My Name Is Jamey Iaccino — This Is Why I Joined Aha!

I just joined Aha! as a People Success Manager. And to understand where I am now, you need to know where I came from. Four years ago, I joined OneLogin as Employee #16 — and grew the team to 185 employees over the next four years. Life from my viewpoint was good. I had a plum role at one of North America’s fastest growing SaaS companies. And I built their recruiting organization from scratch.

Sure, it was a lot of work. But it was the best kind of work for me. I have always had a passion for building things from scratch. The Legos and Lincoln Logs I wore out as a kid gave way to bigger, more complex projects in my early teens. I spent countless hours tinkering with vehicles for the better part of the next decade.

Now, as an adult, I still love to build. I love to build high-performance teams at the world’s fastest growing SaaS companies.

I started my recruiting career at an agency, where I learned the ropes of finding and hiring the best people. I eventually met my next boss through a Meetup group for Ruby on Rails engineers. He worked at a rapidly growing software startup in San Francisco called OneLogin. I had never heard of the company before, but he had ambitious goals for growth — and needed a recruiter to help scale the team. “Challenge accepted,” I told him.

That role taught me the privilege of helping small teams scale into something big. The organization was like a puzzle. My job, as its lead recruiter, was to find each new piece of that puzzle and make the business whole. That drive to find each new puzzle piece kept me excited to get out of bed each day.

For four years I helped grow the team, and was a part of hiring more than 170 new employees. Then, something unexpected happened.

One day, I was on LinkedIn looking for candidates. A blog post from Aha! suddenly popped into my feed, and I read the entire thing. I clicked through to Brian de Haaff’s profile and then the Aha! website. I instantly connected with the company’s mission, values, and The Responsive Method.

I continued to follow Aha! and read new articles. A few months later, I saw an opening for a recruiter on the company website. Except that the role was called “People Success Manager” — I immediately loved the idea.

I had never worked on a fully distributed team, let alone been a recruiter for one. But the more I learned about Aha! — as a product and an organization — the more I knew that I wanted to join the team. The amazing growth and customer feedback speaks for itself.

So, I said yes to a new adventure and joined Aha! as Employee #16 — just as I had at OneLogin.

I guess there is something special about #16. But the real question is always whether a company will have the same values as the team grows from 16 to 32 to 64 and beyond. We have added a number of new folks to the team already, so we are off to a good start.

It has been a real privilege to share our vision and values with folks across the country — and hear how excited they are to learn more about a company that’s doing so many things right.

I’m excited each day to talk to candidates about joining a profitable company that is one of the fastest growing in Silicon Valley. Oh, and by the way, you can join Aha! and work from anywhere in the U.S. you’d like.

So, I have no doubt that we will smash through our ambitious hiring goals this year — because my first few months have taught me that other people are moved to join the Aha! journey too. I wanted to help build the team at another great SaaS company.

That is why I joined Aha! — and why you should too.

[And #16 is my lucky number.]