Default Aggressive: Taylor Nelson on Scaling Recruiting at Filevine
Taylor Nelson, Talent Manager at Filevine, joins Adriaan Kolff on scaling from 230 to over 900 employees with a team of nine, filling every role in under 30 business days, building headcount cases with data, and telling candidates who use AI as a resource from those using it as a crutch.
Show notes
In this episode of the Leaders in Talent podcast, host Adriaan Kolff interviews Taylor Nelson, Talent Manager at Filevine, the legal AI platform that grew from 230 to over 900 employees in the two and a half years since Taylor joined as recruiter number three. Taylor started his career hiring 50 people a week in high-volume agency staffing, and that agency DNA still shapes how his team of nine operates: every role filled in under 30 business days, default aggressive communication with hiring managers, and an intake sheet before any job is posted.
The conversation covers the shift from operator to manager, from responsible for me to responsible for we, and the data spine behind the growth: the 26-minutes-per-hire recording that justified a recruiting coordinator, headcount forecasting with finance (270 hires projected this year, 300 done by late July), what Taylor would do differently on a second run, and how to tell candidates using AI as a resource from those using it as a crutch.
Timecodes
01:18 Welcome and Taylor's background
02:00 Psychology degree to 50 hires a week in agency staffing
03:53 Recruiter number three at Filevine, now a team of nine
04:59 From me to we: the first-time manager shift
08:48 Agency habits worth keeping: 30-day fills and default aggressive
11:27 Building the case for more headcount with data
14:25 The coordinator math: 26 minutes per hire, three hours back per recruiter
15:58 Workforce planning with finance: 270 projected, 300 by July
18:16 What he would do differently
20:45 Intake sheets and the prioritization template
21:39 Manager habits: blocked time and specific sourcing sprints
23:53 Candidates using AI: resource or crutch
27:19 Three takeaways for first-time managers
30:09 The balcony and the dance
33:05 Where to find Taylor
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Connect with Taylor Nelson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylornelsonhr/
Connect with Adriaan Kolff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaankolff/
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Transcription
[00:01:18] Adriaan: Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Leaders in Talent podcast. I'm your host, Adriaan Kolff, and today I have the honor to have Taylor Nelson on the podcast. Taylor, welcome.
[00:01:33] Taylor: Thanks, Adriaan. Happy to be here and take a break from the daily grind to chat with you today. So thanks for having me.
[00:01:38] Adriaan: That's right. And I know you guys are on a rocket ship, so I'm excited to dive in, especially for our listeners to understand a little bit more about your background and what you're currently facing. Speaking of which, Taylor, can you share a little bit more about your years working in agency, then transitioning into your in-house role and what it's like to work as a TA manager at Filevine?
[00:02:00] Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe backing up a little bit: undergrad degree in psychology, master's degree in HR management. When I was going to school, I wanted to be a therapist, a psychologist. That was my goal, and I found out that psychologists don't always make the most money, so I pivoted to something where I could still work with people. I had a professor suggest recruiting, and ever since then I haven't really looked back. As you mentioned, early in my career I started out in a high-volume staffing company. I was a recruiter out there, then a recruiting manager. We were hiring 50 people a week for a lot of different companies that we supported, so it was a lot like a revolving door. You'd send someone out for a job, and two or three weeks later they're coming back because they want to make a dollar more per hour at this other company that's a client of yours. So you got a feel for the hiring process and what it's like to just grind out hires for companies. After about a year and a half of doing that, I wanted to do something a little bit more. I thought there was more to recruiting than hiring forklift operators and warehouse employees. Those employees are the backbone of a lot of companies, and I definitely appreciate the work they do, but I just wanted something more for myself. So I went in-house at a digital marketing company, spent about a year there, and started to see there was a lot more to hiring outside of where I was. So I have played both sides, in-house and agency. I've been recruiting for about nine years, and most of those nine years have been on the agency side, probably four and a half to five years working at agencies, in both high-volume and more technical, specialized positions. And as you mentioned, for the last two and a half years I've been working at Filevine, which is a legal AI company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, with about 900 employees and continuing to grow. When I started here two and a half years ago, we were just over 200 employees, so we've scaled quite a bit and continue to crush a lot of our goals on the hiring side.
[00:03:53] Adriaan: So tell me a little bit more about you coming in, because if I remember correctly, you were recruiter number one or number two?
[00:03:59] Taylor: At Filevine? We had a team of two when I started here, so I was a manager. I was recruiter number three, ultimately, when I started.
