics, whatever it may be. I think knowing that you can pace your day and your week with that level of flexibility already takes a slight layer of pressure off that I think can just naturally start to weigh down on people that feel that they've got the issue of presenteeism where they have to be on it all the time. They have to be responsive at every given moment. So really supporting that flexibility as a starting point is key.
But also having expectations that you can lean on your manager. This is modelled very much from the top from Glen and making sure that one-to-ones happen across the business. And the way that I position it with any new starters particularly is use them really selfishly use them for you to make sure that you are prioritising your focus appropriately, that you are getting help to unblock anything that is causing stress or difficulties that you are using it to talk about your own kind of progression. Because if there was eight or nine days in the week, we'd still be busy. We're in a really ambitious scale up zone and we've got big plans. So the main crux of it then, to support the sustainable pace is the ruthless prioritisation. It's knowing what the bigger picture is and how your role feeds into that. And us from the other side, from the way that we're building our employee framework is to give people that flexibility.
We trust that people are getting their job done. We don't need to see, people don't need to clock in and clock out and take their hours. We know people are committed to doing the work they need to do, so let's give people the flexibility to work around their day-to-day life and things like that where people can take their time out away from their desk and they can meet the commitments that they've got outside of work as well. All helps the natural work-life balance. But yeah, absolutely. There are always times where it's going to become very stressful and I think you'd probably be hard pressed to find anyone in a startup zone that hasn't really felt the pressure of burnout, but hopefully by not only people being encouraged to do that, but also those of you that are really the old timers here that have been here from day demonstrating that yourselves as well, when you're taking time off, you're taking time off, making sure that that's mirrored for other people to be able to go. It is okay to take your leave and not have slack on your phone at that time and not need to respond to a message at 11 o'clock at night because that suited somebody else to send it. And I think across the business, we need to always support each other in being able to have downtime.

Yeah, no, I think that's very important. I have to admit, I struggled with that in the early days where I would be afraid to admit that I had watched a movie in an evening because I wasn't sitting in front of the keyboard and interacting with customers or coding something up. But actually it was actually detrimental to the whole thing because then other people felt that they couldn't do it either. And so that has definitely changed for me and over the years that yeah, I mean people do have lives and they do have other things that they want to be involved in, and it's up to us to encourage that. I'm particularly in engineering, even a lot of them are interested in open source and working on other projects and stuff. We certainly would not want to cut off that creativity. A lot of that can actually feed back into their work and the way they think about things. And so it's not just culture diversity that we're looking for as well. It's at an intellectual level and you get that from everywhere. For hiring at Cloudsmith, I have always wanted it to be a really difficult company to get into. But then when you're in a really great company and now that we're a series B company, how do you think we can keep achieving that

Purely and simply by not lowering our standards when you've got the big numbers that you need to recruit for, not to be swayed by thinking, oh, flip, we have to recruit that many people. No, we have to recruit the best people still. So by making sure that we maintain the standards that we don't compromise on getting the right people in, this is a huge thing for them as well. And this is an exciting party to be in, and we want to make sure that whoever's coming in is just as excited as we are. And so yeah, keeping those standards high is going to be a massive part of that.

Yeah, I've actually been in a scenario, and I'll not name the company where we had let our standards slip and that it was not a fun process. We did a recruitment day that lasted all day, and we got people to go around and talk to multiple different business stakeholders, and then we all went into their room and they basically said, well, we've seen 20 people today and we're going to hire 10 of them. And I was in my angry Alan phase where I was like, no, we're not. There weren't 10 people that were worth hiring. And there was an immediate, everybody was like, oh my goodness, Alan's not happy. What are we going to do? And I'm not sure that we did. I don't think that we did hire 10 people out of that 20, but it was a kind of close call of we are dropping our standards here if we expect to hire 10 of these people. And that's just not the right way to look at it. It's not a bums on seats business. Absolutely. You have to find the best people and keep your standards high, so please make sure that we keep our standards high.

Well, as the HR manager, absolutely. I'm sure it is. Music to that person's is not to hire the wrong people because down the line, but no, it's absolutely, it's a hundred percent our focus to always, always keep those standards high.

And I mean, I think that helps actually when the people that are here already, when they realise that we're not willing to just bring people in and put them in a position where this is the difficult thing. It's actually not fair on the person because we obviously have expectations, which we're pretty transparent about, and we want the people that we put our trust into succeed. So it's as important to them as it is to us that we find the right fit for every candidate. So wrapping up, Carrie, with just sort of like a final question. What advice would you give to other HR leaders in a remote first company?

Reach out to all the stakeholders you can. I think building those relationships early on, making sure that you're setting up your one-to-ones that you're getting to know, the leadership team, what their pain points are, and especially those that are quieter than others that think they don't have any. Building that relationship early so that you can help them as situations may develop. You can help them grow their team. You can understand their priorities and make sure that you're not trying to do everything, especially in a standalone role. There can be that feeling that you just have so many things to get to. Ideally, I'm yourself with a really good leader that can help you with the prioritisation part because that is going to stand us in good stead. We can't move all the boulders all the time, but building those good relationships and making sure that you're focused on the right things will stand you in good stead.

Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule today, Terry, to talk to us. It's been a pleasure. There's been some really interesting insights into the inner workings of Cloudsmith, so thank you very much.

Very welcome. Thanks for having me.