Why Training and Recruiting Need to Work Together w/Seyka & Brian Mejeur
Episode Overview
Join us in an enlightening chat with Seyka and Brian Mejeur, co-founders of Ad Astra, focused on recruiting top talent for the space and clean tech sectors. We discuss the talent launch system and the unique challenges of hiring for specialized industries. They stress the importance of passion over resumes and tackling the disconnect between talent acquisition and development. Discover the value of mentorship, cultural fit, and the impact of strategic hiring on startups. Dive deep into work cultures, personal growth, and the profound influence of "Atomic Habits" on their professional journey. Don't miss these valuable insights on nurturing talent for innovation and success.
Make sure to check out the book recommendations from the episode:
Atomic Habits: https://amzn.to/4baPcrC
About Seyka & Brian Mejeur
A SpaceX Engineer teamed up with a Talent Acquisition professional and started AdAstra - an executive and highly technical search firm for startups in the space and clean tech industries. Brian and Seyka, a husband and wife team, are passionate about space, the environment, and thriving teams.
You can connect with Seyka and Brian through:
Seyka LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seyka/
Brian LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-mejeur/
Full Transcript
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Brian Mejeur [00:00:00]:
What we're really looking for is, like, who's primed to make that box office hit once they're hired? And you don't know, you have to take some risks. But if you can, on the talent acquisition side, know how to identify that potential and pair that with talent development, who can increase the probability of that person following through to deliver something really special that's worth like, that's the make or break of a company.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:31]:
Hello, and welcome to the Making Better podcast, where we talk about how to make ourselves, our teams, and our organizations better. Whether you are a business leader, a talent development professional, or an individual contributor, this show will give you actionable insights to help improve your own performance and the performance of those around you. Today, our guests are Seka and Brian Majur. This is the first time we've had two people on the podcast, so I'm really excited for the conversation. This husband and wife team are co founders of Ad Astra, a company devoted to helping space and clean energy startups find the key talent that they need for their early hires. Brian was an engineer at SpaceX, and after his time there, he teamed up with Seka, who was in the talent acquisition industry to help find highly technical talent who was passionate about the same things that they are. I'm really excited for this particular discussion because I think that talent development and talent acquisition often don't talk as much as we should. Though in this episode, we talk about what talent development can do to help widen the talent pool for specific roles, the importance of culture, clarity, how you can put a clear dollar amount on the impact of your training, and so much more.
Matt Gjertsen [00:01:52]:
Before we get into the discussion, I do want to remind everybody that if this is your first time listening, make sure you hit subscribe so you never miss a future episode. And if you are already subscribed, then I humbly ask that you would share this show with at least one other person, because that is how we grow, and I cannot tell you how much it means to me with that. Let's get into the discussion with Seka and Brian major. So, Seka, I want you to be honest with me. When you were in companies doing all your time in talent acquisition, how much time do you think you've really spent working with talent development teams?
Seyka Mejeur [00:02:35]:
Very little. Almost none.
Matt Gjertsen [00:02:38]:
Yeah, that's kind of what I was expecting. That's definitely been my experience. And then to get a little bit different perspective from two, Brian, we both worked at SpaceX. When you've been in the businesses and teams and you're thinking about bringing people onto teams, and that whole buy it versus build it equation, how much of kind of the thought energy do you think goes into hiring compared to talent development on most teams?
Brian Mejeur [00:03:09]:
It's a good question. I think it kind of has to be broken down into, are we thinking about hiring more junior talent that eventually steps into leadership roles, or are we saying, oh, we have this person and we want to get them to this place, and how do we do that? I think a lot of companies are good at the first part, like, oh, let's hire a bunch of interns. It's free interviewing, free validation of talent, or we'll hire a lot of early career folks, and then the cream of the crop will rise and take on more things. And there is a strong bias to do that in a lot of organizations, which I think can be really healthy. But I also don't know if there's that much infrastructure or support in directing someone into that role. You can end up with technical leaders, but without really any guidance on how to do a lot of the more management duties, for example.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:11]:
Yeah, exactly. I think that's right. And, yeah, that's been my experience as well. Before we were talking to the call, or talking on the call, I was sharing with you that I find it so strange that both roles, talent development, talent acquisitions, they both say talent, but for some reason, we never really talk very much. I've been in maybe, I don't know. I think I've seen maybe half a dozen at most companies where they have a big picture talent leader who is truly in charge of it all. But I don't know. If you go on to LinkedIn and looked up talent leader, typically they're talking about recruiting like they're talking about the recruiting leader.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:52]:
When they say that Sega, you and I have had a lot of conversations, or we had a conversation about this in the past. I don't know. How does that affect the talent acquisition side of things?
