Helion Energy: Maximizing Recruiter Operations with TeamOhana

Tushar Makhija: [00:00:00] Before we show you the AI product. And, uh, I wanted to introduce Ali Yusef, uh, from Ion Energy and he heads up, uh, people and talent and he's joining. He came down here, especially from, uh, Seattle, so thanks. 

Ali Yousaf: Cool. Thank you.

All right. This on? Sweet. All right. My name is Ali. I lead the people ops and talent teams at Ion Energy. Uh, yes, I flew down from Seattle, but also. To show you how committed I am to Team Mohan, I'm very anti PowerPoints in general. My philosophy is documents and writing is how we actually deliver ideas.

And I recently did a talk, uh, early this year and I told my wife, don't ever let me sign up for another talk. We have to do a PowerPoint. So I went, Toshar reached out and said, Hey, can you talk? I was like, yes. And he goes, can I get a PowerPoint? I think I would've said no to anyone but Timana. All right. Um, okay.

This not working. You point down. [00:01:00] Ah, there we go. Okay. So first, uh, I know we're talking about Team Mohana. We talked about ai, uh, can't really have AI the way we want without a lot of energy. So I wanna touch on ion, uh, the company that I work for and what we're building really quickly. Uh, our goal is to build the world's first, uh, commercial generator off of Fusion.

Uh, so it's a power plant, uh, that we're building out in eastern Washington for Microsoft. Uh, and our goal is to deliver clean electricity to the world as part of this. We've had a lot of growth, uh, when I joined. Cool. Thank you. Uh, when I joined, we were four. We were 185 employees. We're 4 75 today and growing rapidly, uh, can't show you the exact number, but I expect that we're gonna more than double over the next year.

Uh, so just two and a half, uh, x growth in the last two years. And then across the board we're hiring hardware science, manufacturing. We're hiring for all of our corporate functions, non-exempt, like very complex workforce needs. Uh, and [00:02:00] throughout the whole time, uh, team Mohana has been the partner during my time there to help us get through this.

So for us, it's like we have mission-driven individuals that we're looking for. Uh, it's cutting edge technology and a lot of scale. So the workforce dynamics are. Uh, are complex from a planning perspective in terms of what we need and how our teams think about it. So I joined ION on August 7th, 2023. I sent a text to a former rec ops person on August 23rd, 2023 saying I need to figure out headcount planning and what's the best tool.

He said, talk to Team Mohan. On August 28th, I talked to Team Mohan and here we are. A little over two years later, but when I joined, it was very similar to Kenny. Honestly. I was hearing his presentation and I said, if I had my eyes closed, didn't know who he was speaking about. I think he was describing what happened at Heon.

We were tracking everything in Smartsheets and doing email approvals when I joined, this is something I saw in the first couple of weeks. Which meant between our rec ops team and our finance team, [00:03:00] we were spending 15 to 20% of our time every week just trying to chase down like what is actually a real headcount.

One of the first flags came to me when we had a, a director role open, uh, on the website. I said, are we hiring for this? It's like, oh, no, maybe. And as I go, what's the headcount? We don't have headcount for it. So I was like, wait, we're considering candidates for a role. That we don't even have headcount for.

Um, and it's a startup where it's like, Hey, if we get the, we will get the person, we'll end up getting the headcount. And I was like, ah, it makes me uncomfortable. I don't love it. Uh, and it was also just unclear for our recruiters, like, what should I actually be working on? What is priority? What do I, what do I think is the direction that I should be going in?

Uh, so recruiting was really spending, and it was one person spending a lot of time chasing down emails, chasing down approvals, uh, and then finance at best really didn't have a place to track it, and it was word of mouth. If they found out what was open, what wasn't. So what I needed one system that our finance and talent team could trust from the beginning.

My goal was this cannot be a talent only solution [00:04:00] and it cannot be a finance only solution. Uh, and I think that's the reason I was able to get buy-in so quickly from leadership on, Hey, let's go spend money on a tool. When you recall in 2023, I think there was a slowdown on investing in talent. Talent specific tools is like, Hey, this will help us from a finance and a talent perspective.

