*APAC Careers Day* Here's How We Roll: Life at Cloudflare

Hey, everyone. Thanks for tuning in to the final segment of the Cloudflare APEC Careers Day.

Hope you have been enjoying the various segments so far. We've kicked off the day five hours ago with Jonathan Dixon, our head of APEC, followed by teams across different parts of APEC, sharing with you how we work and the kind of talent that we're looking for.

So here for this segment, we have the people team and a very special guest joining us today to share with us live at Cloudflare.

So now let's go around the panel for each one of us to briefly share who we are and what we love about Cloudflare.

Let me first introduce myself. I am Yin and I lead the talent acquisition team for Cloudflare across APEC.

I've been actively building the APEC team across all functions since joining in end 2018.

And on what I love about Cloudflare, I think one of the first thing is I love how well we adapt to changes.

As part of a high growth company, we accept that change is constant and we look at it positively as we believe changes bring opportunities.

So in Cloudflare, we always encourage everyone to continue to learn and to look for creative ways to adapt to changes.

And better still, to make changes. Another thing that I love about Cloudflare is how we embrace diversity in our culture.

We make sure we build an environment for employees to feel welcome and inclusive to work in.

I'm going to pass on to you Ayako. Can you share who you are and what you love about Cloudflare?

Hi everyone. Thank you very much and I'm really excited to be here today.

My name is Ayako. I'm a recruiter based in Singapore to hire for Japan office and inside sales and technical roles.

I have been with Cloudflare close to two years and a half and it's been an amazing journey.

The team has grown so much since then and now we have more than 2,000 people globally and continue growing.

We have many different roles and a new opportunity across the regions.

That's one of the things I love about Cloudflare. Keep working on new roles and hiring people in the APAC team.

But even though the company is growing so fast, we keep our transparency and collaborative culture.

We have a weekly global all-hands where anyone can present what you are working on to our fellow colleagues.

Also during the interview process, candidates can go and get to talk to our senior leaders where you can ask questions and exchange ideas.

That's one of a lot of things I like about Cloudflare.

And now I'm passing on to Shireen.

Hi everyone, I'm Shireen. I'm the APAC recruiter for sales, pre-sales and marketing predominantly.

I've been in Cloudflare for three months and counting. What I love about Cloudflare besides being one of the world's largest global award -winning network security company is that we're in a trending space market in building a better Internet with great team synergy, strong global cross-collaboration and supportive leadership with steep accelerated growth in a fast-moving high growth environment.

We're in for exciting times. How about I go next?

I'm going to unmute first. Hi everyone, thanks Shireen and Ayako and thanks for inviting me along today Yin.

So good afternoon, good morning, good evening to people who've tuned in to hear how we roll at Cloudflare.

My name is Kate Fleming and I'm an Australian in case you can't tell based in our Singapore office.

I made the decision to join Cloudflare about three years ago and still to this day I feel lucky that I did and pretty proud to be part of the company.

I've got a long background in account management and sales leadership across the APAC region and with that I spent the last two and a half years at Cloudflare with our customer success team leading the APAC team here working with a diverse bunch of people who truly believe in the mission of Cloudflare and also in working to make our customers lives better.

Now apart from the customer success team and our customers, one of the things that I really love about Cloudflare is our commitment to mobility and incidentally that's why I'm here today.

So Cloudflare takes career progression and mobility really seriously and as part of that I've had the opportunity to recently move from the sales organisation into the people and places team which is where we are today and I'm going to be taking on the global lead role for our back to better initiative which in layman's terms is back to office.

I'm going to be talking about that a little bit later today and trying to give candidates a sense of what the future of work looks like at Cloudflare.

Thanks. And thank you, Kate. Melody, you're next. Hello to each and all watching Cloudflare TV.

My name is Melody. I'm based in our Singapore regional office.

I have been with Cloudflare for one and a half years, close to how tall I am.

When people ask me what I love about Cloudflare, I say Cloudflare is helping build a better Internet.

I'm part of the people team and our employees come to us for many requests from across the entire APJC region from workday issues to benefits claims and more.

No two days are the same and this allows me to provide a diverse ways to help out whether it's giving some guidance, providing immediate support on issues and sometimes just being a listening ear.

On top of that, I've always found refreshing to participate in our weekly company-wide town halls where my colleagues share project insights, celebrate other colleagues' contributions at large.

I also derive a strong sense of belonging when I receive branded swags from notebook to stickers to cap and hoodies.

Thank you so much, Melody. And last but not least, we have Sharad.

Thank you, Yin, and thank you team for introducing all of us.

It is so exciting to be doing our first Careers Day for APAC.

Today is indeed really special. My name is Sharad and I'm based in Singapore. I joined Cloudflare about a year ago and I have the privilege of leading the people team business partnering function here in the APAC region.

That means helping our people settle in, navigating their careers and enabling for them a world-class working experience.

From great onboarding to competitive compensation, learning and development and global mobility, my regional and global peers and I are responsible for all of this for our people.

There truly are many things that I love about Cloudflare, about our organization, our audacious mission of helping build a better Internet, our humility as we go about doing that without much fuss, and all the fabulous people I get to work with every day.

