451 Posts found for Source: First Round Review

Over the years here at the Review, we’ve collected and aggregated hundreds of interview questions recommended by top leaders in every field. Our goal in this piece is to present the very best questions we’ve heard for hiring incredible performers — with deep dives into interviewing technical and product candidates in particular. We hope having them all in one place will make your future hiring … [ Read more ]

Content: Career Information | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Interviewing

Scott Crabtree spent 24 years climbing the ladder in the gaming and software industries, eventually leading his own engineering team at Intel. And after observing life at companies big and small, he recognized one commonality: The happiest people are the most productive. The difference was so striking to him that he retired and rebooted his career, founding Happy Brain Science to surface and share the … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Personal Development

When Ciara Trinidad left her post as Lever’s Head of Diversity and Inclusion, the numbers made her understandably proud: The startup’s team of 125 people was 59% women, 39% men, and 2% gender nonconforming. Even the sales team — historically a male-dominated group — had a 50/50 gender split. “The product team was at about 40% white; the majority was a mix of every other … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ciara Trinidad | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Women in Business

To a large extent, brand is built on consistently setting and meeting a defined set of expectations. Make sure everyone on your team is setting and meeting the same ones. And make it easy for them to be successful, by providing the right assets and guidelines a simple cut and paste away.

Content: Quotation | Author: Leslie Ziegler | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Brand, Marketing / Sales

A lot of companies don’t decide how they want to grow until they’re well into their growth phase. For a long time, your actions pull your company along, and then all of a sudden it switches — your existing business starts pushing your behavior. External forces like feature requests, the need for more customer support, the need to create a team to do X when … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

Check in with new managers, too, and make it known that there’s an off ramp if they need it. Even people who thought they wanted the role may ultimately find that it’s making them miserable. Create check-ins along the way, say every six months. “Are you still happy? Do you want to take on more? Do you want to go back to being an individual … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mike Krieger | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

We didn’t put enough of an emphasis on hiring a diverse team in the early stages. This made it all the harder to bring on women and underrepresented minorities and backgrounds once they’d grown. If you’re interviewing your first female engineer, and she shows up and thinks, ‘Wow, this team is huge and all guys,’ that just makes the barrier even higher. That really does … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mike Krieger | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Human Resources

Fledgling engineering teams and hundred-person juggernauts, boom times and lean years — Adil Ajmal has experienced them all. He’s hired for entry-level positions, VPs, and everything in between. Over the course of thousands (and thousands) of interviews, a curious truth emerged that informs his approach: The secret to closing isn’t offering the most equity or saying just the right thing during an offer call. It’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Adil Ajmal | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Human Resources

Under pressure, startups have a need for speed that makes freestyle negotiations or plug-and-play comp data resources attractive. But it doesn’t have to stay this way — and it can’t if a company wants a sound comp philosophy, one that prizes equity, transparency and employee happiness. Enter Jeremy Stanley, Udi Nir and Guissu Baier, the VPs of Data Science, Engineering and HR, respectively. They’re the … [ Read more ]

Content: Case Study | Authors: Guissu Baier, Jeremy Stanley, Udi Nir | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Human Resources | Company: Instacart

When Leslie Ziegler joined the founding team of Rock Health in 2010, she had an enormous task ahead of her: make the intimidating world of institutional health care approachable for startup founders. No matter what the firm did next, its brand was going to have to do this heavy lifting, and as a veteran art director with the likes of McCann Erickson and DDB, this … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Leslie Ziegler | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Brand, Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

When somebody knows that their review is going to directly affect their comp, they are just waiting for you to stop talking and tell them what it says on that piece of paper you’re holding. Simply tell your report from the outset that they won’t be getting their comp change then and there. Then you can open the door for vastly more productive conversations around … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Bethanye McKinney Blount | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources, Management

One of the greatest sources of compensation inequity is that question every candidate dreads: What are you making now? It’s a really common practice, and it compounds a lot of biases. If someone is not a great negotiator, for example, or took a lower salary to work in the nonprofit sector, they’re set up to under-earn for their whole career. The truth is, the last … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Bethanye McKinney Blount | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources

The clearest indicator of the values driving a company — your own or one you’re considering joining — is already in motion from the start, in one of the last places you’re probably looking: compensation.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bethanye McKinney Blount | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship, Human Resources

After three decades leading data teams at companies like LiveOps, Netscape, and ReadyForce, Lloyd Tabb’s biggest learning isn’t what you would expect — or want to hear: You’re measuring the wrong metrics. We all are.

In this exclusive interview, Tabb shares how to abide by metrics that generate direction — not pats on backs — so that your company can act on what’s most essential to … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Lloyd Tabb | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

If you’re a B2B startup founder, having warm relationships with a crowd of prospective customers is an ideal. But it can also be a reality. In this exclusive interview, Peter Kazanjy shares the steps any startup — no matter how small — can use to build its own, robust Customer Advisory Board. He covers how to recruit members, gather high-quality feedback, keep relationships strong, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Pete Kazanjy | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

After two decades leading engineering teams for giants like Facebook and EMI to Linden Lab and Reddit, Bethanye Blount realized that the most meaningful, even existential, problems she’d encountered were not in code but in comp — and that there are data-driven best practices for solving them. Now, as co-founder of Compaas, Blount is on a mission to help startups ensure that the story their … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Bethanye McKinney Blount | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources

When you say thank you, you increase your own happiness. I know of one executive who puts 10 pennies in his left pocket every morning. Every time he thanks someone or expresses gratitude, he moves a penny to his right pocket. He won’t go home until his left pocket is empty. Whatever you need to do to remind yourself to say positive things at work, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

A huge difference between happy people and unhappy people is how they cope. Three top coping strategies recommended by doctors sound common enough but are too rarely practiced: 1) Talk to someone who cares about you (not just anyone, it won’t have the same effect); 2) meditate or try to be mindful for even just a few minutes; and 3) get physical exercise.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

A lot of people believe that multitasking makes them even more efficient at what they’re doing. Science shows otherwise, in dramatic fashion. Most importantly, multitasking makes attaining flow impossible. That’s the happiest, most productive state of mind, and you can get into it simply by focusing completely for 20 minutes or more on a challenging but possible task.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips, Work

Great goals go beyond SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant to your interests, and time-bound). They have specific milestones that help provide a sense of progress, which is crucial to happiness at work. If you start off with well-defined goals that will allow you to realize success and that have multiple steps toward an endpoint, you are much more likely to enjoy working toward them.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Goals, Management, Organizational Behavior, Productivity / Work Tips, Success / Failure