[00:04:07] Adriaan: And how big is the team now?
[00:04:09] Taylor: Right now we're at nine, so eight recruiters and a recruiting coordinator who helps us with a lot of the behind the scenes. So we started with a team of three and now a team of nine over the last two years.
[00:04:19] Adriaan: And was this your first real TA manager role that you picked up?
[00:04:25] Taylor: I would say it probably was. I had a previous manager job where I was managing a team of interns in a couple of satellite offices, but I wasn't really in the weeds. That was at the agency, so you're just checking in on everybody, making sure their day-to-day is going well. This is really my first in-house manager job where you're seeing the work through on a day-to-day and weekly basis. It's been exciting to see the business grow and see the recruiting team need to expand as well. Being able to contribute to the growth of the company by growing the recruiting team has been exciting.
[00:04:59] Adriaan: So tell me a little bit more about that transition. Coming in as a recruiter in a recruitment team of two, first real TA manager job, but still hands-on. How do you go from being personally very focused on the hires that you make, wearing that as a badge of honor, to becoming responsible for a team, and what did you learn along the way?
[00:05:17] Taylor: I think that's a great question. When you're in the agency space, and I spent five years working in agency, your success is measured by volume and your paycheck can increase due to commission, so the more you hire, the more money you can make. My mindset early in my career was always: the busier I can be, the faster I can work, the more roles I can fill personally, the more money I can make. And in the agency world you're always on an island. You don't have a coordinator, you don't have a team to support you. You're working with three or four clients at a time, so you're very protective of your territory, because you don't want any doubt about whose candidate it was when there's a commission check due to you. So that transition has happened where my mindset has shifted from I'm responsible for me to I'm responsible for we, as a team. If the team is having success, if the team is filling positions quickly and hiring managers are happy, then the recruiting function looks good, and by that nature I look good, because we're running a high-performing recruiting team. That means I'm doing my job. The opposite can be true, however, so it's been a shift toward: how can I help my team perform at their best? What blockers can I free up for them? What hard conversations do I need to go have with a chief officer or a hiring manager to make sure the recruiting function continues to move forward and we're not responsible for anything slowing down on the hiring side? I still carry eight to ten recs myself, so I'm still definitely in the weeds, but it's a lot lower than it used to be, and I've been much more involved in helping my team free up their time and get better at what they do.
[00:07:04] Adriaan: So especially for first-time managers or people in that transition who are listening: you went from two to now nine while still being hands-on recruiting. What have you learned in that journey in terms of your prioritization of time, what to focus on, but also maybe pushing back on your manager or hiring managers?
[00:07:25] Taylor: I think, off the top of my head, I have delegated a lot more. I've been able to trust my team more than I would have in an agency, because like I said, there you're on an island, you want to be protective, and you want to be the one doing the work. It was hard for me at first, for sure. A lot of first-time managers are coming off being high-performing individual contributors, so it is hard to let go of that responsibility and get into the success of the team. It was also challenging because someone on my team isn't going to go about the process the same way I would. They're not going to do it Taylor's way, which isn't always the right way. I understand that. It doesn't mean the task is not getting done; someone else has their own method, their own way of doing things. So I've been able to take a step back and realize that the team member I'm working with has their own way, and the end goal is still there. They can ask me for advice when they need it, but I don't need to hover over them to make sure it's getting done. I think that's where the line was pretty clear to me: as a first-time manager, you're used to having a lot of success on your own, you're probably coming out of a high-performing individual contributor role, and now you've got to shift that a little bit to understand that the end goal is still the same, but how can you help your team get there?
[00:08:48] Adriaan: What are some of the things you've taken from your agency days, in terms of getting to hires, that you've implemented now at Filevine and asked your team to focus on? And what are some of the things you're not doing anymore compared to your agency days?
[00:09:07] Taylor: There's a lot of really good alignment with the agency world, and I'm actually super thankful I spent a lot of time in it, because you start to realize that your time is money. Your clients, just as easily as they want to keep working with you, can truly stop working with you, and there goes your opportunity. So I've been able to help myself and my team think like agency recruiters, where our hiring manager needs to be a priority for us. We are working for them and we need to move at a very quick pace. We have a goal on our talent team to fill every single job in under 30 business days. We were under that last quarter and close to it the quarter before. Industry standards, I think, are about 40 to 60 days. We work with a lot of urgency and a lot of communication. I always tell my team: default aggressive. If you have a question about whether to schedule a meeting with a hiring manager or wait for them to get back to you, my answer is always that the fastest way to get a hiring manager talking is to just put something on their calendar. So default aggressive is something we still do a lot. And also over-communicate. I would rather have my team checking in on the smallest of details than waiting for a hiring manager to come to us with a problem that has grown and grown over time. Those are some things I think still apply to recruiting and that I'm happy to keep. One of the things I want to get better at being in-house: on the agency side you have a tendency to hire somebody and then forget about them, because you just move on to the next role.
