Finding a Fit: How to Evaluate Company Culture

This past week we kicked off the first Femgineer Forum of the year hosted at ModCloth. The topic was on Finding a Fit: How …

This past week we kicked off the first Femgineer Forum of the year hosted at ModCloth. The topic was on Finding a Fit: How to Evaluate Company Culture and the Opportunity.

My favorite part of every forum is to listen to the employees at the host company tell the story of their path, and why they choose to come and work at the host company.

At this forum, I couldn’t have been more captivated than I was by Sarah Wohl, who is a Senior UX Designer at ModCloth. Sarah told us how she initially majored in Multimedia Studies and Graphic Design at Northeastern University.

Post graduation Sarah has had a number of experiences that have helped her hone her design skills from working at large companies like PayPal to early stage startups, and now to growth stage startups like ModCloth.

Knowing What You Want to Do

Achieving clarity is something we all struggle with from time to time, and sometimes that means we have to have multiple experiences both good and bad to figure out what we need, especially when it comes to how you evaluate company culture. That’s exactly what has happened to Sarah. In addition to each experience improving her skills, they have given her more clarity into knowing what she needs to be happy and productive.

Sarah knows the type of work she enjoys doing: designing digital products like ModCloth’s native mobile apps. She has a sense of the kind of environment she wants to be in: a growth stage startup where she can make a mark. And she knows she enjoys working with closely engineers!

Sarah set me up pretty well to talk about: How to Evaluate Company Culture and the Opportunity!

During my talk I covered the following:

Why it’s important to gauge company culture and the opportunity.
How to gauge culture.
How to evaluate an opportunity.

The reason it’s important to gauge culture and the opportunity is because you perform better if you are happy, and to be happy you need to be in a happy environment.

Unfortunately, many people mis-prioritize, focusing too much on having 100% of the alphabet soup of technologies listed in the job description under their belt before they even apply for a job! Or they put salary above all other requirements like flexibility, career mobility, and the opportunity to learn. Finally, they fail to understand what the day-to-day will be like in the job.

How to Interview the Interviewer

I also mentioned that interviewees can be passive, but it’s important to ask the interviewer questions, especially if you are going to evaluate company culture.

One approach is to ask behavioral style questions. With this approach, the responder walks you through a situation, and by showcasing the situation you get a sense of how they think.

Interviewer’s do this all the time! Take for example the question, “What do you do before you check-in code?” If you said something like, “I run the test suite, make sure it passes, issue a pull-request, receive a code review, and then once I’ve got a green light check-in the code,” this response demonstrates that you are a methodical person! If instead you said, “Ugh write the code…” then is shows that there is more you have to learn about software development.

How to Evaluate the Opportunity

When it comes to evaluating an opportunity, I talked about being as clear as possible about what you need without feeling like you are putting someone out. Even if you are unsure about what you need, you should at least know what you DON’T want! Finally, always always always iron out any ambiguities when it comes to policies vs. practice. It’s OK to ask if things are unclear.

If you missed out you can check out the slides below!

Thanks again to our gracious host ModCloth for sharing their awesome digs and contributing to the Femgineer community!

The topic of our next forum will be Finance for Femgineers, and it will be held on February 26, 2014, hope to see you there!

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