Alina Vandenberghe
Chili Piper
Alina Vandenberghe co-founded Chili Piper in 2016, building a meeting scheduling platform now used by Rippling, Gong, Monday, and PandaDoc. A decade later, her company has achieved something rare: employees who turn down recruiting offers, sometimes double their current salary, because they don’t want to leave. The secret isn’t perks. It’s radical transparency about decisions, salaries, and the work itself.
Vandenberghe’s approach to leadership traces back to her childhood in Romania, watching factory workers and agricultural laborers treated poorly. She became obsessed with a question: How do you get people to work hard without coercion?
Force works in the short term. Threatening a child with chocolate to get them out the door. Threatening an employee with layoffs to hit a number. But force creates scars. It builds resentment. It doesn’t scale.
The alternative is intrinsic motivation. Knowing what actually energizes a person and structuring their work around that. At Chili Piper, this isn’t theoretical. It shapes how she hires, how she manages, and why people stay.
I wanted to figure out how to get people to be energized by their work without force. It’s really hard to get that. In some ways I think I’ve nailed it. In some ways not so much.
Alina Vandenberghe, Chili Piper
Interviews are theater. Candidates prepare answers. They say what they think you want to hear. “Yes, I’m so motivated. Sales is my passion.”
Vandenberghe looks past the script. She watches how a person leans in. She looks for light in their eyes. She asks detailed questions about day-to-day work because if someone lights up talking about the work itself, they’ll perform.
This isn’t pseudoscience. It’s pattern recognition. She’s had candidates quit her own team saying “I just don’t have that fire in my belly anymore.” She respects that honesty. Better they leave than stay miserable.
I look a lot more at body language than what they’re telling me. I ask about day-to-day work because if it brings them joy, they’re more likely to do well.
Alina Vandenberghe, Chili Piper
Chili Piper doesn’t hide salary bands. They don’t hide pricing decisions or roadmap direction. Employees can see every major call the company makes. They can influence any decision. If something bothers them, they can take action.
This eliminates the biggest driver of job hopping: the feeling that your employer is hiding something, optimizing for profit at your expense, or leaving money on the table for you.
When a Chili Piper employee gets poached with a higher offer, they tell Vandenberghe about it. Not because they’re considering it. Because they want her to know the market has shifted. She then adjusts salary bands based on that data. The employee wins. The company wins. It’s not zero-sum.
Everything is transparent and everything can be influenced by them. So if something bothers them, they can take action. It no longer feels like a cog in the machine.
Alina Vandenberghe, Chili Piper
Vandenberghe has reinvented herself multiple times. Engineer. Founder. CMO (by her own admission, the hardest job she’s had). She’s done this by hiring the same profile over ten years: people who are extremely curious and extremely self-sufficient.
Curiosity compounds in a remote-first, distributed team. Remote work requires people who can figure things out without constant supervision. Curious people do that naturally. They ask questions. They dig in. They adapt.
This matters more in 2024 than it did in 2016. As AI tooling proliferates, the ability to learn, experiment, and reinvent becomes more valuable than the specific skill you were hired to do.
Chili Piper has a Slack channel called “Automate Everything.” Employees post soul-sucking, repetitive tasks they don’t enjoy. Developers volunteer to build solutions using code, AI agents, or existing tools. It’s organic. It’s not mandated.
Why would a developer spend time automating someone else’s busywork? Because when the company promotes people, it looks for proof of innovation. The automation channel is a playground for building the kind of work that gets you promoted.
The result: automation doesn’t feel like a threat. It feels like capacity expansion. A customer success person isn’t replaced. They stop doing data entry and start owning relationships. Their leverage comes from their humanity. The AI handles the grunt work.
This only works because Vandenberghe sets expectations upfront. New hires at Chili Piper know the company is aggressively automation-focused. They’re not surprised. They participate. They see their role evolving toward higher-leverage work, not disappearing.