[00:10:42] Adriaan: Exactly.
[00:10:42] Taylor: It's been really cool for me over the last couple of years to see someone I've hired, and then I cross them in the hallway or they're at a company event and you can see their success. I've hired people who have been promoted, and that's really fun to see. So one thing I've tried not to do from the agency side is forget about the people I hire, because at some point in their conversation with the company, you were their first introduction, their first interaction with Filevine or any company you work for. You have that intrinsic trust and almost immediate connection with those people. So I've tried to take more of an interest in the people I hire, congratulate them on their big wins at the company, and have conversations with them when I see them around the office.
[00:11:27] Adriaan: Cool. That's such a big difference compared to agency. Going from two to nine, tell me about that journey. Was it organic, was it just the business growing? Obviously it was growing very rapidly. Is that something you had a continuous conversation with your manager about, as in "Hey, we need more support"? How did that process go?
[00:11:47] Taylor: For us, when I first started here, there were just way too many requisitions for the team we had. There was a time when all three of us had 25 positions we were working on, and every single one of them was the most important role. That's hard for a team of three, and looking back now, I truly don't know how we did it for six or seven months. Pretty quickly, though, we realized there were some big hiring needs coming up going into 2025, and we wanted to hire a talent sourcer. Someone who wasn't really a recruiter, someone who could come in and help us build pipelines for our open positions, primarily some of the higher-volume sales and tech support roles. We built a case for that. We built out a data model for our finance and headcount teams to help them understand how much time our team was spending on sourcing and which roles were slipping through the cracks. Recruiting is one of those departments, like a lot of departments, where you live and die by the data. If you're not filling jobs fast enough, you'll know. If you're not hiring the right type of people, you'll definitely know. If someone on the team isn't carrying their weight, you're going to find out pretty quickly. We were getting to a breaking point where we didn't have enough pipeline. We were trying to balance 70 open positions with three people, and we just needed more help. That was the first indicator that the team could expand based on the workload. Then going into 2025, we immediately hired over 100 people in the first couple of months of the year, and we needed more support, specifically on the technical hiring side. I was the only one doing it at the time, and I can't do it all. My agency mindset crept back in: I wanted to do it, I wanted to be the guy. But I knew we needed help, so we hired a few more people. By the end of 2025 we had four recruiters in the Salt Lake office and another in our Chicago office, which was the first recruiting hire out there. The data definitely helped, and so did the forecasting on headcount. I worked very closely with the finance and headcount teams to understand what we're hiring for right now, what we're hiring for six months from now, and what we can get ready for. Because when you're hiring software engineers, engineering managers, these heavy-hitter positions, it's not always 30 days or less, and we need to be prepared for that. If we're trying to hire a position we need in Q4, we should probably post it and start working on it right now, in July or August, so we're ready when the time comes. A lot of it was working with those teams to forecast what was happening. And like I mentioned, we're now at the point where we have a recruiting coordinator. He's been with us for about five months, and honestly it's one of the best decisions we've made as a team, because we're saving about three hours per week per recruiter by having this person on our team. Again, it goes back to the data. Before we hired him, our recruiting team would have to stop in the middle of the day and complete around 30 minutes of onboarding for every person we hired: background checks, submitting an IT ticket, going through new hire forms, filling out several spreadsheets and making sure everything is where it needs to go. I actually recorded myself once just to see how long it really took, and it was just over 26 minutes. The coordinator not only owns that entire process, he's also been very instrumental in new hire meetings and introductions, and he greets all of our candidates who show up for onsite interviews. It really does save us a bunch of time, and it has given our team time back to source for important roles, to have a couple more recruiting screens every week, maybe to make time for a podcast on a Thursday morning. So I think it's critical for talent acquisition leaders to document these things, even the small things, to build a case for something like a recruiting coordinator or a sourcer, or expanding your team in general, because you want to have something to fall back on. You need to understand the why behind it, and showing what life looks like before and after can increase the likelihood of something like that being implemented or added to the team.
