Hiring like a human: what we learned from taking a people-first approach

This is the story of how a fairly routine process—hiring a new teammate—ultimately became an experiment in radical transparency and a valuable learning experience for our team. Dubbed “hiring in the open”, this experience has fundamentally changed how we hire at Wildbit as we tried to understand the intent behind opaque “standards” that are commonly seen in recruitment, and challenged ourselves to create a more equitable hiring process.

The end result was a commitment to being as honest, visible, and communicative as possible in a way that aligns with our people-first values as a company.

Continue reading → • Justine Jordan wrote in Culture

Dec 16th

Four-day workweeks: the experiment that never stopped

We’ve always wanted to maximize our team's ability to have a life outside of work. That started with only working 40 hours a week, which wasn’t typically something you bragged about in the tech space (in fact, it's usually the opposite). Then, after reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, our CEO and co-founder Natalie Nagele wanted to take it a step further. That's when we decided to try a four-day workweek.

Continue reading → • Chris Bowler wrote in Culture

Oct 14th

How to support employees in the upcoming US election

By any measure, 2020 has been a challenging year. Many people from locations around the globe are experiencing greater levels of stress and anxiety. After all, many of us work at home while supporting school-age children, caregiving for family, navigating civil unrest, responding to extreme weather conditions, and more.

In the United States, that reality may also mean the upcoming election weighs more heavily than usual.

Continue reading → • Chris Bowler wrote in Culture

Sep 30th

Getting Postmark’s Lighthouse Performance Score to 100

Earlier this year, our design team spent a few weeks analyzing and improving the performance of the Postmark product website. Our app is known for lightning-fast email delivery, and we wanted to provide a similar experience to the visitors of the website. Conveniently, what’s good for people is also good for robots — search engines increasingly use performance and user experience metrics as a ranking factor in search results. Once completed, this project made the Postmark site significantly faster and increased our Lighthouse Performance score from 68 to a perfect 100.

Continue reading → • Eugene Fedorenko wrote in Engineering