What does it take to build a people-first hiring culture from the ground up, without sacrificing speed or scale? In this episode of Talk Talent to Me, returning guest Anna Chalon, Head of People at Runway, shares how she intentionally navigated her career from startup to acquisition and back again, fueled by a love for building and a clear sense of purpose. She unpacks her criteria for choosing the right company, the power of gut instinct balanced with measurable data, and how candidate experience can be both human and scalable. Anna also offers insights into how she assesses founders during interviews and why speed and thoughtfulness in hiring are good indicators of long-term cultural alignment. Tune in to learn how to build resilient, high-trust recruiting processes and make smarter career decisions rooted in self-awareness and intention!
Key Points From This Episode:
An overview of Anna's journey from Frame.io to Adobe to Runway.
How she used Adobe's acquisition of Frame.io as a career checkpoint.
The importance of being clear about the size and pace of the company you want.
Values over industry: the creative culture and visionary founders that drew Anna to Runway.
Founder responsiveness as a hiring signal (and what to look for in the first interview).
Reflecting on hiring wins and misses as opportunities to learn and improve.
Blending data and intuition to ensure that a role truly excites you.
Building scalable, human-centered hiring from scratch with speed, structure, and soul.
The impact of timely check-ins, personal touches, and radical hiring transparency.
Starting lean but thinking long-term: balancing agility with a premium candidate experience.
The power of seeking out quick wins to add value in the short term.
A simple strengths-enjoyment framework for informed career decisions.
Quotes:
"Even though I'm not going to be using the product every day, the company culture is still shaped by the type of tool you create." — Anna Chalon [08:15]
"[Hiring] is not a perfect science. All these things are still human-based decisions at the end of the day. You do the best with the information you have." — Anna Chalon [14:44]
"My goal when I'm building these foundations is: how do we have enough structure and repeatability that we could hire 100 people – if we need to but every single candidate [also feels] like they're alone in the process?" — Anna Chalon [19:14]
"Any kind of communication is better than ghosting. – When people are looking for a job, anxiously waiting to get a response, it's just not the right thing to do." — Anna Chalon [26:24]
"What am I good at? What do I like? What is the overlap? And how does that apply to work?" — Anna Chalon [37:52]
Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:
