How Thyme Care Scales Care Teams | Nate Brown, VP Market Operations

[00:00:00] Nikhil: So we just talked to Nate from Thyme Care and, you know, Thyme Care is, works in cancer care navigation. One of the things that we talked about, which I thought was super interesting is kind of their pod design, where they have a combination of clinical and non clinical folks. They try to have people with really localized knowledge in certain geographies, but then more broad clinical knowledge.

[00:00:24] Danielle: Yeah, and then from how they even scaled up those pods in the first place, you know, his team is like 90 plus people. So then Nate broke down their hiring game plan and like what they do in the whole recruiting process, which was really unique.

Like they use a ton of role play and very hardcore role play where everybody on the team is trained up. You could see his whole body language shifting when he talked about it. It was for real. 

[00:00:48] Nikhil: Yeah, this one is definitely for the pro mafia, you know, players listening in but you know, I thought it was super interesting. We go through hiring, org design and a bunch of other really interesting stuff. So [00:01:00] take a listen to the end for also some of the three actionable experiments that you can run in your org today and let us know what you think.

[00:01:07] Danielle: All right. Nate, welcome to the pod. Are you excited? Nervous? 

[00:01:13] Nate: How are you feeling? Really excited. Really excited. You know, I have been to two of the knowledge fests that you two have put on and been absolutely wowed best, best conference I've been to most valuable. So I feel like I'm in great hands. I just hope I can deliver for you guys today.

[00:01:27] Nikhil: Wow. We don't even need to do an ad for this one. Basically just did for us. Amazing. Yeah. Now we've had a great time also seeing you present and contribute to the Knowledge Fest agenda as well. So we're excited to chat. That's why we wanted to bring you on. Awesome. 

[00:01:44] Danielle: You have an interesting story of growing kind of, I guess, what all operators dream of joining very early stage and then watching the hyper growth and being part of that leading big teams leading through all different stages of growth.

So that's kind of what we [00:02:00] want to unpack with you today is your journey at Thyme care. Scaling up from pre seed all the way now to managing a team of over 90 people, a company of over 150 people, and hopefully impart some wisdom for all the listeners and folks out there that are going through this journey now, or kind of somewhere between that stage.

Could be helpful though to just like kick things off, Nate. Can you give us a explanation of like what Thyme Care is and just what your team is? 

[00:02:28] Nate: Yeah, absolutely. So, at Thyme Care, really, our focus is to ensure that, every cancer patient receives the highest quality care. And so the way that we do that is we partner with health plans and risk bearing providers and risk bearing entities, to work directly with their members or patients as well as caregivers, work with their providers as well.

To make sure that we can coordinate to improve the patient outcomes, overcome health disparities and really kind of, you know, [00:03:00] focus on reducing the total cost of care of the cancer population. The way tactically that we do this is by providing wraparound navigation services to those affected by cancer and doing so in really tight coordination with providers as well.

that means we do things like providing clinical and non clinical support that goes beyond the clinic that patient is in. So these are things like providing proactive symptom management, treatment education.

We help to facilitate access to, things like local support services, so this is providing connections to, organizations that offer financial grants, as well as organizations that offer some community support, in home cleaning, things like that. and then also, you know, we're doing things like finding appointments for these individuals, within network specialists.

[00:03:48] Nikhil: Awesome. And can you tell us a little bit about what your role looks like today and maybe like how it's evolved over time?

[00:03:54] Nate: I was very fortunate to have joined the Thyme Care team as one of the founding team members, in the summer of [00:04:00] 2020, which was pre seed.

We then launched the company on October 1st of 2020. And so it's been in this incredible journey of almost three and a half years, my role in actually joining Thyme Care at the very beginning, was basically chatting with co founder, saying, Hey, we really need you to think about how we can get a pilot live.

And by the way, we don't have that pilot signed yet, but we're going to figure it out. 

And so over time, Over the course of, you know, kind of the 3.5 years, my operations role has transformed into, building out our partnership operations team, which is focused on driving customer success with those health plans and risk bearing providers and risk based entities that we partner with. it also includes leading our care delivery and care delivery operations team, which is really focused on actually.

Providing those wraparound services to to those affected by cancer. 

