The tech industry may be facing a labor cooldown, but that doesn’t mean the whole sector is struggling. In fact, information technology (IT) is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the US, according to Indeed.
Eric Lund, head of global recruitment at IT firm Kaseya, which expects to be the sixth-largest software company by 2030, has experienced this growth. Its global staff has ballooned from 1,500 when Lund joined in 2021 to nearly 5,000 today. As the company continues to expand, Lund plans to stay in lockstep with that growth—which is no simple feat.
Lund currently oversees a team of 25 recruiters who support hiring for all levels of the company, though he expects his team to grow as well. His primary focus has been both ensuring his team is always evolving their recruiting practices, and that the talent they hire is a best match for the firm’s long-term strategy.
“The skill sets that you were using for 1,500 people are very different than the skill sets you’re going to be using when you’re 5,000 people. So as we continue to grow…what you’re doing is going to be different,” Lund told HR Brew. “Our organization has to reinvent itself every year, and it’s important that those people that we hire are able to scale and grow with our organization.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?
Building [a] process that is scalable…We hire 200 [to] 300 people a month at our peak months, and so we have to build processes that can scale to that, or scale to even 500 a month.
Also when you scale your organization, having checklists. It sounds silly, but having checklists and processes and procedures…that are flexible. You don’t want to have such rigid lines that you can’t make decisions…I would rather my team make 30 decisions and five of them be wrong than make no decisions.
We have [interview] scorecards, and we use Greenhouse as our [applicant tracking system], but making sure that we structure our scorecards to continue to build off of each other…versus it being: this person does this, and this person covers this. Each round really builds up to making sure that you’re all making the right decision—[has] been a big process change for us.
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
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That I’m the recruiter for everyone. I know that’s probably a common answer from a head of recruiting and onboarding.
I always say recruiting is a team sport, because it’s not just the recruiters. It’s the hiring managers, it’s the team members making the referrals, and it’s the culture of hiring the right people as an organization that ultimately makes or breaks a recruiting organization.
It’s ultimately the whole organization that’s responsible to recruit the best talent, because the best talent will probably come from your referrals and finding the right people.
What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
The people, by far. Watching people make an impact not just in their careers, but also in the organization. When you get to see somebody that you placed…grow in their life and their journey, and maybe it’s personal, they started as an entry-level person, and they came in right out of college, and now they have a family, and they provide for their family.
I’ll never forget [when] I placed somebody for one of their first jobs ever. This was…when I was in staffing, almost 10 years ago, and now he’s a senior director at a large bank in the southeast. He’s thanked me multiple times for just making that one pivot in his career change. That’s such a heartful moment when you can provide that impact to somebody, and I think that’s ultimately the best part of what we do.
What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?
I’m most optimistic about leveraging technology and AI specifically to give us insight. I know there’s other things that people love about it, but helping enable the decision-making to find trends that you don’t even know are trends yet…When we continually get larger and larger data sets of people, we're going to be able to start seeing trends quicker and then automatically suggest them to you. And I think that is something that’s going to be super, super impactful.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?
Not holding people overly accountable to things…We should hold our teams accountable to what they should do, and that’s ultimately how you build a winning culture. Because the market was so tough, I think people were being allowed to not perform at the level that they should be.