So why do we go with Team Ohana? I think the biggest thing was like just the shared visibility, right? Uh, like full transparency across several functions across our leadership team. We've set it up away and all of our leaders across the board know what we're hiring for everyone. Like we, we try to be a transparent company.

Uh, and it's just everyone has visibility. Like what is going on with our hiring plan? What teams are hiring, what levels, uh, what is the target compensation? And there's no question on, on what is going there. The next is, uh, real time data. I just love that. I never have to think about is this static or not?

Uh, what was approved, when was approved? What's our target start dates? Uh, what is the context and history on it? What is the comment, uh, that we, the comment history that we had? It is just so nice to have one place where like everything is stored and I'm not chasing up your [00:05:00] emails and not chasing up your slacks.

Uh, I'm not looking in sheets. It's just all in one spot. Um, that was obvious from day one. I also actually love that we can configure the workflows, especially on the approval side, to customize for what we need. We have different requirements. Our default was we don't need approvals on technical backfills, 'cause we're gonna keep hiring more engineers.

We don't want an approval chain on that. But any net new headcount that we get must go through approval up to our CEO. And I love that we were able to customize that from the beginning. Internal transfers, we wanna leave that up to hiring managers and to the PPPs. So being able to customize workflows and not be like, Hey, this is gonna be a one size fits all, where now the CEO has to approve everything or approve nothing was like another big value prop for us.

And then just like no more of that is that rec real conversation. I have not had to ask. No one has asked me that since we signed back in October of 2023. And I will tell you, as a talent leader, I will iterate it again. Throughout. This is like, it is so refreshing to have my team spend absolutely zero bandwidth on what is real headcount, what is not, and having those [00:06:00] conversations with finance.

And we can actually go and focus on the most core important part of our job, which is actually hiring roles.

Implementation. Uh, this was, this was another thing that I rave about. Uh, to this day, uh, I've implemented a handful of tools in the last four years, leading talent teams. This was the, the quickest one. Easiest one. Uh, I am. As Char knows a pretty painful customer, I'm very impatient. Uh, I think everything should be done as quickly as possible with zero errors.

Uh, and the implementation was exactly that. Uh, we were able to replace Smartsheets and email approvals right away from day one. Uh, finance and talent teams were involved in setting this up, and we've continued to improve upon that partnership in terms of how we owned it. The entire thing was built around enablement and helping our teams move faster and not adding process that slowed us down, which made it very easy to get buy-in from engineering and a lot of technical leaders.

And the last thing, it was like, it was just, it was just intuitive and simple, and we did not have a lot of pushback from anyone within the organization on the rollout. [00:07:00] So moving from Smartsheets and emails to Team Ohana, it was, it was seamless. I spent very little energy. On convincing leaders we should, we should make the change.

Why moving away from Smartsheets was, was a negative. Uh, and then the training and whatnot that the team did to set our teams up for success was also super smooth. So we were able to go from signed contract to live in less than six weeks.

Okay. So once we were live, like what has the actually been the impact? Uh, I think biggest thing is for finance. Uh, I'm gonna speak on behalf of my finance partners at Ion. Uh, maybe others can advocate for this is headcount and budget accuracy. Uh, as long as we are doing our job in team Ohana and assigning the appropriate level and making sure information is correct, finance does not need to try to guess what the cost might be from a labor perspective.

Uh, they do not spend any time reconciling requisitions. Uh, it means they have more time to ask me on why we're hiring at this level and this cost and who approved that, uh, which is different. And those are the arguments I would rather be having with the finance team than, hey, which role is coming in, which is coming out.

Uh, [00:08:00] and they can actually use it for forecasting. The last two years we've used Team Oana to, uh, for our annual planning. We are in the middle of using it right now, uh, to make sure like we are tracking our costs and we know what's coming and we're able to, uh, build that into the budget for talent team.

Uh, again, it's just. My, my recruiters really love that they have something that has clarity on like what is live and what is approved. Like I cannot stop iterating, like how important that is for a talent team. I, I'm a big believer, everything with leadership and uh, um, just leading teams. Everything comes down to clarity and expectations.