Today I lead partnership operations team and our care delivery and care delivery operations team, which is the 90 plus amazing folks [00:05:00] that Danielle was reference referencing earlier. and really the kind of focus areas of each of those organizations is that on the partnership operations side, we are looking to comprehensively partner and launch.

those, you know, health plans, risk bearing agencies, risk bringing providers that we have contracted with. And so there's an aspect of that speed to launch and understanding how we can do so in a way that is really going to set ourselves up for success with the performance that we need to drive.

part of that also is making sure that we are driving a high MPS with those partners. and then on the care delivery side, you know, this is really focusing on all of those components that, Make, care management and population health actually click in terms of driving that value. So these kind of KPIs air more on the side of our member enrollment and retention, our member experience, how do we actually think about core interventions, that are going to drive the best outcomes.

So these are things like how we're performing on unnecessary acute care utilization, [00:06:00] reduction, comprehensive clinical capture, site of service optimization and things like that. 

[00:06:04] Nikhil: I'm curious, like just on the NPS front, I feel like a lot of companies all measure this kind of differently a little bit.

A lot of the other metrics that they got a little bit more cut and dry, right? Like utilization and all this kind of stuff. I'm curious, like how you measure NPS with the orgs that you work with. This is like surveys. Is it, you know, qualitative? 

[00:06:23] Nate: So on the MPS front, it's actually it's a really good question because, on the one hand, the partnership operations team.

And really, when we think about actually partnering with these health plans or other entities. We get so embedded. And so we're talking to, like, so many different departments and making sure that across the member experience, the provider experience, the marketing and awareness side, the data side that we are just exposed to, so many different stakeholders.

We have this kind of broad swath of folks who we want to make sure that we are, that we're driving alignment with and driving value for, but then at the same time, Thyme Care is just over four [00:07:00] partners launched. And so it's like, we don't have a ton of, data points to be able to kind of feed in that.

We are absolutely anchoring more on the qualitative now. So oftentimes we, are. basically sending questions kind of across email to be able to capture the sentiments of the folks that we're working with. And actually, as sort of a pro tip when we do have a scenario where we have this kind of, you know, example of really great partnership.

We are actually. Using that and trying to be a friend to our growth leaders as well to be able to ask those individuals that share the positive feedback. Hey, can we actually take that and talk to other prospective clients about it? because it might be something that helps to give the look and feel of what Thyme Care does.

We did about a year ago, try and NPS survey. and we sent it to, number of folks. we got a response rate of zero. going to take that is that they really just love those conversations. Those personalized conversations that we were having in the emails rather than them not wanting to fill out a survey.

[00:07:54] Nikhil: Yeah as a person who's like a power user of google forums I can tell you that it's not exactly [00:08:00] the most official looking thing. 

[00:08:02] Nate: Yeah, 100 100 percent. 

[00:08:04] Danielle: To level set on this role of a care navigator. Sounds like they're a really instrumental part of the execution of times cares wraparound services as well as like a huge headcount component. Could you just kind of zoom in and give us a taste for your hiring process and learnings around just the care navigator role?

[00:08:23] Nate: I think the first thing that I have to do is just give a shout out to our very talented recruitment team who are absolutely pivotal and helping us as an organization think through what does this recruitment journey kind of look like for us as we are in this world where, We have an idea of the role.

We are continually sort of building an engine of our care model as the plane is taking off. And so there's just a lot of moving parts. And how do we make sure that we're continuing to be kind of agile in the hiring and in the work that we're doing? I think the earliest learning that jumps out to me was around [00:09:00] our understanding of where we needed to be looking for and screening these candidates, that maybe was counterintuitive to what we knew at the time.

