Hiring for Hypergrowth: Wesley Gilbert on Scaling Talent at On Running, Uber and Manychat

In this episode of the Leaders in Talent podcast, Adriaan Kolff sits down with Wesley Gilbert, Head of Talent Acquisition at Manychat. Wesley’s career has been built inside some of the most talked-about scale stories in tech: Google, four years at Uber as EMEA hyperscaled from 2,000 to 20,000 people, then four years at On Running, where he led global TA as the company grew from 300 to 3,000 employees and built the retail business from zero to around a thousand.

Wesley walks through how On Running’s founders refused to copy the Nike and Adidas playbook and instead built a two-tier hiring strategy: high-potential talent who would grow up inside the culture, and senior leaders pulled from tech, FMCG and luxury who shared the brand’s passion but brought outside-industry thinking. He explains how the team broke down the company’s values into an assessment model, why interview rounds were intentionally longer, how MetaView and structured debriefs raised interview quality at scale, and where On’s approach differed from Uber’s competency-first, talent-density model.

Wesley also talks about the move to Manychat, where AI, the creator economy and a more competency-driven culture have shaped how he is rebuilding the TA function. He shares the leadership lessons that took him longest to learn: stepping back from being the expert in the room, the ‘big rocks’ framework his CEO at On gave him, and how to build a leadership team you can lean on when your function scales past what one person can hold.

Timecodes:

00:59 Welcome and Wesley’s background: Google, Uber, On Running, ManyChat

02:22 Thriving in high-intensity, build-from-scratch environments

03:54 Joining On Running at 300 people: a Swiss startup with a culture-first vision

06:18 Why On refused to copy Nike and Adidas, and the two-tier hiring strategy

08:58 The three risks of hypergrowth: quality, culture and diversity

10:08 Scaling from 300 to 3,000: how to convince talent before the brand was known

11:05 Defining what “top talent” actually means and turning values into an assessment model

18:17 Why On’s process had six to seven rounds, and the experience day in Zurich

20:43 What Uber did differently: competency over culture, and country-by-country startups

23:56 Joining ManyChat and what the platform does for content creators

27:20 Standardising and professionalising the ManyChat recruitment process

30:12 Lessons in hindsight: positioning TA as a strategic function, not an executional one

32:39 Learning to delegate, build a leadership team and stop being the expert in everything

35:24 The ‘big rocks’ framework Wesley’s CEO Martin shared with him at On

37:35 Adriaan on his own move from day-to-day operator to founder on the balcony

42:16 Where to connect with Wesley

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Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/matchr/

Get in touch with us: https://www.matchr.io/who-we-are/contact/

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Connect with Wesley Gilbert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wezgilbert/

Connect with Adriaan Kolff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaankolff/

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RSS feed: https://rss.com/podcasts/leaders-in-talent/

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Transcription

[00:00:05] Wesley Gilbert: It’s very rare that you meet a company where the founders care as much, if not more, about the culture of the company than they do about the product.

Why don’t we say, ‘Let’s find people who have a passion for our industry. Let’s find the people who are really passionate about sports or health and fitness, or just generally like the space that we operate in but that currently operate in different industries.'” And we wanted to bring in some of that expertise.

I don’t think success or failure when you hire somebody into a role is typically a reflection of competency at all.

It’s very much about whether that’s the right environment and whether they have the right skill sets to be successful.

That’s fine. Okay. We can find people that are good at what they do. What we wanna know is can we find the right people that are going to make this a great place to be and are gonna build the culture that we care about?

My kind of whole approach as a leader is I want to surround myself with people that are smarter than me that are more talented than me, that are brilliant people that I can learn from and look up to.

[00:00:59] Adriaan Kolff: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the Leaders in Talent podcast. And today, Wesley Gilbert is my guest. Wesley is a seasoned TA leader, having worked at companies like Google. After Google, he joined Uber right at the moment when they went through hyperscaling. And in just four years, Wesley was part of the organization that grew from 2,000 to 20,000 people in a variety of different TA and sourcing roles.

And after Uber, Wesley was headhunted by On Running to be their global head of TA, and scaled On Running from 300 to 3,000 employees in just four years, and also build out the retail business from zero to around a thousand by the time Wesley left. And currently Wesley is leading the head of TA function at ManyChat and is helping ManyChat scale globally.

Wesley, awesome welcome. Welcome to the podcast.

[00:02:04] Wesley Gilbert: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, made me sound like somebody that only 10X’s companies.

[00:02:11] Adriaan Kolff: It’s like wherever you go, come join us, because when Wesley’s in the building, we’re gonna 10X.

[00:02:17] Wesley Gilbert: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, it’s been a wild ride for sure with these companies.

[00:02:22] Adriaan Kolff: Before, of course, we prepared some questions after reading your bio, and of course, is Uber, super intense environment, right? Scaling it. On Running, super intense environments.

Is that the type of environment that you thrive in or are you also a little bit, after having experienced what you’ve experienced at those two companies like, “Ha, I need a little bit of a breather,” in terms of the level of intensity?

[00:02:53] Wesley Gilbert: Yeah. It’s a fair question, but I think I do get motivated by the madness of it all.

I think probably one of my favorite things to do as a leader is build out a lot of the things from scratch. So actually, when I was at Uber, we were building the EMEA business, and the EMEA business was just so different to the US business, which had been where the kind of majority of the hiring had happened up to that point, that we had to redefine a lot of the processes and a lot of the things that we were building out from scratch.

And I think this is where I get excited, this is where I get motivated. And what I enjoyed at On is you’re coming up with very specifically, okay, how are we gonna build this process? how are we gonna design this assessment philosophy? How are we gonna think about things like our employer branding strategies that are very specific to individual countries or regions?

And I think, yeah, that sort of problem-solving madness of it all, you’re building the plane as you’re flying it, as people always say. Yeah, I just enjoy that. I enjoy that work and I enjoy the kind of hustle and creativity that it brings. So yeah, I do think that’s probably my sweet spot, actually.

[00:03:54] Adriaan Kolff: Yeah, so cool. So cool. so let’s talk about these real-life experiences, right? Yeah. And let’s start with On Running, actually, because you joined when On was really early days. 300 people is already a significant organization but nothing where it is today, and especially the size, the scale, and the ambition, when you joined. Give us some context. What did it look like when you joined? and how big is On now?

[00:04:23] Wesley Gilbert: Yeah.

[00:04:24] Adriaan Kolff: You know, at the time when you left.

[00:04:28] Wesley Gilbert: Yeah. So when I joined, it was very much a small startup. It was very much a Swiss startup. Lots of Swiss white males.

And they, but they really had an amazing vision, the founders, that came across to me straight away in the conversations that I had when I was joining. It’s very rare that you meet a company where the founders care as much, if not more, about the culture of the company than they do about the product.

And I think they really figured out early on that this is the kind of culture that we wanna build. This is where we’re gonna differentiate ourselves. And they’d also done that on the product side a little bit, because they were very much a kind of premium luxury brand. Yeah. And so they were trying to position themselves slightly differently.

But I think we realized very early on when I came on board, and I very much the reason I came on board was because they painted such a positive picture about this culture, and what it was like to work there, and how human-centric it was and how much they wanna invest in people’s growth. And it just resonated with me straight away because I felt we are, as talent acquisition leaders, selling that culture externally.

And I think you have to believe in what you’re selling, and you have to really buy into the vision. And they had such a clear view on, we really believe in the product. We think it’s, it’s really good, and we can get it to more people, but we also feel this culture is something that we wanna invest in and we care a lot about.

And the passion for it just came across really quickly. And I think they said to me early on, “Well, how do we differentiate ourselves? how do we grow, and how do we bring the right talent in?” And they had a pretty clear view because of the fact that they wanted to build out this culture that we would have to stand out.

Because the problem is when you’re a challenger brand and you’re a brand like On was to Nike and Adidas and the larger players in the market.

[00:06:18] Adriaan Kolff: Yeah.

[00:06:18] Wesley Gilbert: The reality is if you try to replicate what they’ve done, or if you try to become a mini version of those companies, you’re always gonna lose because they have more resources, they have the bigger brand, they have the bigger budget.

It was really a pretty ambitious goal to say we can grow ourselves to be a major player within that sports industry. And so there was a lot of fear that if we just went out as well and hired in the same way that Nike and Adidas did, those people would also then bring their kind of understanding and their learnings from these companies and try to recreate that within On.

And that would again, just make us a mini version of these companies. And that was a big fear for the founders of, “Hey, we can’t just fish in this pool, in this ecosystem that the sports world is because then we’re just gonna bring the same understandings and learnings.” So we said, “Hey, let’s have a bit of a two-tier strategy then.

If this is what we wanna do, if we wanna scale,” kind of part one was how do we find smart, hungry, talented people that really had a lot of potential and that could grow with the brand. So there was a real view on instead of if we identified that this is the best person that we wanna hire for the role, who’s the next person in line behind them, or who’s the person behind that we can invest in and we can go out and find?

So there was a big focus on how do we find the right kind of high potential talent, invest in their growth, but also have them grow up in our culture so that they would be a part of kind of scaling that culture, growing that culture, but we could also define a little bit of their working approach.

And then the other part was how do we find talent that actually isn’t within that industry ecosystem? Because Nike was stealing people off Adidas, Under Armour was stealing people off Puma. It’s like this cycle of talent that was going around and within the industry. And the view was, “Hey, why don’t we try something different?