Seyka Mejeur [00:05:04]:
Yeah, there are so many different directions that we can go with this, but, yeah, a key one is, especially when we're talking about recruitment, what we do is very niche, very focused startups, clean tech and space startups. Right. Talent pool, not big people that we're able to pull in from other industries. It's tough to do. Once people have developed their career, either at legacy companies, it's really tough to get them successfully integrated into a startup, or if they're coming from tech, can be hard to get them right. We need high reliability people. There's just a lot of nuance there. We want to get our talent pool bigger.
Seyka Mejeur [00:05:44]:
What will happen at startups is you need somebody who can do the thing, who can own the thing, and the number of people who in the world of the number of people who can do that work really small, sometimes we're talking less than ten people in the world that can do this job, and we go, you can sometimes find. You contact all ten of the people who can do the work right now, and none of them want to move to LA. Okay, so now we're talking about if we find somebody that's close to it, but they're not going to be able to really own this for six months. And the company says, well, we don't have the resources to put into developing and training this talent, so let's just keep looking. Well, the joke is it's going to take us six months to now go out and find that person when the talent pool is that small. Right. And so if there was more integration and work that we can do on the talent development side of things, it opens the pool up and it helps us kind of work step in step and meet the market where it is.
Matt Gjertsen [00:06:53]:
Yeah, Brian, you're nodding your head a lot in that it sounds like you've seen this firsthand quite a bit.
Brian Mejeur [00:07:00]:
Yeah, I think the number of times that we've interacted with folks that like, oh, we really need this thing. And it's like, okay, well, here's nine out of ten. Or the market's like, this isn't available and fully what you want, and the trigger is not pulled. And they then get backed into this corner and then come back 612 months later and say, okay, let's do it. And you're like, we could have just done this right. Time is so vital, and these people are so capable of learning. Let's put them in that opportunity to learn and succeed and give them the tools and resources to be successful in that. And, yeah, it comes up time and time again.
Matt Gjertsen [00:07:48]:
Where do you think that comes from? Because I could imagine a couple of different things, but I often, in just my non recruiting view of watching things, it seems like very often companies and leaders ultimately don't know what they're looking for or don't know what success is. So they're kind of like, looking for certain badges know, well, they worked at Apple, so they must be good at this. Or they have this degree, they went to this school, so they must be good at this rather than really being able to assess it themselves. And if they can't assess it themselves, then they certainly can't develop it themselves because they don't really know what makes someone good. Does that resonate at all, or are there other factors at play in that hesitancy?
Seyka Mejeur [00:08:35]:
I'd say that I think that that definitely can be the case. I think that for a lot of the people that we work really closely with, they do have a pretty finely tuned meter of what they're looking for. Sometimes what that covers, they need somebody that can do so much at a startup that it really makes the number of people who are capable of doing all of that really low, coupled with already having smaller talent pools. To answer your first question, and I don't know how to say this in a way that won't get me in trouble, so I'm just going to say it is, I think that in large part, talent development is looked at as a cost. Right. That's expensive. And this is the part that might get me in trouble, is I think that in both of these arenas, both in talent acquisition and in talent development, there are people who are so excellent this work. And there are a lot of people who are very not excellent this work.
Matt Gjertsen [00:09:47]:
We talked about this. Yeah, there's very little barrier or bar that's set for what good is that people can benchmark against.
Seyka Mejeur [00:09:56]:
Right. And so when leaders have sat through bad acting videos that they're just trying to fast forward to be able to check the box like, yes, I did the training and can I download something that can click for me to get through this, right. They go, I don't want to pay for that. As opposed to people who have had it done really well and they've been cool. I'm able to learn and develop and gain new skills. I think that we can start to open up and get people excited about using that to fast track their team to higher level of productivity.
Matt Gjertsen [00:10:34]:
Yeah, that makes sense. Brian, what has been your experience coming from that engineering background where, I don't know, there's many more kind of bars or degrees or things that clearly denote that when you moved from kind of that world, now that you're more in the talent acquisition world, how have you seen that transition?
Brian Mejeur [00:10:55]:
Let's see if I answer this directly or not, but we can circle back if I don't. But I think in engineering, it is a little bit easier to have this bar. Right. There's a lot of binary. This was right, this was wrong. You know how to do this. You don't know how to do that. You can put someone through a test and see how they succeed and that's really challenging to do.