And so at the beginning, we were really indexing on recruiting individuals who literally had cancer navigator, a patient navigator in their title. This was, you know, the way that we were directing our recruitment efforts. We were just hyper focused on that role. And I think the personal learning.

that I had on this was that, cancer navigation in general, actually not even just cancer means so many different things to so many different organizations. And it's not like there's this kind of, one size fits all approach. And so we actually had a bunch of individuals who had really deep experience in things like Appointment scheduling or appointment coordination, even navigating like prior author, things like that, but they weren't the comprehensive transferable skill that we were needing at the time because it was just too narrow of a skill set. One of the things that we actually ended up doing [00:10:00] was we realized after a few mishires in this area we realized our mistake. And we said, I think we're actually selling ourselves short here. We should expand our funnel. We should look at what are the types of roles that can offer

transferable skill sets that we feel pretty confident. And so I think we first started in going a little bit broader than the targets. We said, okay, instead of just cancer navigators, let's think about going ahead and understanding case managers, understanding social work backgrounds, understanding even like health plan, customer service or plan benefits, individuals who are used to these High volume you know, type of roles, providing that support, being able to navigate, those scenarios.

[00:10:38] Nikhil: Did think boy ever come up in that job title search?

[00:10:41] Nate: I would say that the target audience isn't yet in that think boy audience, but it's part of our mission, you know, we're trying to get that market out there. 

[00:10:47] Nikhil: Tough, tough,

[00:10:48] Danielle: I don't, I don't think you'd be good at that job.

[00:10:49] Nikhil: That's not wrong. That's not wrong. 

[00:10:53] Danielle: I don't think we want big boys in that one. 

[00:10:57] Nate: Agreed. Yeah. but I think, you [00:11:00] know, beyond kind of that initial push, one of the things that was interesting also in the beginning, which was a balance, was Let's actually think about roles that are really concrete in, in empathy, in high variability and see if these individuals could actually function within that changing Thyme Care environment.

So actually we got some pretty good success in hiring in people from outside of healthcare as well. So, folks who came from customer service within clothing stores or, different types of telephonic outreach. You know, I think today we've sort of, Continue to refine that profile and understanding that, at a baseline for the majority of the rules that we have within the care delivery organization.

We want to have that kind of core health care experience. There is a whole language around it. There is just a baseline understanding how to move in that world. but it's something that we're continually, you know, revisiting and refining. 

[00:11:52] Nikhil: I do think there's something interesting too, because for a lot of the patient facing roles, especially like patients also don't speak that healthcare lingo [00:12:00] anyway, right?

So you don't really want someone who is like too over like indexed or like, you know, brain warped to buy the healthcare lingo stuff. They need to be able to like speak the language that patients, you know, say themselves. Right. And then can translate it on the backend, like what's necessary. And I also think, you know, in healthcare, a lot of role names are like totally made up anyway.

Right. Like care manager, case manager, project manager, like. All these things are, can be such, you know, nebulous and within the company themselves, they're like managing completely different things from company to company, right? There's not even really a standard. So I think it's, you know, I think it's super smart to like, just.

Yeah, figure out like more, more like qualities for a role and then map backwards. I think that's awesome. Yeah. One question is, you know, I'm curious, like interview process wise to like what kinds of things are you asking in these interviews to try and like suss out? The qualities that you're looking for, either in case manager or even like broader ops.

[00:12:59] Nate: [00:13:00] Yeah. So the first thing that I'll say that's incredibly important here for any role, and frankly, at any size of an organization is making sure that you have an aligned.

interview kit that includes not only what are the competencies that you are testing, what are the exact same questions that you're asking to every single candidate that tests those competencies, and What is the rubric that you are using internally to go ahead and grade those answers to make sure that you're removing bias from the entire process?

Within our care delivery organization, we have competencies that Float across things that are little bit less tangible, like being able to understand self awareness and growth mindset, a bias to action and prioritization also down to the things that are more technical, pun intended, where it's like, what is your level of comfort with technology.

And have you worked in an organization that has changing tools and product updates that are kind of feature updates that are shipping every week and things like that. the way that we've structured these areas is [00:14:00] really leaning more into. behavioral questions that get at what has someone's lived experience actually been in these particular competencies.

And then I think the, you know, the The thing that we have also found to be really beneficial, especially within the care delivery side, is how can we partner that with more of the situational tests of competencies through things like like role plays? In the early days, you know, one of the things that I'm actually really happy that we did when we think about, the topic role plays was we

decided as an interview team within those, those folks who are going through the process for both our clinical and non clinical roles, actually, that we were going to, like, fully commit, I'll call it, like, Juilliard style, just, like, fully commit to the acting of these role plays and understanding what we are actually trying to get out.