Why don’t we say, ‘Let’s find people who have a passion for our industry. Let’s find the people who are really passionate about sports or health and fitness, or just generally like the space that we operate in but that currently operate in different industries.'” And we wanted to bring in some of that expertise.

We looked at leaders in the tech industry, we looked at FMCG, we looked at the luxury space to say, “We’ll take a bet on some of these people.” And knowing that they would need to learn our industry and that we’d need a bit of investment, that would be something that we would proactively go after, and we would come up with a strategy that would allow us to do that to be able to hire those people and give them, and onboard them and get them into our industry.

And so I think those elements were what made up, “Hey, there’s some things we can do differently.”

[00:08:57] Adriaan Kolff: Yeah.

[00:08:58] Wesley Gilbert: And then, as always when you’re in a hypergrowth early phase, it was a lot of how do you avoid the kind of what I call the three biggest risks of hypergrowth. First, your quality of hiring dips because you’re hiring so fast.

Yeah. So this was our focus on that and how to be intentional about it. So I’m sure we can talk more about how we did that. Then there’s the culture aspect. So they were very clear on the culture, and culture doesn’t scale well at all. You have to be really intentional about it and really focused on it.

So that was a priority from day one. and then a little bit around diversity as well, ’cause as I said, we were aware of the fact that we were a Swiss company, majority of the teams were Swiss. We didn’t… We had teams in APAC at that time, in the US, but they were a very small piece of the business.

So it was all about how do we diversify that group and how do we diversify our leadership teams? And that became the mantra from the founders of “how do we diversify?” How can we make these teams not homogenous and really scale in a healthy way? So yeah, those were the three core elements that we were focusing on.

But as I said, that kind of two-tier strategy is what helped.

[00:10:08] Adriaan Kolff: So you remind me of Mike Tyson says, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face,” right? Yeah. This all sounds great. I’m like, okay, that makes a lot of sense, but scaling 10X.

[00:10:20] Wesley Gilbert: Yeah.

[00:10:21] Adriaan Kolff: Especially from 300 to 3,000, so much infrastructure gets broken, so many processes. There barely are never enough hiring managers. The business is growing like wildfire, right?

How do you do that successfully from a TA perspective, right? Great, we need diverse talent, but at the same time we’re short 200 people in X, right?

Yeah. and simultaneously probably the people that you were approaching that come not directly from the fashion industry, they will need some convincing. It’s like why is this an exciting company? Now everyone knows On Running. I assume the majority of our listeners will know On Running, but at the time, the majority probably would.

It’s On Running? Like what? Like what? Who are you guys?

[00:11:05] Wesley Gilbert: Oh, 100%, yeah. In the early days reaching out to people, it was very much a case of who are you and what makes you different? But I think we had a couple of things early doors that helped. I think Roger Federer joining definitely kickstarted our kind of brand recognition, and that was super helpful.

But honestly, it’s the one of the biggest challenges that I think anyone who’s listening to this who works in TA will totally understand. But I think what a lot of companies get wrong, and what really we were very lucky that the founders really understood this from the beginning, is — very often when you’re leading talent acquisition, and I’m sure you get this a lot as well in your position, what you hear is, “Just bring me top talent.

I wanna hire top talent. I wanna hire talented people. I wanna increase talent density,” right? Yeah. All of these buzzwords. Yeah. And you’re like, “Right, but what does that actually mean to you?” Because a lot of companies don’t actually take the time to define what top talent actually is for them.

I think every person is different, every individual, and your track record of success is as much to do with the environment that you find yourself in as it is your own capabilities. I don’t think success or failure when you hire somebody into a role is typically a reflection of competency at all.

It’s very much about whether that’s the right environment and whether they have the right skill sets to be successful. And I think what we did really well is we took a lot of time at the beginning to break down our values, and they called them spirits at On, and the behaviors that align to those of what would make somebody successful within this company.

So we were scaling really quickly. You had to be super comfortable with ambiguity. You had to make a lot of decisions without all of the information you actually needed to make those decisions. you were often not necessarily needed to be hired for the role that you were being hired for, but for the role that was coming in six to 12 months, because within that period of time, your role was so much bigger and your responsibilities were so much more complex.

So we were always having to think, “Well, can this person actually do the next role rather than the role that we’re hiring in? What is this person’s ceiling? what is their potential?” So we focused a lot on how do people think and who they were as people, more so than core capabilities and competencies.

So whether that’s a leadership approach, whether it was how collaboratively they work, or operated or all the things that we would look for in terms of what is gonna make somebody successful within our hypergrowth business and within the type of culture that we wanted to build, and we broke that down to become our assessment model.

So essentially, when you think about it from an interview process standpoint, our interview progress focused a lot less on what are your previous achievements and let’s break down the core role competencies and really drill into those.

[00:13:53] Adriaan Kolff: Yep.

[00:13:53] Wesley Gilbert: More so than my previous companies did. That was definitely more of the focus at Uber, for example, where it was always hire the smartest person you can find, hire the most intelligent person in the room.