But there is one special aspect of working at Cloudflare that I really, really love, and that is Cloudflare capabilities.

Please allow me a few minutes to explain. Cloudflare capabilities, as you can see on the slide in front of you, are the behaviors that make people successful at Cloudflare.

I also like to think about them as the foundation of our culture.

Let me read through a little bit of that copy. Communicate clearly, directly, and transparently.

Make sure you are understood well and leave no room for ambiguity.

Communicate in an honest, direct way.

Share the whole picture. Give and receive feedback to help yourself and others get better and improve the quality of the work.

Get bad news out fast. Build trust by being transparent.

Do the right thing. Integrity and ethics are everything, right?

Be accountable and principled. Do the right thing, even when it is hard, especially when it is hard, and do what you say.

Get your work across the finish line.

Well, get the job done, right? Completion gives you a sense of achievement and satisfaction.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of done. Balance quality with execution.

Do your work efficiently, set bold goals, and measure progress and impact objectively.

This one is really important. Lead with empathy and assume good intentions.

We are all on this journey together. Every single one of us passed the same hiring bar.

Proceed with good intention and assume good intentions in others.

Be customer-oriented and put the customer first. React quickly to repair and remedy issues and come to the table to solve tough problems together.

Be curious to learn and grow.

There are new and exciting problems and challenges to solve every day.

Be curious, be humble, and be always learning. Ask questions with humility.

Learn from the answers. Be a good learner, and more importantly, be a humble teacher.

Embrace diversity to make Cloudflare better. We win as a team. Diverse perspectives enabled by a diverse workforce make for a better workplace and environment.

We want to make Cloudflare a welcoming and inclusive place for everyone by respecting and appreciating differences.

Be a force for good. Now, you will likely notice that these behaviors or capabilities, as we call them, are not really very different from what your organization or other organizations care about or talk about as their core values and things that they hold in high regard.

The difference of Cloudflare, however, is that these capabilities permeate through all of our people and business decisions.

Internally, we have detailed these out further by specific behaviors we expect of our people at each level within our career ladder.

These capabilities form the basis of discussing performance, growth, and mobility decisions for our people, and more recently, also our hiring decisions.

Like I said, we think of these as the foundations of our culture and refer to them as the behaviors that make people successful at Cloudflare.

So for those of you thinking about joining us, please do think of these.

And that's me. Thanks again, Ian, and back over to you.

Thank you, Sharad. Thanks so much for sharing the capabilities that we place emphasis on.

In addition to capabilities, providing a conducive working environment for employees are also of utmost importance.

With the COVID situation, one of the hottest topics has been the changes in the way we work.

We're glad that we have Kate here with us, who will be joining the people team soon, who is leading the Back to Better, Back to Office initiatives to share more with us.

Over to you, Kate. Thanks, Ian.

I think the phrase of the last two years is you're on mute, and that seems to be me today.

I keep going to start speaking while I'm on mute. So thanks for the intro, and let's spend the next 10 or so minutes just talking about Back to Better, what we're calling Back to Better, which is Cloudflare's Return to Office initiative.

People will have seen all types of content in the media, industry news, a lot of academic publications.

I know Harvard's doing a lot of work around this at the moment and understanding the psychology of coming back to the office after something like this.

We've got to remember that for most people, we've not had this type of disruption to our working lives.

Of course, there are people who may be working in countries, I'm thinking of Afghanistan, for example, who are going through serious work disruptions.

But for the majority of us who've maybe been lucky enough to live in more stable environments, this is very new.

And so there is no set answer. And one reason why a recent survey said that 75% of respondents identify as wanting to take direction from their employer about what the post-pandemic world will look like is because we're all looking over our shoulder at each other, and we're all trying to work out how to move forward.

And I want to tell you how we're doing at Cloudflare.

All right, so let's talk about this. Back to Better, what is it? So Back to Better for Cloudflare is how we're thinking about return to the office.

We want to think of the time that we've had under the pandemic as an opportunity to really question how we work, and see if there's ways that we can do things better.

You've heard that we're curious, you've heard that we're principled, you've heard that we're transparent, we like to experiment, you can tell from our style that we also aren't judgmental, and we like to take and receive feedback.

And we're applying all of that to how we're thinking about coming back to the office.

What are the best things?

What are the surprising trends that have emerged in our workforce during the pandemic?

And what things do we really miss and want to bring back?

So I'm going to take you quickly on a journey, and then we'll talk a little bit more about where we are.

So if you cast your minds back to early 2020, when a lot of offices were shutting down because of COVID, we thought of this as very temporary.

We weren't setting up home offices, most of us were making jokes about working on hall tables.

One of the leaders in my team had a box on an ironing board that he used to have a standing desk at home.

We had people who were literally working in their children's bedrooms, and in fact, many of us still are.

But we viewed it as a little bit of a temporary thing, and it was scary from a health perspective, sure, but it was also a little novel.

It was a bit exciting. It was a little bit different.

And we got to enjoy the flexibility of, say, a company like Cloudflare, where we are knowledge -based workers, and so we can work remotely.

