
How We Found Great Talents for Our Remote Company Without Spending a Fortune - kundi
http://blog.nightwatch.io/finding-remote-employees
======
nottorp
Let's see... i have a FB account for keeping in touch with some non technical
friends who don't know better. I am in no groups and post nothing. Filtered
out?

Now about your form:

Why would I like to work at ... whatever your company was called? You offer
remote (big plus) and perhaps you pay well enough. (opens the main web page)
Other reasons, no - you seem to be spammers so the only reason I'd work there
is money.

Coolest things you've ever done work wise? Legit ISH but you're filtering out
competent people that did their job well at a boring job. Does writing a
(admittedly pretty simple) kernel driver without having access to the hardware
and having it work with (i think) just one modification count?

Coolest things you've done privately? None of your bussiness.

What are your prospects, dreams or expectations, career wise? No one in their
right mind will answer honestly here, they will insert some canned interview
lie.

The remote question is legit, but it filters out everyone who has worked in an
office and got sick of it. Only people who have worked remotely can answer
something meaningful here. Expect another interview lie here.

Btw my answer is "the most challenging thing is to pry out all the information
you need out of people, and you need to be proactive about that".

------
ddorian43
Carefull of too much "extensive application form", it may bite you. Takes time
to fill those forms and then get an automated "no thanks", can be
discouraging.

Point is to reduce friction but not too much. (code this big function before
applying).

I would add a salary-range too. As insanely cool the work may be, your
kids/landord don't care that you're saving/changing the world.

Example: Coolest things can be in the resume, what would you like is usually
the job-description/role etc, can you work remote (I already have x years
remote in my resume) in same/different timezones .

Many forms double the things that already are listed in the resume (all
questions taken from the form are listed in my resume).

~~~
ggg9990
Most companies don’t care how discouraging they are to the people they don’t
hire.

~~~
neogodless
And this is exactly why the comment above yours has value. Beat the drums and
spread the message.

I mean, I suppose it's entirely possible that "most companies" are quite
pleased with their hiring process and the people they have hired, and truly
believe there is no one better that they could have hired. But there's a
pretty good chance they could have hired someone better... not objectively,
universally better, but better suited to their actual day-to-day needs.

------
larrik
> If a person’s answers are clearly inflated and their claims of
> accomplishment seem exaggerated, take it as a red flag.

I'm not convinced you can tell that as well as you think you can.

> it's 99% certain that your next hire has a Facebook

If you are hiring a social media manager or SEO person (like in this article),
definitely. I feel like hiring devs are often a different challenge
altogether.

~~~
janesvilleseo
You’d be surprised how many people in digital marketing don’t have a Facebook
account. I thought I’d be shamed for never having one, but the more I talk
about it, the more people I find out don’t have one either

Note: I have an empty/fake account so I can access client accounts.

~~~
gk1
I'm a marketing consultant and I don't have FB. The line about "99%" of
candidates having FB makes me think the author is out of touch.

~~~
yani
Does it not mean exactly the opposite that you are becoming a dinosaur?

~~~
gk1
My teenage nieces/nephews don't have FB either, so the likely answer is "no."

------
hellerve
You want exceptional talent, you know that they need to be “pampered” to take
the job, and yet you make them fill out a form before they even talk to you?
That doesn’t sound like a great tactic.

In my experience the single best free tactic for vetting candidates is having
them be referred by your employees. Of course you’ll still have to look at
them yourself like at any other candidate, but at least they have a direct
reference you can talk to. If your employee is any good, chances are the
people they want to work with/have previously worked with and enjoyed it are
as well.

~~~
HillaryBriss
yeah. i personally struggle sometimes to answer the question "Why do you want
to work for XYZ company?"

and that's because so much of why i want to work at a company boils down to
the specific tasks and working conditions and the specific people i will
interact with in that specific job. the overall company seems like a small
factor a lot of times.

also it's hard to know much about some new, private, very small startup
anyway. how much info can i really obtain about something that small and that
private?