That’s the person I want in my team.

[00:14:05] Adriaan Kolff: Yep.

[00:14:05] Wesley Gilbert: On was very different. On was, “That’s fine. Okay. We can find people that are good at what they do. What we wanna know is can we find the right people that are going to make this a great place to be and are gonna build the culture that we care about?” So when I think about the kind of the process and how we built it, the hiring manager call focused a lot on that.

The case study allowed us to assess for role competency because we typically built a case study for almost every position within the company, and this is where we expected people to counter against challenges that they would find in their role or come up with a specific strategy or do certain things.

So this is where you could demonstrate your in-role ability through those and we’d really deep dive into those with candidates at length. But the three to four team interviews that followed that step, they were almost exclusively focused on how they showed up. So what was important to them, how well they’d match with the culture and values that we’d really spent a lot of time breaking down and identifying the behaviors behind.

And so we didn’t do a typical standalone culture interview that you would typically find in most interview process. We expected each person who was an interviewer to own an aspect of our values. So what that meant is that they could go very deep on a topic. So if you’re thinking about, say, for example, one of our spirits was the entrepreneurial spirit, and it was all about, how creatively have you solved problems?

How have you thought outside the box? How have you taken ownership of problems that are outside of your span of control? These were things that person would focus really heavily on, and then the next person might be focused more on the team spirit, which is more about, how did they collaborate?

How did they work with others? How did they make the people around them successful? And it was all framed through the lens of that but around the core skills. So you’d still be assessing some of the aspects of the role, but it would be a lot more about how entrepreneurial were they in terms of how they solved those problems, or how collaborative were they in terms of how they worked.

So we had a very clear view, which came from the founders: this is the culture we wanna build. That allowed us to be very laser focused on hiring people that would actually help us to build that culture or that would help us to create that environment, and that’s a lot more of what we spent time exploring with candidates.

And the other part of that is training, right? So you define that. Yep. You say, “This is our assessment model. This is the culture. These are the things we care about when we interview and assess people.” Then you have to train people on that. And so what we tried to do is really guide the teams on these aspects.

How do they ask the right questions? How do they spot the red flags of somebody who maybe isn’t going to help us to create the right environment here? And over time, with that training, with that development, with that reinforcement, the teams got really good at spotting someone that was like, “Hey, this person is phenomenal.

Their track record, their CV is outstanding.” But actually when we talk to them, we realize pretty quickly that they wouldn’t be successful here, or they wouldn’t take the culture of that team in the right direction. So we were early adopters of tools like MetaView, which allowed us to very granularly explore what was covered in interviews, and then that also allowed us to both analyze the quality of the conversations that were happening, but also provide real time coaching.

And of course, we built a lot of custom training programs that we ran our teams through really quickly at the beginning, that really leaned into this of, “Hey, actually we care more about the culture, and we care more about the human element of the person you’re interviewing than the capabilities.

We trust that you’re gonna spot the right person from a capability standpoint, and we’ll give you a little bit of support on how to do that. But really we’re leaning into this soft-skill piece — this is where we want you to spend a lot of your time because this is what’s gonna allow us to build a really meaningful culture.”

So obviously hugely time-consuming for recruiters, to go through all of that and constantly do that coaching. But I think it allowed them to become stronger strategic partners because people actually could say, “You know what? You’re making me better. You are making me better at what I’m doing here.” And they valued that a lot.

So I think… I don’t know if that answers your question, but it was really about just defining the process, just defining the assessment model, breaking that down, and making sure that was what we really focused on.

[00:18:17] Adriaan Kolff: Yeah. So, Wesley, in passing you mentioned actually quite a number of interview rounds.

You said hiring manager interview, right? An overall culture assessment, a case study, and you said three or four more team interviews. Is that correct? Yeah.

[00:18:36] Wesley Gilbert: We were intentionally making our process a little longer and a little bit more robust because we felt that, ironically, when I started it was a real startup, right?

So we were having people doing 12 interviews, and I said, “Look, this is too much,” but how do we find the middle ground? So sorry, Wesley.

[00:18:54] Adriaan Kolff: For leadership roles or in general in the company there were just a lot of rounds?

[00:18:58] Wesley Gilbert: Mainly leadership roles. We were getting up to those numbers.

It really depended. They had a very unique approach to interviewing when I started, ’cause we’d also do something called, what they called experience day. Yeah. And what that meant is it was a movement session. So they would, as part of the process, we brought everybody on site, which also was something that ultimately we had to move away from.

It doesn’t scale. Yeah. But we flew every single candidate into the office in Zurich, and then they would do some interviews, but then they would also do what we called, as I said, an experience session, and this was some sort of movement session. So either the team would take them to do a yoga class or they’d go for a run, and these sorts of things.

