Ask A CTO with Josh Daltry

Candidate Insights

Sep 2

In this month’s “Ask a CTO” blog series, I had the opportunity to chat with Josh Daltry, CTO of Scoir, a rapidly growing tech startup based out of West Chester, PA. We caught up on his new role and how COVID has impacted everything from interviewing to onboarding etc.

I noticed you recently changed companies. Can you tell me a bit about what Scoir does and your role there.

Scoir was founded in 2013, but has grown significantly over the past few years. We are building a first of its kind network to revolutionize an extremely flawed college admissions process. We are doing this while honoring the students right to data privacy (without selling names and email addresses) and providing them with a product experience that makes the whole process easier to navigate. Students access Scoir through their high school or can create an account directly at https://app.scoir.com/. For high schools, we offer a digital counseling experience that takes a lot of the administrative burden out of guiding students and their families through college search and admissions. It’s a really powerful platform.

I joined in April to accelerate the growth and evolution of the product side of the organization. I’m responsible for the teams that lead software engineering, data science, product management, and design.

What was it like interviewing and onboarding during a pandemic?

Fortunately, the interviewing stage was all pre-COVID. I had been commuting from West Chester to Center City every day in a similar role with Picwell. Moving to Scoir was driven by an opportunity to join a rocket ship of a startup right in my backyard.

Onboarding remotely as CTO was new territory for me. While Picwell was extremely remote friendly, I spent most days in the office. So building rapport and trust with a much larger and more rapidly growing team, while dealing with “Zoom fatigue” and related connectivity issues was a real challenge.

To better support our expanding team, we’re making a big investment in our employee pre-boarding and onboarding experiences. We want both to be low-friction, high-quality, and representative of the Scoir culture. Early feedback has been great.

How has Scoir been handling in-office vs remote work?

We are taking a very conservative approach to ensure the safety of the team, and will be full remote through at least 2020. Although we have a beautiful new office in downtown West Chester, one that the team spent significant time and energy to design and build, we’re now big believers in remote work and the benefits it can afford a company. For example, we can now engage with talent that would otherwise be out of commuting range. So that has been an upside.

Anything that you think has been really successful with keeping morale and culture up?

The investment in our onboarding experience has been, and I believe will continue to be, very important.

Our co-founders Gerry McCrory and Kevin McCloskey have also put a lot of effort into remaining in front of employees despite everyone being remote. We have a bi-weekly company “town hall” where we share all the goings on across the business and discuss how the pandemic and other events are affecting our lives.

Acknowledging the strain this pandemic has caused on folks' mental health is also really important, and the best action we can take as leaders is to encourage our team to take time off, especially during these summer months. I’m not looking forward to being trapped inside during the winter!

I know you have been hiring, what are some challenges you have faced with interviewing and on boarding new hires?

Pre-COVID, there was a natural social evaluation in the interview process. Interviewing for “culture fit”. That was usually done over lunch, beers, or some other type of social outing. Rather than replace those interactions with something else, we’ve removed it from the process completely and have focused solely on evaluating against role fit. Not only has this made the interview process more efficient, the results haven’t suffered. The new folks we’ve added to the team have all fit in great.

Any specific roles you are still looking to fill right now?

Right now we are coming to the end of a large hiring push, but we are always interested in talking with software engineers, product designers, and product managers who connect with our mission and vision. I anticipate that we will continue to see rapid growth here at Scoir!

For more information on Scoir, be sure to check out their page!