[00:15:58] Adriaan: It's interesting what you say about the recruitment coordinator and the planning. Finance: you guys obviously have a budget and a bit of a forecast. Is that pretty accurate? Is it something you do on a quarterly basis? Because workforce planning is often a pipe dream at many companies we work for and speak with. And do you use it for your own capacity planning?
[00:16:24] Taylor: Yeah, we go through annual planning. I met with our VP of Finance and went through what the headcount for the company was supposed to look like going into this year, for example. We were projected to hire, I think, just around 270 employees this year. I can tell you it's July 23rd and we are over 300 already.
[00:16:46] Adriaan: You're done. You're done.
[00:16:47] Taylor: Yeah, the recruiting team is taking the next six months off and we're just going to be enjoying it. I think that's another benefit of a great recruiting team: being able to adapt. We've had these initiatives that have happened. Filevine has transitioned into a legal AI company, so we need to hire more product folks, more engineers. We're building out engineering teams that require not only a handful of engineers but engineering leadership and test engineers. These new teams and initiatives come up, and obviously you're not planning for those things, so you have to be adaptable. You have to be able to call an audible on the fly. But for the most part, you check in regularly and make sure you're not risking over-hiring. We typically meet with the finance team annually, go through the plan and what we're allotted as a recruiting team, and try to hire within that. Then as initiatives come up, we look at the team again and say: if we need to hire 35 engineers in 2026 and we only have two technical recruiters right now, one of which is myself as the manager, we need another technical recruiter on the team so we can balance out those workloads. That's how we were building the case, and that's how we solidified that we needed to add another technical recruiter a few months ago. Now we're in a sweet spot where everyone's taking eight to ten recs. No one's working on too many, but no one's twiddling their thumbs waiting for work either.
[00:18:16] Adriaan: So you scaled from 200 people when you arrived to 900 people two and a half years later. You more than 3x'd the company with a relatively small team, I must say. Looking back, what are some of the things you would not touch, and what are some of the things you would change or do differently?
[00:18:35] Taylor: I probably would have hired a recruiting coordinator immediately back then.
[00:18:40] Adriaan: Oh, interesting.
[00:18:41] Taylor: Hindsight's 20/20, like we say; you don't realize the importance of it at the time. I look back at all of the, I won't call it wasted time, but a lot of time spent unwisely. We tried to automate it and couldn't figure it out. Early on at Filevine, at least when I started, there was a huge push for research and development hiring as well as business development. If I had to do it again, I would probably prioritize hiring a technical recruiter a little bit faster than we did. As I mentioned, I was the only person handling technical talent, which included engineering, quality engineering, site reliability, product design and product management, until about June of 2025. So I went a year and a few months being the main resource for technical talent, and looking back, I would have hired an additional resource a lot faster, because I was probably creating the bottleneck for those teams. I would also love to go back and get pretty granular with the hiring managers on what their needs are. When I started here, it felt like everything was on fire and we had to be really scrappy, and you're probably hiring anyone who would accept an offer, because you just needed to fill the job and move on to the next one. I've learned now that not every role is the most important one. Of course they're all important for the company, but we've built out this prioritization template now, so we understand what's a priority one versus a priority zero, and what can be pushed off for a couple of weeks, or where interviews don't always have to happen. I would love to have built that prioritization early on and alleviated some of the high pressure the recruiting team felt in 2024 and 2025, because we put a lot of pressure on our team to fill roles quickly and find the right people. So those are a couple of things I would change pretty quickly on the process side. And there are a couple of things I implemented when I started. They didn't have a screening process or structure; people were taking notes in any capacity they could. We implemented a couple of AI tools to help with that. I implemented an intake form, so now we fill out an intake sheet with every hiring manager before their job is posted, so we as a recruiting team can get very specific on not only the intangibles that are not on the job description, but: what's the interview process? What's the compensation, and what's your wiggle room on comp? Are there companies that come to mind that you want us to hunt from or go after? Are there deal breakers on the other side that are just absolutely not? There are a lot of these process things I've been able to put in place as well. And we've had a lot of success, like you said, scaling from 230 employees to over 900 now, with offices in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and two offices in Europe. It's been a challenge, but a fun challenge to be a part of.
[00:21:39] Adriaan: And what about yourself as a manager: mindset, how you do your one-on-ones, your meetings, how you structure your weeks and your days? Is there any silver lining there, looking back? "If I would've known this, I would've done Y," next to, of course, the operational piece?
