Just because a company has made it into the big leagues, that doesn’t mean it can rest on its laurels. But how do you keep that nimble startup state of mind? We spoke to leaders at five prominent Chicago tech companies to find out.
Home Chef streamlines the cooking process by delivering pre-portioned ingredients to your home, along with cooking directions so you can make delicious meals easily. Meal delivery can be customized and organized via the company’s app. Matt Pulley, chief technology officer, said the same employee traits that made his team successful in the past are the keys to continued growth in the future.
We continue to hire the whole person, rather than just a resume.”
Why is maintaining a startup mentality so important to your team?
Even as we mature, growing in size and complexity, it’s important to maintain elements of our startup culture like flexibility and learning. We foster those things through our iterative product planning process, where active learning is key.
How do you continue to recruit for people who embody those values?
When it comes to recruiting, the same core traits we needed when were were smaller are still needed now. There are more opportunities, more people and more complex decisions to be made. Now, more than ever, we need people who share our core values and our culture. So we continue to hire the whole person, rather than just a resume.
Paylocity provides businesses with cloud-based payroll, HR and administrative software to help them increase efficiency. Senior Vice President of Product and Technology Ted Gaty and Director of Strategic Initiatives Karen Klimara provided insights into how the company maintains its startup vibe.
Maintaining elements of a startup culture allows us to deliver better results for our customers.”
Why is maintaining a startup mentality so important to your team?
Gaty: Maintaining elements of a startup culture allows us to deliver better results for our customers and offer a more attractive workplace for potential employees. As a company that is growing rapidly, it’s more important than ever to ensure we don’t lose sight of this mentality.
How do you continue to recruit for people who embody those values?
Klimara: We recruit for talent who embody our principles of empowered teams, accountable ownership, relentless delivery and unmitigated curiosity — all in service of meeting our customer’s needs. Our principles ground us. They are the epitome of our culture and our guiding posts to maintain our startup environment while we expand and onboard talent from anywhere across the country.
Guaranteed Rate offers digital mortgage services to consumers at competitive rates. Scott Stephen, chief growth officer, said employees who embody the company’s values help keep its culture intact.
Creating a positive culture remains very important to growing the business.”
Why is maintaining a startup mentality so important to your team?
The keys to retaining elements of a startup culture within mature tech companies are to maintain an innovative mindset, stay close to employees and be willing to move fast.
How do you continue to recruit for people who embody those values?
At Guaranteed Rate, we have a set of 10 core values, which drive everything we do to serve our customers and contribute to our success. Creating a positive culture remains very important to growing the business, so we are focused on creating the right conditions, hiring great people who share our values and working hard together to drive toward our growth goals.
Avant provides middle-income households with personal loans and credits cards through their online lending portal, acting as an option for those who don’t qualify for traditional bank loans. Robert Reynolds, chief technology officer, said flexibility and two-way honesty keep his company operating like a startup.
Maintaining our startup mentality and embracing our roots are huge keys to our flexibility.”
Why is maintaining a startup mentality so important to your team?
We make a concerted effort to empower leaders to make decisions without a heavy hand guiding them. Creating bureaucratic processes would be counterproductive to that empowerment, ultimately leading to slower delivery, less innovation and static technical design. We move at a pace where we don’t have time for those shortcomings. As such, maintaining our startup mentality and embracing our roots are huge keys to our flexibility, speed and quality of work.
How do you continue to recruit for people who embody those values?
We place a heavy premium on ensuring we have cultural fit in the interview process. That discovery is a two-way street — we want to make it clear to prospective employees how we operate at Avant so they can make the correct decision to join or not join our team. We also want to ask the correct questions to infer whether we believe that prospect would be a great fit or not. There is no exact science to finding a cultural fit, but if all parties are honest with each other, which is one of our core values, it leads to great results.
Digital marketing agency closerlook works to facilitate relationships between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare professionals through tools for data collection and marketing, as well as interactive website design. VP of Human Resources Joanna Kontoudakis said agility and a deep toolbox of skills are things that employees must have in order keep the company on its toes.
What’s most important is excelling in similar work product experiences.”
Why is maintaining a startup mentality so important to your team?
Even though closerlook has been around for over 30 years, we’re always evolving and changing to stay in front of the needs of our customers and remain agile enough to react quickly to what we see missing in the marketplace. Our multi-disciplinary teams include pharma-marketing strategy, brand and creative strategy, multichannel marketing and marketing intelligence. We can only do this successfully in an environment that encourages a nimble and agile approach to solving our clients’ challenges.
How do you continue to recruit for people who embody those values?
For us, it’s recruiting for candidates who are additive to our cultural values versus just a good fit. Do recruits have the skill sets and experience that support thinking outside the box or taking a nimble approach to a new idea? Can they speak to instances where they’ve had success in other industries? We’ve found that being experts in our industry is less important in most roles. What’s most important is excelling in similar work product experiences. By relaxing this criteria, we’ve found strong candidates who are able to bring in and support fresh approaches and smart thinking.