And so they were really focused on spending time with people, getting to know them as human beings. And eventually, we had to remove some of these elements, so what we tried to do is replace it with more of this focus on, how do we get to know someone through a process?

And we were very clear upfront with candidates to say, “You can expect to go through probably something around six to seven interviews here, which is longer than you’re gonna have at other companies, but because we wanna get to know you, and we wanna spend a lot of time understanding who you are and how you think.”

[00:20:10] Adriaan Kolff: Wow.

[00:20:11] Wesley Gilbert: We were very transparent about that. And that was probably the biggest complaint actually that we got from candidates was, like, “This is a long process.”

[00:20:18] Adriaan Kolff: Yep.

[00:20:18] Wesley Gilbert: We also got a lot of feedback to say, “But you know what? It’s been a really pleasant process because it’s been a real two-way thing: you get to know me, I get to know you.

And a lot of the interviews haven’t been the traditional tell me about your experience, walk me through your CV. It’s been a lot more of, oh, so who are you and how do I get to know you?” And I think we got a lot of feedback that, yeah, people appreciated that a lot actually, ’cause it felt more human than a lot of the conversations have been.

[00:20:43] Adriaan Kolff: And interesting. So then you had Uber, right? Also hyper-growth. Like, how did they look at the recruitment process? Because you said there were significant differences in terms of how the recruitment processes were set up. And this is why I love to have these type of conversations, because there isn’t one golden recruitment process, right?

So what worked at Uber that was different compared to how you ran it at On Running?

[00:21:12] Wesley Gilbert: Yeah. And I agree with you, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way of doing things. But what I think probably where Uber did fall down a little bit is they didn’t care so much about the cultural elements in the early days. So the process was a little bit tighter, so definitely fewer rounds, than what we had at On. And, as I said, it was very focused on competency. I’ve never worked in a company where I’ve been surrounded by smarter people in my life. This was the most talent-dense company I’ve ever worked for, before or since.

No, no offense to any of my colleagues at ManyChat. But it was unbelievable. And I think if you look at the track record of the people that we were working alongside, people that were mid-level managers within that company at the time that I was working there, went on, they’ve gone on to be GMs, CEOs.

Huge, a lot of them have started their own companies, because Uber had a huge focus on entrepreneurship. And I remember in the early days there was a big focus on hiring people that had done some form of an entrepreneurial venture on the side, was often a big focus. Yeah. So we’d look at, “Oh, I started an e-commerce website on the side of my job,” or where I sold these things that I like.

Great. We love that. That’s what we were looking for. But then also, as I said, there was such a high talent bar, that kind of intelligence, track record, success that had been delivered. you had to be so exceptionally good at what you did to get in. But that didn’t always breed a great culture, because the problem was, again, we hired a lot of what you would call brilliant jerks, right?

People who came into the company that were just absolutely exceptional at what they did, but were not particularly great in terms of how they worked with others. Or we found that there were very different cultures in offices, in different offices, different regions. Because how it worked, in especially in the really early days, we’re talking kind of 2015 when I first joined, you essentially had a general manager of a country who operated as if they ran their own startup.

And the way they ran their country was their own responsibility, and they had the opportunity to hire who they wanted and build their teams how they wanted, and define the business how they wanted. So you ended up with these kind of loads of mini startups, and each one had its completely unique culture and its completely unique working approach.

And it worked really well to scale those businesses quickly, and those countries quickly. but it didn’t make a kind of centralized culture, essentially as a company, and I think they struggled a lot with that. So yeah, it was different, but interesting.

[00:23:49] Adriaan Kolff: Yeah, yeah.

[00:23:50] Wesley Gilbert: But very effective, as well, actually.

[00:23:56] Adriaan Kolff: How are you using that now at ManyChat?

again, smaller now. I’m not sure, definitely growing. I’m not sure if you’re on the same hyper-scale as you were with Uber and with On Running. What are you doing now? What are some of the best practices you’re implementing at ManyChat?

[00:24:16] Wesley Gilbert: Yeah, so I think very much you have to get everybody on board.

[00:24:18] Adriaan Kolff: Give me some — sorry, sorry to interrupt. Give some context on what you do with ManyChat because I’m not sure if everyone will understand what ManyChat does.

[00:24:27] Wesley Gilbert: Sure. Yeah. So ManyChat is a company that’s very much, I think, at the forefront of the AI space within what you would consider to be content creation, creators, right?

So historically, we started as a kind of chat-automation platform. so we would do a lot of really interesting automations, for example, on Instagram, right? So if you have somebody who runs a business through Instagram or WhatsApp, you’re gonna see, you’re gonna be able to automate a lot of the conversations and interactions that you have with your customer base through a tool like ManyChat.

And I think the future direction of where we’re going is more focused on content creators. So we’re really focusing on channels like Instagram and TikTok, whereas before we had a very broad approach. It’s not that we won’t use some of these other channels, but it’s definitely a bigger focus on the content creators.