[00:21:54] Taylor: For me it's probably making sure my team has the tools they need to be successful. I still work on a lot of roles, and I learned early in my career to block out time and manage my time effectively. When you come out of an agency space, you have to be able to do that. I used to be the recruiter who would skip lunch and take back-to-back calls all day long, because I just wanted to be busy, I wanted to be productive, and I wanted to show I was actually contributing. Now I've learned it's okay to block out my lunch hour and actually just go reset for a minute. It's okay to block out 4:00 to 5:00 PM to catch up on all the things I've done. I have one-on-ones with my team because I want to make sure, as a manager, that they're feeling supported by me, that they're okay in their roles, that they're not burning out and not getting into the rabbit holes recruiting sometimes has. I have meetings with our executive team built out every single week as well. But I also have time to focus on sourcing, and I get very specific on which roles I'm sourcing for, on which days, during which blocks. I've found I get distracted if I just put a block on my calendar that says sourcing time. What role am I really working on? I can spend five minutes on a product designer and then distract myself for ten minutes on a software engineer. So I've built out very specific sourcing events: I'm sourcing 30 minutes for a product designer, then 30 minutes for a software engineer. That's helped me get very specific, and I've encouraged my team to do it as well. You can get really granular: headphones go in, the rock and heavy metal music comes on for half an hour, and we just go.
[00:23:40] Adriaan: Let's go.
[00:23:42] Taylor: Yep. Absolutely.
[00:23:44] Adriaan: Oh, so good. I love those moments. I'm not a rock guy, I listen to techno, that's my cup of tea, but I really resonate with getting in the zone and getting shit done.
[00:23:53] Adriaan: You are an AI-first company. What is the philosophy around candidates using AI during the interview process?
[00:24:00] Taylor: A great question, and something unfortunately we come across far too often. For me it's more prevalent in the engineering space. I see it more than I can remember in the past, for sure: software engineers, product designers, someone who is pretending to be something they're not. My opinion over the last couple of years, because I've used it as well: I use it to help me suggest screening questions to ask in an interview, or if I'm trying to get more specific on an engineer with a background in C# and I need to understand something a little bit more, I'll put it into Gemini: what's a good question I can ask right now? Because I'm not a technical expert. So my opinion is this: if you can use AI as a resource versus a crutch, then you're using it correctly. We try to ask specific questions that most people should know, but they're not generic. They require a little bit of brain power, a little bit of thinking. You can tell pretty quickly when someone's body language changes, when their eyes glance to the other part of the screen, when you hear some typing in the background. If they're scrambling for answers, maybe they're just not as confident as they could be. You have to play a little bit of a detective role as a recruiter to find the candidates who truly know their stuff versus the ones who are just hoping to get by. Unfortunately, I've had experiences on both sides. I've had someone who was using AI throughout the entire process actually get all the way to the offer stage with our team, and we just didn't feel right about it. So we suggested we fly that person out here to meet with our engineering leaders, just to get a sense of whether they could actually sit in front of someone watching them. The candidate declined to come out. They made up excuses for why they couldn't, and it was pretty apparent they were doing really well in the video calls, where they could probably rely on another screen on the side. But when it gets down to the real deal, you start to see it. So I think it's challenging, especially for recruiters. You have to be able to navigate that, and AI is just part of what we do now, living and breathing inside every company. So you have to be able to identify who's using it as a resource and who's using it as a crutch.
[00:26:15] Adriaan: What's the company's policy? Are candidates allowed to use AI during the interview process? Are there specific use cases, or is it not allowed at all?
[00:26:23] Taylor: We definitely allow them to use it, and we are pretty specific about which roles it's okay on. I've had engineering managers say, "I'm okay if you want to use AI on your coding assessment, but I also want to make sure you can be hands-on keyboard and figure this out as well." It's very encouraged here. As an AI-driven, AI-first company, it would be silly for Filevine not to allow it. But it makes you as a recruiter and a hiring manager have another notch in your tool belt: now I have to make sure people are actually skilled at what they're doing. So we do allow it. Not every role is suited to allowing it, but it goes back to: is it being used as a resource, and are you able to talk us through what you're doing within the AI tool? Or are you just typing into Claude, "Build out this code for me," and presenting it as your own work?
[00:27:19] Adriaan: Fair enough. Hey Taylor, wrapping up: you were in this transition, you went from two to nine, you still have a couple of rec loads, but your team has grown. You're two and a half years in, and you guys have tremendous success, one in the recruitment team, but also as a business. Looking back, what would you tell first-time managers who are where you were two and a half years ago? What are three takeaways, or two or four, you would tell your younger self or anyone in your shoes?