So, we best practice from an interviewing standpoint, we went ahead, we created,[00:15:00]  the actual situation we'd shared with the candidate what that situation was, but then we have like a back story. We like understood like three additional paragraphs of like what this person was actually feeling and what were the needs of that individual and then within line of the role play itself,

we actually had all of our interviewers who are going to be testing for that competency, fully commit to saying, I am going to actually act in a way that I would understand this person should this, with this situation were real would actually act in real life. And so we had some really talented interviewers who were presenting this situation of being really upset, within a particular area or, actually being a little bit, like annoyed with call coming in and not actually knowing and testing like the credibility.

And it was a really nice. It was a nice shift because I think prior lives I've experienced role plays within interviews where[00:16:00]  if you half ass it's just like it totally falls flat for everyone involved Like you're just like hating leading the role play the person's are we really going through this?

like Dog and pony show, like what's going on. But when you really committed, I think some candidates were like taken off guard a little bit. cause They're like, Oh, wow, like these guys are really going in. But I actually think it really helped to suss out, second and third level skills around empathy,

those aspects of like motivational interviewing and things like that. 

[00:16:25] Danielle: I've been made like imagining you and like a full Shakespearean costume throughout that answer. And like, I love, I think role play in interviewing, especially in like more customer service or However, you want to define that role seems to make a lot of sense from the side of the interviewer, because you're assessing their competency and like real time ability to navigate it.

But from the interviewee perspective can seem somewhat unfair because you are not trained on that subject or like, you don't really know exactly the ins and outs and you would learn that on the job. How did you define or [00:17:00] develop the right kind of role play? And for folks that want to do that, like how do they make sure they're keeping it fair on both sides?

[00:17:07] Nate: Yeah, it's a great, it's a great call out. So within our role plays, we actually purposely chose situations that. weren't going to be laden or dependent with Thyme Care context only. And so we would, for our nurses, choose clinical situations that, for that role in particular, they, they would have experienced within their role.

And we were not asking questions that were dependent on, like, the Thyme Care. Methods of identification or product or things like that, just to make sure that we were keeping it, as unbiased as possible. The other thing that I would say is like, within our rubric, we were also reminding our interviewers that.

Any type of reflection that they were having on the role play any type of feedback should not be dependent on the Thyme Care context But only on that rubric that we were providing that were was about the situation itself and not within the Thyme Care setting. 

[00:17:59] Danielle: Okay, cool. [00:18:00] And are you are you doing this all synchronously or using any software to manage any of that interview process?

[00:18:06] Nate: Yeah, so so right now we are doing the role plays themselves synchronously. Just because we want to be able to have that Second and third level, kind of situation evolving, as we do that, But we actually have relatively recently implemented some technology that has helped us out in our interviewing high volume roles.

That is a Canvass. And so Canvass is basically a tech platform that allows you to have asynchronous video recorded interviews, The way that we indexed on Canvass was how can we make sure to use that async video interview step, as an additional, narrowing of the funnel and only allowing folks to pass through who are.

who are sort of satisfying the requirements that we think are baseline. So, for example, we had some really, dramatic learnings in the beginning, I would say, from our candidate hiring profile and not actually realizing that we needed to [00:19:00] test for comfort with technology as a comp as a competency itself.

And we quickly realized with our homegrown, care management tool. Time box with the fact that, at the very beginning, we had our care partners in our ends documenting in multiple different Google docs and things were coming at them from every different type of tool. And Slack was, you know, blowing up on the side, that it was like a really core thing that we absolutely needed folks who are comfortable with different types of tools.

Over time, I would say this was not something we did at the beginning, but over time as we. Really realized the baseline need of that type of a competency. And knowing that no matter what, every single person coming into the team needed that we ended up using Canvass to be able to preemptively screen.

For that comfort level with technology, as well as a couple other areas, I think around kind of mission orientation and things like that, to be able to more effectively and efficiently, screen our candidates to advance to, I just want to say in person, but like zoom rounds, to go through the rest of their interview loops.