Brian Mejeur [00:11:16]:
In these talent areas, like you're already discussing, where I think it changes a lot is sometimes you have this super duper niche role. We hired an electromagnetic analyst before, right? Someone who can do extremely complicated multi physics simulations in the electromagnetic space and then how it impacts the mechanical world. This is like, highly.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:48]:
Nobody knows what you're talking about anymore. It's so far beyond that. The words we don't even understand.
Brian Mejeur [00:11:52]:
But that was the point, right? The point was that good luck, just like if you're going to hire someone and train them to do that, you're going to need to set aside years to do it. So that's a really good point. That role is like, yeah, we got to get the right person who's at least, maybe not ten out of ten, but maybe they're eight or nine out of ten on the technical skills, and they're ten out of ten with the mentality side of things. But there's a lot of roles that are much more generalist. And I think it's in those areas that they say, oh, I want everything. But in reality, let's check a few boxes, prove that they're super competent and can do a lot of things, and then they're going to figure out the rest and again, give them the tools and the resources. Because kind of going back to part of what we were talking about before, too, is, yeah, sometimes they really know what they want, but also what they really want can change. Like the business needs change, the needs of the team change.
Brian Mejeur [00:12:51]:
So it's more about hiring for attitude and aptitude whenever you can, whenever these roles that you are less specific. So that way you can use talent development to get folks to where they need to be to ultimately support the business needs the best.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:12]:
Yeah. Since you all, like you said, you're hiring for these very often very specific roles, almost no matter how big the company is, you're not going to develop a talent development strategy for teaching people how to be electromagnetic analysts. It's just not going to happen. But kind of to that point and to the point that you made, Sega, of people seeing l d as a cost center, from your perspective, I think there's a great opportunity to give, especially people in talent development, some clues as to what are a few things that are maybe the nontechnical things that are the most common deficiencies or misses or something in candidates, that if a company at least had these, it would dramatically or maybe at least somewhat increase their talent pool so that it would make that hiring process easier, because we know we can cover these I don't know, 1234 or five things. Are there any things that come to mind that are frequently. Maybe they just aren't quite ready for this yet, that if we could get them ready, it would really help the hiring process.
Brian Mejeur [00:14:28]:
Yeah.
Seyka Mejeur [00:14:28]:
First thing that comes to mind for nontechnical areas that I think there could be a lot of support are kind of on the cultural side of things or kind of the pace, autonomy and ownership required to be successful in a lot of these roles. Right. That we're going through a topic Brian's been talking about a lot recently is like a one, three one right here. Help me if I do this incorrectly, but concise outline of the problem. Three potential paths forward and my suggested path forward. And being able to use that sort of structure, bring proactive solutions, figure out how to take ownership. Right. These sort of environments aren't places where people can kind of wait for a numbered list of priorities to be given to them by their supervisor or an outline of what they're going to be doing.
Seyka Mejeur [00:15:29]:
Sometimes you'll have that, but often it's just go forward, figure it out, align, well pieces like that. Right. So that's nontechnical. That does absolutely go the breadth of the organization, and it's something that makes it so that we can't pull in people from legacy companies. Right. It's just a very different kind of pace and design to that.
Matt Gjertsen [00:15:59]:
Yes. That junior level. Anybody who doesn't have that ownership experience under their belt, it can be shocking the first time you get it. That makes a lot of sense. That saying, okay, we have a pathway to take this person and get them to understand that there's bits of critical thinking in that decision making, communication skills. There's like little bits and pieces in there that makes a lot of sense.
Seyka Mejeur [00:16:31]:
Another thing that pops up is just the design for mentorship. Right. How can we make the process and path to mentor so that when we do have somebody who can transfer their highly technical insights to a junior individual. Yeah. We're not trying to create a learning module to teach us technical insights, but we can design the structure to help the mentor transfer that information with incurring the fewest number of hour to hour spent. Right. So we can also have them working on their technical components as well.