When they come in, they start with that promise that we’re very strong operationally. As we move towards automation, their leverage comes from their humanity. There’s no layoffs per se. It’s an expansion of their capacities with the aid of agents.
Alina Vandenberghe, Chili Piper
Chili Piper is fully remote. Yet Vandenberghe’s best hiring channel is in-person conversation at industry events. This seems contradictory until you understand what she’s actually optimizing for.
On video, people perform. In person, at a conference, away from a microphone, people relax. They’re more authentic. They admit what they’re struggling with. They talk about what they’re actually good at versus what they think you want to hear.
Vandenberghe doesn’t work a target list. She doesn’t walk into Pavilion or similar conferences with a checklist of open roles. She networks with people the industry considers extraordinary in their domain. She has conversations. She learns from them. She offers value. Sometimes, months or years later, she circles back: “We’re opening this role. Would you be interested?”
This requires patience and genuine curiosity. Both traits she models. It also requires hiring distributed talent globally, which expands the pool considerably.
We don't have a big brother kind of culture where anything that they do gets monitored at all. Whatever they get the results on, that's part of the way they get motivated. They can see every decision that we make and they can impact any decision that we have around pricing, around packaging, around road map. Everything is transparent and everything can be influenced by them. So, if something bothers them, they can take action, which is like unique. It no longer feels like a cog in the machine. It no longer feels like you're part of a culture that belongs to someone else. It's something that you're in it and you can impact, so it's just very different.
Has that changed now with AI? Um I'm Louis sent and this is who we hire. Today's guest, co-founded Chili Piper in 2016. A decade later, Chili Piper serves Rippling Gong Monday PandaDoc and thousands more. Alina Vandenberg, welcome to Who We Hire. The pleasure is all mine. Alina, thanks so much for being here. It was so fun preparing because you're everywhere. So, you know, rather than asking the same questions you've answered, I want to dig deeper um into into a lot of places especially into like, you know, what what moves people. So, you know, I was watching the podcast where you were on with Brian Drancko and you said that ever since you were little, you were curious about what moves people and, you know, how they make decisions and you talked about wanting to become a leader specifically so you could treat people better than you saw your parents being treated. They were, you know, factory workers in Romania, you had friends in agriculture and that they weren't being treated well. So, when did you feel like you had actually done that at Chili Piper? I think that one thing that's kind of through my experience in coming in as Romania stood out and I wanted to rectify was the idea that in order to get people to do something, you need to force them. And if you ever had children and you try to wrangle your way out of the door in time for school or for any activity, you know that getting someone to do something is really difficult. Forcing people is effective like short-term sure. You can threaten your kids with chocolate with all sorts of things like that and if you run out of time it's it's a methodology that that we all rely on to be effective. Yet, I'm finding that it's the kind of method that creates most trauma and most most scars. So, I went on a journey to figuring out how do you get energy and how do you get people to be energized by by their work without force. Well, it turns out that it's a complicated formula. It's really hard to get that. I would say that in some ways I think that I've nailed some parts in some ways not so much. I think that for instance as an example with my kids what really works all the time is playful creativity. So, always invent a little game in which we're like all sorts of I don't know we're defending we're defending the planet. We're going after monsters on the on the corridor. There's always
for like clean up time? For clean up time. And the playful creativity can only come when your brain feels less tired when you feel less oppressed when there's room for your creativity. But, that's not always available. What's available is intrinsic motivation. If you know the human really well and you know what motivates them and what gets them to come to work every day for instance at your paper then you use that intrinsic motivation to be able to get the results. And it's a complex puzzle. I I would say that in some by some metrics we've managed to do it but there's still a lot for me to learn to do it better. I I love it. Yeah, it's a constant evolution. How do you like find that in the interview process? How do you really find that intrinsic motivation during an interview without working with them, without, you know, being next to them? I would say it's really hard because we are training the interview process to show our best self and we say, "Yes, we're so motivated and our work is so