We’re diving right into summer with the addition of Louisa Suesserott to our team as Head of Talent Advisory. She joins us from N26, where she most recently served as the fintech’s Global Head of People Operational Excellence. She brings a wealth of experience to Cherry Ventures across executive search and in-house recruitment plus a true “founders first” mindset (quite literally — she started and ran her own recruitment agency for seven years). At Cherry, she’ll work side-by-side our founders helping them in matters involving recruiting global top talent, hyper growth, and scaling.

Let’s meet Louisa 👇

Joining Cherry represents your first move into venture capital. What are you most looking forward to in working at Cherry and with our portfolio?

I’m very excited about a role where I can now devote my time helping founders unleash their potential in building exceptional companies. I’ve had the luxury of working with executive leadership for most of my career, I’ve built up 1–2 man startups to support companies through hyper growth, and there have been so many learnings along the way. No matter what stage you are at, there are challenges at all levels of hiring. There are also different challenges and milestones a founder will encounter at different stages of growth. So, being able to hold companies’ hands through these changes and considerations is very rewarding.

What do you enjoy most in working in the talent sphere? It’s one of those careers that is always evolving and there are new approaches, new products, and ways of working.

You’ve hit the nail on the head as to why I enjoy it so much. It’s one of those career paths where you are continually learning as the industry evolves. Aside from uncovering the best talent, another passion is building a culture where people can be their best selves. Organizational design and its impact on performance fascinates me. I’ve seen a lot of approaches and the different degrees of impact on employees, good and bad.

We invest in young companies. What are the 2–3 most important hiring considerations founders need to consider regarding talent early on?

1. Have an eye on building diversity in your top levels early on. Your first hires are your talent magnets for future hires. Get it right early — and you’ll have an amazing competitive advantage.
2. Hire for resilience and a growth mindset. Think about what you need the role in your company to achieve. What does success look like in the next 6–12 months? Don’t be bamboozled by education (a diversity killer) or a great sounding company name (what made them successful there, may not make them successful with you). Explore the problem you want to solve and hire the best person that can help you solve it.
3. Make finding and introducing great talent to your company a KPI for all your employees. Put it in the job description, your performance reviews, let it become part of your DNA. Don’t make any one team responsible for the growth of your company — it should be everyone’s responsibility to build a great team.

How has tech hiring changed over your career?

When I started in 1996, I worked in the City of London and my clients were investment banks. I didn’t have a computer. Candidate files were stored in a metal filing cabinet. I would mostly walk candidate profiles over to my clients, fax, or post them.

Candidates were sourced via headhunting — literally calling up hundreds of banks, getting through reception (in a very creative ways) and navigating your way through the company to find the person you needed. You would research physical business magazines, yellow pages (business phone directory), place adverts in newspapers and most importantly references through your network.

Within a year the first computer arrived on my desk and I was immediately hooked. Google did not even exist at this stage. I used a searching tool called Hoover where I was able to uncover even more information on companies (but only if they too had a presence).

Then there was the invention of job boards, which was interesting to watch. A lot of people thought it would be the end of the recruitment industry but instead it just blossomed.

For me, however, it’s always been about building strong communities and research.

So I quickly jumped on the social network sites before Facebook even existed. For me, these were great connection tools. And then around 1999–2000 there was this tiny beta platform I came across called LinkedIn. It wasn’t what we know today. It was a peer-to-peer exchange of business contacts — I was hooked! I think today it’s slightly tarnished by lazy recruiting tactics, such as spamming people with inappropriate roles, where the recruiter clearly has not even looked at their profile they are contacting. However, it still holds a lot of value if used correctly, in conjunction with other tools of course. You are missing a trick if you only use this tool for headhunting.

I’ve also always tried to seek out new tools that give me the competitive edge, away from where regular people would look. The internet is a researcher’s dream.

I saw the rise of GitHub repositories — another amazing tool for connecting with tech talent.

There are now tools to create nurture campaigns and I love where the business is going around automation and increasing productivity.

Will all this ever replace humans? This threat has been there since the beginning of my career but I don’t think that will be the case in my lifetime.

You’re obsessed with the magic of data. Why?

Data is knowledge, knowledge is power. I love the saying “without data, all you have is an opinion.” I’ve used it throughout my career to improve productivity and processes, decrease costs, and observe and address bottlenecks. It’s the interpretation that’s super fun for me.

The power with data is the ability to tell the story of the operational health of your company. Who wouldn’t want to know that?

You’re also a hardcore diversity advocate.

Diverse hiring should be top of mind for all companies and more needs to be done in this area. I’m very proud to be part of Cherry Ventures, because you are actively championing diversity within the portfolio and it’s a condition on our term sheet.

Embracing diversity is not about culture fit, but culture add.

Currently, I am participating in designing a playbook around diversity hiring for the Tech Talent Charter, with a specific focus on how to access all of the available tech talent if you are in a startup or scaleup environment.