And of course, we are cybersecurity market leaders, so that we had the security and the mobility piece down pat.

Businesses and humans approached this initial period as a short blip in time, we'll be going back to exactly how it was before you know it.

Six weeks passed, longer time passed, longer time passed, COVID spread throughout the world.

And over time, we start seeing successive waves.

And then the conversation turns to, well, listen, we're just going to shut down, let's treat this as semi-permanent.

We're going to shut down for now, but we're all going to open in the northern summer.

I remember us talking about being back at the office in July, and that's July 2020 we were talking about.

As things progressed, that changed, and we started pushing it back, and we started pushing it back.

And what we started realizing in industry, and in Cloudflare, and in academia, that working with this notion of we're just on pause until we get back into the office as we were, is probably not helping us.

It's not helping us mentally, and it's also not helping us prepare for the future.

So the Cloudflare leadership team, and this has been led by Matthew and Michelle, who are our co-founders, have really gone through this journey as well.

They've really followed the zeitgeist. They've talked to their colleagues, other Silicon Valley CEOs, other companies that are hyper growth like ours right around the world.

They collaborate with Atlassian, who are well known for their remote work practices, and they're trying to understand what's the best way forward for Cloudflare.

And the way that they're using it, and the lens that they're using to understand the best way forward is, yes, researching, so using the curious part, being transparent, saying to people, listen, this is what we think the plan's going to be, but it might be wrong, and we might completely have to stuff this up.

Well, we might not have to. We may stuff it up, and we may need to go back to scratch.

But also, we've done it with some guiding principles in mind.

Matthew and Michelle, from the outset, have talked about inclusivity.

They've talked about sustainability, and they've talked about retaining Cloudflare culture.

And when we talk about things that we love about Cloudflare, this is one of the few companies I'm aware of that lives and breathes what they say.

Everyone says that employees are important. Everyone says inclusivity is important.

No company is going to go on the website and go, you know what?

Employees are kind of number three priority for us. So everyone says that you're number one, but how many people literally sit down and think about something this significant and say, how do we make sure that we retain inclusivity?

How do we make sure that working parents and working carers who live in multi -generational households who've gotten used to a certain type of working process during the pandemic aren't going to be disadvantaged if we go back to the office?

How are we going to make sure that we can bring in more diverse talent, people that may have different accessibility requirements, maybe different physical requirements, all different types of spatial considerations?

And those guiding principles have shaped every single conversation that we've had so far.

So pretty exciting stuff.

So what is Back to Better? It is Cloudflare's way of thinking how we're going to work post-pandemic.

Okay. Next, what does that actually mean in terms of Cloudflare?

Well, if you recall, I said that we've been through this thought process throughout the pandemic.

At the beginning, we thought, hey, we're going to return back to the office in a few weeks.

And that had been how Cloudflare had always worked.

We prided ourselves on the community connection and serendipitous inventions that came because we had central hubs, because we brought people in together.

Americans talk about the water cooler conversations.

In APAC, it's generally the pantry conversations because we love our food.

And probably for people in Australia, it's the pub conversations. But it's the same thing.

It's the people you bump into from work that you might not generally sit next to or talk to.

You might talk about what's going on. You might get to know someone new.

You might find out about a project that another team's doing that actually somehow would help a problem that you're solving.

Or you may just be building social capital.

And social capital is the intangible benefit of, say, Yin and I have worked together for a long time.

And she knows that sometimes I have trouble getting my work across the finish line when it comes to recruiting.

But she is patient with me, and she knows that I mean well. It's just sometimes customers get in the way.

And we've got that relationship where we can give a bit of give and take because we've got that social capital.

How do we make sure that people coming back post-pandemic can build that up as quickly as possible?

So for the future of us, this is where we're at today.

We want to have open spaces that are collaborative, that are welcoming, that have breakout spaces for the loud people.

That's me. And for the engineers and the people who generally complain about the people like me.

We want everyone to be able to do their best work at Cloudflare in the office if they choose to.

We don't expect you to be in the office full-time.

We don't expect to go back to how we used to work, which was five days a week in the office.

I know Sherad's been working with his team and they're thinking, you know, maybe we'll get in once a week-ish and we'll collaborate and Thursdays might be a good day.

I know other teams that are saying, look, we want to have our group in the last week of every month because that's when we usually have to close the books.

So it's our flow. It's going to be quite flexible.

The other thing that it's going to be that's quite different is we're really recreating our office spaces so that they become our off-sites.

If you remember in the companies that you're at, usually you have an off-site, which is where you all go to a different location.

So you can be collaborative and feel free and brainstorm.

We're going to recreate our office space. So you come on premise to do that collaboration.

Think of really fluid spaces that can be booked for groups of 20 or more where we're going to be open to be able to ideate and innovate.

The busy work that we used to do in the office, that day-to-day head down work, for most of us, we might be doing that at home if that's the place that we prefer to be at.

We might be doing it at a cafe if that's the place we prefer to be at. Of course, I say all this with a caveat.

If you're on the office team and your role is around making sure that the physical safety measures in the office are being adhered to, you're going to have to be in the office.

But we apply a bit of common sense.