~~~
JustSomeNobody
"I like to work in interesting domains on interesting problems. From the
outside, it looks like this describes your company so I'd like the opportunity
to talk to you and learn more about your company."

~~~
HillaryBriss
nice. yeah. i like that sentiment, that perspective. i would feel good about
answering in that that way. thanks.

(for some reason, i always imagine companies want an answer like "Well, I've
been dreaming about fixing bugs in billing systems for discount airline
backend software since I was in the sixth grade. And since your company is the
third largest discount airline backend software company in this part of Ohio,
I just had to apply.")

------
BerislavLopac
This form risks loosing the best candidates, for being too extensive (as
@ddorian43 has noted) and requiring the candidates to dedicate a solid amount
of time to formulate their answers in writing; and the best candidates don't
have too much time on their hands. And it is not just the time to write the
answers; the questions are quite open-ended and require the candidate to
consider their inner motivation. Some candidates might even be compelled to
lie when answering questions such as "What are your prospects, dreams and
expectations?" because they might fear a negative reaction to the truth, which
is often along the lines of "I want to be fairly compensated for my
contribution".

It would be much better if they offered multiple pre-defined options, with an
additional option to write in another answer; e.g. for the first question it
could be something like:

    
    
        Why would you like to work at Nightwatch? (select all that apply)
    
            [ ] I like the product
            [ ] My skillset is a right match to the position
            [ ] I hope to learn new skills 
            [ ] I am the watcher on the walls
            [ ] Other (please specify): _________________________________________

~~~
neogodless
I think a useful question to ask candidates to help preserve my sanity would
be:

Which word means "moving towards the state of no longer having?"

    
    
      [ ] peacing out
      [ ] lossing
      [ ] losing
      [ ] loosing
    

I'd probably accept #1 and #3.

~~~
logfromblammo
What is the absolute worst?

[ ] the greengrocer's apostrophe

[ ] people willing to debate standard comma versus Oxford comma

[ ] typos not caught by spell check, because they are also valid words

[ ] a homophone or near-homophone incorrectly replacing a word that would
otherwise be valid

[ ] an obvious dearth of proofreading or copy editing

~~~
galfarragem
CV and any kind of interview are, IMHO, subjective. You'll hire not the best
for the job but the one that complies with your biases.

Empirically, I would say that the most optimized hiring strategy is: trial
most, keep the better ones.

------
j_m_b
This is just another "this is how we setup the hoops people need to jump
through to get hired at our company!" article. I don't particularly think
making it more difficult to fill out an application is the kind of filter
you're looking for. I don't see how you are going to find "great talent"
(another term that's been rendered meaningless) without looking at a Github
page, sample projects, or viewing sample code. No mention even of Hacker News
Who's Hiring thread!

------
zanalyzer
"Facebook groups are super useful because it’s 99% certain that your next hire
has a Facebook."

