Clint Smith is the founder & president of CareerPlug. This month we’ve asked him to share his thoughts about one of our core values.
The CareerPlug team recently decided to make some important changes to our Core Values. While we were all pleased with the growth that CareerPlug has experienced as a company over the past few years, we also felt that we were not doing enough to incorporate these values into our everyday work. Many of our newer team members did not see our values as much more than a sign on the wall at our office. I wanted to change that.
One common theme among successful companies is that every team member has a clear sense of the organization’s goals and values – and they live and breathe them every day. I realized that we needed to update our values to more clearly define our mission and culture.
Our whole belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff like delivering great customer service or building a long-term enduring brand will just happen naturally on its own.
– Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos.com
Through conversations with our clients and team members, we were reminded of something special – our hiring software is really easy to use. Our clients come to us looking for an easier way to hire high-quality team members. Some of them are still stuck using emails or spreadsheets to recruit, while others are looking for relief from another applicant tracking system (ATS) that is too difficult for their managers to use. These clients consistently tell us that our system is easy to use: a big compliment considering that some of these clients are, by their own admission, not exactly computer experts!
We decided that Make Hiring Easier should top our updated list of Core Values. This process has given us a clear understanding of who we are and, perhaps more importantly, who we are not. We make hiring software for non-software people. This means that it needs to be easy enough to use for any owner, manager or team member – not just HR professionals. It also means that we may need to pass on implementing features that will add complexity to our system. Now whenever we have an important decision to make, we are asking ourselves: Will this make hiring easier?
“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.”
– Roy E. Disney
I knew that we got the Make Hiring Easier core value right within about 15 minutes of formally introducing it to the entire team. After the meeting, I heard the phrase “Make Hiring Easier” used multiple times by our Dedicated Account Managers during calls with their clients. When I thanked one of them for including it in a conversation, he said “It just came naturally – that’s who we are.”