Matt Gjertsen [00:17:05]:
That makes a lot of sense. So from the talent development perspective, it's kind of like maybe there's a bit of teaching people how to be a mentor in that, but then also maybe just kind of providing the structure of what does a mentorship program look like? Maybe there's some software involved, maybe? Just like, how often do you touch base? Maybe. How should conversations go? That makes a lot of sense, because then again, and I think this is one of the challenges that LNd falls into a lot, is when people come to us with a problem, like, we want to be the ones finding the solution, we want to be the solution, rather than providing the framework for the solution so that you can kind of solve it yourself. I think we miss that a decent amount, probably because in times where leadership development, for example, often when you stand up a leadership development program, the L and D team is meant to be like the experts in leadership. So they're the facilitators. They're the ones doing it all. And if that's your mentality for all these technical domains, you're just going to be like, forget about it. When there's still something that we can bring to the table of, here's some tools that we can provide you to make you better able at supporting yourself.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:25]:
That makes a lot of sense. Brian, anything come to mind for you?
Brian Mejeur [00:18:30]:
Yeah, I think a big area that some companies could do a lot better to support their needs in this area is being crystal clear on what their company culture is and crystal clear on what they value in their teammates. You can do this by even if you've been around for a couple of few years, or even if you just have a founding team look at what's been successful in those teammates or at the company so far, what are the key characteristics, what are the key traits that got you there and is consistent across the organization, and really highlight that in culture statements and in your hiring and in your talent development processes. Don't try to be everything at once. No organization can be everything at once. But know who you are, know your identity, and keep aligning that throughout hiring and talent development. Like one of my favorite Elon quotes or references ever is kind of the idea that a company is the sum of its vectors, right? It's not just how big of a vector you are, how much you get done. It's like, what direction are you also pointing? And so making sure that everyone's pointing in the same direction and, you know, how you're operating is huge.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:55]:
Yeah. As you were talking through that and this idea of making sure you bring in the culture, it sparked in me, because when I think a lot about having culture and having some kind of, like, onboarding process to get people in on the culture, it reminds me of turnover, and especially early turnover and the challenges of turnover for you when you all are, I guess, how much do you have to fight against that in organizations? I mean, you're dealing with relatively highly mission driven, relatively small organizations. So maybe it's not as much as an issue for the folks that you're working with, but I don't know whether it's companies you work with or more broadly, how hard of a factor is that to overcome just that early hire attrition? Because I keep hearing about how it's kind of rising throughout the world.
Seyka Mejeur [00:20:43]:
Yeah, it's definitely a key factor, and it's something that we work on a lot. So kind of, to look at this from the angle that we see it, a lot is a lot of staffing agencies, which is kind of like, we don't identify as a staffing agency. Right. We do executive and highly tech headhunting. Yeah, that makes sense.
Matt Gjertsen [00:21:10]:
It's not just bringing a bunch of people.
Seyka Mejeur [00:21:12]:
Got it right. We're not bringing a bunch of people. It's not butts and seats. It's like a strategic. Who are we looking for? How do we find them? We're not going to like, hey, please apply. Right. People aren't applying for the jobs, but almost exclusively aren't applying to the jobs. So what we'll see is a lot of organizations that do kind of like similar things to us.
Seyka Mejeur [00:21:35]:
They almost have salespeople as recruiters. Right. They're trying to sell the job. And there's definitely a component of what we do, which is getting people excited about the role. But we also do a lot of door in the face work where we go. This is not going to be a good fit for you if you are XYZ, and that doesn't mean that you're bad, but your style. Right. If your style can't fit with the style of the company, this is not going to be a good fit.
Seyka Mejeur [00:22:08]:
And we want to screen you out early. Right. We're going to waste everybody's time if we get you into the seat. And this was a mismatch. There's some easy examples to point to. We've talked about pace. Right. That's an easy one.
Seyka Mejeur [00:22:22]:
Another one, especially of people coming from legacy companies, engineers, as you both know better than I do, even love to get things right. They like for things to be done the right way. They know the numbers. You want the numbers to add up. They've got a concept of like black and white, what's right, what's wrong. And with startups, when we're looking at potentially pulling people from legacy orgs, it can be like, yeah, I'm going to get it right, I got to get it right. Insert funny joke about boeing, okay, we got to go slow because we got to get it right. But at startups, it's like, yes, we want to get it right.
Seyka Mejeur [00:23:09]:
Sometimes we want to get to our first iteration, and it's okay if it breaks because we're going to learn a lot from it breaking. And when you're pulling somebody from Raytheon, right, getting that concept can be really difficult. They could say, yeah, I like to work at a really fast pace. But then when you get into it and you go, would you be okay building something that's going to break because you got to build it fast? And it's like, whoa, no, that goes against my identity. Right? And so I say all that to say that figuring out how to get a clear vision of what does work really well, who does work really well at this organization, and one, making sure that's what you want it to look like, right? So getting a clear snapshot, what works really well, and then going senior leadership, is this an accurate representation? Otherwise, we need to change some things. And then being able to take that and communicate it to talent because it's so expensive in time and money and resources to be getting people into the seat that aren't going to fit.