And there is, I think, a real opportunity, because the whole creator economy is scaling faster than any other economy. They predict that it will be bigger than the music industry in the next few years in terms of revenue. So it’s really where the growth is happening.

And more and more, these content creators are becoming brands in their own right, and they have a lot of eyeballs on them. But a lot of the support that they have around them is only there when you’re a really big content creator. So if you are somebody who is a MrBeast or whatever, then you have a social media team, you have a PR team, you have all of these people that help you grow and scale your business.

Where ManyChat comes in is, it can take somebody who is a struggling content creator who’s maybe doing it on the side, and they have to do a full-time job, because a very small percentage of the industry actually do it full time. A lot of them, it’s part-time content creation.

This will allow you to kind of supercharge your business enough because you can automate a lot of the interactions you have, the conversion rates are much, much higher with people that have, that when they create content and push it out, when somebody direct messages you, it automatically comes back from ManyChat.

So if you follow someone on Instagram and you get a message saying, “Thanks so much for following me,” “Here’s my newsletter. We’d love to send you more information on this stuff. Please send me your email” that’s probably ManyChat’s automation that exists in the background. So it does a lot of these really clever moments of interaction with fans.

And then there’s also this whole future direction that we have where we’re gonna become almost like a CRM for content creators, and we’re gonna help them also determine what of their content works well, what doesn’t work well, what times they should post, and all of these things to help as well.

So yeah, there’s lots of really exciting stuff happening over here at ManyChat.

[00:27:20] Adriaan Kolff: So given the success and the growth rate, how did you look at the existing recruitment process when you came in at ManyChat? And what are some of the things, based on your previous experience, have you implemented at ManyChat?

[00:27:37] Wesley Gilbert: Yeah. So I think one of the first things that often happens when you come into a startup is the approach to recruitment is very different across different functions, and it’s also very different leader to leader. Because if you don’t necessarily have a clearly defined idea of this is the methodology that we wanna have, both in terms of how we assess, how we think about things, how we structure the process, you’re gonna end up with a lot of people bringing their own version of what’s worked for them in the past to the business.

And we were very leader-led in terms of how we did recruitment when I started. I think what we’ve tried to do is really create a bit more of a consistent approach to how we run a process, how many steps our process has, and make that a lot more streamlined and a lot more structured in terms of how we think about things.

And then it’s all about creating our — again, I talk about an assessment philosophy, because this is something that really is important to me, and I think a lot of businesses get it wrong. So it was really about looking at how do we break down the core capabilities of what we’re looking for?

Again, in this business, slightly different. They have a slightly less focus on culture than On did, and they’re more focused on competency and again, a bit more of the Uber model. So you have to take what is important to the company and that makes sense in terms of what they’re trying to build.

So that’s what we’ve been looking at right now: how do we create for each of our individual functions, break that down to understand these are the core competencies, these are the key roles, these are the things that we’re hiring on a regular basis, build out the assessment philosophy behind each of those and break it down so that then we can structure that across the different interviews so we have an intention behind each of the conversations we’re having.

Because I think a lot of people get caught in the trap of just having four or five conversations with someone that are all the same conversation because you just go, “Oh, tell me about yourself,” and then the next one is that. And we noticed very quickly that was happening in a lot of our different areas.

So it was all about, okay, how do we define the intention behind this conversation? What are you assessing for, what is the next person assessing for. Introducing things like better and more robust intake meetings so that people understand exactly what we’re looking for. And also adding in things like debriefs so we can all come together and make an informed decision.

I think it was all just about standardizing and professionalizing and structuring the process so it made sense and everybody understood their role within it. Whereas, yeah, I think historically it had been a bit more scattergun in the approach, and some functions were doing it really well, some functions didn’t know what they were doing and needed support.

So it was about, yeah, aligning and bringing that consistent quality across the board. That’s really been the focus.

[00:30:12] Adriaan Kolff: Obviously, if you look at yourself now, and you look back at your period at Uber, at On, and maybe — you can already have a little bit of perspective about your first couple of months at ManyChat.

Knowing what you know now, what are the things that you feel that you’ve done well and you would have kept, and what are some of the things that you now know, with the knowledge of hindsight, would you tell yourself to do differently?

[00:30:39] Wesley Gilbert: Oof, that’s a good question. I think what I’ve always tried to focus on and do well is really defining what it is that you wanna get out of talent acquisition.

So I think for me, it’s always I’ve always tried to build something that I believe is a strategic function that adds a lot of value to the business. So I don’t believe… I’ve worked in companies where talent acquisition is more of an executional function.

[00:31:06] Adriaan Kolff: Yeah.

[00:31:06] Wesley Gilbert: And I think you’re missing an opportunity when you operate like that, if it’s really just about the end result and less about trying to really work together.

