Startups are weird.
On one hand, it’s total chaos. I can speak for myself and everyone else in the office when I say that what I thought I’d be doing during the week can get completely blown up by customers coming to visit, interviewing new potential hires, or a last minute project to push a big sale over the finish line.
On the other hand, what I’m working on has never been clearer. The ultimate purpose of this company is to help businesses all over the world transform the way that they think about hiring (and give them the tools to do it). That means three things:
In short, when it comes to hiring and employing human beings…
We’re trying to close the gap between what companies want to do when hiring and what they actually need to do.
To do that, we need time, happy customers, lots and lots of data, and the most caring team on the planet. I fully believe that we’re on the way there.
Paul Bilodeau, the CEO, has been building his expertise in sourcing, screening, and growing talent for more than 10 years.
Not willing to fall into the venture capital trap, he decided to bootstrap all of his startup concepts by setting up consulting firms which would help companies find talent while dogfooding the software his team would design. As startups go, a few of the attempts failed. However, one of these Data Science consulting firms was where Filtered was born.
Since then, the Filtered team has grown to 11 people and raised enough money to officially split from our mother company. We’re lucky enough to be able to work in a big space that we can call our own.
All of us here are making this company something personal. Oliver, the first person to write code here at Filtered, told me:
It’s exciting to see my baby grow under the best education environment, so she can be strong, ambitious, and creative.
In fact, apart from the software, we’re finding ourselves becoming a strong, ambitious, and creative (plus, proudly multicultural) team as well. This is due to a foundation of encouraging excellence through everyday learning and creativity.
It’s not easy to build a culture of learning, teaching, forgiveness, and leading by example. But we do our best.
An interesting bonus is that in a company of less than 50 people, our quirks define the company. Every new person who joins brings something unique which shapes how we spend our day and what we learn from each other. We’re hoping not to lose that feeling as we grow.
One thing I really like is how many books are already lying around the office waiting to be read. I’ve taken home a few and added a few more to the collection. Not all of them are for business (for example, Paul is a total sneaker-head).
Derek, who runs Sales, shared with me:
People think about a fast growing startup and think revenue, press, popularity and funding. Yeah, those things are all cool, but secondary. What growth means at Filtered is personal scaling and growth… you’re on a rocket ship of learning here.
Another thing that I really enjoy is that we do volunteer tech talks every two weeks to make a point about sharing knowledge.
Don’t just take it from me. This is Ruby’s first full-time design job and she mentioned:
Filtered is composed of really tiny but healthy team. I feel healthiness of my company/team in 3 ways:
1) It really gives me a lot of opportunities to explore what I am interested in.
2) I can learn how to design a product in a comprehensive way since I highly collaborate with the product team, dev team as well as the sales team.
3) I like my colleagues a lot! They are very warm and professional problem solvers.
Usually, startups don’t have a lot of room for people without previous experience, but at Filtered we choose to learn together, coach where necessary, and seek outside guidance when we reach our limits.
I should say…. we like to get out there and have fun too.
Henry from Sales said it best:
How many people sit at home on Sunday night and dread Monday morning? Well I don’t!
Everyone here is indispensable and working on something interesting. I can’t wait for more people to help us out at Filtered. We are…