Funny, that's precisely how I filter candidates too. First question: "Did you
bring your Facebook?"

~~~
wierd0
> Facebook groups are super useful because [...]

I guess our visions aren't aligned then. Anyone into the sport of making money
would agree that SEO is a good thing but the way you sell it to me I'd want to
kill myself before I work for you guys.

Nightwatch, you produce market speak aimed towards the completely wrong tree.

------
gaius
_The secret of jobs is joining and targeting the right Facebook and LinkedIn
groups._

Nothing about that sentence makes any sense.

Also “talents”?

------
mlthoughts2018
When I was first promoted to leading a team and tasked with hiring people, I
was really scared because of the prevalence of articles and anecdotes claiming
scary things like “80% of people in software can’t code” or “one bad hire will
destroy your team.”

After a few years of doing it, I think those fears are silly and it’s all a
lot of overblown scare tactics to pressure us into cargo-cult adoption of what
Google has done, usually through consulting firms that advise on the
recruiting process or through new businesses like HackerRank, etc., that try
to commoditize this fictional hiring fear.

What has worked for me is trusting recommendations from my existing team,
employees in a company, or my extended network. I’ve also selectively reached
out to specific users of GitHub, Stack Overflow, Kaggle, and other community
sites. I will also travel to university recruiting fairs, professional
conference recruiting fairs, and sometimes local meetups or technology groups.

I avoid opening up a job ad to the whole internet and accepting an
undifferentiated stream of resumes. I avoid it _not_ because it means I have
to weed out “bad coders” or some nonsense — in many cases, _most_ applicants
are fully skilled enough for the job, and it’s just a big lie in our industry
when people whine about inability to pass FizzBuzz. It keeps the incentives
aligned towards hiring hyper-competitive 22-year-olds who just spent 10 months
on leetcode and end up working for a lot less money, while nobody thinks about
the impact on culture, long-term design or other expertise, diversity, etc.
They just want the 22-year-old leetcode jockeys to arrange them as a doll
collection in open-plan seating for VCs and investors to walk by.

Instead I an internet stream of resumes because it’s not cost effective to put
myself in a position where I or especially engineers on my team have to scour
huge piles of resumes.

I can’t stress this enough. You should not open yourself up to a firehose of
resumes. And adding extra filters, like coldly making candidates complete a
code test before they even speak to a human about the nature of the job is
just a symptom of the contortions you have to do if you open yourself up to a
firehose.

Focus on improving the useful signal of the _source_ of resumes. Keep
diversifying and improving this, and take on small batches of higher signal
resumes.

If I could summarize what has worked efficiently for me:

\- keep job ads short and technically focused on the intended job duties

\- don’t open yourself to a firehose of resumes

\- use technically probing conversation, recursively digging into really
technical details of the candidates past experiences or studies

\- code tests, if used at all, should be used lightly, involve no hazing-style
algorithm trivia, and candidates should have options regarding their comfort
and preferences (e.g. doing it on-site vs take-home, using their editor &
programming environment of choice, generous time limit, and absolutelt nothing
resembling HackerRank/coderpad/whiteboard hazing nonsense).

\- Keep initial interviews short and informative.

\- Use the max over a candidate’s performance in early rounds, and min in
later rounds, explained below:

\- In early rounds, always have more than one interviewer to get multiple
impressions, and use the _best_ candidate impression to decide to continue
them to the next round.

\- in late rounds, have many interviewers and use something closer to the
candidate’s _worst_ session to decide on an offer, but perhaps with some
careful discussion to mitigate the chance it was unrepresentative.

\- And of course _always_ give the candidate a chance to ask questions and see
the facilities. I would expect a candidate to absolutely turn me down if they
aren’t allowed to ask questions, and why shouldn’t they? Especially if my
company comes across like we care more about cramming in one more trivia
question than about the candidate’s curiosity and preferences, frankly then
_we don’t deserve to hire a good candidate._

There really is such a woeful lack of _Peopleware_ -style common sense in
modern tech hiring; a lack of basic humanity or empathy to such a degree that
it actually hurts _business_.

~~~
logfromblammo
So which garden hoses of resumes should I put my resume into--rather than the
fire hose--if I want to be hired by a good company that follows your
recommendations?

If you don't drink from the fire hose, you're accepting the intrinsic biases
of the lower-flux feeds that you do use, and missing the candidates that won't
necessarily know to stand exactly where you are willing to search for them.

But then, if you do disclose your sources, and everyone starts using them,
those eventually increase in volume and decrease in quality as well.

The problem is still finding a method to match high-quality employee
candidates with high-quality employers, without getting swamped by any low-
quality parasites inserting themselves into the signal and masquerading as
high-quality for individual benefit.