Matt Gjertsen [00:24:14]:
It's interesting because I think, again, reflecting back on a lot of my experiences, what I'm hearing from you is just the importance of, not only from you, Brian, like, the importance of having that really clear culture, which can often come from a talent development organization, but we spend all of our time focusing on the employees, and we kind of start at day one, and how do we get people going there? But it would be incredibly helpful for us to, because quite frankly, we just say, okay, now recruiting, you go figure it out. And recruiting goes and does their own thing and they look at the culture. But having both teams talking together through that entire creation process, because you're right. I remember, I forget his name. There's some computer engineer, he's written a few books on dating, and he was talking about how in the dating world, what you really want to do is lean in as much as possible to your weirdest qualities. Like, if you're a nerd, own the fact that you're a nerd. If you're into Star Trek, all of your pictures should be in Star Trek. Because though, that is going to dramatically decrease the pool of people who are out there who find you interesting.
Matt Gjertsen [00:25:22]:
The people in that pool are like, this is my thing, right? And so then it's great and to your point, I've definitely been at companies where their recruiting team was much more of a sales.org, and it was much more of a mentality of, no, if we're in the office, we don't want to say we're in the office in the beginning. We want to wait and kind of get them talking to us first. And then once they're in love with us, we'll be like, oh, by the way, we're in the office. But now they're going to love us, so it'll be okay. I don't know if that's a good strategy.
Seyka Mejeur [00:25:54]:
Right? Yeah, exactly. I think, first of all, that was my strategy with dating, and it worked really well with Brian. He's my co founder.
Brian Mejeur [00:26:03]:
And you found the nerd.
Matt Gjertsen [00:26:05]:
Yeah.
Seyka Mejeur [00:26:09]:
But, yes, exactly. Being able to be able to see and then be able to communicate your true culture. Another good example of this, we did a pot on our podcast. We had Hans Koenigseman and Hans, and we were talking about kind of the culture at SpaceX and talking about working tons of hours. And it was a really fun conversation. And a friend of mine texted me and was like, hey, it was a really great podcast. But I just thought it's really bad that SpaceX has that culture that people have to work so long and they would see their boss coming in before them and leaving after them. It sets, like, a really intense example.
Seyka Mejeur [00:26:59]:
And I was like, bad, maybe it's not good for you. And that's great that you know that, right? But how sad would it be if there wasn't a place like this and the people who wanted to work like that, now they don't have a home right now, we're removing all the diversity of these companies to make it so that they fit everyone, and then it makes it so that nobody has a home that really fits them. And there are people who, in that SpaceX culture, and, yeah, there are people who get burnt out super fast. That's okay. That's good. And we would want. How terrible would it be then if somebody's interviewing at SpaceX and we're going work like 40 hours a week? Right? Work like that. Right.
Seyka Mejeur [00:27:48]:
We wouldn't want to represent it that way. We want to say, you're going to work with some of the smartest, most intense people in the world. You're going to put your literal blood, sweat and tears into this organization, and you're going to achieve things that nobody on the planet has ever achieved before. You're going to scare the bejesus out of a bunch of people and you're going to light the fire inside of others. And that's the goal.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:11]:
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I know. Speaking for myself, honestly, when I first started working at SpaceX, it was really hard for me. I felt it was almost unfair because I started working there right after my daughter was born. So she was three months old when I started. And I was really frustrated for a really long time because it was like, this company is everything I want it to be like. I'm deeply passionate about space.
Matt Gjertsen [00:28:34]:
I want to be pushing it, but the only way to really stand out and move forward is just by putting these crazy hours. And I'm not in a position where I want to put in those crazy hours. And I was really frustrated by that. And then I'll say myself, I grew up and kind of realized that not everyone needs to be able to work everywhere. And it's great that we have different and different people will thrive in different environments, exactly like you said, and that's fine. And that's great.
Brian Mejeur [00:29:04]:
Yeah. This is all so very well said already. But another way to quick paraphrase this is be brutally honest about who you are to yourself and then be brutally honest about who you are to others, and you don't need to apologize for that. And that's what will, circling back to the beginning, that's where attrition comes from, is if someone starts and it's not what they expect or you're changing the job on them, or this, that and the other. That's why people leave. People don't leave because it's what they thought it was going to be. That's pretty rare, right? It's because it's not what they thought it would be.