[00:27:48] Taylor: That's a great question as well, and I come back to a lot of things I learned early in my career. The first thing I would say: as a first-time manager coming from being a high-performing individual contributor, your job is to make sure the success of the team is there. I had my current manager tell me in a one-on-one once: "You don't get points for doing it all yourself. You get points for getting it done, having it on time, and doing it right." That always lives in the back of my mind. I don't have to do it all by myself. I have eight very qualified and talented people who can help me do it, and I'm going to get points for having everything done on time and done right the first time. So the first bullet point is: trust your team, and be a good manager who builds that trust with your team. The second, and maybe this is the second bullet point for you here, Adriaan: I have a principle I've tried to apply in my management, and my philosophy is teach, train, and trust. I want to teach somebody something, train them and be available when they have questions, but then I'm going to trust that they're doing it. A number of years ago I was starting my own recruiting podcast, so I give you all the credit for the time and dedication it takes to do this. The person I was interviewing mentioned that he tells his team it's okay to make new mistakes, because if you're making new mistakes, that means you're trying something and learning from it. Where we don't want to go back to is making the same mistakes again. So be open to new mistakes, be open to teaching your team and allowing them to see that. And the last point, and it's still something I am working on: early in my career I confused being busy with being productive, and those are two very different things. I would tell first-time managers: you can be as busy as you want to be, your calendar can be totally full, but that might not be the most productive use of your day. I've realized that blocking out time, spending time sourcing, spending time with my team, is more productive than having 12 interviews in a day, even though one calendar looks like I'm doing a lot and the other calendar doesn't. Quality over quantity is something I've really started to hone in on recently.
[00:30:09] Adriaan: So interesting. My former coach taught me a big lesson. He called it the balcony and the dance, and he said: as a leader and a manager, on one hand you want to be on the dance floor and dance with the rest of your team, but at the same time you also need to be on the balcony overlooking the dance floor. And he asked me the question: "Adriaan, do you ever schedule time just to think about the business?" I was like, "What?" And he said, "Do you have thinking time? Do you have dedicated blocks in your agenda where you go for a walk, or where you sit down and think about the business, and stand on the balcony?" I realized I was very good at the dance. I loved the dance, because it made me feel productive. But what was actually needed, especially as we're growing rapidly with my company, was to spend much more time on the balcony and, to your point, trust the team to do the dance. But they need direction on where to go.
[00:31:05] Taylor: I love that. I think it's great. There are a lot of those little one-liners we've all learned in our careers. I had a former CTO tell me, "As a manager, you can be the cure or the cancer, and you need to decide." His story was that he would walk into the office some days happy, a smile on his face, talking with everybody, and the mood of the office increased immediately. But then he would also have those days where traffic, or a terrible meeting, or a lot of stress was going on, and you could feel the mood dampen a little bit. So he had his supervisor pull him in, similar to your story: "Are you going to be the cure or are you going to be the cancer for the day?" And I think as a manager, especially a first-time manager, it's helpful to realize that the mentality and the attitude I bring to work really can impact the rest of my team. When it's time for me to be on the balcony, if I have a poor attitude, the rest of my team is going to feel it and we're not going to perform well. Getting into the mental side of it is important as well.
[00:32:04] Adriaan: So important. The energy you show and give off: you're a mirror to your team. And what you find acceptable, that's what the rest of the team finds acceptable. I will never forget, I went to a lecture around culture, and the teacher there explained that it's not your high performer who sets the bar. It's the person that's least performing who is the bar for the rest of the team, because that's what everyone gets away with. It really stuck with me, because I always felt like people strive for the highest, and of course you celebrate those achievements. But it's the people who show up late, or don't do their work fully, or drop the ball left and right: if that's acceptable, then people know it's okay to also, once in a while, be late. And as a manager, that is everything. Because you don't lead by example, you are the example.
[00:32:55] Taylor: That's a great point. There's probably some note-taking for me on things I can do better going forward as well, so I appreciate the wisdom there, Adriaan.
[00:33:05] Adriaan: That was such a great conversation. A lot of nuggets of wisdom. I love your journey. What's the best way for people to connect with you? Is it over LinkedIn?
[00:33:12] Taylor: Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to always make connections there. And we're hiring right now, we've got almost 100 positions. So if you're out there listening and you're looking for your next adventure in legal AI, come find us and we'll be happy to talk.
[00:33:25] Adriaan: Amazing. Thank you so much, Taylor.
[00:33:27] Taylor: Thanks, Adriaan.