Valve breaks the code as a workplace

Print Screen from Valve's Book. Their copyright.

I'm reading through the perhaps leaked Handbook for New Employees by Valve. Whilst I'm reading it, I notice myself becoming excited and writing notes aside. Ideas start evolving in my brain connecting to cells on the left, right and beyond. How amazing and how what I'd want to accomplish too.

Valve, in their own words, is an organization that is totally boss-free (since 1996). They give all the power to the people. The power to hire the best, to decide in which projects one will spend their time on, the power to decide on the value of their peers (which effectively affects one's compensation) and so on. Whilst this type of freedom is definitely attractive, it suits only certain types of people. Those who are immensely smart, self steering and are able to see the scope of things. It won't work for people who need mentoring, guidance, who are title-hungry and who love bossing others around.



Few pointers from Valve Software culture:

Print Screen from Valve's Book. Their copyright.

1. They talk about families of employees, not just employees.
2. Valve is all about self steering, in good and potentially bad.
3. Nobody is hired for a role. They are hired to put their best foot forward where ever it makes most sense and brings most value.
4. Compensation becomes adjusted over time based on internal peer driven valuation. 
5. There is no career ladder as there is no ladder whatsoever.
6. Hiring is the most important thing at Valve. They believe missing out on a great recruitment will be the most expensive mistake they can make.
7. They prefer T-shaped people (highly skilled at a broad range of important things, but among the best in their field within a narrow discipline)
8. It seems like a group of independent artists working together towards the same goal.

Whilst Valve's culture is beautiful in most of it's aspects, it's not a culture suitable for just anyone to copy. If you read the handbook to the end, you'll find them to agree with it. But there are certainly many elements to copypaste or to inspire to take steps suitable for your organization. In my case, I'm thrilled and heavily inspired to fit some aspects into mine.

For Finnish readers; there is a conversation on this topic on Linked In Talent Pool Finland -group.

Be inspired!

Susanna

Why it's worth to blog as an HR

Don't you agree, that these days finding and attracting your future employees is not only time consuming and expensive but also darn difficult? There are more and more channels, networks and social media where we should be present and active at all times. What if you could enhance your employing power by attracting people to you instead of you hammering each and every door possible in the attempt to find them? Employer marketing is more than job advertising Generally marketing in recruitment goes by the name of job advertising. In other words, we post the vacancy to selected job boards. But who do we reach? Mostly those who are actively looking for new career opportunities. But who are they? And what if our company brand isn't appealing, attractive and known in our recruitment target groups? Write a blog! Blogging regularly is an easy way to establish an employer image in your target group as well as engage the potential future employees into your company culture, values, business and ways of working. Blogging shouldn't be limited to the company CEO. Job seekers are generally interested in different types of stories than what comes out of a CEO's pencil (or pad). Even though blogging is made super easy these days by variety of services offering free blogging tools, such as blogger or posterous, the best way to draw traffic to your company is a blog integrated into the corporate site with an URL containing the company's domain name. But this is getting technical now. Why search engine ranking matters to HR too? When job seekers hunt for career opportunities, they tend to google or go directly to the websites of companies they find appealing. If your corporate brand is not appealing or known, you need to make sure google finds you. Writing a blog is an excellent way to enhance your search engine rankings. I won't go into technical details but in a big picture, the more you write (and tag) about keywords job seekers are interested in, the better will be your company's search engine rankings. You want job seekers to find you, become attracted to you (your company that is of course) and start looking for and forwarding around your vacancies. As the forwarding is made very easy in the social media, needless to say how these little agents can spread the word to millions of people before you count to ten! This is way more cheaper than buying a job advert and way more effective than copy pasting links to your job adverts by yourself. What to blog about? What interests you if you were a job seeker? Of course any data that helps the job seeker to improve their chances in finding the perfect job for them. You want to create content that is interesting, exciting, valuable and easily forwardable. Why? Because the web is full on material that is of no interest to anyone. So it's a waste of your time and space in this universe to produce something of no interest to anyone. Examples of worth while content: Your recruitment criteria, what they mean and why they are important to your company Your company culture in pictures, people and action Tips on what you appreciate in a good job application Advice on how to prepare for an interview at your company Success stories of career development in your company Examples of what opportunities exist for personal development in your company General salary data from your industry Information about industry related vacancies News and innovations within your industry Your goal with blogging should be to get our content to spread across as far and wide as possible so that next time you advertise a vacancy and people google your company what they find is a lot of valuable content that convinces them to apply to such an interesting company and employer. In our recent blog "Pushing or Pulling talents" we wrote about the importance of employer marketing. Being "out there" on the web with your content sheds a light into who you are as an employer and this will most likely make job seekers pay attention to your job advertising in the future as well. What do you think? Do you blog and has it been a good lead generator for your recruitment? We'd like to hear!