The things that talent teams care most about is like, what are the roles I'm working on? What are the priorities and when do I need to fill them by? If you can give recruiters that, that addresses like 90% of their challenges, the other 10% is getting hire managers to respond and review resumes. But, uh, I don't think anyone's built a tool that solves for that just yet.

Uh, and then. Zero bandwidth wasted on verification. Uh, I, I keep iterating that over and over, like it is just so refreshing to have, not have to spend any time on that as a talent leader. Uh, [00:09:00] and we actually just end up spending more time on hiring, more time on partnerships, uh, and strategic conversations on like, Hey, let's actually go through the prioritization of the roles that we know all are approved.

Let's go through target start dates. Let's educate hiring managers on why target state start dates are important. Um, and everything might seem urgent. Let's think about how a start date impacts budgets and timelines and how it impacts your team's ability to be able to onboard and bring in new talent. I think ultimately it has made, uh, our talent team more of a strategic partner more quickly because we're not spending administrative time talking about administrative headcount things with the, with the hiring teams.

And then this brings me back to, like, I think about if you're, if you're going to make this pitch or talk to your team about like what life without Team Mohana looks like. I can tell you, uh, these are the biggest things, which is headcount does become hard to track. And I think sometimes CFO like, oh, that's fine.

We'll figure it out. But that's actually how teams and companies end up getting bloated. 'cause now you don't have the right mechanisms in place. Uh, the ways to track headcount approvals [00:10:00] and, uh, headcount requests becomes really manual and labor intensive. So. At the end of the day, like people will default to being lazy and approving things or letting them go, and then next thing you know, you hire 25% more than you needed to and the company's gotta make some tough decisions.

Headcount is never a surprise for us. We've gotten to offer with over 300 plus candidates since I've been at Helion. Never once has it been like, was this headcount approved? It also allows you to, uh, like if, if you don't have it, you're just spending so much time, uh, managing. Headcount, right? Like I said, 20% of talent ops and finance time before I joined was going just towards tracking down spreadsheets, tracking down approvals and emails.

Uh, so what that ends up happening, as you scale and you get bigger and you have more headcount requests, you end up adding more people just to do that manual work. Uh, I think that's a pretty easy thing to calculate, right? Like take 20% of the salary of the individual working on it. That's the cost. Um, what's, what's the ROI on that plus, uh, in the, in the spirit of how do we enable teams to be more strategic?

It's giving them [00:11:00] time back to actually go work on the impactful things and not tracking things down. And the last thing is, we all know with hiring, like you have to be able to move quickly. If you're at a startup or a company that's growing and scaling and you have aggressive hiring plans, missing hiring targets means you're actually missing timelines and milestones and deadlines.

And when you don't have a good way to track that and you have, don't have shared visibility and alignment, you delay starting hires by 5, 6, 7, 10 days, sometimes several weeks. Because you're just trying to figure out like, do we hire for this? What are we supposed to hire for? When do we hire, who's responsible for it?

You skip all that with Team Oana and actually you just go into, let's go get this role hired. So what have been some of the results for us? I don't have the nice metrics, uh, like Kenny did, but I think speaking to that, uh, our recruiters are using realtime. Uh, they're managing realtime data, not spreadsheets.

Uh, everyone's actually focused on hiring. Uh, I just love, actually this morning I was in a thread with a recruiter on a role that we have right now. We had some questions on it. We went back and checked in Team [00:12:00] Mohana. What was the level we aligned on? What was the common history on why we picked this level?

It's like, oh, great, we have all of that here. What might've been something that's done over a couple days was literally a seven minute conversation that I did, uh, during breakfast this morning. Super easy for us to get through that. The other thing is hiring managers see status instantly so they know exactly what they're recruiting for, what's live, uh, what they're supposed to be prioritizing.

There's none of us chase. It's one thing to chase down HMS for again, resume reviews, submitting feedback. But adding in the layer of having to chase down, like headcount, headcount requests or like what's going on there, they don't have to do that all zero time. Uh, and I do think it's like very clear accountability.

