HALF THE EQUATION
Andrew Allen serves as VP of Content Marketing for Crossover, the remote recruitment company that seeks to democratize global access to impactful, high-paying jobs. Allen understands the appeal of the major shift to remote work the world has seen over a few dozen months, as well as the fears that businesses have about letting go and taking advantage of the benefits of putting together a remote team that can be sourced from any place that the best talent in the world happens to be.
“They’re not seeing both sides of the coin. They’re missing half the equation,” Allen says of the uncertain. “They’re looking at remote work as a concession for their existing workers – but they’re conflating work from home with remote work.”
Companies who avoid remote work – or simply do it wrong – are missing out on the ability to fill their company end-to-end with the best global talent. “Can you imagine the US Olympic team only hiring athletes who live in Silicon Valley? No! To get the best of the best, they hire from everywhere.” This is a “bold new future” scenario that Crossover offers of a new kind of talent pool made up only of the very best: “If you can actually employ a team that’s only rock stars, why wouldn’t you?” Allen asks. “And that’s the benefit that companies are completely overlooking.”
Another huge plus those resistant to remote work miss is the enormous benefit of asynchronous work.
“I’m not saying get rid of all Zoom calls and get rid of meeting in person, because those things have value,” Allen says. “But we’re still stuck in the mode of thinking like we have for the last sixty years, since the advent of massive office buildings. That model prioritized synchronous communications. Board rooms made sense when sharing a room was the only way to effectively collaborate! But the world has since then developed a ton of very effective forms of collaboration that aren’t synchronous – from instant messenger to Google Docs – and most companies are still behind the 8 ball.”
Allen mentions how coders, for instance, can be in “deep work” mode when a call from their boss comes in. That coder has to stop what they’re doing in real time to answer the call, killing their rhythm.
“Now if that same boss asked that same question in an asynchronous way, the worker can complete their deep work and add the value that they had, keep their flow, make fewer mistakes, and then deal with the question that came in,” he explains. “Some communication needs to be synchronous, sure, but the best communication is what gets the job done the most efficiently. And once you accept this and you start using optimal forms of communication for the task at hand, you open up the possibility to turn time zones into a strength and not a barrier.”
ORIGIN STORY
Allen got his start in banking after he attended a careers expo at 17 with the intention of choosing an acting school. Soon, he was New Zealand’s youngest bank manager, a wave he rode into marketing. But Allen thirsted for the chance to sell a product he really believed in.
A few years later, he had won the green card lottery, which enabled him to move to New York to work in Broadway theater. He quickly got hired as the Associate Director of Marketing at the Pulitzer Prize-winning Manhattan Theatre Club, in a job that straddled both of his major life ambitions at once.
“What that brought to what I do now is a real appreciation for the craft of storytelling. When your product is the best stories in the world, your marketing messages have to be worthy of that,” Allen says.
With the COVID pandemic hitting the world, and his native New Zealand once again marked as one of the safest places in the world, Allen returned to his first home. At the end of a mandated period of managed isolation, he found himself in an unfamiliar spot at the southern tip of the south island. Without any restaurants open, and stuck by torrential downpour, Allen popped open his laptop and started looking for work.
“And that’s how I found Crossover! There are a ton of testing rounds, and one of the first things you have to do is a cognitive aptitude test. And if you don’t score in the 95th percentile, you’re out. They get 55,000 applications a week across their different jobs, and the role that I went for had 26,000 applications,” he remembers. “But I was like, ‘You know what, I’m here, I’m in the middle of nowhere, there’s nothing else to do, I’m just going to use this rainy day to throw my hat in the ring. And next minute, they’re calling me up saying, ‘We want you’ and I took the job.”
“I knew I’d be great at the job – but I wouldn’t have been able to prove it without Crossover’s unique testing process.”
AN INEVITABLE NEED
“Experts have been predicting for years that remote work is inevitable, yet there’s still no clear place to find a remote full-time job right now,” Allen says when asked how the company fills a need. “Despite the ability to click a little ‘remote position’ box on LinkedIn, the difference between hiring someone overseas and hiring someone in your neighborhood is vast, and incumbent recruitment sites are structured completely around location. There’s no box you can tick for ‘hire the best person in the world, anywhere’… Crossover wants to be that solution,” he explains.
Citing a huge number of ways in which the system could be improved, Allen says Crossover has been working to solve the biggest barriers of remote work since 2014 – citing internet speeds, on-premise servers, and ubiquity of video chat as three formerly ‘insurmountable’ barriers which innovation and a pandemic have already obliterated.
“But even though everyone got a free trial, remote work isn’t ubiquitous – yet. For example, one of the reasons that companies are afraid to hire overseas workers is because it’s harder to judge whether someone is qualified when you’re unfamiliar with the name of the school that they went to or any of the companies that they’ve worked for,” he says. “That puts people from overseas at a real disadvantage.”
Crossover has, he says, developed a system that puts everyone on the same rung, giving people from far-flung corners of the planet finally the opportunity to prove their skill and abilities on a global level.
“The model comes from the idea that great people come from everywhere,” Allen explains. “There are so many areas in which we accept that increasing the denominator increases the quality of talent. Crossover believes that the only reason we’ve grown accustomed to having just a few rock stars in every company is because the denominators are too small. If you’re only hiring people in your own zip code, you’re just going to have to settle for the best that you can find. What we want to bring them is the ability to be the best person in the world, not just the best person who lives nearby.”
THE JUGGERNAUT
“As a result of the pandemic, like everything shifted into the cloud. So we’re all using Google Drive, we’re all using Zoom. We’re all accustomed to dialing someone into the meeting who isn’t in the room. So many of the technological barriers have been lifted,” he continues. “This company has been flying the flag since 2014 saying that the future is remote. If your product does not require you to be present in person, your job will eventually become remote. Brain surgeons and house painters need to be there in person, obviously. But all the knowledge workers in between can sit down at any laptop in the world and bring what they have to offer to your company.”
For Crossover’s talent, hiring companies are required to set a value for a position they need filled.
“They say the best person in the world is worth X to me. And that amount gets paid to the person who gets the job no matter where they live, or what they’ve done before. And so that’s our way of making sure that we have completely equitable pay across the entire company,” Allen explains. “So if you’re based in a corner of the world that’s never had access to top-tier tech careers, we’re really attempting to globalize the kind of pay that’s previously only been possible in Silicon Valley. We’re looking for the kind of person that Google classically wants, who simply doesn’t live in Silicon Valley or even in the US, predominantly in the tech space.”
Also foundational to Crossover’s culture: “No BS.”
“It’s a very lean structure, very much in the startup style,” Allen tells us. “I think it’s great for someone who gets frustrated by the bloated nature of working at a tech giant where you’re one of 20,000 people and your job is the tiniest leaf on the tiniest branch of a giant tree. You really get a lot more scope to make your mark, and you don’t get caught up in unnecessary bureaucracy.”
“There’s no winner in the remote workspace yet. There’s no juggernaut,” Allen reminds us. “There’s no ubiquitous name in that space. We think that that space is going to be claimed in the next 12 to 18 months by someone. We think we have the right expertise for it. We’ve been doing this for a long time before the pandemic already, and we’ve built this giant database of some of the world’s smartest people. We want to be the juggernaut.”