These guest posts are very impressive.
MBA Mondays: Guest Post From Chad Dickerson
recruiting and culture are yin and yang .... A great head of HR is critically important but culture and recruiting are owned by everyone if they are successful. ..... I will drop nearly anything I am doing to help close a key candidate. ...... "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." ...... the forms of communication available today mean that you can communicate the mission and vision of your company more broadly and directly than ever, which is what I did when I blogged in May about our long-term vision for Etsy. It has never been easier to tell your own story and talk about your company directly with the people you want to reach ....... you should always keep a direct channel open ..... communicating directly gives candidates a deeper sense of what your company is trying to do and they come into the process knowing what your company is all about, often self-selecting to your mission. I've found that this takes the recruiting process up a level. ....... performance metrics rise and fall, valuations go up and down, and stock prices fluctuate. Culture and values persist. ..... we at Etsy have been publishing key metrics from the Etsy marketplace in a monthly "weather report." ..... rigorous values and responsible practices ..... Diversity is one area for improvement, and we're actively and transparently working to improve our score ..... the truly great candidates can take a long time ...... In early 2010, we launched our engineering blog and named it Code as Craft, tying the mission of engineering back to the larger culture of craftsmanship in the Etsy community. ....... "If your culture isn't explicitly leaky, if it doesn't aspire to change the world beyond the walls of your business, if it isn't captured in the product you're building and your users' experience, then it probably isn't culture, it's just cheerleading and team spirit burning up expensive inputs of time and company outings. Culture is lived, and it's why generosity of spirit is such a key piece of our team culture" ........ "Management by objectives tells a manager what he ought to do. The proper organization of his job enables him to do it. But it is the spirit of the organization that determines whether he will do it. It is the spirit that motivates, that calls upon a man's reserves of dedication and effort, that decides whether he will give his best or do just enough to get by." ....... It's hard to quantify this spirit, but you know it when you've got it, and you know how painful it is when you don't. ..... a leader is mostly responsible for tending to the spirit of the organization, and for making whatever adjustments need to be made to keep that spirit strong and powerful. In the end, that spirit matters more than anything.
