Joe Walsh joined Veho after nearly 5 years at Uber where he gained high standards for what it means to recruit quality candidates, but he had feelings that he had missed out on the building phase of the company. Luckily for Veho, those feelings of wanting to build something are what he brought with him as well as his diverse skills in the area of recruiting.
How long have you been with Veho and what is your role?
I started in April 2021, so it's been a little over a year now. I am a recruiting manager but I still work on a few roles here and there. My team and I support the corporate recruiting function. So, basically everything in revenue, legal, finance, accounting, people operations, real estate… what else… pretty much everything non-tech.
What did you do before you came to Veho?
I started off at Uber as a sourcer in the Santa Monica office. Initially, I was hired to help build the early UberEats teams on the West Coast. Then I moved to San Francisco to help support a group called Product Operations where I got a chance to get a full view of the business and learn from some really amazing hiring managers on that team. Working with that team was the most fun I had while I was at Uber.
Their expectations for what is great was on another level; also, just getting a chance to learn from super smart people who had such a big impact was very instrumental to me becoming a better recruiter. They helped me understand the business and I think a solid foundation of business acumen is key to being a strong recruiting partner. They were tough on me, but I feel like that is where I sort of turned the page in my career. When I look back at that time, I'm so thankful for their patience because I wasn't a very good recruiter when I first started working with them.
My last role at Uber was supporting our Global Safety and Insurance team. This was totally new to me. I never had any experience in recruiting for insurance and it's such a big part of the company that people don't even realize. It was also my first time working directly with a VP level executive. In that role, I got a chance to work with the VP of Safety Insurance who is a really early Uber employee and just all-around one of the smartest people I've ever met. He basically invented insurance for rideshare. Getting to support him and learn from him was something I'm really thankful for. Because, again, his expectations for what is good is very high.
How did you end up at Veho and what was that process like?
Well, after four and a half years working with great people and soaking up as much knowledge as I could, I felt like I was ready to go apply some of those learnings at an earlier stage company. I had a great role at Uber and I loved the company, still do, but I always felt like I missed out on the building phase. When I joined Uber, I joined at 10,000 employees and by the time I left I think they were at around 28,000 or 30,000 employees.
So, I always wondered, what would it have been like if I had the opportunity to join Uber four years before I joined? And that got me thinking about what the next opportunity for me could be. I thought I was either going to go out and do my own thing, perhaps start my own little boutique recruiting agency, or I wanted to go somewhere and build something from the ground up. When Veho came along, it had all of the right signals of being the opportunity of a lifetime.
The business fundamentals are really sound, which was something that I wanted to feel confident about and then the leadership team as well; I felt really confident in the people that they were hiring.
They were hiring very high-quality talent, especially at the leadership level, which was really attractive. Ita had reached out to me about helping Veho as a consultant and they did not have a recruiter at that time. It started as a general conversation about what the company should be thinking about as you're building your recruiting team. Here are the metrics you should be tracking, here is what a good interview process looks like etc. Five minutes into that call Ita totally shifted gears and he was like, what's stopping you from coming here full time? From there we started formal conversations and a few weeks later I was joining the team.
What's the most exciting thing about the work you do at Veho?
Well, I guess it's the opportunity to be part of the company and witness everything first hand. It might sound silly, but Veho has the chance to be a historic company for a number of reasons; not just because we hire a lot of people and have raised a lot of money, but because I think most people in the world will get their packages delivered via the Veho platform in the very near future. For a tech startup nerd like me, that is really cool. Then to be a part of that and help make that vision a reality is really humbling.
I also think we have an opportunity to really change the standard when it comes to company culture. We talk a lot about creating a culture where people can do their life's work. I may never have the opportunity to join another Veho. So many things have to line up, so I guess my answer is that the most exciting thing about working here is that I think I am doing my life's work at a company that only comes around every 10-15 years or so.
We also clearly live our values everyday, in particular for me, one of our core values ownership was something I embodied from day one. My first week here I was making decisions that I would have never been able to make at a larger company. Those decisions are made levels above and to be the person who's assessing whether or not we should bring on this applicant tracking system versus this one, or this coding platform versus the next one, and thinking about the budgeting and our cost per hire, those are all really great skills to have as somebody who has not had the opportunity to participate in those conversations in the past. It also allows me to make decisions that might be wrong, which is scary, but it forces you to think critically and learn faster.
What are the most important Veho company values to you personally?
I think the one that stands out most to me is probably Human. We're always thinking about people first and I think, if you start with that foundation and you maintain that as you scale as a company, you're going to be able to build a company that is not reactionary down the road.
Here, we always put humans at the center of everything we do and that's 100%, including teammates, driver partners, customers, and clients.
Why do you love working at Veho?
I love working here because I know that every task and everything that I do has real value. There's nothing that I do on a daily basis that is busy work or work for show. All of the things that we do here are high priority and really meaningful and every person that we hire has a huge impact on the company.
You'd be amazed at how much of a difference one person can make at a company of this size. That's exciting.
