Why we hire for values fit at productboard 👗

In the fast-moving world of tech startups, it’s easy to become obsessed with growth, sales figures, and valuations. But really, everything is about people. If you don’t hire the right people, everything else will fall short. But what do I mean by the right people?

Well, you need to hire talented individuals if you want to push the company forward. But it’s not all about ability. You also need to ensure that the people you bring into the company will understand, respect, and align with your core values. In this article, I’ll explain how we do this at productboard.

🧬 Hiring for values fit

I joined productboard two years ago. Since then, I’ve helped scale the company from 20 to 200 people — and we’re still growing rapidly, despite the COVID-19 crisis.

One of the biggest questions we’ve had to answer along the way is: how do we scale the company fast while retaining our sense of identity? The answer, of course, is to get hiring right.

When you are a small company with only a handful of employees, it’s relatively easy to instill a strong culture and set of values that connect you. As you scale, it gets much harder. With each new-starter, that message around your identity and core values — that sense of who you are as a group — has the potential to be diluted.

To avoid losing sight of who we are, we hire for values fit. In simple terms, this means we screen each candidate to see whether they naturally exhibit or align with our core values. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter how talented they are, or how amazing their experience is — they aren’t the right person to bring into the group.

Why? Because our values matter. They define who we are as a group. Without our values, we wouldn’t be productboard. We wouldn’t have the same expectations of ourselves and each other. We wouldn’t be able to build a team and culture that we are truly proud of, because there would be nothing to guide us.

🗿 Is this the same as hiring for culture fit?

Not at all. Hiring for culture fit has become a popular approach in recent years, as the focus on workplace culture, employee engagement, and social issues has intensified. But this approach has many issues.

First, hiring for culture fit reinforces unconscious bias. The metrics used to assess whether or not someone ‘fits’ a company’s culture are rarely objective. Often, they can exclude diverse skills, abilities, and personality types.

In many cases, hiring managers use the notion of culture fit to reject candidates simply because they are not like the rest of the team. Instead, they tend to choose candidates that are similar to them. An outgoing extrovert would be more likely to fill his/her team with other outgoing extroverts, for example. This is a slippery slope, where companies can quickly become ‘tribal.’ You are either accepted and welcome or you aren’t.

By hiring for values fit, we make strides towards removing unconscious bias, ensuring that productboard is a welcoming place for people of all backgrounds, ages, personality types, and so on. This ensures a diverse workforce, where people’s differences bring something new to our culture. At the same time, it ensures that the company’s identity and values continue to guide and connect us as a group.

🧩 How we go about hiring for values fit

At productboard, we start screening candidates against our values at an early stage in the recruitment process. We look for alignment with the following values:

🙊 Transparency

At productboard, we’ve baked transparency into the way we work. Everyone has access to information about the company’s direction, turnover, sales figures, and processes. We value open and honest communication, and we look for candidates who will align with this value.

🙉 Empathy

Whether it’s towards teammates, customers, or the wider community, empathy is extremely important to us. We look for candidates who understand, respect, and celebrate the differences between people, and have the emotional intelligence to put themselves in other people’s shoes.

🐒 Curiosity and a growth mindset

We’re a fast-growing startup where nothing stays the same for long. We actively look for people who want to grow with the company and help propel us to new heights.

🙈 Humility

We look for people with a willingness to listen and learn. As well as being talented, they’ll understand that they still have room to grow and improve — and we support them in doing so.

🙊 Teamwork

Although we are spread across different continents and time zones, we are one big team that celebrates every win together. So, we look for candidates with a strong sense of teamwork and togetherness.

Similarly, we look for certain red flags that suggest that candidates might not be a good values fit. These include:

🐒 Big egos

We’ve come so far in such a short space of time, but we like to keep our feet on the ground and remain humble. Candidates with overly inflated egos have the potential to upset the balance of the team. We want to hire people who are interested in group success, not personal glory.

🙈 Dishonesty

Honesty and professional integrity are important to us. We’re cautious with candidates who oversell their capabilities in an attempt to impress.

🙊 Stubbornness

If a candidate appears stuck in their ways or refuses to see the value in different processes, ideas, or opinions, it’s unlikely that they’ll have the intellectual humility to seek ways to improve or work within a close-knit team.

🖤 Retaining our heart and soul

Ultimately, hiring for values fit allows us to have the best of both worlds. We get to build a vibrant, diverse workforce that is inclusive to all, while staying true to the values that have made productboard such an amazing place to work.

It’s important to stress that our values aren’t just a marketing gimmick or a box-ticking exercise. We don’t just put them on a poster on the wall and forget about them. They are guiding principles that connect us and make us stronger. They inform the way we work and interact with each other, customers, and the wider world. By using them to guide our hiring decisions, we can scale the company while retaining its heart and soul.