exciting and we've always wanted to be in sales or we always wanted to be in customer support or whatever the function it is that we are hiring for." Um so the words that come out of people's mouths might be the right ones, but I look a lot more at body language than with what they're telling me. Um and a lot of I ask a lot of questions about the day-to-day work because I know that if the day-to-day work is exciting for them and it brings them joy, then they're more likely to do well. Um so I look at how they're leaning in, like their uh light in their eyes, um whether they still have the fire inside or not. And again, it's a lot more on body uh uh reading their body language than than the words themselves. Love it. Um we we we literally had somebody quit our sales team saying, "I just don't have that fire in my belly anymore." They told our head of go-to-market that and it was like, "That's That's great. That's what we want, right? If they don't have that fire in their belly, it's okay. It's um you know, and yeah, identifying that in the interview process is is definitely uh difficult and and I think I I heard you talk about light in eyes before, passion for the role. And it's hard, right? A genuine passion, you know, versus somebody who just really wants a job and is a good interviewer. Um you know, and and you said on the What Makes You Tick podcast that everything you do comes back to seeking joy. And you know, joy it means something different to everyone. So how do you identify that? Like how do they have joy in in the the day-to-day tasks and role? Like you know, are they jumping up and down and filling out their CRM? Like what? What what does that mean to you? There's a this book that left an imprint on me. It's called Love and Work. And Love and Work? Love and Work. And the idea is that I mean it's it starts with a simple premise is that if you love what you do, then you're never work a day in your life. Yet it's a difficult um it's really difficult to figure out for each one of us what parts of our work are the ones that are very unique to our skill set. It's It's very difficult to identify what has the most impact. And I'm finding that for every role if you try to put somebody in a box. And so for instance, let's say a CMO, which is my who I target and I know best. For a CMO they're required to know so many things. They're required to know very well operations and be like a good architect of strategies. They're required to be a really good manager. They're required to be really creative to be able to stand out. Uh to be really good at so many channels and at distribution at positioning, at at content. It's like such a wide, diverse, broad skill set. It's impossible to find it in one person. It's just impossible.
Yeah. And you would know, you've done it, right? You acted as a as a spy and and became a became a CMO. And it was super freaking difficult because while I consider myself good at certain things like at engineering and then building things. Um And so so so many things just didn't come naturally to me. And finding how people kind of gravitate and learning more about where they're what are the kind of activities that bring them most energy and have the greatest impact, the most leverage. Cuz it's very tempting to do the stuff that you find easy to do, that like be just busy work. That's what everybody kind of tends to go when when they're not feeling safe. So I would say it's a combination of making sure that our employees feel safe and honest about the kind of things that bring them energy that have the biggest leverage and working with them on that. Um making them feel a lot more transparent. Okay, this thing I really hate. Can we bring somebody to help me on this cuz it's just draining me or it weakens me. Um and it's hard for people to admit that because they've been conditioned through their evolution to think, if I'm weak at something things, then I'm going to be vulnerable. And at work especially, I cannot admit that I have these cracks where I'm actually not not figuring it out. Um So, I I would say it's a constant back and forth of building trust and having people feel comfortable of identifying the weak the the things that are drain and the things that are energetic. And has that changed now with AI? I mean, you know, it's a different world than when you launched 10 years ago. Is it easier for people to say, "Hey, like I can use AI to do this part of my job?" On one side, yes. On another side, not so much. I would say that for instance, I use cloud code a lot and I've running different MCP servers on one computer and on another one. Um it can do so much and you can externalize so many of the tasks. The problem is that it can feel really overwhelming because you think, "Oh, this one this task only takes me like 5 minutes now instead of 8 hours, so I'm going to do so many of those tasks." But when you're trying to cognitively manage so many things all at once, it becomes really overwhelming and I think um so, it really requires another human around you to remind you what you're really good at, where you have most leverage, focus on that, don't focus on on trillion things. Um I would say an important partnership with with someone in the team is critical. Yeah, I read I