I always say to my leaders now at ManyChat, “We’re trying to build the best version of your function together, and we’re trying to understand what you need to get to: what are your objectives, what are your goals, and what are the things that you’re going to need today and you’re going to need two, three years down the line in order to make those goals become a reality?”

And we try to build a long-term strategy together. So it’s not just, “Hey, these are the 10 roles that I need you to hire in the next quarter,” but it’s really, “This is where we’re going. This is the skills gaps that I have on my team. This is the succession planning that we have right now.” And you try to become a bit more of a partner where you’re building a future version of that function together, and that’s, I think, what’s allowed me to be successful is that most of the recruitment functions that I’ve operated in have been viewed as strategic partners.

They’re somebody that leaders wanna sit down at a table and say, “Hey, this is where I’m going. What do you think? What are the problems that are gonna come along?” and we figure it out together and build a plan that’s gonna make that successful. So I think this is what I’ve hopefully done well.

Yeah. In terms of what I would pass on to myself — the leadership journey that I went on at On was so fast that it was just an almost nonstop learning process.

[00:32:39] Adriaan Kolff: Yeah.

[00:32:39] Wesley Gilbert: And I think what I didn’t do well in my early days is that I think when you’re a manager, and when you lead a team of maybe six to 10 people, you’re feeling “I need to be the expert in the room in everything.”

When someone comes to me and they’re like, “Hey, Wesley, I need your input on something,” you need to be able to meet them at eye level and say, “Yeah, I’m here for you. I’m the expert. I’m gonna help you get out of this.” but I think as you scale through the company and the team suddenly is 50 people, like it was at On, and you are being pulled in a million directions, it’s physically impossible for you to now be the expert in everything.

You just can’t. The business is too broad. And so the role as it evolves into a senior leadership role, I think I very quickly had to learn the importance of delegation, and trust, and understanding where I needed to be that key decision-maker and where I needed to be the expert versus where I was simply becoming a bottleneck if I tried to continue to be that expert.

Try and… Yeah, that kind of slowed us down. And so I think it’s really critical to build a great leadership team around you, something I’ve always leaned on. Honestly, my whole approach as a leader is I want to surround myself with people that are smarter than me, that are more talented than me, that are brilliant people that I can learn from and look up to.

I think, people that will hopefully amplify my strengths and fill in my weaknesses. And I think that is critical. But what I was gonna say is that I’m a strong believer in this purpose-driven leadership. And so I think what I had to learn over time was you know what?

What your role becomes is you need to set the vision. You need to help everybody understand the purpose of their work, the things that we need to achieve, the broader business context, that they maybe don’t have and really understand together what we need to deliver. And so I think for me I would always try to understand, what are the key things that we need to achieve that year, break it down into the quarters, the months, the weeks, and really understand, okay, if we’ve achieved X, Y, Z by this point, then we’re on track, otherwise we’re behind.

And that whole process was probably what I would tell myself prior is be more comfortable stepping back, be more comfortable no longer having to be the expert in the room. Yeah. Just be more comfortable understanding that you have the longer-term view, you have the bigger picture vision.

And you can be a lot more comfortable. I think there’s a concept in management that’s pretty well known, it’s called big rocks. I don’t know, do you know it? The concept.

[00:35:24] Adriaan Kolff: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

[00:35:25] Wesley Gilbert: Yeah. So to break it down super easily, it’s your life is a big bowl.

[00:35:31] Adriaan Kolff: Yeah.

[00:35:31] Wesley Gilbert: And all the little things that pop up through the week are sand and water and they will fill that bowl straight away, no problem. And I think, it was really important that when you start your week, you set what you call your big rocks already. These are the things that are either your key things that you have to achieve from a work perspective, or the things that just generally make you happy, right?

Whether it’s spending time with your friends or your partner or exercising or doing all of these things, playing with your kids maybe. Those are your big rocks, and if you place them in the bowl first, all of these things that are sand and water, so they’re the little topics or the million Slack messages and emails that we get every day, they’ll still fill in around these big rocks.

But those things have been prioritized first because they’re the things that are most important. And so that was a really key learning for me as I was going through my leadership journey. Because my CEO Martin at On, he said to me, “Look, the problem with hypergrowth is that you could work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and you’d still shut your laptop with 100 things to do.”

Yeah. And he was like, “There is no way you can get your work done.” Yeah. And I think for me, at the beginning it was a constant battle of I have to achieve these things, I have to get these things done. And after a while you have to be comfortable with saying, “Actually these are the big rocks.

These are the important things I’ve prioritized myself. I’ve prioritized the key things that really needed to be achieved, and everything else is just noise, and it will figure itself out.” You always find a way to get it done. and you have to just become a lot more comfortable in just shutting your laptop on a Friday and saying, “Yeah, I got 100 things I didn’t do this week, but I got these things done and that was the most important thing.”

