Episode 12 – How to hire like Canva – Why people are the secret to success with Mahesh Muralidhar from Airtasker and Canva

What you will learn in this episode

How Cliff and Mel from Canva convinced Mahesh to leave his startup (just when he was about to close the seed round funding) to go and work at Canva.

Mahesh’s TimTam marketing hack that won him Uber’s as a client

Why recruitment has been one of the major factors around Canva’s success

Why talent acquisition is just like growth marketing

Don’t compromise when hiring – wait for the right skillset

Why you should never underestimate anyone

How to be commercial when hiring

Thoughts around business leadership

Resources mentioned

Take a HR course with Mahesh

Airtasker

Canva

TimTams

Zappos

Stack Overflow

YouTube Premuim (formerly YouTube Red)

(The mighty) Tottenham Hostspur

Mahesh’s ‘hiring in football article’ (coming soon)

Book Recommendations

Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Work Rules by Laszlo Bock

Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux

What business would you build on Mars?
I have very dry and geeky answers to these kind of things. My first response was, "What do they need? What do they want?" Then I was like, "Let's make some assumptions." I'm a tourist coming into this brand new country. We're not going to sell probably something that I think is cool because it's exclusive. Gold seems to be very attractive to people constantly, so if they don't have a shiny thing or something that smells nice or something that drives an immediate kick of endorphins, I'll find that out and then I'll sell to them. I'll just tell them that this is the coolest thing and make it super exclusive.

Reach Mahesh here

Mahesh on Twitter

Mahesh on LinkedIn

To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast