Welcome back to this week’s P | A | C | T news, your newsletter by Tech Talent North.
This edition of PACT dives into what “great talent” really means in today’s tech world. Klue’s Senior People Business Partner, Simran Bahia, gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how her team refined a clear, three-pronged framework—performance, potential, and culture contribution—that’s helping define and elevate top talent across their org. It’s a refreshingly honest take on building winning teams in a competitive, fast-moving space.
Key takeaways:
- With market forces and evolving tech leading to smaller teams, the importance of defining great talent is magnified for any size company;
- At Klue, ‘Defining Great Talent’ has been formally anchored by a three-pronged approach—performance, potential and culture contribution; and
- Leaders need to similarly support all three prongs with consistent clarity, ongoing opportunities to collaborate, and a commitment to employee growth.
With so much of the tech sector’s success hinged on evolving AI, innovation and market competitiveness, the importance of defining great talent has never been more integral to success. However, for Klue—a competitive enablement software company committed to harnessing the innovative potential of AI to provide their clients with a Win-Loss edge—defining, finding and growing that talent is an imperative.
Fortunately, it is one that Simran Bahia, Senior People Business Partner at Klue spent much of 2024 bringing together in partnership with their VP People, Alexis MacDonald, senior leaders and managers before launching at the start of 2025. Core to that final result is a defined mission for Klue’s People Team, which has grown to six since Simran marked their first step into HR six years ago when then sole Vancouver-based company numbered only 30 people.
“It all begins with asking ‘what is the role of People teams in this time’ and the answer is to enable business performance,” said Simran. “How do we do that? Through attracting, retaining and growing great talent.”
Top Teams Built With Top Talent
Even more fortunately, Simran has long sported a talent edge of her own.
“The People team is committed to driving business results by empowering Kluebees to maximize their impact and reach their full potential,” said Simran, who takes that mission to heart. “It’s crazy how much of the sport lens has shaped my perspective of HR and why I enjoy what I do and can bring to the careers of others,” said Simran. “It’s always about building a really great team that, but also a competitive one like you see in team sports where you are all getting behind one thing. During my sport years, it was about being proud of our routine and how well we performed. Now, in the grand scheme of business, it’s about making a really great product and that takes a really, really great team in this market.”
The importance of that truism has only been magnified by present day experience and the view of the road ahead.
“If we are going towards an environment where we need to be learning how to maximize the potential of our teams, you want to have the best of the best, the people who are going to make your company and your team successful,” said Simran. “So, what makes up the DNA of that person? That’s why we made up our definition—to get at what high performance really means and how we could explain it to people in a way that was motivating and achievable.”
Defining Great Talent: A Three-Pronged Approach
The three-pronged approach of Klue’s “Defining Great Talent” program, launched at the start of 2025, does exactly that, but also ensures a platform for ongoing engagement and evaluation while laying a roadmap for achieving that high-performing status.
As for the three prongs, Simran drills down into the fundamentals—Performance, Potential and Culture Contributions.
Performance: “This is the first and obvious prong — your skill set, experience and impact in your role. Ultimately, we’re all here to make a company successful, so performance is critical.”
Potential: “The second prong is your potential for growth and impact. Are you here really engaged in what we’re doing, really engaged in the build? Are you looking forward and finding opportunity and expanding your impact or growth that could be role-related, such as stretch projects in the past. How have you run with them?
Culture Contribution: “The third prong of culture is our competitive edge. It’s something our CEO truly believes in, and we have said this from the start. Culture is key because we cannot have people who are strong performers but not contributing to the culture. How are they embodying our culture? How are they being defenders of our culture, and how are they also shaping and inspiring that in other people?”
Brutal Honesty, Boundary Busting & Future Building
With Klue’s team having grown to 200 across multiple provinces across, as well as the U.S., Netherlands and London, Simran has not only helped champion those defining traits, she also knows their value in better defining Klue’s talent standards in a globally competitive talent market.