Why not have some of the candidates vet each other? Give everyone a random set
of N partially anonymized resumes, and ask them to pick the one out of the N
that they would most enjoy working with at your company.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
This is very true, and if you find that for your use case, you really need
that bigger fire hose, then by all means go for it. But you have to agree
you're shifting different costs around.

If you go with the fire hose, you have to pay the weed-through-tons-of-resumes
costs, often including build outs of application systems, standardized portals
and application/interview pipelines, third-party recruiter overhead, etc.

I would argue that even if the fire hose is allowing you more access to the
tail of some candidate distribution, it is not worth that cost, and in all
likelihood the best candidates would be reachable through other means anyway.

In reality, many of the companies that use these big recruiting platforms
designed to wrangle an internet fire hose of resumes fall into two camps (yes,
an oversimplification, but often useful):

\- big corps who want a large pool of resumes solely to put downward pressure
on salary -- these are the same companies that will ask you to do a 20 minute
song and dance interview with someone from HR right at the start, which is
nothing but pretense to ask about your salary requirements, and immediately
reject you if you either won't say or say something too high. This kind of
place right away communicates that engineering managers don't have the power
to hire good people, only people who were cheap enough to pass the initial HR
filter.

\- Places that cargo-cult copy the hiring process of other, uncommonly
successful places.

When you focus on cultivating a smaller network of places to request resumes,
you do pay a cost. You do immediately prevent yourself from good candidates
who wouldn't just happen to be in your targeted applicant communities. But
this is life. Trade-offs. Do you _know_ that this cost is worse than all the
costs associated with the huge big-box applicant pipelines? I mean, people
using those pipelines are still often heard griping about how hard it is to
find candidates and how long it takes. My experience has been that the
benefits of narrow, specialty / community focused requests for applicants work
out to be a lot better overall, even if I have to endure some unpleasant costs
to do it that way. No method is perfect, so you have to look at the trade-
offs. And as always, your mileage may vary.

> "The problem is still finding a method to match high-quality employee
> candidates with high-quality employers, without getting swamped by any low-
> quality parasites inserting themselves into the signal and masquerading as
> high-quality for individual benefit."

I actually really disagree with this, and I think it just perpetuates the
myths about tech hiring. In reality, _very few_ applicants are "masquerading"
(and, by the way, _all applicants_ are in it for individual benefit). People
seriously overestimate how many applicants are "fakers" \-- especially because
they will ask some asinine hazing trivia, like some useless question about
esoteric data structure internals, and then when someone can't answer it
perfectly in 20 minutes, they'll be declared a "faker" and the interviewer
will jump on Hacker News and write some comment embellishing the situation, as
if the candidate ran away in terms when asked to solve FizzBuzz, despite
having 10 Ivy League degrees on their resume. It's nuts.

Few people are fakers. It's safe to assume applicants are sincere, and then
technically probe them. If they can't speak with you in good technical detail
about their experience or studies, it doesn't meant they are a faker, but it
might mean they aren't the match for your role. Be nice to them, give them
useful feedback, and move on.

