People & DEI in Organizations: Q&A with Lori Golden, Director of Talent Acquisition

“People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps.” – Mary Kay Ash, who founded a cosmetics company in 1963 that’s earned more than $1.2 billion in sales since inception.

According to Forbes, companies with a strong cultural mix and a pool of diversity experience a 4x increase in their revenue growth as compared to the companies with a homogeneous workforce. People constitute the core foundation of any organization. Nurturing talent and supporting their physical and mental well-being is not just good for employees. It improves the workforce’s overall likability towards its organization, thereby directly impacting and improving business efficiency and productivity. At Ocrolus, we recognize that our employees are our most valuable assets, and that’s not only good for culture, it’s also good for business.

To get a better understanding of workplace culture and hiring at Ocrolus, we connected with Lori Golden, Director of Talent Acquisition. Lori brings 20+ years of experience working in technology and brings a passion for disruptive, fast-growth startup environments. She previously worked with UiPath, an RPA unicorn valued at $35 billion, where she helped scale the team from pre-series B and just a handful of people in New York to over 850 people throughout the US.

What excites you most about Ocrolus? What made you jump on the rocket ship?

I saw that Ocrolus was already experiencing tremendous growth. We’re talking five times revenue growth in 2018, and three times growth in 2019, even grew in a 2020 downmarket.

I think that as a company, we’re so well-positioned to address a massive market. The process of analyzing credit worthiness and underwriting decisions has been the same for a very long time. For us to offer a solution that combines technology with a human-in-the-loop (HITL), I think is the wave of the future. Our future is combining technology, automation, and AI, with human beings and human cerebral thinking and optimizing those efforts for 100% accuracy and even greater efficiencies.

That’s why I’m here, because I see that the market is ripe and the soil is fertile for a company like ours to really grow, disrupt and make an impact.

When scaling a team, what matters the most? How important is maintaining a sense of culture?

Culture is one of the most important aspects in scaling a global team. Technology can be replicated, products can be replicated, messaging can be replicated, but the thumbprint of the team that you’ve created cannot be replicated. That is where your true differentiation as a company lies.

So, ensuring that you’re hiring in a way that elevates and expands your culture to be more inclusive, diverse, open, trusting and transparent, to provide that space where people feel safe to move quickly, even make mistakes, and then grow and learn from those mistakes is critical.

What do you look for in a diverse candidate?

Certainly, a candidate needs to have the right skill set and experience. We also have several values that are important to us at Ocrolus, and we like to find those values aligned within the people that we’re looking to hire. The most important thing is to find people who really thrive in an ever-changing environment. When they come in and see that a certain process or a team doesn’t exist, and they get excited about the opportunity to create something, i.e., people who are builders and pathfinders.

How do you ensure DEI within the organization? 

It’s challenging to ensure diversity in a space where there’s already a shortage of diversity among engineers and technologists in general. The way we can ensure inclusion is simply by providing a transparent space where people are encouraged to come to work as their authentic selves, where differences and uniqueness are not tolerated but celebrated. We spotlight our employees; we want people of different backgrounds, experiences, ages, colors and religions because it makes for a richer environment.

It’s important that the technology that is literally being built as the framework of life for tomorrow makes sense to the people who will be using it. The only way to do that is by hiring diverse teams to create the technology.

What would you say to someone who’s interested in joining Ocrolus?

I would say hurry up, because we’re taking off, and we’re in the perfect place at the perfect time. Everything is lined up and the analysts are acknowledging our achievements; Ocrolus has been recognized as the #1 fastest growing fintech on the Inc. 5000, and the #1 fastest-growing company in New York on Deloitte’s 2020 Technology Fast 500. The stars are aligning, and the market is begging for us.

Are you a Fintech enthusiast who thrives in a fast-paced work environment? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Check out our Careers Page.