read your LinkedIn post today where you you said you're, you know, solving six hard problems now instead of just one and, you know, it's AI doesn't get tired, but we do. So, it's figuring out how to leverage it best for sure. It's uh Um so, going back to like hiring filters, you've reinvented yourself multiple times across countries, industries, roles. We just talked about, you know, you becoming CMO at at Chili Piper to really understand and you said it was the the hardest job you've had. Um in terms of like reinvention, you know, is it more important now than ever? And you know, like have that changed when you were recruiting your first 10 folks and to now when you're, you know, hiring your 100th person? I'm assuming that the the kind of profile that we used to hire 10 years ago still stands even these days. And the reason why it still stands is because we hire people that are extremely curious and extremely self-sufficient. And when you have curiosity towards something that you fear, the likelihood of you grasping and understanding a lot more is higher than someone who just looks at it from outside and waits for things to happen or for people to go in a certain direction before you act. Um It it it's really difficult. So, I would say that we still have the same fundamentals in place where we hire people that are extremely curious um and extremely self-motivated because it curiosity these days is still continues to be the most important part in in in any role. Yeah, curiosity. It's uh is that back from your your Steve Jobs days where when he featured your app on on the iPad? Uh the So, in addition to that, you've done something I think different than than most founders that I know and work with. And you know, I I've spent the last two and a half years trying to get our values from something that I believed in to something that we actually hire and parted ways by but you've had your values written from day one on ChiliPiper and so like how do you get them functional faster than most founders do and and you know, how did you do that? I would say that the values didn't come from what I believe that I needed to do rather than how myself are operating so it feels very natural to me it doesn't feel like I need to impose anything it's just how I function and um as a result I don't have I don't need a reminder of how we need to hire or how we make decisions um yet the more we enforce it gets because I'm the one who like does the things from the front um myself I'm the one who runs things with MCP servers I'm the one who goes and meets customers I'm not on a pedestal I'm not in a glass room somewhere um I'm in the front lines as well helps me understand what needs to be done and helps me be closer to the problems and I think that's probably the main reason why it continues to be in the in the waves of of of the culture. I love that so it's more than writing them down it's having leadership actually embody them and live them and you know, making that very visible. Mhm. Mhm. What when do you introduce the values in interview process? Is it you know, from the first interview or is it during you know, you're about to make an offer like how how does that work during the interview process? It's funny but I don't do like a session on them on this is our values but because I hire for these values those people are representatives of those things without even realizing that they are representing our values so for instance, one of the things that we test a lot for is a value that we call help, which is how happy you are and how much energy you get by helping others. And the reason why we hire for that is because you get really brilliant people that learn to be really good individual contributors, but they're very separated and they consider themselves very separated from the world. And in those cases, they tend to hoard things, they tend to keep things for themselves, and then everybody else feels neglected. And it's really hard to create like a good team culture and movement when one is is really isolated. So, I pay a lot of attention, does this person get joy when they help others? And are they just trying to give me the answers that I want to hear, or is it really genuine? Wow. Yeah, you you mentioned you know, if they want to leave the world a better place, they're going to leave Chili Piper a better place. And you know, that that was so impactful, gave me goosebumps uh listening to that where that that's exactly who we want on our teams. Um you know, and it was funny on the the What Makes You Tick podcast, they got you to admit that you may have some alien roots. Uh but you learned a human operating language. So, I I I love that framing. Um what what is the human operating language when it comes to building a high-performing team? Well, to to give some context for those that have not listened to the podcast. So, for me it was really really difficult to Oh. interact with with humans for a very long time. And the reason for it is because um I was So, I I I grew up in Romania. I would have probably been uh labeled as autistic growing up because I really didn't enjoy interacting with humans at all. I would just love being with my computers and be left alone. And I felt like computers were a lot more predictable. I