We approve this headcount on this date, it was ready to hire. I can go back to my talent team and hold 'em accountable. How long did it take us from the time we open, we said the role was ready to hire Until we open the role that helps hold the team accountable to making sure like we are actioning quickly.

Once headcount is approved and live. And then the second piece is it actually we can track how quickly we're moving through hiring candidates. Team Oana shows that data as well. [00:13:00] Uh, and I think ultimately it comes back to there's just the same source of truth. Everyone is talking the same language, uh, from the same book.

There's no question like, where do we go to, uh, we call it to internally, we call it Ohana. It's just like, it is, it is a key part of our tech stack that helps us all stay aligned, uh, and focus on the right things. And then the, the real metric for me, and the only one I think that matters for me is like 2.5 x growth in the last two plus years, and I'm not exaggerating, zero hours spent across talent, finance, leadership on what is real headcount.

No one has asked me that question since I joined. Uh, and I hope that's one question that I, I never hear again in my, uh, in my recruiting career.

And then just, just closing on how I think about, uh, AI's impact on workforce planning. And this is really more of a, more of an ask for or a live, uh, product, uh, request for, for Shar and the team. Uh, and it goes from an order of, uh, I think what's most feasible to, [00:14:00] to probably a little bit harder, but I would, I would love an AI agent that proactively starts managing start dates for us based on, uh, the health of the pipeline.

Team Mohan already has access, talks to Greenhouse, which is another reason I love it from an integration perspective. Uh, and my guess is can probably see how our hiring, uh, how pipeline is, uh, what are our historical passthrough rates. So based on that, I know we're getting like, Hey, here's suggested start dates, but start adjusting the start dates for me.

Instead of me having like, well that's one of the biggest pain points for me personally, like how do we continue to like go in and manually update start dates? What if we had an agent that just does that for you? It's identified based on historical roles you've hired for, based on where the pipeline's at today, your pass rates, uh, where we actually move this start date out for you by 15 days.

That would, that would be an amazing workflow. Next is actually would love it as it sees. Uh, teams continuing to grow, uh, it starts to actually recommend headcount for you. An example of this that we're going through with 2026 planning is one of our managers was in their scenario, they submitted 20 C 20 [00:15:00] ic, individual contributor headcounts.

Uh, and we're going through the plan and then, uh, our CEO actually flags me. There's zero manager headcount in here. In my head, I'm thinking, man, I am not being a great partner because I should have caught that. My CEO should not be catching that. What would be better for me is Team Oana. The agent just says, Hey, you should add two managers to support this.

Or, Hey, ion has a standard of, uh, this is span of control for managers to add this headcount. Or the fact that you hired P three senior engineers maybe wanna start bouncing out, like gimme recommendations. Uh, and then the last thing is actually like. Start, start mapping out what an ideal, uh, org chart or workforce looks like, or let me feed a context on, here are our goals.

Here's what we need to do to grow. Here's what it looks like. And based on that, it's like, this is what I think your org should look like. This is how much you should hire. This is when you should hire. I would love a future where, like you give it as much context as possible. Uh, you, you fine tune it with the things that are important for your business, the goals that you have.

And based on that, it actually suggests an entire scenario for you. Like, this is what you need to go out and do. So then we're spending even less time [00:16:00] on the things that Team Mohan makes easy today and enables us to go do more of the strategic work. And then what I'll close with is I always ask people, like, I do reference calls sometimes, right?

Uh, but I always close with like if I was in a position where it's like, Hey, you're the head of talent. You only get to pick one tool. Every other tool someone else gets to pick for you, your a TS, your HRS, whatever it is, what are you gonna pick? For me? The, the answer is always team Oana. Because with that, at least I have clarity on what I'm working on and everything else.

Like I can make it work. All right. Q and a.

Yes. 

Guest 1: Ali, what do you do with this extra time? Now we got on your hand. 

Ali Yousaf: Oh man. I think, could I sit up here and say, having Team Oana enabled me to go take on the people off scope? I don't know. Yeah. 