Matt Gjertsen [00:29:42]:
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. To kind of end this note or put a cherry on the top, maybe there's not a way to do what I'm going to try to do right now, so feel free to tell me if I'm putting you in an unfair spot. But kind of one of the things that we try to do here, one of the arcs, especially for talent development people, is to try to figure out, okay, from the talent acquisition perspective, how can we help prove the worth of talent development? Like, what are the things that talent development can do that will be most valuable to talent acquisition and help improve it? And so if a talent development team is focusing on these things, of having the important, really defining culture really well, making sure it's woven into the process, making sure we're teaching these, like, critical, we have a pathway for teaching critical thinking and decision making and communication. I don't know if I can ask you for a number because that seems a little absurd, but I don't know, just what's your sense of how much that would be worth to an organization to have those boxes checked? How much better or simpler or faster could it potentially make their talent acquisition process?
Seyka Mejeur [00:30:53]:
I think an easy number for companies to calculate is to look at what is early attrition. What does early attrition look like? Right. That's a way to calculate numbers. If you go, hey, if we have a team that's able to create a really strong program for bringing people into our organization, if we're able to reduce early attrition, then now we just have dollar amounts we can put to it, right? There's a formula that we can look at, I think another way to look at numbers, and this is something, an idea I was hanging on from earlier in our conversation. I'll loop back to it and bring them back together. But another way that I think talent development can really support organizations, and again, especially speaking about where our mind frame is in this niche of space, startups, clean tech startups, is we're often looking for these. We call it like the heads of this role that comes in early in a startup. They need to be able to do the thing right? They have to be technical enough to do the thing with their own brain, their own hands, their own computer, and then they also have to be strategic enough to make a plan for the future.
Seyka Mejeur [00:32:17]:
And they need to have the leadership skills in order to grow a team under them. That's a lot of areas of expertise, right? And you're not owning one tiny piece, you're owning like a whole department. You're like doing a whole department technically, strategically, and growing a team. And this is this golden person we're looking for. Frequently it's tough because you usually have to snag them from another startup because otherwise too many things. People don't have at bats for that many things regularly in order to develop, being a seasoned expert in all of those different things. So creating talent development outlines that, supports in the leadership and the leadership component of that, so that you can take something that's technically excellent and build them into a leader because you've got some time, right? It's not a long time, but you've got some time to develop them into a leader before they need to be growing those people. It really opens up the talent pool to who we're able to bring on.
Seyka Mejeur [00:33:28]:
If we go cool we need somebody who is technically excellent and who can see the big picture, but we're confident that we're going to be able to grow them into a leader. That would be a lever for us to pull.
Brian Mejeur [00:33:45]:
To add to that, we've found that so many of these startups, right, they're taking big swings. 90% of startups fail. You got to take big swings, you got to take risks. And part of that is a little bit in hiring and talent development, right? We sometimes call it like the sequel, right? You can hire someone who's already done it before and they're going to come back and they're going to do it again and it's going to be the sequel. Right, but how often is a sequel anywhere close to as good as the first hit, right? And so what we're really looking for is who's primed to make that box office hit once they're hired. And you don't know, you have to take some risks. But if you can, on the talent acquisition side, know how to identify that potential and pair that with talent development, who can increase the probability of that person following through to deliver something really special? That's the make or break of a company, right? Like the vast majority of these companies, they have ideas that can work. It's about executing them fast enough and cheap enough.
Brian Mejeur [00:34:57]:
And so much of that comes down to having the right talent who's ready and developed properly. And so I also think you could put a dollar sign on that, right. If you could say, sure, I can take someone who hasn't done this before, and I can ensure some level of increased probability of success based on having done it before. Now you're delivering tons of value.
Matt Gjertsen [00:35:26]:
You're both making me feel really good. So at the end of last year, I spent some time sitting down, thinking through and creating a framework that I call the talent launch system. It's meant to be like a four step approach of how to create a talent development system that really focuses on impacting the business. And I call it the talent launch system because it's got this big play off of a rocket analogy. So the first one is stage zero, then the first stage and second stage and everything. And so the first three stages are, first is streamlined compliance training because it's actually a really simple box that you can check really quickly. But a lot of companies, they just spend way too much time and energy, mainly time trying to do really bad compliance training. Then number two is hiring and interviewing training, so that you're making sure the people you're bringing in are really good.