[00:19:59] Nikhil: [00:20:00] I was gonna say my like dystopian tech brain is like. I wonder if this is like a good like avatar GPT use case where it's like, Oh, can you like simulate, can you basically do a simulated customer call with a candidate and actually run through it. Although I can see without guardrails on something like this, that it might just get totally unhinged.

But it could be interesting, honestly, see how they handle that. Right. That's like how the real world works. Right. 

[00:20:24] Nate: Yeah. The big discussion internally was also that where it's a. Yes, we want to be more efficient on our side, but like we can't sacrifice candidate experience. We can't make it seem like we're making people jump through a million hoops before talking to a real person and everything like that.

So I think it was, you know, continual balance. We're definitely just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to that type of tech enablement. 

[00:20:45] Danielle: The Canvass with two S's, I looked it up, is this asynchronous software that you're doing before that role play stage, and you're using that to assess the technical fluency and some other kinds of.

What [00:21:00] are they like tactically doing that you're assessing? Like, are they navigating a software and you're watching them do it? Like what is what's happening? 

[00:21:08] Nikhil: Wait, sorry. Canvass with two S's like Canvasss. 

[00:21:13] Nate: Correct. I'd have to defer to them. 

[00:21:17] Nikhil: Just checking. All right. Nevermind. No more questions for me. 

[00:21:23] Nate: Yeah, Danielle, to, to your point, we actually used to within our interview loops have a screen sharing portion when we were doing them synchronously and watch someone. We had this kind of prompt that we would follow and watch someone navigate a website and kind of go to particular areas that we wanted them to go to, to try to prove that fluency.

What we realized, though, is that the thing that was actually more important for us was not for that wrote ability of like navigating one website or having that intuitive understanding of like where something might be in user design, but it was actually the fact of, an individual is going to need to deal with multiple variables of [00:22:00] tools and those tools that are changing.

And so we ended up going a little bit more behavioral on this. And so with what is actually being asked within these async video interviews, is, questions like, When have you used multiple technology tools and systems to complete a single task at work? And tell me more about that task. Also, we are asking things like tell me about a time that when you learned a new technology, what was that technology?

What was your approach to learning? And so it's sort of getting at some of these fundamental skills that are around that utilization of tech, without actually needing to do that screenshare. 

[00:22:35] Danielle: In your organizational design of the care navigation. You shared a little bit with me about this pod infrastructure that you've designed. Could you kind of break down what this pod is like what they do for folks that want to think about different org design within their care teams?

[00:22:51] Nate: So, yes. So let me first define what a pod actually is within Thyme Care and what we mean when we talk about that. So. Within our pods, we [00:23:00] have a group of, clinical and non clinical team members. So these are, oncology RNs and our care partners and they are getting clinical direction as well.

And additional support from our nurse practitioners and medical directors on the side. And we are basically each of these pods is supporting an assigned group of could be within one of our partners. It could be across multiple partners, but really, the focus of this pod is getting geographic expertise within the particular area, that they are providing support.

 This sort of regional approach has been really interesting for us because our first state that we started in was New Jersey. We were able to understand through this pod structure and through the learnings that we had all of the different, idiosyncrasies basically of that market and understanding what is at play, not only talking about what is the tendency of the hospitals that have the best marketing and so that patients know all the time about what's going on there, but [00:24:00] also Hey, what are the transportation services that literally refuse to drive past this bridge because they don't want to go over that particular river.

And so it's like that type of kind of neighborhood understanding. It's the whole like healthcare is local thing, right? that understanding helps to really unblock more effective services that we can provide because we are able to have a better understanding of that region.

Another aspect of the pod is that we are making sure that we have enough redundancy within our own team, such that if we have a team member who's out of office or frankly, you have a team member who inevitably transitions out of the organization, we are still able to provide that support to that panel of members and really making sure that we're there and in a timely fashion.

[00:24:44] Nikhil: Can you tell us a little bit about like. The metrics of success for a pod look like how you think about that, maybe relative to like, maybe if some pods have sicker populations or more, you know, is there like an adjustment or benchmarking?

Thing that happens between pods because I'm sure, you [00:25:00] know, different patient panels are very different. Just curious how that looks. 

[00:25:03] Nate: Yep, that's exactly right. So there's basically case mix suggestion as we think about our acuity segmentation so that we can ensure that. We are not overburdening one.