Guest 1: And then follow up, uh, in terms of, you mentioned about accountability, considering now you have data to back you up in terms of.[00:17:00] 

Time to hire, et cetera. Uh, did you see efficiency increase? I know in the past you've managed through spreadsheets, but how did you see that shift happening, uh, in productivity, time to hire efficiency? For your team. 

Ali Yousaf: Yeah, so I think time to hire and time to fill has actually continued to get more challenging for us.

But that's not a team Moana challenge. That is just the nature of our business where we are going for more senior, more technical talent, and we are asking a lot of them to move to the Seattle area. So that, that's been, that's been a separate challenge. What I have seen is our time to get a headcount approved.

Yeah. Uh, and get it ready to hire and actually go live has increased or decreased significantly. I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, uh, but I'd say like when we are follow process and we're consistent with that, we can go from headcount submitted to can approve rec live in less than seven days, like very consistently across several stakeholders, several approvers.

This is going from. Uh, the, the submitting team, uh, finance team, CEO approval, uh, actually getting the rec in greenhouse and getting through [00:18:00] approvals on getting the role posted can all happen in less than a week. 

Guest 1: And then one more follow up, 

Ali Yousaf: please. Yep. 

Guest 1: In terms of your CFO asking you next year, how would you define ROI for team Mohana to continue to invest in this?

How do you see that? 

Ali Yousaf: Uh, I think there's a handful of things. I mean, we're at a size now where the cost of our headcount, like our, our budget spend on headcount is so large. That I would basically tell 'em like, Hey, we either go hire someone at, uh, I don't know, you wanna hire a good workforce planning manager paying, you're paying like 1 50, 200 plus, right?

At least we go hire them to manage that for a tens of millions dollar budget headcount. Or we use a tool, uh, that we have, uh, that we have a good deal with, uh, with Tema on, on, I think. I think that's one way. The other is just quantifying like. Go talk to your FBNA manager who's been working on our 2026 plan where we're getting ready for exponential growth, and tell me how we would've managed that if we weren't working out of a tool like Team Oana.

How much of that time would've taken? It's already taken a lot of time because of the scale of growth we have, but if we were working out of something that isn't [00:19:00] Team Oana, how much time would we have lost there? Thank you. Anyone else? Yes. Yeah, 

Guest 2: I like a call out on using it for annual planning. I'm curious, do you reference back to, okay, we've decided for this year, these are the goals we're hiring for when they're starting.

How often do you kind of reference back to your source to see like, are we on track? Are we off track? Are we like getting to what we need to know? 

Ali Yousaf: Yeah, so, uh, I think some of this comes down to like. The, I think we did a really good job of this the first seven or eight months of the year, whereas I was consistently doing monthly check-ins.

Uh, really the, I guess from October, 2023, up until June of 2025, I was doing monthly check-in with leaders. Like, this was your approved plan, these were your target hard dates. Let's adjust them. What should we move or still, are these still the right priorities? Uh, and then I think this summer. Nothing on Team Mo Honda, but like from us, we just, our scale just went hyper, right?

So we have not done as good a job of that. And now we're reconciling everything [00:20:00] in prep for 2026. But we have good controls in place where there'll be a monthly sync starting in 2026 between finance and talent to audit. What was our headcount plan? How are we trending against it? What do we need to change?

Uh, planning to do quarterly check-ins with the leaders on this. Was the plan that you submitted, does that still check out? And that'll all be in Team Mohana. And then, uh. We haven't committed to this at all as a whole, but I do think it's like there'll be a refresh in June or July about halfway through the year and like, does this overall hiring plan still make sense for what we need for the rest of the year?

Uh, but it has been great. It has been great when I'm following process and actually holding myself accountable to like, Hey, this was the start day we had, these were the priorities, how these shifted. Uh, and when you do that, like it makes it easy 'cause you're updating it and you can see when things change.

Uh, a good example of that is actually a role that we had last year. Um, I came back, I was like, Hey, this is a super hot priority. What's going on with it? And I was like, uh, I, I don't think it is. I literally can go back into the team Ohana history and see that we went through our exercise and this was marked as a normal priority role.

So that's why the team hasn't pushed on it as much as the others.[00:21:00] 

Anyone else?

Right. Thank you.

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