Recruiting Top Talent is Product Management

Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal, discusses how remote work improves employee retention, leads to more productive teams, and allows companies to draw from a larger talent pool.

Taso Du Val, CEO at Toptal, holds a longstanding belief that some of the best tech talent exists outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.

He saw it firsthand when he was a software engineer himself, and when he had to work with software developers overseas.

“Most people then, and somewhat still now, believe the best software developers reside in Silicon Valley. To say that’s the only place where good software developers reside? I knew that was not true from my own experiences,” he says. “In fact, the best software developers I had worked with are actually all from Eastern Europe.”

Determined to prove to other people what he already knew, he founded Toptal, a company that connects organizations to freelance software engineers, designers, developers, and product managers across the globe.

Taso, unsurprisingly, holds some fairly forward-thinking opinions on the nature of work. If you ask him, remote work should be the new normal. “You save lots of money, you retain better talent, and you’re able to acquire better talent. There’s almost no reason not to do it.”

Talent can be found anywhere, he says, and companies shouldn’t limit themselves by geography, or they’ll be limiting the organization’s retention, efficiency, and growth.

In this episode, you’ll learn a lot about remote work, recruiting strategies, and predictions for the future of work.

Here are the highlights: 

• Some of the hiring challenges facing employers today (3:50)
• Where Taso sees the remote work trend heading (6:17)
• Toptal’s best practices for hiring and managing distributed teams (8:39)
• How the strategy differs when hiring remote vs. on-site teams (11:24)
• What will the future of product management look like? (13:32)