So what does a future work look like at Cloudflare? For people that are thinking of joining us, it's going to be flexible.

The future is flexible. Now, once again, the caveat being no one's come out of a pandemic with the knowledge workforces we have.

The last big pandemic we had was 1918 with the Spanish influenza.

Very different. So we don't know really what it's going to look like in the end.

But I can tell you right now that whatever decisions we make to change things will be done with inclusivity, sustainability, and those core practices in mind.

So think about a normal week. I'm going to think about sales because that's what I'm closest to, customer success.

I'd probably want to be in on a Monday. Sorry, my old hat, my old customer success hat, not my new hat.

I'd probably want to be in on a Monday because I want to connect to the other leaders and I like to do that face-to-face and get a sense of where we are on the numbers, how the pipeline's looking.

Tuesdays, I'd probably want to be with generally Tuesdays and Wednesdays I'm with customers.

Thursdays are internal. I meet with my other leads and we wrap up any challenges for the week.

And I try and use Fridays for getting the heavy work done.

So all of the things we committed to customers during the week and making sure that we got that done and making sure that we can update the US before we close the week.

So I might say, look, I'm going to work from home on Fridays because that's my head down day.

And that's just an example. I might say, work out with my manager that I prefer not to be in the office really on any set days.

And I might just come in once a month.

It's really going to be up to you. But we are going to make sure, as I said, that we're inclusive.

We are going to do a series of activities when it's time and safe that's going to turbocharge that social capital.

So for people that are thinking about joining Cloudflare, one of the hardest things can be to join a new company during a time like this.

How do you go and build relationships and build those little networks to make yourself successful?

We're going to be running a series of campus-style activities when we do go back to the office.

Think of it university a week if you went to university, where there'll be different booths and different orientation exercises.

And it may be, hey, here's the IT booth.

I'm going to go and have a look at my laptop. I know I need to have a look at my phone because I'm continually doing weird things to it and getting locked out of our functions.

And so everyone new and old or prior employees alike will be able to go on site and answer those questions.

But we're also going to set up little pods and little groups.

And those groups are not going to be the people that you work with every day.

It's going to be a relatively random assortment of people that will be like your freshman group.

And you might have some people that are really tenured, some people that are senior, some people that are junior, some people are brand new.

And throughout that orientation week or that homecoming week, you're going to be doing something little with them every day that's really going to help you to build up connections and almost turbocharge that social capital so you can start to get things done in the company.

All right. So what does it look like?

It's really flexible. The office spaces are going to be really designed around collaboration.

Yes, you have to apply common sense and talk to your manager.

One question that we also have is could I be fully remote? You notice I've been talking about the offices as a home base for a like every company for us to have some roles that will be let's say 20% as a rule of thumb to start that will be able to be fully remote.

It depends absolutely on the hiring manager, on the requirements of the role, on taxation, on a range of things.

So I don't want if you're if you're in a really interesting location that's miles away from anywhere right now and you're watching this, I don't want you to think I'm not going to apply for Cloudflare because it's going to be office based.

We are open to remote but we're not all going to be remote.

It is going to be certain roles and I think that's a really nice balance actually.

We'll have time opportunities for the remote people to come in.

All right. So moving forward, what does this mean for you as a candidate?

I've already started on that. So one, do not preclude yourself from applying for Cloudflare because of where you are.

Number one, if you are a good human and you are curious and you are principled and you are transparent and you believe in doing the right thing and making the Internet better, apply.

We don't care where you're based. We'll work that out later.

In terms of your interview process, what does that mean? Right now, the recruiting team can tell you more about that but for you as a candidate, it means it's all going to be virtual and we're going to follow whatever the rules are in the local jurisdiction.

So I assume there's going to be people here watching right now from right across APAC and potentially even around the world.

When we talk about opening offices and having people together, we're not talking about breaking any government rules.

That's just a caveat. We're talking about doing the right thing about those locations and different locations may come online in different stages.

Next thing, how do you find out more? So I'm based in Timbuktu but I'm really interested in joining Cloudflare.

How can I find out more about what the future of work would look like for me?

Well, speak to your recruiting team.

If you don't have a recruiting team, that's okay. Find someone at Cloudflare and contact them.

Shirad and Ian are going to pop up a slide at the end of today where they're going to show you all the contact details.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Don't preclude yourself. If you're a good human, don't automatically cut yourself out of the race.

Bring yourself forward and share what you're thinking.

Also, one other thing under the idea of Cloudflare being really open is if you're seeing this being done somewhere else or you're working at a company that did a remote or a dispersed workforce really well, ping me and let us know.

We'd love to crowdsource information. We'd love to share with you in more detail what we're doing and we'd love to learn from others in market because this is not a zero-sum game.

We all need industry to get back together and we all need people for mental health and social well-being and for economy to get back into some type of a new balance.

All right, I'm going to pause here. If you go away with anything, if you've just joined Back to Better, it's just what we're calling how we're going to go back to the office.

And when I say back to the office, we're not really going to be going back to the office like we used to.

We're going to go back to collaborate and have fun and we're probably going to be doing our busy work at home.

And once again, if you missed the beginning, if you don't want to work at home, that's okay too.

There will be space for you to work in the office. The key word here is flexibility.

The future is flexible at Cloudflare and we really look forward to talking to you about it.

Thanks, Yun. Thank you. Thank you, Kate.

I love the phrase, the future is flexible. You have shared some really, really useful insights and I was just thinking that, whoa, Kate basically answers so many of our candidates' questions in this presentation.

So thank you so much.

I think one thing that I'm really glad to hear is that we look into catering to the different needs for our employees, which is a very big part of us, right?

Like people is our biggest asset. I definitely look forward to hearing more from you and your team on Back to Office and definitely looking forward to having more pantry chats soon.

So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Kate. Now, this is Cloudflare Careers Day.

We want to share with you the engagement journey from candidate to an employee for anyone who is keen to explore working with us, right?

So the journey will usually start with attracting potential candidates through the interview process and hopefully resulting in a hire.

I will share more on this stage of the journey in more details later.

And moving on to the next, one of the other part of the journey is once hired, the people team will take over the engagement to guide the new hire through the onboarding process and the initial navigation into the new role.

Melody will share more on this stage of the journey. And then after that, we will continue to engage and involve the employees in many different ways throughout the rest of your employment journey.

And Sharad will actually share that as well at the later stage.

Now, coming back to the first stage, which is the attract and hire, let's get more details.

Let's get into more details of the first stage, right?

As a potential candidate, your first point of contact is usually the talent acquisition team.

As part of our hiring philosophy, we want to make sure all candidates go through a deliberate and well-paced interview process.

You will get to meet a diverse panel of interviewers and stakeholders.

And as candidate, we want to make sure that you have the time and opportunity to have a better understanding of not only the role, but also the type of training that you will be expecting to have, the kind of career progression to expect, the compensation and benefits for the role.

Ultimately, we hope that at the end of the interview process, both the candidates and the interviewers will be able to make an informed decision, be it you as a candidate to decide whether you want to join us or the interviewers with regards to the decision to hire.

So this is something that we want to actually make sure that at the end of the whole interview process, we will end up with both parties agreeing that this is the best decision forward, right?

Cloudflare APAC is growing exponentially. We're actively hiring across all functions in the region.

I'm going to invite the recruiters to share more with you with regards to what are some of the exciting roles that we are currently actively hiring.

Shireen, would you want to actually share the functions that you support and some of the interesting roles that you are working on right now?

Sure thing, Ian.

Hi again. I recruit primarily in the sales, pre-sales marketing space across five APAC markets.

So they are basically ASEAN, Greater China, ANZ, Korea, and India.

We're now expanding, doubling our team across APAC, and we're now recruiting for strategic account executives, account executives for direct sales, strategic solutions engineers, solution engineers for pre -sales.

And of course, we have demand general manager, generation manager, and country marketing lead for marketing, just to name a few.

So what the ideal talent will look like across these roles, and more so for direct sales, are essentially talents who come from a B2B enterprise.

They can be mid-market or large enterprises, selling environment in the network cloud application security space, equipped with strong market portfolio, new client acquisition, relationship building, senior stakeholder client engagement skills, to drive new and existing sales and value proposition.

For solutions engineering or pre-sales, as we call it, similar criteria would apply, except from a technical perspective, where you would be the technical SMEN consultant, working hand in hand with the direct sales team, architecting the best scalable security value proposition and solutioning.

And last but not least, for marketing, the same would also apply.

Talents who come from B2B or enterprise tech environment, with end-to-end, so that would mean from conceptualizing, planning, all the way to executing.

So we're looking at very hands -on individuals with leadership experience in online and offline marketing, in an ultimate aim of driving new leads and demands, with more awareness, presence and ultimately business revenue or pipeline.

And of course, last but not least, we want talents who are passionate with our brand, curious and driven to make it happen, and aspire to thrive in a fast-moving, high -growth environment.

That will be all. Thank you.

Thank you, Shireen. I think it's exciting times for the sales and marketing team as we expand in this region.

Ayako, over to you. Share what kind of roles that have kept you busy at work these days.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we have so many great opportunities.

I'm excited to share some of the couple of exciting roles to pick it up.

But first of all, our Japan office is growing. We are hiring several roles in sales and technical teams.

Japan office right now is about 15 people, and we are planning to grow in double of the size.

So that's really exciting.

And you can be a part of this growing team. So if you're interested in, like, please check it out.

I'll carry outside. And then I also wanted to highlight some of the roles that we are looking into in Japan and also APAC regions that I hire for.

So regional sales manager. Shireen has explained to you the account executive role, but it's also similar role that who drives sales in Japan.

And then successful candidates will have an existing network contact within Japan, enterprise company within your territory, as well as relevant channel partner, such as system integrators, value added reseller, managed service providers.

Good to have skill is network and security background or selling SaaS product to the large enterprise customers.

And I also wanted to talk about inside sales, which we call internally business development representatives.

This role, we have many roles open because we have dedicated language support for market support.

Inside sales is the first point of contact for the customers that need help finding solutions.

And then successful candidates will be self-motivated and comfortable working in fast-paced dynamic environment.

One to three years of experience in inside sales or similar capacity in technical industry is preferred.

However, we have many team members who are our high performer.

They have joined business development team as a fast full-time job out of college or switch from other industries.

So my advice to you is if you're curious about our technology and love to help customers, this is a great team to join, learn, and grow with us.

And yeah, other role is solution engineer who works closely with our enterprise prospect and customer to educate, empower, and ensure their success on the customer platform.

Ideal candidate is ability to manage the project, work to deadline, and a part of life between competing demand and understanding how the Internet works.

And then, of course, you need to be passionate about technology and have the ability to explain complex technical concepts into easy to understand terms.

Yeah, you are naturally curious and then builder and not afraid to get hands dirty.

So as mentioned earlier, we have so many exciting opportunity and I cannot share all of them today.

But don't worry, you can find more detail on the roles and in our career website.

And you can go to crowdflare.com career jobs, select by the locations and the team you are interested to know more about.

Otherwise, you can drop me an email and we are happy to share more about the role.

Lastly, we are looking for people who have basic understanding of network security and interested in our technology.

Some roles does not require many experience as long as you're curious to learn.

So don't hesitate to apply if you are passionate to join Crowdflare.

Thank you. Thanks, Ayako. Very, very detailed and I want to actually say Japan is growing, growing exponentially.

We want you to actually reach out to us, right?

If you are very keen to explore working in Japan. But of course, one of the first thing is you need to be native in language.

But we are open to talk to you in any capacity that you like to actually explore and then we'll see what we can actually make things work.

So thank you both, Shirin and Ayako for sharing what roles is actually open.

So please feel free to reach out to the team. We are all here to answer any queries that you have with regards to some of the interesting roles that you find on our job site.

Moving on, for us here, once we actually make a hire, you may now ask, what should you be expecting once you sign the offer?

Well, for us here in Crowdflare, the people team will take over and guide us through the onboarding process.

Melody, I'll pass it on to you to share more on our very, very interesting and unique onboarding process.

Over to you. Thanks, Yin. Next slide, please. Okay, you must be curious.

Let me highlight the first 90 days to you. Over the past 18 months, because of the pandemic, our global onboarding program has been helped remotely virtually in the comfort of one's home.

The first week is considered the gearing up phase.

It covers high-level orientation and overview on how each department works together, how we build products, our security awareness, our infrastructure, and our go-to-market GTM strategy.

Apart from that, you also go to systems assess, navigating through our wiki intranet portal, memorizing with the policies guidelines, and greeting each colleague you meet along the way.

New hires love to do this, setting up their own class virtually via g-chat rooms and touching base with their peers from there.

There you go. The first week goes by quickly.

The second week is delegated to boot camps, whereby most new hires will be assigned to functional boot camps.

Example, customer support, sales, engineering, and the list goes on.

At this point, many new hires start to feel the intensity with a steep learning curve.

We do strongly encourage one to take a break at intervals, stand up to stretch a little, or have an early rest the day before.

By and large, the remaining group of new hires gradually starts on the job training, OTJ, and all connecting with their respective teams and stakeholders.

In parallel, they also take the time to catch up on extended online learning courses and or team time.

Next. As a matter of fact, we like that our colleagues volunteer their time to render a welcoming environment.

From the high participation rate, we created the Cloudflare Buddy Program, which supports new hires during their first 90 days on the team, a critical time period to get new hires ramped up and support them in their long-term success.

Buddies serve as cultural ambassadors as they help show new hires around, share cultural knowledge, and answer general office questions.

The likes of, where's the best coffee or bubble tea in town?

And favorite lunch spots not to be missed. Hashtag no dumb questions.

Next. For most hires in the sales team, the hiring manager will set a 30, 60, 90-day plan with them during their one-on-one.

It allows the hiring manager to connect regularly, check in to align at appropriate time frame to enable new hires to get up to speed faster, remain at Cloudflare longer, and build the career of their dreams.

This may include defining our culture, setting clear expectations, and establishing cross-functional relationships.

In addition, we have various resources like manager toolkits, working from home tips and support, COVID -19 updates, etc.

Now, it may seem like a ton of tasks. Fear not. New hires are provided with a simple checklist to follow through.

Lastly, we are always looking at new ways of working and how to better ourselves to provide a world-class onboarding experience.

Aligning to the open-door policy approach, new hires are given the channel to provide their feedback at a 30 and 90-day time period.

Along the way, if there are any issues or questions, our learning and onboarding partners are available to support you.

Alternatively, we have other platforms to reach out, for example, through a help desk ticket, email, or G-Chat.

Voila! This is it.

I have just summed up how we rock and roll in the first 90 days at Cloudflare.

Looking forward to having you. Thank you for your time. Back to you, Yin. Thank you so much, Melody.

It's such a busy first three months, right, as everybody navigate through the initial onboarding stage.

But of course, our job is not done after the onboarding stage.

The people team will continue to engage with you throughout the journey with Cloudflare.

Hey, Sherrod, would you want to actually join and share what are some of the interesting ways that we will continue to engage with our employees onwards as well for the, my apologies, for the rest of the journey?

Yeah, over to you, Sherrod. Absolutely. Thank you, Yin, and thank you, Melody, for that amazing description and explanation of what to expect in the first 30, 60, and 90 days.

It's incredibly exciting. There's a lot on this slide, and I encourage you to look through that as I narrate what it is that our approach to engaging employees once they've started and hopefully settled into their roles is after the first 60 or 90 days thereabouts.

We care deeply about our people and are always attempting and endeavoring to provide them an awesome experience of working at Cloudflare.

Clearly defined goals, regular touch points with leadership and cross -functional teams, and well-established rules of engagements are just some of the many elements we have in place to enable our people to do the best work of their careers.

We have strong recognition programs in place that provide our people the added motivation they need to go above and beyond to deliver high performance.

At Cloudflare, our career development and global mobility opportunities are constantly evolving to keep up with our growth and our people's aspirations for their careers.

We truly are a very exciting place to be, and as the recruiting team has just shared with you, there are tons of open positions across the APAC region and beyond.

I encourage you all to look through our careers page, look at what roles excite you, and then talk to one of us.

All right, if we can move to the next slide, please. This is a very important aspect that I do want to touch upon briefly with respect to all the ways that you can get involved at Cloudflare.

We have many ERGs or employee resource groups, employee-led interest groups, and social clubs, some of which are represented on the slide in front of you.

So if you're interested in being part of or learning about a specific community or have a particular interest, join that group.

If you have something you want to share, you feel passionately about, and you want to build a community around, start a group or a club.

The idea is we want everyone to bring their whole selves to work and genuinely feel like they belong at Cloudflare.

That's what we are attempting to do, build a truly, genuinely inclusive organization that is helping to build a better Internet.

I think we have time for a few questions if we have any.

I think so far, we're still waiting for the questions to actually stream in.

But I think at this point, I would probably like to actually just, while waiting for the questions to stream in, if there's any other last comments from the team as well to actually share or thoughts on hiring here.

Kate, you wanted to share more. Yeah, I do, actually.

And it's a point that I really feel quite strongly about. So one of the things that we talk a lot about is people come to join us, and it's a technology company.

And just quickly, a couple of things. So we don't want your location to preclude you.

But two other things, we don't want phase of life or depending on the roles, necessarily like background.

So you know, the recruiters have gone through, we absolutely need intelligent people on the technical side.

We need intelligent people on every side.

But you don't necessarily have to have a university degree in technology to be a great fit for the customer success team or a human resources team, or, you know, even the, our customer support engineers, they don't necessarily have technical backgrounds.

Now, of course, if you do have that, you're going to be flying.

But there's a lot of us and I urge you to go on LinkedIn, look at the backgrounds of a lot of people at Cloudflare, we're a really disparate group.

So number one, don't don't preclude yourself based also on your university.

And then the other thing too, I just want to touch on is is phase of life and age.

You know, one thing that we hear a lot about, what I hear a lot about from from my peers, based in the US, they talk about, you know, Silicon Valley's very ageist and whatnot.

And, you know, we often talk about gender and diversity on ethnic grounds, but you know, age is really important too.

And I want to, I want to really call out do not preclude yourself based on age, whether you're at the bottom end of the spectrum, or like me, like you're getting to the other end of the spectrum.

And it is really, really important that we have diversity across all aspects in our workforce.

And so if you have, once again, you're the right fit, do not preclude yourself, let us let us talk to you.

We don't want people to not apply because they think that they're too old, or they're too experienced, or they're too senior.

We really want to have that diversity of thought and diversity of experience in the workforce.

So thanks, you know, I just want to...

So true, so true. Kate, but I want to make one comment, you're definitely not at the other end of the spectrum in terms of age.

I want to actually make sure that that's clear on this.

Now, and I think to actually add on to that, right, we welcome people with varying years of experience as well, right?

We have associate programs, we have internship program, we have meet level management roles, we have senior management roles.

Even if we do not have a role opening right now, we always welcome for you to reach out to us if you're interested to know more about what it takes to actually join Cloudflare.

We are always happy to just reach it and to make way in terms of introducing for you to actually have a chance to actually talk to some of the executives on the team, right?

Unsolicited, no obligatory.

And what you need to do is to introduce yourself and share with us what you do best.

And with that, we should actually be able to actually work something out.

So yeah, Sharath, I want to actually give this chance for you to wrap up this whole session.

Over to you, Sharath. Thank you very much again, Ian.

That's it, folks. I thank all of you for participating. I'm talking to my team here.

Thank you all for participating and for your inputs. I'm really hopeful.

I'm quite sure actually that our audience found it useful and interesting and that at least some of them are thinking about looking through our open positions, at least some of them.

As we wrap up the Life at Cloudflare section, I want to summarize quickly what it is we talked about in our session today.

We started by introducing ourselves and sharing all the things we love about Cloudflare.

If we had stayed with just that section, we would have run out of time, so we kept it short.

We then spoke about Cloudflare capabilities, the foundations of our culture, and the behaviors that make people successful at Cloudflare.

As I said in that section, if you're interested or thinking about applying to us, please do think through some of those capabilities.

