Portland marketing automation company Act-On Software had some practice with remote work prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. The company had several regional offices between California and its Portland headquarters before consolidating everyone in downtown Portland in 2018.
Company leadership has tapped into that experience as it navigated remote work in 2020 and then a hybrid model that has followed. It has 169 global employees with 110 in the Portland metro.
We caught up with Katrina Beeble, talent acquisition development manager to talk about the company’s hiring needs this year and the state of the regional workforce.
Are you currently hiring or are you planning to hire this year? What are the most challenging roles to fill currently? We are fully staffed at this time, but plan to hire later this year as we grow in the second half of 2023. We would like to hire across all functions, but the priority is to grow sales and go-to-market functions, as our sales grow. Challenging roles to fill include engineering and senior sales positions, so we are always on the lookout to network with strong talent in those categories.
What is your opinion on the current workforce availability of the Portland metro? A majority of our employees are Portland based. Although we continue to find great talent in the Portland metro, recruitment looks different now than it did three years ago. People want more flexibility in where they work, and we see that reflected in our search for new Actonians. Fortunately for us on the recruitment side, Act-On allows for that flexibility and provides benefits that are easy to sell.
What is the current office strategy? Are people in office, remote or hybrid? We have a remote-hybrid setup. Most of our Portland-area staff come into the downtown office each week. Although we do not track exactly who’s coming in when, a majority of our employees are in the Portland area. We feel it’s important for all Actonians to have an in-person workspace they enjoy coming to, so we host frequent team bonding events and meals in-office. We periodically also bring in our remote staff to participate in such events.
For employees who are remote, are they in the Portland metro or Oregon? Or do you have people nationally or internationally? All of our employees have the option to work remotely, although we strongly encourage people in Portland to come into the office. We have our EMEA headquarters in Reading, UK, and our field-sales organization is located in their respective territories. Those not in field-sales, nor in Portland, are distributed across California, Washington, and the United States. While we always had field organizations and some remote workers, the pandemic improved our systems and organizational acceptance of remote workers, enabling us to hire the best talent wherever they reside.
What are the benefits and challenges for workers who work outside Portland? The benefit is finding teammates with a breadth of experience and backgrounds. Whether it’s regional knowledge for our sales team or cultural understanding in other markets, we find that having a mix of staff lends to our company’s strength and approachability.
A challenge for any team that in part works remotely is making sure everyone feels connected to our company culture and core values. Whether you work in Portland or across the globe, we want people to feel they have a home base with us.
It’s been a rough year or so for tech companies as the economy has shifted. How does HR strategy shift from boom times to more slower growth times? We have always been very employee-oriented, offering a strong benefits package and employee perks such as unlimited vacation policy, lunches provided in-office, and payment for employee fitness programs. This has helped us retain and attract talent, as the economy shifted. Of course, we slowed the hiring in 2022 to weather the economic downturn, and tightened our budgets. We look forward to getting back to a period of industry growth, later this year.
Have you invested in new benefits for employees? If so, what are they and what was the driving factor in selecting those benefits? In March this year, Act-On launched an Employee Development Program for all Actonians who have been here six months or longer. This involves a supervisor working with an employee on an action plan toward career development and desired promotions. Plans may include additional trainings, job shadowing, tasks to help growth, or approval toward new certifications.
How has your job as a human resources professional changed since the pandemic? We are seeing and feeling an even more people-focused culture in the realm of HR. The priority for Act-On has always been people first, but through the pandemic, we’re seeing more HR and recruitment practices everywhere come to embrace employees’ needs in a much more adaptive way. This helps with recruiting and retaining.
