Growing Amazing Teams:
Seven Reasons Why Our Company Culture Succeeds
by Tammy Sachs, Founder and CEO
The environment our company lives in changes incredibly fast. Agile talent acquisition and management requires throwing out last year’s assumptions and looking at the current landscape. What got you here won’t necessarily get you there. As I was taught at Ogilvy in my formative years, in a creative services business, every morning your talent walks into your office. That means, you’re only as good as your team and the passion they have to do great work.
Who that team is can change as the market changes, as your service offering evolves and as you learn from what worked and what didn’t. Here’s my list of what works for us:
- Our staff are our best recruiters. They know and fiercely protect our culture. Easily a third of our staff comes from staff referrals and we bonus people for successful hires.
- Each team votes on a candidate. The goal: a resounding thumbs up. What this does is ensures everyone wants to work with a new hire and they’re vested in their growth.
- We seek people with off the chart passion and curiosity. Passion is contagious and accelerates engagements.
- You can teach skill, not talent. We look for people, especially in B2B and healthcare, that embrace complexity and thrive on ramping up or leveraging their domain knowledge. Age and experience are not always a measure of success. We often find “outliers” with unique domain knowledge, strategic thinking and/or communication skills that are a winning combination.
- We are a team-oriented, whiteboarding culture. With minor exceptions, our team likes to work face to face, intensely collaborating on a white board to identify and ladder up insights.
- We’re highly visual and work with a creative team to translate insights to metaphors easily embraced by strategists, creatives and senior management. We rate ourselves yearly on our “visual IQ” – how well our visual deliverables are received by clients.
- Last and most importantly, we only hire people we’d want to hang out with, learn from and who share our “beginner’s mind” – that there is always something new to learn. People who have lots of empathy and a “beginner’s mind” tend to be great listeners, researchers and colleagues!!
What would you add onto this list based on your experiences?
By the way, we are hiring top tier full-time researchers in healthcare/medtech, B2B and B2C. The last two (B2B and B2C) cross industry verticals and run the gamut from financial services to ecommerce, retail, smart products, telecom, travel and innovation in any space where there is a gap between what companies offer and customers want. If you are a researcher who would like to learn more about working at Sachs, please reach out to us at careers@sachsinsights.com and check out the Careers section of our website.