Kate then took us through our very interesting and exciting approach to what we are calling back to better.

The future is indeed flexible. Yin talked about our hiring philosophy and what you can expect during the hiring process.

We then shared all of our open positions across APAC and across functions.

Melody then spoke about what your first few days, weeks, the first 30, 60, 90 days could look like.

Then I touched upon a few ways we endeavor to enable a great career experience for you, including things like mobility and growth and cross-functional exposure and such.

With that, we all thank you very much for your interest and time in Cloudflare and staying with us for some part of your day today.

Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you. Thank you for joining us. I'm Shawn Zeller.

I'm the Principal Architect at Naturebox. We make good food delicious by taking simple, good-for-you ingredients and package them into products that we think our customers will really enjoy.

You can find our products on our website and also at major retailers like Safeway and Target.

Having a quick website is very integral to us being able to sell a product online.

People, you know, if you're clicking on a Facebook ad and you end up on the website, you expect that to load quickly on your phone.

You expect to be able to purchase quickly. If we're not able to get the customer's attention almost immediately, they're going to go off browsing a Facebook article.

They're going to do something else. And so we need to deliver a very fast experience in order to actually turn that into a purchase.

A big portion of us trying to maintain a fast website is being able to cache as much as humanly possible.

So we use Cloudflare as an example to cache all of our non-customer specific data, so including our entirety of our product catalog, inventory, etc., so that we can deliver those responses to the customer as fast as possible.

When we started with Cloudflare, one of our main API requests for our catalog data was taking on average 20 seconds.

That tremendously impacted our customer response times.

After using Cloudflare, we were able to move that down to be a completely edge-cached response that took on the order of 35 milliseconds.

That was a 17x reduction in actual response time and improved overall latency and overall response times of all of our requests.

One of the main issues for an e -commerce website is trying to maintain things like PCI compliance, which is very important for how we're dealing with our own customers' financial data, whether it's credit card data, etc.

We use all of the Cloudflare web application firewall specific functionality in order just to make sure that our customers' data has an extra level of security outside of what we build into the application.

I mean, from our end, the best thing about being able to use Cloudflare is that we can use just one solution for all of those things.

We use Cloudflare for DNS, we use it for CDN, and we use it for web application security.

So being able to use one solution for all of those just makes it a way less overhead for us in terms of managing it, documenting how we're using it, and trying to teach new people as they come on board the team how to use that application.

If we didn't have Cloudflare, we'd probably be having to do this directly in the application level, or we would have to purchase some number of other applications, other network hardware that we'd have to all configure or have to deal with on a daily basis.

Cloudflare to a snack, it would be the white cheddar and caramel popcorn, because you get a couple different flavors, and it also tastes good.

We're betting on the technology for the future, not the technology for the past.

So having a broad network, having global companies now running at full enterprise scale gives us great comfort.

It's dead clear that no one is innovating in this space as fast as Cloudflare is.

With the help of Cloudflare, we were able to add an extra layer of network security controlled by Allianz, including WAF, DDoS.

Cloudflare uses CDN, and so allows us to keep cost under control and caching and improve speed.

Cloudflare has been an amazing partner in the privacy front. They've been willing to be extremely transparent about the data that they are collecting and why they're using it, and they've also been willing to throw those logs away.

I think one of our favorite features of Cloudflare has been the worker technology.

Our origins can go down and things will continue to operate perfectly. I think having that kind of a safety net provided by Cloudflare goes a long ways.

We were able to leverage Cloudflare to save about $250,000 within about a day.

The cost savings across the board is measurable, it's dramatic, and it's something that actually dwarfs the yearly cost of our service with Cloudflare.

It's really amazing to partner with a vendor who's not just providing a great enterprise service, but also helping to move forward the security on the Internet.

One of the things we didn't expect to happen is that the majority of traffic coming into our infrastructure would get faster response times, which is incredible.

Zendesk just got 50% faster for all of these customers around the world because we migrated to Cloudflare.

We chose Cloudflare over other existing technology vendors so we could provide a single standard for our footprint, ensuring world-class capabilities in bot management and web application firewall to protect our large public-facing digital presence.

We ended up building our own fleet of HA proxy servers such that we could easily lose one and then it wouldn't have a massive effect.

But it was very hard to manage because we kept adding more and more machines as we grew.

With Cloudflare we were able to just scrap all of that because Cloudflare now sits in front and does all the work for us.

Cloudflare helped us to improve the customer satisfaction.

It removed the friction with our customer engagement.

It's very low maintenance and very cost effective and very easy to deploy and it improves the customer experiences big time.

Cloudflare is amazing. Cloudflare is such a relief. Cloudflare is very easy to use.

It's fast. Cloudflare really plays the first level of defense for us. Cloudflare has given us peace of mind.

They've got our backs. Cloudflare has been fantastic.

I would definitely recommend Cloudflare. Cloudflare is providing an incredible service to the world right now.

Cloudflare has helped save lives through Project Fairshot.

We will forever be grateful for your participation in getting the vaccine to those who need it most in an elegant, efficient, and ethical manner.

Thank you.