Fiverr’s staff doubled in size during the pandemic. Here’s how they upskilled a surge of new managers

What happens when your business doubles in size unexpectedly, and your talented workers are suddenly inexperienced managers? If you're the HR team at Fiverr, you create an upskilling system unique to your operation.

In early 2020, Fiverr, the online marketplace for freelancers, had grown to about 400 employees after nearly a decade in business. But COVID-19 created a surge of interest in Fiverr’s platform, and by the end of that year, the company’s staff had more than doubled in size.

Fiverr’s business boomed throughout the pandemic as mass layoffs led unemployed workers to rely on the platform to find part-time and contract work. Simultaneously, the global shift to remote work forced companies to realize the value of hiring digital, remote-first talent.

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As this new way of working took a permanent hold on global organizations, Fiverr’s growth gained speed, and today, the Tel Aviv-based operation has ballooned to over 1,000 employees. Filling those positions — and finding talent to oversee them — has been a challenge the company never anticipated. As members of Fiverr’s staff were rapidly elevated to management, the company’s HR team hustled to find ways to quickly and effectively upskill those workers.

EBN checked in with Liat Dakar Peles, head of global HR at Fiverr, to better understand how they managed rapid growth, and how they systemized upskilling talent to move into management roles.

How did the rapid growth Fiverr saw during the pandemic change the way you thought about managing teams?
We started 2020 with about 400 employees and today, we’re almost 1,200 in size. So that’s meant that a lot of people who’d been working as individual contributors all of a sudden became managers. And managers became managers of even bigger teams, and of other managers. All of that requires different skills, so we’ve focused a lot on developing those skills — communication, alignment, influencing others — and figuring out how to do that in a hybrid model.

How do you even attempt to teach those kinds of skill sets at such a rapid clip?
It was one of our biggest concerns, and biggest challenges. We followed the 70-20-10 model. It’s a learning approach that suggests employees learn skills or obtain new knowledge in three ways: 70% from job-related experiences, 20% from social interactions with others and 10% from formal education, like events and training. The model’s creators hold that hands-on experience is the most beneficial for employees because it enables them to discover and refine their job-related skills, make decisions, address challenges and interact with influential people within work settings.

Employees also learn from others (the 20 percent) through coaching, mentoring, collaborative learning and interaction with peers. The formula holds that only 10 percent of professional development optimally comes from formal lessons.

It’s sort of like learning a language: You can download an app and take classes, but if you’re not practicing and getting real experience, you won’t be able to speak the language.

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How do you formalize that kind of thinking?
We really tried to develop personalized onboarding for new managers. Instead of six, seven or eight sessions of development training, we worked with those new managers to understand what areas they felt they should focus on, and what were their biggest challenges. It’s hard to transition from hands-on work to a manager role where your success now depends on others. So we talk a lot about values and communication and help people figure out where and how they can best grow, and then we applied that 70-20-10 thinking to those goals.

What did that look like?
For example, we started a mentorship program that would help people communicate and work together, even if they don’t rely on each other on a daily basis. It was structured sort of like, I’ll say, America’s Got Talent. So the manager is well-known and selects talent in the organization that they want to work with, outside of their normal team. We had PR leaders working with managers from our customer success team, for example. There were workshops for mentors, and structures put in place to help mentors and mentees communicate and set up objectives and get feedback. We ran this program for a few months, and at the end, employee surveys showed 100% satisfaction and 100% interest in participating in the program in the future.

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Fiverr is a globally distributed workforce. Did that complicate your ability to grow and hire talent?
It’s been a challenge, and it varies a lot by country and roles. It’s especially hard for us to find tech talent, which is why we opened an office in Kyiv. Marketing roles, for example, are easier for us to find in the U.S. So the hybrid workforce is one of our biggest opportunities in 2022, because we are really focused on hiring from anywhere as we continue to expand internationally. We used to really focus on hiring locally, whether in Tel Aviv or New York. But now, expanding that pool is helping us with growth, and it’s helping those new managers address that growth.