So yeah, I think if I went back, that would be the lesson I’d give to myself is just: be better at prioritizing yourself, understand that you’ll never get everything done, and stop trying to keep up with being the expert in everything because you just physically can’t, and be more comfortable with that.

[00:37:35] Adriaan Kolff: Such a good point. It’s something I’m experiencing. We are rapidly tripling this year in terms of our size, and I’m really out of the day-to-day business now.

[00:37:47] Adriaan Kolff: I’ve worked with two different coaches: one, to get comfortable with being out of the business, and two, to understand that much better people are running the company now, but it’s still my job, one, to put the people in place, and two, to give them direction of where we’re heading.

So I can completely relate.

[00:38:06] Wesley Gilbert: Oh, 100%. Yeah, it must be so hard, right? ‘Cause it’s your baby, and you’ve invested so much of yourself into it, and then suddenly it’s okay, now it’s going out into the world, and I don’t have that level of control that I used to before. And yeah, it must be tricky.

[00:38:20] Adriaan Kolff: And on paper these things sound so logical, right? A lot of things like yeah, especially when you articulate it. But when you’re in it, when you’re in the grind and, like, when you’re doing the work, it’s hard. It’s hard to take a step back and oversee the battlefield. my leadership coach, he called it the dance of being on the dance floor and on the balcony.

You still need to dance a little bit, right? To really understand what’s happening on the dance floor. But you need to be on the balcony enough to really oversee the dance floor and what’s happening and what the direction is where you want your organization and your team to go.

[00:39:04] Wesley Gilbert: Exactly. It’s trying to understand where to zoom in and where you have to be present, versus where you can, like you say, be on the balcony and just observe and everything’s okay. And I think, going back to the point of a leadership team, and I’m sure you’ve probably built, hopefully, one around you that you trust a lot.

And this is where what I try to do is create a team. I always think about it as hey, we’re just solving a lot of really tough problems together, and we are a leadership team because it’s not my job to say, “This is how we solve these problems.” It’s about creating a collaborative group effort around it to say, “Okay, you’re the expert in this topic.

You’re the expert in this topic. I’m the expert in this topic, so let’s all work together to figure out the best solution. And I think that’s really what’s worked for me as a leader, is just surrounding myself with people where I can go, “Okay, I need to lean on you, ’cause you’re the expert here and I need you to tell me what to do.”

Yeah, and trust that person is gonna deliver great work. Yeah, it’s hard. That’s the challenge.

[00:40:09] Adriaan Kolff: What is something that you’re looking forward to for 2026?

[00:40:14] Wesley Gilbert: I am feeling my age a little bit by saying this, but I turn 40 this year.

Yeah, so it’s a huge milestone, and I’m looking forward to it because so is everybody else, right? Every one of my close friends is also turning 40. Yeah. So it’s a big year of celebrations that are coming up, where I imagine everyone is gonna be getting together a lot. So this will be a big year of reunions and catch-ups and all those sorts of amazing things.

And I think from a work perspective, I think I’m really just excited about the direction of where things are going at the moment.

I think we’ve been battling with so much of the disruption of AI and all of these kind of new challenges that have popped up within the recruitment space. But I’m ever an optimist, a techno-optimist, or at least I try to be, and I think this year is gonna be, hopefully, really impactful in terms of maximizing our time within talent acquisition.

Because I think a lot of the tools, as they get better, and I mentioned MetaView already, and I promise you I’m not sponsored by them, but I think some of the stuff that they do really is just fantastic. And I think there’s more of these tools popping up now where I see, hey, you know what?

When we incorporate these aspects into what we’re doing within talent acquisition, they just free us up to focus on the things that are really important, ’cause I think, when I’m encouraging my recruiters to be successful in their role, I’m all about spending as much time with the business as you can.

Spend as much time with your hiring managers, your candidates, building your networks. These are the things that I want you to be spending your time on, and some of these new tools, I think, will just hopefully remove some of the busy work, some of the admin, some of the stuff that kind of bogs us down and hopefully will allow us to spend more of our time having strategic conversations, having impactful conversations, and actually improving what we do.

So yeah, I’m trying to stay optimistic. As much as AI terrifies some people, I hope it will become a multiplier in terms of our…

[00:42:16] Adriaan Kolff: Our business. I fully agree. I’m in your camp. So, with that being said, Wesley, thank you so much for joining the conversation.

Can people find you on LinkedIn? Is that the best way to connect with you after they’ve listened to the podcast?

[00:42:31] Wesley Gilbert: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best spot. I’m Wesley Gilbert on LinkedIn. You should be able to find me, so no worries.

[00:42:42] Adriaan Kolff: Wesley, thank you so much.

[00:42:44] Wesley Gilbert: Thanks for your time, Adriaan. It’s been a pleasure.

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