We're not just looking at the volume of members, right? So that we're not overburdening one pod versus another. I will say that over time, we are also getting more specialized within the pods that we have. So, for example, for a recent partner that just launched, we are getting a higher volume of patients who are in their peri diagnostic phase.

So cancer has not yet been confirmed but we are actually helping, get in touch navigating them through the process, hopefully to a point where they actually, come back negative for any type of cancer screening. We have actually specialization within pods now that are focused on folks who don't actually have a confirmed cancer diagnosis yet.

So we're starting to see some of that. flex into areas of, how can we make sure that folks are working to the top of their license and also, [00:26:00] specializing skill sets where we need to based on the impact that we think it's going to have on kind of the overall business model. 

[00:26:07] Danielle: In all of your evolution of being at the company from such early stage to now 150 plus people, could you maybe just share at a high level, which company planning methods worked and which ones didn't at the different stages 

[00:26:21] Nikhil: I need to know as I move from zero to one, what my OCR process has to be. 

[00:26:27] Nate: It's very difficult. our journey in this was in basically March of 2021 was when we had our first, member engagements, and we're going live May of 2021, we actually had a board meeting and, we were so excited to share some of these member stories and some of the early like funnel things that we had realized.

We got a question from one of our board members, that was basically like, okay, great. What are your next two years look like then? And it was just this sort of moment of like, holy cow we need to figure out how we actually [00:27:00] go forward. We got really great advice from that same board member in saying.

I know it can be overwhelming to try to think about where you go from here when you are still sort of building out what your pilot looks like still getting your feet under you. So think about an activity where you write your own press release to be able to understand where you need to go and work backwards from that as you define your goals.

This one actually hit a sort of personal heartstring of mine because in a prior life I was in learning and development consulting, and we used to do an activity, that was part of a workshop that was around self actualization, that was a little bit morbid, but it was like write your own obituary, and understand what you want to I know loaded.

It was a really interesting and helpful reminder, frankly, of, like, all right, start with your end state and try to work backwards and let's like take a stab at something and figure out, you know, where we go from there. And so we actually- 

[00:27:56] Nikhil: Your obituary: "He took a stab at something."

[00:28:00] Nate: Exactly. 

[00:28:02] Danielle: Should we put Nikhil on the spot and have him tell us where Out of Pockets is going to be in two years? 

[00:28:06] Nikhil: Please don't. 

[00:28:06] Nate: Oh, that's a great idea. Maybe after you write your press release, Nikhil. So, yeah, so I think like this exercise was really helpful and we actually we took it really seriously, which I'm proud of because it ended up being, you know, at the time we were an organization of like, probably like 25 people, and we were really focused on having conversations around this press release to understand, like, where is it that we need to be?

And in the fact of like writing something down and seeing the words on paper, it was so helpful to understand. You know, down to the nitty gritty things of like, Oh, well, we're saying we want to be live with these folks, but like, that doesn't really make sense. Or like, is this actually what we want to be known for?

Or, you know, we sort of took the Amazon, like working backwards approach. I think they do this pretty commonly there where it's like, you actually include things like customer quotes and like, what are the things that you like want people [00:29:00] to be saying? And so it's just this really helpful exercise to be able to understand, like, Okay.

How do we actually think about the target setting and moving from there? 

[00:29:10] Nikhil: It's kind of like also an interesting way to like see if everyone's aligned on values, right? Because if everyone has to write the press release and people are all writing totally different things and you're like, all right even internally The messaging is not like consistent, right?

[00:29:23] Nate: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. 

[00:29:24] Nikhil: Pretty, pretty interesting. I like that. 

[00:29:26] Danielle: In design thinking, re's a method where you take, you aggregate a bunch of quotes and rather than clustering them by like what they're talking about, you create a newspaper headline that would be like reflective of what those quotes are.

So I could see something like there's some parallels there of the newspaper headline almost framing around a problem or an approach versus just being like. Kind of boring and stale and, you know, yeah, that's really cool. 

[00:29:53] Nate: A hundred percent. 

[00:29:54] Nikhil: My takeaway from this is basically Thyme Care does a lot of role playing, whether you're a dad, you're [00:30:00] a patient, you've launched the thing, we're just, we're pretending, we're making stuff up.

[00:30:05] Nate: Full team of thespians, that's for sure. We're rocking and rolling over here. 

[00:30:09] Danielle: Yeah. I wish we wore costumes! 

[00:30:13] Nikhil: Seriously. Well, we like to wrap up the podcast by basically asking, about like three tactical experiments that people are listening to. This could potentially run their org today just to see how it would do.

So, you know, we've talked about some of them. I'm curious, like it, when you think about the highest impact stuff that has worked for you at time, care, like, are there three things that you think everyone should just give a shot internally? 

[00:30:38] Nate: For folks who are in, parts of organizations that have member or patient facing roles, I would think about the type of asynchronous I would testing incorporating asynchronous as part of the interview process to be able to further drive efficiency for those candidates that are actually coming through and having, you know, in [00:31:00] person or zoom interview time, I think we saw a lot efficiency, driven entirely, you know, again, thanks to our recruitment team from the use of Canvass.

I'm going to pronounce it Canvass. McKeel from the use of Canvass. And also, at the time when we started expanding our communication to not just telephonic, but also written, we started actually doing very simple writing samples that folks needed to submit. , and it was just a really great way to continue to drive really, talented, candidates, to our interview loop.

Outside of that, When we were just talking about the sort of setting of organizational goals and the alignment that's required. 1 of the things that was really helpful that we've done in the past and ironically, we're actually doing again very soon in the future.

Here is around. Testing how embedded and resonant your organizational goals actually are . The way that I've done that in the past is sending a really simple survey or an email that asks either your team [00:32:00] or the entire population of employees. , if you want to be a little bit bolder, to share.

What do they think the top three company priorities are for x year or for x quarter? The results of that are always really insightful because not only are you at a base level Highlighting gaps in areas of alignment and thinking and where folks are kind of thinking that they need to spend time but also you are hearing perspectives about based on the things that are surrounding you within your organization This is what people think are the most important.

 Diagnose that? Why is it that people think? Is it the fact that it's being talked about all the time? And this other thing that's actually higher priority isn't, being discussed? Is it just a, you know, a misnomer? Like what? How do you actually think? Think through that?

And then I think third to just double click a little bit There is a lot of value in doing a self audit around For the most important initiatives that you are working on Try to map out and understand [00:33:00] who are the actual decision makers within that worker or within that process.

I think that oftentimes, especially within growing startups, things are moving so fast, and there's sort of a melding of organizations that it can often become unclear as to who is the actual sign off of a decision. Who actually needs to be consulted around it and everything in between.

And being able to drive clarity in understanding who and how decisions are made is something that can be a real unlock, for getting the highest priority things done for the organization. 

[00:33:38] Nikhil: And is there like a way you test that? Like, do you, like, how do you figure, do you just have one person go through or do you have people do surveys?

[00:33:46] Nate: Yeah. So I've actually done this more personally on the initiatives that I'm involved in. , but then I've also cascaded this to, to my team members to have it as an exercise that [00:34:00] we've done in a team meeting where we actually take an inventory of, Hey, what are all the things that we're working on right now?

And let's just make sure we all have clarity and that we're all on the same page about. Who's actually signing off on, on these areas, whether it's within our organization or whether it's actually, you know, requiring cross functional input as well. Awesome. 

[00:34:18] Nikhil: Well, Nate, I think that's pretty much all the time we have.

Appreciate you coming on and discussing this. I think it's like. You know, a problem a lot of us have faced in some capacity working at a growing startups, right? Like things can move really fast. And you're trying to both, you know, put out the fires as well as find people to help you put out the fires.

Right. And you know, this is a great way I think to help figure that out for. You know, especially for clinical teams who, you know, have care member, have people who have to deal with patients and all this kind of stuff. So appreciate you coming on to chat.

[00:34:49] Nate: Appreciate it. Thank you both so much. Really appreciate the opportunity to share and yeah, we'll see you at the next knowledge fest. We'll see if you guys will have me, I'll be there. Hell yeah, of course. [00:35:00]

[00:35:01] Danielle: Application bars being set high.

[00:35:03] Nikhil: Exactly.

‍