"Culture fit" is the Holy Grail of hiring, but when Tracy Lawrence launched the catering startup Chewse, in 2011, she gave experience an inflated importance.
“We’re really into transparency and talking truth to power, but we didn’t always have a way to vet it,” she says. That led to a toxic hire: someone with crazy-impressive skills and market chops but a passive-aggressive streak. Fast-forward six months and the Chewse culture was marked by whispered unease and gossip.
“We couldn’t even pinpoint why everything felt so wrong at first, until another employee brought it to our attention,” she says. Though parting ways with the bad hire was quick enough, righting the culture took more time.
Now Lawrence makes sure that culture questions -- Tell me about a time you disagreed with your boss. What’s the most difficult conversation you’ve had with your manager? -- are in every interview. “Even from the first hiring phone call, we’re up front about our culture,” she says. “If giving honest feedback or getting hugs doesn’t work for you, you shouldn’t work here.”
Relax How This Company Bounced Back After a Toxic Hire stories
Entrepreneurs look back on the blooper they thought would kill their company.
Customers screamed at them when they started, but they kept buying.
Repeat after us: It'll be ok.
A Silicon Valley darling moved too fast.
You might be doing this wrong.
Know your enemy and know yourself.
Failure is the unpleasant beginning of being reborn as an entrepreneur.
If you’ve started using the beta of Firefox 3, you’ve probably already seen the new Smart Bookmarks folder that is created by default. This folder can be useful for looking up sites you just visited or bookmarked… but how do you get it back if you accidentally deleted it?
Sometimes when setting up computer workstations for company employees and / or family members, you might not want certain default XP applications to be accessible. In this tutorial I will show you how to disable the features Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, and MSN Instant Messenger. Keep in
Since it is Earth Day I thought I would include a quick post on how cool Freecycle groups are. I doubt these groups will “save the world” or anything like that, they are pretty cool to join nonetheless. I have found some cool tech items and other items that come in handy for everyday living. If
If you are having issues with Internet Explorer running extremely slow, crashing, locking up, or just generally behaving badly, there are a couple of troubleshooting steps that you can follow to likely fix the problem. And no, I’m not going to just tell you to install Firefox.
A reader wrote in yesterday asking why she no longer had the “pretty” glass windows, and how to get them back. It occurred to me that there might be other people with the same issue, so I’m writing up the (fairly simple) instructions for others that might have the same question.
Last week i wrote about switching my main OS to Kubuntu and so far everything has been going fairly well except for a few configurations here and there. I hope to have some cool posts regarding Linux topics in the near future. One of the things I really have enjoyed so far is Open Office. We can
One of the things that has really annoyed me about running Firefox on Vista is that Internet Explorer looks really slick with the Aero Glass extending down onto the entire navigation bar… and Firefox just looks pathetic sitting next to it. Thanks to the Glasser extension from my new favorite person
Have you ever noticed that many files don’t seem to work in the Preview Pane in Windows Vista’s Explorer? Until recently the only way to work around this was a painful registry hack… but now there’s a utility that will let you easily add file types to the preview list.
One thing I like to do is point out the extra software applications try to sneak in during installation. Especially it that software can definitely be considered “Crap-Ware”. I have found a couple of instances of this while reinstalling Trillian on my Vista machine.
If you’ve been a reader of this site for any amount of time, you are probably familiar with the Keyboard Ninja concept… we like to feature all sorts of ways to quickly access applications or functions with complicated shortcut keys. But what about regular people? Isn’t there a simpler solution?