But I can't even imagine how awful it must be to harbor such a cynical
attitude that you need to be significantly worries about people "masquerading"
during interviews. It really, truly just isn't true, not even when you _do_
use a fire hose stream of resumes.

~~~
logfromblammo
If you disagree that fakers are a problem, then all you need to do is turn on
the fire hose until your resume bucket is full, then turn it off. There will
be a suitable candidate for you in there. You don't need to filter by any
specific criterion, and you can rely on the random confluence of people that
are looking for work just as you happen to be taking resumes.

If you don't believe the fire hose is full of unsuitable candidates, and you
can't evaluate more than 100 resumes, then don't take 10000 resumes and try to
filter it down to 100 with outside resources. Just take 100 resumes to start
with, and go from there.

The assumption that the fire hose is filled with low-quality resumes is
_intrinsic_ in your suggestion to get resumes from other sources. Everyone has
pumped their resume into the big reservoir at one time or another. Not
everyone has supplied--or even known about--all the various garden hoses.

If the fire hose _isn 't_ full of junk, why would anyone intentionally _not
use it_?

Even if you can only evaluate 10 resumes at a time, spin the valve on the fire
hose until 10 squirt out, and evaluate them. It's okay to have your search
fail, because you can always spin the valve again to get 10 more. Even if your
search succeeds, you can still get another 10 resumes from the fire hose.
That's the whole point of having it. If people stop tapping that reservoir,
the candidates go somewhere else. They stop putting resumes on Monster and go
to Indeed. They stop using job sites and go to LinkedIn. They get tired of the
recruiter spam on LinkedIn and go to Facebook groups. You're relying on the
candidates you want to be surfing the same wave of signal-to-noise that you
are, and to be fighting the same arms race of eminently-suitable-for-the-job
versus oh-yeah-prove-it.

By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask the
job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a specialist
in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X than they
actually have. It isn't that they _can 't_ do X, but they aren't what you
specifically asked for. The specifics in the job advertisement are themselves
a type of filter that some people will work to defeat in order to get past the
arbitrary filtering layer to the human evaluation layer.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> If you disagree that fakers are a problem, then all you need to do is turn
> on the fire hose until your resume bucket is full, then turn it off.

This is wrong because you are presuming your conclusion (that fakers are the
problem) already. Fakers _aren 't_ a problem, and it is _the other_ reasons
for avoiding the fire hose that matter.

But generally, I would agree. If it were possible to set up big box resume
submission solutions and turn them off after a little while, it would be fine.
There would be many qualified candidates. It might depend on exactly what
specialized skills you need if hiring for a specialized role, but generally,
yeah, you collect 1000 resumes and most of them correspond to people who can
do the job, or who would need modest extra training or mentoring to do it at a
high level.

You collect 1000 resumes and you definitely _aren 't_ gonna get 999 "fakers",
and this fact isn't really the point.

The real problem is that you can't turn off the resume fire hose when your
bucket fills up, because the existence of the fire hose is a political
problem. You have to deal with HR having their nose in it, meetings and policy
and bureaucracy about how to choose workday or greenhouse or some slick new
start-up, whether to pay retainers for recruitment firms (who also might have
perverse incentives).

Most often I, as the hiring manager, have no control over resume collection if
it is done through generic application portals, online careers sites, or job
aggregator sites. What happens is I get a _weekly_ batch of some unreasonably
large number of resumes, have to filter them myself or with my team, and then
send back the approved ones to someone in HR. HR then does pre-screeners and
comes back and says, "you can't hire any of those people because they all want
competitive salaries" and we go again over and over, until 6 months have
rolled by, my team is ready to vomit at the sight of another resume, and HR
_finally_ breaks down and lets us increase the budget, and we go back to some
candidate we wanted to hire from the original batch of resumes, but they got a
job in the meantime, and we repeat.

Your comment seems to presume that internet scale fire hose of resumes somehow
doesn't get managed by a bureaucratic HR system, but that's _never_ the case
(anymore, not even in early start-ups).

You avoid the fire hose because it requires affixing a bureaucratic collection
mechanism to the front that mediates how you are able to review resumes, and
limits you from choosing the candidates you want.

You're right that _if you could turn on the fire hose for some time amount of
time_ then you'd move through qualified candidates very fast. _But you can 't_
by the very nature of the apparatuses you are forced to use if you use an
internet-wide fire hose _at all_.

> By the way, you may have misunderstood my use of masquerade. When you ask
> the job-seeker community for a specialist in X, then a generalist, or a
> specialist in Y may adjust themselves to appear to have more skill with X
> ...

I actually think this is more of a symptom of bureaucracy as well. Companies
don't usually create job ads for specialist in X, and when they do, they
usually are not coherent, and the hiring filters are also not coherent. So the
company creates a job ad for specialists in X, but everything about the
interview and hiring process makes it impossible for specialists in X to
actually get hired (from coding trivia to salary limits to impossible wishlist
job ads claiming to want 10 years of experience in a technology that has only
existed for 5 years, etc.)

The problem is more that the company is saying, "We define 'specialist in X'
as: costs less than $150k, has 13 years of experience with data science, and
is an expert with React" because they don't know what they are talking about.
The job ad maybe looks like it's a data science position, so someone who would
_actually_ be qualified for the job maybe has 5 years of experience in data
science and no experience in React because that part is totally a mistake for
whoever created the ad.

Then some pointy headed recruiter gets the application and thinks, geez this
guy only has 5 years experience as a data scientist but we wanted 13, and he
doesn't even have experience in React, but it says right here in the job ad
they you need it! This guy is masquerading!

Anyway, it seems like we probably won't see eye to eye on it, and that's cool.
I don't mind if lots of people keep cranking on big solicitations for
thousands of resumes, because I can keep flying under the radar and using
different techniques to find candidates.