Matt Gjertsen [00:36:17]:
And then number three is manager training. So it sounds like those kinds of things are. At least a few of them are roughly aligned with a lot of what you all are talking about. So that's awesome. Amazingly, over a half hour has already gone by, something that I didn't think to ask you before, but I would love a quick question to kind of throw out at you since you get to work with such interesting teams doing amazing things. What is the most interesting role that you've ever hired for, if one pops into your head?
Seyka Mejeur [00:36:52]:
Really interesting. We have so many interesting roles. I'm like, so many things are coming to mind for so many different reasons. We partner with Varda space and we were hiring their head of mechanisms. We needed somebody that was able to create mechanisms that work in zero g. And so getting to speak to people who have that technical expertise and the company was very early at that time, which is a really fun time to get to talk to because the people who get it, get it, and the people who don't, don't. Right. And we could talk to them about it till we're blue in the face and we do.
Seyka Mejeur [00:37:34]:
And sometimes you can get people excited about it that don't understand it when you're first starting the conversation. But that was a really cool technical role that is also working on in space manufacturing. And so everything about it was really exciting.
Matt Gjertsen [00:37:51]:
Excellent. Brian, have you found yours?
Brian Mejeur [00:37:53]:
Oh, my gosh. Yeah, there's too many. I guess I'll touch on a couple which both coincidentally happened to be in the Bay area, but one of them was a kind of like payload, rf, like radio frequency person who's just so specific and there's such tricky people to find and hire for. And we got the job and we were hearing about it and we were just like, oh, that's this person. We interviewed this person before. And being able to call that person up who's making way more money at a bigger company and convince them, like, no, this is the job that you've always wanted. You should move again. You just started this job.
Brian Mejeur [00:38:34]:
You're making way more, but you should move again because this is the job for you. And making that happen was super cool. And another employee, number one, head of propulsion role a year ago was a blast. Kind of a similar thing of being like, oh, we're going to find a place for this. And this is an exceptionally fun problem to solve and being able to make that match and kind of these department heads, if you will, that are highly technical but can do so much more than that. That's where so much of the fun has been for us.
Seyka Mejeur [00:39:12]:
And if I can add on to what Brian's saying, there is part of what's so. We love people. We love people, we love space, we love clean tech. That's why we do this. And so part of what is so energizing and so magical about the work that we're doing is we're developing this database of all the relevant people in our industry, and not just what they can do technically, not just what's on their resume, but what lights a fire inside them. What are they motivated by? What is going to be their game changing next role? For that RF engineer Brian was mentioning, it was really cool to be able to give him a call, right? Call him up. And we were like, hey, we found it. And he was like, no, things are good.
Seyka Mejeur [00:39:56]:
I'm at this big tech company, it's good. And I was like, no, really, we found it. Let me send it to you. And he was like, okay, I'll take a look. Called me that day and he was like, I think you're right. Let's talk. Let's get it in. And it was like the fastest interview process.
Seyka Mejeur [00:40:12]:
And he's so happy there, right? And so being able to. We're not collecting resumes, we're like collecting dreams. Very easy way of putting it.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:24]:
But that is the tagline, right? At Astro, we don't collect resumes, we collect dreams.
Seyka Mejeur [00:40:30]:
Yeah. And it was the same with the other example, right? You talk to people, you go, well, what is the thing that would light a fire inside of you? And then maybe it's a year later, but when we find it, we can call them up and go, we found it, let's go.
Matt Gjertsen [00:40:48]:
That's neat. And that's the thing I love about the startup. There's so many things I love about kind of like the startup, especially like the space. Startup space is that one. Being in startup world means you're accepting massive swings. So it's hard, it can be depressing, you can have mental breakdowns, but man, the highs are so just. The wins couldn't be bigger. But I'm always amazed because since leaving space, I stayed in the LA area, and now I know people at all the cool companies.
Matt Gjertsen [00:41:22]:
Like, I know a bunch of people at relativity, I know a bunch of people at rock lab. It's amazing how small and tight knit a community it really is. So I'm sure for you, yeah. Getting to know those people, you can just have this community, this pool to pull from that. I'll be honest, I'll say I envy you of the niche that you have found and what you're going for. I just can't imagine the amazing conversations you must get to have about this, especially in the world. The other thing I like about the fact that I was working at SpaceX and that stuff is there's so many things going. It's so easy to turn on the news and get really down on the.
Matt Gjertsen [00:42:05]:
But, like, in our sphere, there's just every reason to be amazingly hopeful about the future. We can solve all the problems. We can do it all. We can feed everybody. We can go to other planets. We could do it all. It's neat.
