July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Last week VentureBeat ran an article on the nationwide unveiling of Collegefeed’s early career marketplace. The company aims to help college students present themselves professionally online, explore career options, and connect with employers. In order to test how well they accomplish these goals, I recruited a current college senior to help me out.

Meet Max

Max is a mechanical engineering student at Santa Clara University. This June he’ll be graduating and is currently searching for a job in Silicon Valley. I asked him to test Collegefeed’s services to see how useful he found it and what his general thoughts on the site were as someone who is the company’s target market.

How easy is Collegefeed’s sign-up process?

When registering for the site, new users are promised “3 steps, 1 minute, and Collegefeed will be personalized just for you.” Max listed the top three companies he would like to work for, then he listed three areas of interest, and finally he filled out basic information on himself, though he was able to pull most of this automatically off of LinkedIn through the site. He said he found the registration straightforward and very easy.

After completing his registration, he worked on filling out his profile. Here he felt that some of the information asked of him was a little specific or odd. For example, the site asks for users to upload work samples. Not sure what to include and hesitant to go searching through old binders and folders, he opted just to skip this step.

As part of filling out his profile, he was asked to create a personal statement, something which he equated to the first question in a real job interview. He thought it would be a good way for employers to quickly get an idea about him. Overall, he thought his profile was a simple but effective way of conveying information about himself and what he values.

With his profile (mostly) completed, he started to navigate around the site. You have three areas outside of your profile to explore: “companies,” “jobs,” and “peer assistance.”

He first clicked on “jobs” and found that the “jobs for me” section was the most helpful. Here the site recommended positions and companies that were similar to the companies and areas of interest he named when registering. The rest of the “jobs” section he found less effective, namely due to being forced to search for companies or keywords rather than just browse. He said this made it difficult to find jobs he was interested in, but once he did find something interesting, it was just a click of a link to be taken to the application page for the position.

Next he navigated to the “companies” section.

“The companies tab is pretty cool, actually. Search by name and then you can click on one and it will give you an overview of the company. The company page has sections for overview, products, jobs, and competition. Although, they don’t always have as much info as I would like, they still have a ways to go to improve the size of their database,” he said.

The “peer assistance” section was where he spent most of his time. In this section other users posted accounts of interviews with different companies and the questions asked. He mentioned that although he found it potentially very useful, the fact that there were not many companies represented diminished its effectiveness.

Overall, Max thought that the site had some kinks to work out but that he found it very useful. Only a user for a few days, he says he plans on using it in the future to find jobs and that once the small issues and limited content issues get fixed, it will be even more helpful of a tool.

How Collegefeed goes about addressing these small issues and lack of content will determine how the company, whose site had a limited launch in March and a nationwide release ten days ago, succeeds in the future.

Collegefeed’s plans for the future

In a phone interview, Sanjeev Agrawal, Collegefeed’s chief executive, revealed that the number of current users was only in the thousands. He would not reveal a more specific number than that. Following up on this point though, he said that the company is not pursuing a large user base at the moment, instead focusing on developing the social network.

According to Agrawal, Collegefeed is currently “like Facebook when it was only likes and pokes.”

Planned for the near future are more conversations between recruiters and users using Google+ Hangouts. The capability to connect with other users is also planned for the near future, though the company is trying to make sure connections are used as a tool to be leveraged, rather than just another metric for the site to boast.

“We don’t want to be social just for the sake of being social,” Agrawal said.

In a landscape with competition such as LinkedIn and ReadyForce, Collegefeed is hoping to attract both new users and companies. The company is currently speaking with investors regarding raising a first round of funding and this capital could be used to attract the users and companies the site needs to truly thrive.

Photo credit: Collegefeed

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

By Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, Xtreme Labs

When scaling a company, it’s the easy things that become most difficult. Whether you’re bringing on new employees, organizing team workloads, or simply trying to keep open lines of communication, bigger teams often mean bigger headaches.

In five years, Xtreme Labs has grown from an office of eight to a staff of 250.

While many companies stumble at this point, our business goals for 2013 require us to bring on 100 more people by year’s end. How did we reach this point and what will allow us to meet the growth required for 2013, you ask?