~~~
logfromblammo
So the fire hose is not the problem, but the fact that other people are often
blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it.

You use garden hoses because you can sneak them past the fire hose monitors
and connect them to a tap in your team's office. Once you have tasted the
water and selected an appropriate candidate, then you can smuggle them past
the gatekeepers and get them hired.

But that still leaves me with the question: if I want to get hired by you, how
do I know which garden hose to use?

I have seen sane, descriptive job ads that instruct interested applicants to
ignore the standard application instructions and e-mail their resume to a
particular address, with a specific keyword in the subject line. That
indicates a simple filtering program, perhaps with an auto-reply function,
that goes to someone _not_ an HR gatekeeper. Some people out there are
connecting their own garden hoses to the main reservoir, such that they
control the flow rate and the filters.

If the reason you don't use the fire hose is because your own company makes it
unusable, that doesn't necessarily mean that other companies--especially small
ones, with maybe one part-time HR employee--will also make it unusable.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> So the fire hose is not the problem, but the fact that other people are
> often blocking or restricting the manner in which you access it.

I guess it's a matter of words and it might dissolve our question, because the
way I see it, "fire hose" == "people are often blocking or restricting the
manner in which you access it". At least, that's what I'm trying to mean by
opening yourself up to the problem of managing a fire hose of incoming
resumes. The platonic ideal of a large stream of resumes that I can easily
slice and dice of my own accord, in practice, doesn't exist and would be so
rare as to not factor into the discussion.

------
jacknews
"We want the best talent at the best possible price"

What "price" range were you aiming for?

------
BerislavLopac
And also about the "Why do you want to work for this company?" question: don't
presume that I do. What I do want is learn more about you (feel free to ask me
what caused that, though), and if I find you interested I might even want to
work for you. But you need to sell the company first.

Companies too often assume that a) applicants know everything about them, and
b) are keen to work there from the beginning. But hiring is a two-way street,
and the candidates -- especially the best ones, and especially in IT -- can
often afford to shop around before deciding which offer to accept.

------
gabrielblack
You failed selling your company to me. Your tecnique seems just another
philosopher's Stone that incompetent recruiters think were capable to find out
and capable to engage magically IT specialists paying less as possible. Maybe
it was possible only because, engaging remote workers, you can hire people in
country with low cost of living.

------
lsaac
Good English is, clearly, not one of your company's core values..

------
lsaac
There is so much talk in the tech world about equality in the work force, yet,
all too often, you hear lines like "separating the wheat from the chaff"
regarding job applicants. Is there maybe a more respectful way to speak about
people who are less talented than others?

~~~
ggg9990
I think most of the talk is about increasing the number of women and non-Asian
nonwhites. I’ve heard very little talk about being more respectful of people’s
humanity (whether applicants, employees, or the general public).

------
iblaine
I fully expected to see jobs for 'Media Marketing Ninja' or 'Social Media
Hacker', but the jobs listings are normal. Was not surprised to see it's an
SEO company. Making the internet a better place one backlink at a time!

------
dtertman
Can't help feeling the TLDR here is "luck". Heavy survivor bias, no metrics on
things that either weren't working or feedback from candidates/hires of what
worked.

------
pc86
Actual title is "fortune," not "cent"

------
himom
Someone fix the title plz. “Talent” is both singular and plural when referring
to employees.