Seyka Mejeur [00:42:23]:
That is so well put. It's a really excellent point.
Matt Gjertsen [00:42:28]:
So, to close it out here, I do want to finish with a couple of quick questions. One, what is one book that you would recommend everyone read and why? Or podcast suggestion, one or the other?
Seyka Mejeur [00:42:44]:
Oh, my gosh. I'm laughing because I won't shut up. About comic habits by James clear. It's my favorite book. It's right behind me. I am obsessed with atomic habits. It's all about making, building an intentional life, and doing so through not just, like, muscling and willpower, but using your neurobiology to create systems that your system responds well to so you can create habits for yourself.
Matt Gjertsen [00:43:14]:
I love it. Brian, do you have.
Brian Mejeur [00:43:20]:
Too, like, I don't consume nearly as much as seka does. She consume so much good stuff on this stuff, and that's been one of my favorites. Usually I'm not that into kind of, like, the personal development type stuff, and that one just really clicked with me and felt very practical and helped me understand my brain and how to make things better and how you can do things that makes your life worse without you really realizing it. And so, yeah, I guess we're kind of accidental atomic habit geeks over in our household over here.
Matt Gjertsen [00:44:04]:
I love it. I need to just finally do it. Despite my bookshelf behind me, I have not read atomic habits yet. And I think it's just because I hear so many people talking about it. I'm like, okay, it's like the thing, but everybody keeps telling me it's like a great book, so I should actually read it. What is one skill that I focus a lot? Whenever I talk about training, I talk about behaviors, I talk about skills. What skill has most helped you succeed in your life?
Seyka Mejeur [00:44:35]:
I think the thing that comes up for me is dedication over motivation. We can love motivation to get us started and have that big bang of dopamine when we come up with a new plan. And I think for me, I've created kind of like a piece of my identity is keeping my eyes set on the goal, regardless of motivation fluctuating. Right. Or the energy for that thing fluctuating. Keep going when the time gets tough.
Matt Gjertsen [00:45:10]:
Excellent. And come up for you, Brian. See you thinking.
Seyka Mejeur [00:45:15]:
Brian has so many skills that make him excellent at what he does. Some that stand out to me are he sees details much more thoughtfully, and he just sees them better, more quickly than a lot of people. And I think that that has made him really excellent at a lot of what he does. He sees details. He sees when things are off and he's able to point to them and articulate what they are. He's also really thoughtful in relationships, so he takes a lot of care and love with the relationships that he's handling, and it's really a useful skill in business. And I think that that can be overlooked a lot. But if you want people to have a dopamine release when they interact with you, you want to make the world better throughout each of your interactions.
Seyka Mejeur [00:46:09]:
Right. It's a key piece of being successful, what we do.
Matt Gjertsen [00:46:12]:
Absolutely. See, that's why everybody needs a good partner to pick them up and remind them of, like, hey, you're doing good.
Brian Mejeur [00:46:21]:
Yeah. Thank you. That was very kind. I just got to sit back and hear words of praise, so thank you.
Matt Gjertsen [00:46:28]:
Awesome. Well, this has been great. I think, like I said, I was really looking forward to this conversation because I don't think the talent development and talent acquisition worlds mix enough. And so hopefully this provided a little bit of push to some of the talent development folks out there of like, hey, you can help the talent oxygen folks. There's real ways that you can improve it. Start talking to them, get to know them a little bit better. So thank you so much for being on today. I wish you all the luck with AdAstra.
Matt Gjertsen [00:47:01]:
Like I said, I'm jealous of the conversation. Don't get me wrong, I love my job, but you got some pretty good stuff going on there. So thank you so much for being here today.
Seyka Mejeur [00:47:11]:
Thank you so much for having us. Really impressive stuff that you're doing, and it's a true pleasure getting to connect with you. Every time we speak, I'm like, feel like I just drank a coffee. I'm ready to go take over the world.
Matt Gjertsen [00:47:24]:
Awesome.
Brian Mejeur [00:47:25]:
Yeah. Thanks so much, Matt. This was an absolute pleasure.
Matt Gjertsen [00:47:28]:
Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you liked the discussion, make sure to hit like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. As a reminder, if your team is struggling keeping up with the training development demands of your organization, we want to help. Better everyday Studios is a full service instructional design team that can help you with everything from ideation to actual content creation and delivery. Please reach out to us using the link in the episode notes below. Have a great day.
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