Here are three tips that every growing software company needs to consider in order to grow consistently, efficiently and effectively.

Hire fast, fire faster

This mantra comes from entrepreneur-turned-VC Mark Suster.

Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance. Candidates often test as false positives and false negatives. For example, a candidate could have the ideal skill-set for the position, but may not have put her best foot forward in a two-hour interview. When software companies ask coding questions, expect answers on whiteboards, and disqualify for giving the wrong answer, they are forgetting that most people don’t write code on whiteboards.

This scenario sets the candidate up to fail because it forces her to use a method that few engineers use in their regular workday.

The opposite may also happen: she may have mastered the interview, but is an incompatible fit in skills or culture. How do you counteract these scenarios?

Don’t drop the concept of a defined interview process altogether. Instead, recognize that interviews aren’t perfect. Ask challenging questions that try to establish how the candidate thinks, and don’t disqualify someone for giving the wrong answer.

Organize your work environment to be a good indicator of whether or not an individual is a good fit relatively quickly. This is a better predictor of performance because it uses real in-work data instead of interview data. Instead of trying to create questions that elicit a symptom of fit, build performance indicators directly into the culture and work experience. A lot of companies follow a “hire slow, fire fast” mentality, which involves an extremely rigorous interview process but often results in throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Instead of using the interview as the proxy for performance, use an internship or a few months of work experience, for valid, real-world data. Recognize that “the map is not the territory;” a great interviewee is not equivalent to a great employee.

Monotasking = efficiency

Over the past few years, it has become normal for people to do many things at the same time. Now, we’re starting to go overboard with it.

In multitasking, the time it takes to switch between tasks, also known as the context switch, becomes extremely expensive as more and more tasks are attempted simultaneously. When you examine context switching costs in aggregate, it’s clear that multitasking wastes a lot of time.

People often think the end-goal is to be the most efficient multitasker possible. They take joy and relief, in catching up on their e-mails during a meeting. However, multitasking often leads to messing two things up simultaneously. Should we be rewarding employees for this behavior?

Emphasize the idea of monotasking—doing one thing at a time.

Implement processes like pair programming that allow your engineers to monotask. Teams of two that are accountable to each other are less likely to get distracted by e-mail, the Internet and social networks. Consider organizing an open, agile team room where everyone can see what others are up to.

Don’t let the calendar dictate when to meet

It’s extremely difficult to have an effective one-on-one meeting.

People are busy and often don’t prepare properly. An effective one-on-one requires both sides to be in the right mindset and to queue up topics, requiring regular bookkeeping. However, these necessities usually don’t coincide in the real world, and the reason why is simple: A career reflection moment is unlikely to happen during a scheduled one-on-one.

When an issue arises, come together and fix it right away. Being available to host an impromptu meeting allows employees to grab you for a chat while the topic and context are fresh. It’s also possible to combine the merits of an unscheduled one-on-one with a 15 or 20-minute lag time in order for both sides to prepare properly.

As companies grow in size, coordination costs increase. As headcount increases so does the overall communication. A potential alternative to unscheduled one-on-ones is to host scheduled meetings, and cancel them if neither side needs it. At the end of the day, everyone has their own management style, and it important for managers to remain flexible when communicating with their team.

Filtering out candidates post-hire, monotasking, and impromptu meetings, are just a few of the principles we’ve used at Xtreme Labs to guide our growth while protecting our company culture.

If you’re managing a fast-growing company, we hope they come in handy for you too.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Not every company achieves a billion dollars in sales, pays new hires $2,000 to quit, or makes the Fortune Magazine lists of “best places in America” to work. And not every company has a 500-page “culture book” that defines who and what it is.

Zappos, the online shoe-and-almost-everything-else retailer, is known for having an amazing corporate culture. The company’s corporate goal, which started out as “delivering wow,” is now “delivering happiness.” But it also delivers a lot of revenue.

How?