would give them an input, they'd give me output, input, output, and I had some control, at least some seeming control over it. Whereas with humans, there were like very a lot of randomness. So, I stayed away from them until uh until as much as I could. I would never imagine that today. Like you you you're just so outgoing and you know, you're always traveling. You're always so, you know, in very you live a public life. So, it's uh I would never imagine that. Yeah, I I know it's hard to deduct that from from my current uh ex- behavior, but in the past I I I used to be very different. I I used to be extremely avoidant of contact and of engagement. And until I went to this uh event that's done by this foundation that do events everywhere that they teach on communication um for 10 days. I would do a lot of practice cuz it's one thing to read a book about how humans function and it's another thing to constantly do practice for 12 hours a day where you uh imagine conflicts that you have with people and you just try to uh try to see it from their angle, try to understand how they make decisions. And this like 10-day intensive training got me out uh from like an extreme introvert to someone who now enjoys uh human interaction. Yeah. Wow, that that's incredible. The I mean, you know, so you can develop that. You can go and develop the the the skills for uh you know, wanting to to like I I I talked to um it was Rand Fishkin a a week ago and you know, he mentioned like he didn't want to be a CEO. Like he didn't want to go and, you know, develop the the those skills to go manage a, you know, two 300 person company. Um so, you know, with with with with that it's interesting. Now, the remote first, uh but your best channel's in person. That's what you said to Andy on Whispered Hiring. Um you know, you're a fully remote company, but your best recruiting channel, your best channel for hiring people is in person. I I couldn't believe the contradiction. So, like walk me through what that actually looks like um you know, for a first-time founder with no network, no conference presence, like how do they go and borrow your playbook? I would say that I'm getting a lot more um good at identifying talent in person than I had at the beginning. So, what has changed for me is that for industry events, for the personas that we're targeting, I talked to a lot of customers and I talked to a lot of prospects and what I noticed is that they're a lot more likely to be who they are in person without when the cameras are not recording, when there's no no taker, and when they're fully who they are, you learn more about them than you could in a Zoom call. Um and the more transparent they are with themselves on the type of things that they do well, on the type of thing that they're still struggling, the more I lean in because I know that they're self-aware and I know that they've and a lot of cycles thinking about what's um what's true to them. And those for me are the best kind of candidates. Um they've gone through enough self-reflection to understand what are their strengths uh and they're open about it. And the fact that someone talks honestly with me about those kind of things, like for me it's like a green flag and I dig in right in. So, like what what what does that look like? Let's pretend I'm, you know, going to Pavilion go-to-market in New York later this year and, you know, I want to hire a CMO. Am I, you know, going with a target list and saying, "Hey, I want to meet all these CMOs?" Or am I, you know, doing it a little more covertly and, you know, just uh you know, trying to understand if I like this person and saying, "Hey, I could work with them. Let me find a place for them, you know, in our marketing team." I would say that that would be really difficult if I would do that. Um I never have like a specific target. I know that things are going to be ever-evolving. I just like to meet as many people as I can that their peers consider to be extraordinary in certain things. So, I don't have like a target I'm going to hire for this role I'm hiring for this role. I just like to be exposed to really smart people and when the right time comes through a long-term relationship then I can I can consider to tap them and hey, we're opening this role. Would you be interested to kind of be part of it and then we can start a discussion. I love that. Are are you expecting them to keep in touch throughout the process or are you, you know, proactively reconnecting and always you know, on the lookout for top talent to join the team? I I don't have an expectation for them to follow up with me. I don't imagine that none of us has the time on that front. I do tend to when I notice someone who's really strong, I tend to um continue the conversation in terms of digging in more on a topic. I get them on a call, hey, how are you solving for that? More of a learning experience for both me and them. Like what am I seeing? What are they seeing? Um and then through this kind of conversation then I learn a lot more about what really drives them. I learn more about my own industry. Maybe I teach them something. Maybe I can give them an interaction but the the continuation for for me for the discussion is learning and making it win-win for both sides. Um and it usually that's how I get to know a lot of people. I love the perspective on that and you know, there's there's there's so much value from thinking like that. Like it's not a a a zero-sum game. Um you know, both parties need to win. So, Mhm. And and we can all learn like you know, when we're interviewing and taking we learn something from this person, right? Uh if we don't learn any anything from this this interview process or it's very clear they're not going to really work here. Um so, you know, moving from that, you you talk about um you know, AI a lot. Now, you're VC-funded, you've raised money at uh $46 million, I I think today. Um, you know, so you're getting pressure from the board in terms of the increased ARR per per employee. Why why does Why doesn't it look like lovable uh or Cursor? So, like, how do you think about hiring now? Are you, you know, before you can go and make a hire, are you saying, "Hey, can an AI agent do this? Can we do, you know, more with less? Does everything need to go through AI before you go and and and make a hire?" Or like, how does that evolve in the last year or two? So, I would say that my ARR per employee is pretty good. I even though we've had a good ARR per employee from the beginning because we have talent everywhere in so many good countries where where the base is not as high as Silicon Valley as it is for many of these AI startups. And in addition, um we've never over-hired, so we don't have surplus plus that like many other companies like Square recently had to let go of of so many people. Yeah, 5,000, right? Yeah, it's and it's going to probably continue in the space that a lot of these these movements are going to happen. Yet, um what I'm noticing is that our employees are We've hired people that are very technical and they love to dig into things. We have like a Slack channel where they can automate everything. They put requests for soul-sucking tasks and there's always a volunteer that loves to play with uh with a tool to kind of wipe code or solve for that the thing. So, we're very efficient operations-wise, I would say, more than 99.99% of the companies already. So, when we're bringing someone in, it has to be someone so good that they can have such a big impact on our operations and how we function. Um that is These days is becoming harder and harder for us to hire, I would say, because of that. That That's an amazing standard to to have set. And wait, did you say it's called a a soul-sucking task is the soul-sucking task Is that what the channel is called? Automate everything. Automate Automate everything. I love it. So, team members can go and request for developers to go and automate a soul-sucking task that they don't get joy from doing. That's correct. Yeah. We started it about 3 years ago and we let it kind of grow organically. And the reason why people volunteer for these kind of things is because in the um uh when we promote somebody, they have to show proof of innovation, that cool stuff that they've been building. So, they go to that channel for inspiration of things that they can do. So, it's an organic channel. And it goes back to what you were saying about, you know, finding people who enjoy helping others uh and and, you know, then they get promoted based on that. That's That's brilliant. I think a lot of founders can go and borrow somebody's ideas here. The So, um have you been able to like fully replace any roles with AI? I would say for us it's always been about to trying to automate as much as we can. So, people when they come into Chili Pipery, they start with that promise that we're very strong operationally and we work around automating as much as we can. So, even though like a CS person might We might say, "Hey, we want to replace this role for like SMBs because it just takes so long to do those repetitive tasks to onboard someone." Everybody comes in with that understanding. So, there's no resistance to those automation AI or you're replacing my role. They are participants in that and they see how the role is evolving towards doing the kind of things that are critical to the business where they can leverage the relationships that they're building. So, there's no resistance to it. And as we're moving towards automation, they um I I would say that their leverage comes from their humanity. And there's no layoffs per se. It's more of a expansion of their capacities with the aid of agents. It's It's It's difficult I would say for for all of us to kind of get to grasp on what can be automated and what not. Um but it's a it's an interesting puzzle. Yeah, it's brilliant. You know, let's do more of what makes us human and, you know, automate, like you said, the parts that don't bring us joy and um e- even if it does bring you joy, maybe, you know, it it's more effective for a robot to go and and and do this. And, you know, we're we're we're looking at that as well, but it's like what we haven't been as focused on introducing that like in interview process and saying, "Hey, we're, you know, we're looking to automate as as much as we can." Like we we've automated inbound applicants, um you know, to test for their English level, um cuz we we hire in Latin America. So, to test for English level, it was taking