Talent Makers

Expert Insights: Tope Awotona

Babatope (Tope) Awotona is the founder and CEO of Calendly, a beautiful, simple scheduling tool that in less than five years has served close to 30 million people worldwide. Tope was born in Lagos, Nigeria, moved to America in high school, and became an entrepreneur after a successful career in software at companies like IBM and EMC.

We know you get very personally involved with hiring at Calendly. Could you please describe how that breaks down in terms of time spent?

In the past year, 75 percent of my hiring involvement was on hiring my executive team; about 20 percent was spent hiring VPs and senior managers reporting to those folks, and the final 5 percent was elsewhere.

What does it look like when you get involved with hiring when it's not potentially one of your direct reports?

It runs the gamut and it's everything from their presenting a 90-day plan to me, to spending time with them to understand their leadership and team-building philosophy. The most exciting is when I get to share the company vision and connect it to their role. One of our teams was trying to hire an individual contributor. This person was really talented and had another offer. The team asked if I was willing to make a video to help convince the candidate to take our offer, and of course, I said yes.

It was a pretty simple video, actually. I told the candidate how important the role was. I then went through the things that they would be specifically working on, and how ...