Be Distinct
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
The biggest reason Clipboard Health writes this blog is to tell people who we are. We wanted people generally to know more about us, but specifically we have always written the blog with an aim of getting job candidates up to speed on what to expect from us. We try to use writing as a tool to even out some of the knowledge imbalance that sometimes comes out of the interview process; we don’t want anybody starting a job here without having a just as good of an idea whether we will be a good fit for them long term as we do about how well they will fit us.
We have for the most part stayed away from bragging about our growth (>6x over the last year!) or that we are a still-rising Y Combinator 100 company to focus on other things like our values and culture. It’s not that profitability and growth don’t matter to candidates - they absolutely do and should - but those are by their nature metrics that tell you how a company is doing rather than what a company is like. Profitable, growing companies are rare, but companies that are a truly good fit for an individual applicant are even more rare; we want people to know we are successful, but we want them to know whether or not they can be successful here even more.
We spend a lot of effort on this because these days being a start-up isn’t necessarily anything special; start-ups are a dime a dozen and there’s only so many funding round announcements candidates can pay attention to before they just start ignoring them. Differentiating yourself as a company in today’s market means figuring out what makes your company distinct, the unique qualities your company has that make it the best fit for the kind of people you are looking for.
You shouldn’t be a good fit for everyone
We love talking to people who have start-up experience. There’s some roles within the company where it’s distinctly more difficult to get hired on with us if you haven’t worked in something at least very similar to a start-up. Why? Because that’s who we are; working for Clipboard is vastly different than working for an established mega corporation. There’s structure here, but it’s much less rigid; the structure we have is focused on giving people support and room to do what they need to do much more than it’s focused on cookie-cutter deliverables and every-day-the-same routine. Things move faster and people need more initiative to do well
If a candidate starts work at Clipboard Health expecting and desiring a traditional corporate environment, they are almost always going to be in for a hard time. Unless their expectations of the kind of environment they would enjoy were off-base, aspects of our company that are often considered benefits are actually negatives for them: the freedom we give people to develop their own projects can seem like a lack of direction and the ability we give people to choose their own direction can look like a lack of instructions. It’s not that they are wrong about the value of those standards and we are right or vice versa much as it is that they are just looking for something we don’t have. It shouldn't come as a surprise when that scenario doesn’t work out.
Giving people a distinct impression of your company avoids most of these problems. Letting people know you have a faster, more risk-taking pacing lets a candidate opt out if they are looking for a slower, more careful pacing. Letting a candidate know they will be expected to show a lot of initiative and curiosity in driving their projects lets them pass on the position if they want a more defined role that offers more rigid oversight. More often than you’d think, it’s the candidate that pumps the brakes on the interview process when you make information about who you are front-and-center in your conversations. It’s important to note that this is fine. A hiring process is best when it’s truly a collaboration, and for better or worse the candidates know more about themselves than you are going to learn in a few interviews. If they sense it’s a bad fit, trust them; learning about it during the interview process is a best case scenario for both parties.
You are going to pass on a lot of talent
We want to be clear that nothing we’ve said so far should be taken to indicate that we think that an unsuitable fit indicates that a particular candidate is less in some way. Every so often, we run into a candidate that has the exact skills we want, tons of experience and a proven track record of success whom we end up not being able to hire. This isn’t because we think they are in some way generally bad. It’s also not something we do happily; when this happens, it’s actively painful to pass on that person. Responsible hiring means giving people the best chance at success, and sometimes we aren’t able to honestly say we can do that for some individuals, even when they are often amazing in a way that makes us sad to lose them.
If you are distinct and show it, you are going to run into a lot of this. This might not be true if you aren’t that picky about your staff in a way that would allow you to hire people who were bad cultural fits and knew it but needed to take the job anyway, but not if you are trying to build the kind of cohesive culture that reaps the benefits of getting a lot of people together working in similar ways under a similar philosophy. That means a lot of good people are going to pass on your job opportunities (and vice versa). It’s often hard to remember at the moment that this is a feature and not a bug; despite letting quality people get past you, it’s a win-win for everyone involved.
You get a chance at the best talent
Being distinct doesn’t have a huge effect on everyone without exception. Some people just starting out in their careers don’t have a good idea of what they want; this is something they have to learn over time as experience teaches them the kind of environments they do best in and the kind of personalities they work best around. Some people are just insanely versatile and enjoy the variance they see in work culture as they move from job to job over the course of their career. With these people, the value of showing the ways you are distinct from other potential employers is limited; they get something out of knowing, but it’s more informative than determinative.
With that said, we’ve found that the very best people are disproportionately likely to be difficult or impossible to recruit unless they have a great picture of the exact shape of your company’s culture, what it does and where it’s going. This is true to the point where candidates proactively asking deep, insightful questions about the details of the philosophy and tactics of the company is a consistently strong sign of quality; a person who asks those questions is much more likely to make it through an interview process with us than someone who doesn’t.
This is true for a couple of reasons. The first is that very good candidates are usually very attentive and have investigative minds. A candidate that’s “awake” in this way spends a lot of time noticing patterns and cause-and-effect in the world around them. Their workplace is no exception; they very quickly get a good idea of what works for them and doesn’t from their working experience, accurately gauging what kind of environments they should look for in the future. And a candidate knowing what they are looking for indicates a certain amount of self-knowledge, as well; a candidate indicates they also have a healthy self-knowledge of their own capabilities and limitations just by knowing about their own detailed preferences.
The second reason that candidates who focus on fit are often high-quality is that truly exceptional candidates always have choices. We are aware that the more a candidate brings to the table, the more options they have; we are ideally only one of dozens of places they could go. This is especially true of the best-of-the-best. High pay at growing, exciting companies are par for the course for a lot of them, and they know it because those companies are actively reaching out to them to tell them so. With good compensation and good company metrics as a given, they have the freedom to focus on what else the company brings to the table - it’s culture, it’s methods, or it’s mission. If you can’t make clear to these candidates how your company is distinct, you won’t be consistently successful recruiting these people, full stop.
Showing distinction
The good news about being distinct is that you already are; your company already has things about it that set it apart from other companies. The difficulty arises only in terms of noticing those things and making other people aware of them. If you can’t or don’t communicate about what makes your company special, it doesn’t matter how special it is; the top-notch candidates will move on to a company that’s better at expressing why they are particularly suited for the candidate's needs.
Clipboard Health puts a lot of effort into making clear what we are and what we are looking for. Some of that happens on this blog, but more happens in ways that aren’t as outwardly apparent. Our interviewers spend a lot of time writing questions that not only tell us about those being interviewed, but also tell us about them. We try to get them into conversations with people from the departments they hope to join as soon as possible so they can get detailed answers to their questions from people working in the same roles they hope to fill. We often send people our internal blog posts, or case study problems that mimic the kind of work we do and how we do it. We do everything we can to make it clear to them just how good of a fit we are, whether that fit is great or non-existent.
The upshot of all this is a staff of people who really chose to be at your company, not just in terms of pay or stated mission but also in terms of what your company really is at a granular level. It means teams filled with people who had the opportunity to carefully consider the environment they wanted to join and whether or not they themselves thought they’d do well there. This works out about how you’d expect: overall, the people we recruit are happier and do work they are happier with, and all it took is making sure they knew who we were. That’s a tremendous advantage, and all it takes to get it is making sure that your candidates know as much about what makes you worthwhile as you do about what makes them valuable to your company.
If this article is the kind of thinking you find cool or exciting, we’d love to talk to you. Apply here, and we will be in touch soon!