~~~
repsilat
It's fine. You can interpret "talent" as a mass noun, in which case you
wouldn't pluralise it ("There's a lot of talent here.")

Alternatively, you could use it in another sense ("He is a great talent," and
"Our employees are all great talents.") Interpreting the title in this sense
is slightly awkward but certainly grammatical.

------
bradgnar
artificially generate views for your blog to get more people aware of your
company?

------
gain_sky
Sounds like another obnoxious silicon-valley wannabe company. The kind of
place that is "changing the world" one internet search at a time.

"Define your company values and mission" 90% of these are tautological
marketing catch lines, anybody with a brain will be able to smell the bullsh*t
on this one.

Also keep in mind that their tagline is that they "create enterprise-level
search visibility tools for internet samurais of the future". Samurais -
enough said.

~~~
lostcolony
First, I want to say I largely agree with you.

Second, I want to say that the 10% of a company's values/missions that aren't
tautological marketing catch phrases are actually -incredibly- important, and
can directly contribute to a company's success. The fact 90% deviate is more
to do with companies not realizing how important it is to not just be
marketing fluff, than any intrinsic value or lack thereof of having such a
statement.

Fundamentally, a company has many decisions where they have to choose A or B,
not both. Oftentimes these decisions are made at a level the CEO or similar
has no insight into. To be able to ensure people make the right decisions and
are all pulling in the same direction, a culture has to be adopted. Mission
statements, value statements, etc, are the only tool the CEO really has to
shape that culture, beyond simply hiring into the roles directly underneath
him (which is hard to do without insight into what is going on beneath
-them-). The Culture Code has a great segment in it about how Johnson &
Johnson's credo (specifically, "We believe our first responsibility is to the
doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use
our products and services") led to its handling of the cyanide in the tylenol
incident, which saved the product line (when every analyst was like "that's
done, no one will trust Tylenol again"), as well as introduced the now
ubiqitous tamper proof packaging.

~~~
gain_sky
I'm unaware of the Johnson & Johnson example you mention, but to me a company
with a "good" culture code (are they ever bad? or even different?), is like
Kim Jong Un saying that North Korea is free and fair.

I'm not saying that culture doesn't exist but it exists in the decisions that
are made by the people who run the companies themselves, they set the tone and
precedent for how the company works and the employees take note and follow.

~~~
lostcolony
Yes, there are bad cultures. More commonly, there are companies without a
culture. Oh, different departments may have a de facto culture, but the
company as a whole doesn't have one. That's a problem. Because where a company
grows and delivers value is in the alignment of very disparate concentrations
and expertises. You can build the best damn software system in a given domain,
but if your marketing team isn't on the same page, it will fail. And if your
marketing team is awesome, but the product completely misaligns with what
they're selling it as, you will see some initial success, but very quickly be
disrupted or flat out fail (though if your business people are good they can
possibly swarm to buy any competitors before they become a threat).

The decisions are important, yes. But the person at the top isn't making every
decision. They may have the best intentions, but if somewhere down the chain
of command someone is prioritizing the wrong thing, focusing on the wrong
thing, but still doing their job okay, they won't be told to do differently or
let go. Defining a focus allows their immediate superior to recognize they're
not doing their job. It even allows their subordinate to tell the manager
"Hey, our mission/values statement says X; are you sure we should be doing
this?" and possibly fix it without escalating it (though if escalation is
necessary, it also provides a reason to escalate it, and a reason for the
superior to pay attention).

------
gk1
TL;DR - Post job ads in Facebook groups.