our recruiters probably like, you know, 30-40 hours a month. And now we're we're able to automate that. And they they can spend, you know, time with candidates have better English, and we can send resources to the ones that don't. So, um you know, really good point on on sharing the sharing that beforehand to to make sure that, um you know, they're bought in and they're excited about that kind of thing. Um so, I I I love that. Thank you. Um so, you know, I I as we start wrapping up, I you know, the one of the most like I was really excited to talk to you because you have the culture that nobody wants to leave. So, back in 2019, I was a first-time VP of Sales at Mailshake. Um it's a sales engagement software. Competes with like Outreach, SalesLoft, and uh our CEO, Sujan Patel, told me, "Go and recruit, right?" So, I'm first-time VP of Sales trying to go recruit. And I was doing a pretty decent job, but, you know, every time I would ping a Chili Piper AE, nobody would even want to take a call. Um you know, and and just last week I saw our head of go-to-market, now LatAm Sales, and trying to poach from Chili Piper in Latin America. I told him, "Look, don't waste your LinkedIn credits. They're not going anywhere. Even if we could offer them more money, they're not going to leave. I've already experienced this. Um Alina, how do you build that? How How How did you do this? Well, it's good to hear that they refused the the offers. They tell me they tell me that they're getting poached for sometimes double the money and so forth. So, we have a very
even take the call. They're like, "No, I'm happy. I'm I'm not I'm not No reason to leave." The reason The reason why they're open about it and the reason why they're probably a lot more resistant than most is because of so many transparent policies that we have that allow them to make really good decisions in this case. So, I'll I'll give you some examples. Um So, we don't have a big brother kind of culture where anything that they do gets monitored at all. It's They get the results whatever they get the results on that that's part of their um the way they get more motivated. And for them, that's amazing, especially for those that have kids. They can go whenever they want to spend time with at lunchtime or whatever that is. Or if they feel more inspiration in the evening to create things, then then it's that's their time. Um obviously, they can be wherever they want. They can be in beautiful Medellin where you are. And like explore the world and that's a beautiful perk, I would say. In addition, they can see every decision that we make and they can impact any decision that we have around pricing, around packaging, around road map. Um everything is transparent and anything can be influenceable by them. So, if something bothers them, they can take action, which is like unique. Um and I would say that another thing we do around our salaries is market-based. So, we adjust our salary bands depending on what the market data gives us. So, for them, if they're being poached with a higher salary, then we take that into consideration how we look at the data. So, for us, it's an interesting data point. Oh, then if the market values you that much, should we look at the way we look at our bands and should we make some adjustments? So, for them, they get excited to tell us, "Hey, I'm being poached for that much." Because then for us, it's like good information to have and adjust our our how how we look at the market adjustments and so forth. So, um because everything is so transparent and everything can be impacted by them, it no longer feels like a cog in the machine. It no longer feels like you're part of a culture that belongs to someone else. It's something that you're in it and you can impact, so it's just very different. Yeah, and I mean you're about to have a you know, a chili fest in New Mexico, right? Coming up in in in 2 months and a you know, I I watched a video where you know, your your co-founder and husband, he's on on stage and you know, it's it's it's a vibe. It's a whole vibe. Everybody can be whoever they want, which makes it for very big personalities to come out, you know. That's incredible. Alina Van Ember thanks so much for being on the Who We Hire show and for sharing more about your wonderful culture that you built at Chili Piper. A if folks want to find you, where where should they go? On your LinkedIn is the only safe place to be these days. Well, why why is that? It's because people are a lot more cautious when they share things. They don't try to do things just to trigger people. They do it with more thought process behind posting things. That is very true when you're when your personal and your company brand and you can't really remain anonymous. It removes the anonymity. It's it's definitely a safer place to be. More civil, yeah. Alina, thank you so much. Really a pleasure speaking with you and learning more about you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Darius, and thank you for bringing me joy reminding me that people don't want to leave. I sometimes forget, you know, I'm so caught in through the forest that sometimes I don't see the trees, so it's beautiful that you reminded me of it. Well, there you have it. Who We Hire.