As Simran also knows, a bit of brutal honesty can lead to great things.
“In terms of pursuing talent, we really focus on quality over quantity,” said Simran. “We take a very intentional approach to building our pipelines through referrals, outreach and employer branding, but above all else, seeking the talent who aligns with who we are and who we are not. When we’re talking to talent, we are very upfront about who we are to encourage that self-selection. If you think this is going to be hard or too scary, we’re okay with that. We might not be the right stage company for you.”
“We look for people who push boundaries for what’s possible for them, their peers and their customers, so our three prong approach helps us make sure we’re bringing in the people who will help us grow, not only today, but during tomorrow’s challenges as well,” said Simran, noting that the duo forces of changing shareholder demands and AI technologies has only exacerbated this need. “That same willingness to push boundaries goes right into our product.”
And while it’s too early to anchor the metrics of the review process’ success, Simran is already hearing the good word at team level.
“While it is too early to tell from a business impact perspective, I feel like we’ve had a lot of great success from the employee experience side, where people felt like they were very clear on what was expected of them, how they performed in the past six months or what they could do to improve their performance or increase their impact,” said Simran. “We want to make sure we’re being open, so while we’re looking at the three prongs of culture, potential and performance, within those areas we actually illustrate what and how you’re doing.”
Simran points to the performance rating, where Klue has replaced traditional numerics with four quadrants and colour-coded feedback to highlight areas key to individual development.
“We went back and forth around performance ratings, but at the end of the day, it’s all about giving people clarity. For us, the rating is just the facility for a conversation,” said Simran. “It’s all in the details and the dialog after and that’s why we did a lot of manager training on how to deliver this and how to structure your feedback. It’s not just about the rating. It’s about the examples that you give.”
Connection, Collaboration & Innovation Key For Klue
Moreover, Klue has clued in to what works best to foster that performance, switching to a hybrid model as a result in 2024, while fostering a host of catalytic connections geared towards collaboration and innovation.
“We strongly believe in in-person collaboration and how it impacts innovative potential in that casual learning that we really need in this environment. Now, we have the majority of our team in our hubs and hybrid, but what we’ve done is try to find intentional ways of building that connection,” said Simran. “So once a year, we fly everybody to Vancouver for our kickoff, where we talk about our goals for the year. We really anchor it around building together and getting excited about what lies ahead.”
“Beyond that, we find other ways to stay connected. Every Friday, we have something called ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ where people share what they’re working on. They’re not telling us. They’re actually showing us. It could be something scrappy and unpolished. It’s not a slick presentation, but the chat is going off and there is engagement,” said Simran. “Every six weeks, we do ‘What’s Up at Klue,’ where the SLT presents what’s going on in the business and people within each department present something as well.”
That cross-pollination to drive innovation is a driver of all three prongs of Klue’s talent profile. Another favourite, Simran notes, are their Slack-driven ‘Donuts,’ which connect team members monthly just to get acquainted, see what and how they’re doing and learn a bit more about each other in the process.
“We really believe in cross-pollination and collaboration, and it doesn’t have to be fully in person. One of the things we’re doing right now is having our engineers sit on sales calls every so often—and then following up during our ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ with a segment called ‘Engineers on Sales Calls’ where they share exactly that—what they learned being on sales calls. So, we’re finding ways to make it work even in hybrid or remote settings.
It’s well worth noting that Klue has been cued in to the importance of their team from the start, Simran notes that having formalized a means of ‘Identifying Great Talent’ is win for all parties.
“People want to work with us and our company because of our culture. It all comes down to the experience, but it ties to our product too. This is a product that has not existed in an industry that’s new and we’re shaping,” said Simran. “So, we’re just trying to find people who want to build that future with us. I think it’s an exciting moment at this stage of growth, where there’s this opportunity of the unknown, of what this space going to look like, but also shaping that together.”