I talked to David Vik, the “coach” of Zappos who joined the company as the 119th employee. He focused on building people and building a positive corporate culture, and scrawled the graphic that would eventually become its iconic shoe-as-exclamation-mark logo. He not only helped Zappos build its globally-famous culture, he also transformed his most recent company, recruiting firm Riviera Partners, from “12 angry people” to one of Inc. Magazines’ fastest-growing companies.

Vik recently published “The Culture Secret,” a book about empowering people — and companies — through vision, purpose, and pure wow.

VentureBeat: What was your role at Zappos?

Vik: I was just “Coach” of Zappos … kind of like being a coach of a sports team. My focus was to empower employees to reach their potential, and to drive the culture.

VentureBeat: You were a chiropractor before that, right? How’d that transition happen?

Vik: Nick Swinmurn, the founder of Zappos, was a patient of mine, and I invested in the company. In fact, I sketched out the logo with a shoe in it.

I had retired after 22 years as a chiropractor, building one of most successful clinics in the States, but after I retired there was nothing to do. So I went to the company’s startup day for new hires when there were 118 people in the company.

At the end of the day, Tony (CEO Tony Hsieh) had them vote on me … and they wanted to me to join the company!

VentureBeat: A ton has been written about Zappos’ culture. What’s unique about Zappos?

Vik: Their vision, which originally was to deliver wow, and now is to deliver happiness.

Selling shoes is a commodity … so you have to do it different than anyone else. We built a huge selection and had the idea that you could buy whatever you wanted and return what you didn’t want for free. The focus of every department was on delivering wow.

What I did was deliver wow to our employees … I had a throne in my office and had thousands of visitors, all of who sat in my throne. You’re a king in your life, you were built and born to reach your potential, and I wanted them to feel that.

It started with the employees, and they delivered it to our clients.

VentureBeat: Are there some core needed elements of a great culture in any company?

Vik: Well, yes, that’s the reason I wrote the book.

See, culture is squishy … people say ‘We’ll let dogs come in, and we’ll put beanbag chairs in the office, bring in foosball tables.’ But that’s just window dressing. The culture is what you do and how you do it, it encompasses everything.

What I’ve found is you need five structures:

• vision: what you’re doing
• purpose: why you do it
• business model: what will fuel you as you’re doing it
• wow and uniqueness factors: what sets you apart from others
• values: what matters to you

When everyone knows it, they can get behind it, and then they don’t have to be told what to do. For instance, at Apple, it’s tools for the mind, and employees have the autonomy to create and invent what tools of the mind they’re going to make.

A lot of companies have a long mission statement, and no one can remember it. You need something very short: this is what we do, and this is why we do it.

VentureBeat: What kills a company’s culture — or at least a positive culture?

Vik: Companies just get off track.

First off, they don’t articulate what they are, and then it kind of becomes culture by default. Leadership can also destroy a culture by managing people (when you should only manage things, not people). Often it just kinda gets watered down. Companies start off with a great vision and purpose and then it kind of gets diluted.

Vision and purpose are not transaction based, but need to be experience based. For example, a car rental company isn’t about renting cars: They should say we’re connecting people.

In the past, companies were company-centric, but today they have to be customer-centric. They have to be in alignment with the wants, needs, and demands of the customer. If not, they’re going to die. Fifty years ago, the average lifetime of an S&P company was 50 years, and now it’s only 25 years.

Some companies think they’re the only gal in an Alaska bar.

VentureBeat: What about in tough times? How can a company work on culture when the house is burning down?

Vik: It’s simple. Customers vote with their pocketbooks whether they like you or not. So companies need to quit being company-centric and start being customer-centric.

It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. It’s not about masseuses and prime rib. Those are cool things, but in many cases, it’s like a rich parent giving their kids a ton of money and toys, but not their time. If you want a great culture, you sit down, and talk: How are you doing, how’s your family, what can I do to help you out?

In the old days, the machines were the assets and the people were expendable. Now it’s the opposite.

VentureBeat: What role did Tony play in Zappos’ culture?

Vik: Huge. He had a real big role.

Tony had a company before Zappos and he sold it when it got to about 100 people. He said it wasn’t fun anymore —  it wasn’t a fun place to come to work. He wanted to change that, and I think that’s one of the reasons he hired me.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc