How to Diagnose if Someone is Satisfied or Dissatisfied at Work

It seems like everything we do at Menlo is geared towards establishing a bond with the new people joining the team in a way that they, as quickly as possibly, can fundamentally understand our purpose and understand their role in accomplishing that purpose. And so it actually starts at their first touch point with Menlo, which is often one of those tours. Often the people who are coming to visit us, are curious about us enough that they might decide at some point, they wanna work for us. One of my standard jokes at Menlo is that people regularly offer us their children, and what I mean by that is, often the parents will be the ones that first come in.

They see this space, they see this company, and they say my kid would love to work at a place like this and they tell their child to come visit us. Now a lot of times the children are kinda skeptical. They’re like, really, Mom and Dad? You’ve found the place I wanna work every day? But they come in, they see it, and it grabs them. So right at the first point of contact, long before we’re actually recruiting them, long before we’re pulling them through our weird interview process. We’re communicating to them what our core values are in these tours, now if they decide to come in, the interview process drives the point home.

Our entire interview process is experiential, it’s all an audition, you start doing things in the manner by which we work. We work in pairs during the interview. We collaborate with other human beings. We communicate to the interviewee that your job is to get the person sitting next to you, who’s competing for the same position, your job is to get them a second interview. To exercise good kindergarten skills, to share, to collaborate with another human being while my team is watching you do this. They’re deciding is this the kind of person I want in here.

That I would pair with someday, and so by going through this kind of audition experience, people are figuring out right away is this for me, is this consistent with what I want in a work place. The first day on the job is actually the second day of the interview process. The first day on the job is a one day paid contract where they come in and work for us, for pay, for a single day in our space. So right away, we’re immersing them in our culture. It’s not the standard, what I call two people lying to each other type of interview.

This is a serious audition, where you get to come in and actually do work side by side with our team members. And again, in that moment you’re also learning our culture, and it’s not learning it just from me, not from a tour I’m leading, or an interview I’m conducting, you’re learning it from the people who actually do the work. If you make it through that process, then you go through a three week trial and you’re pairing with three different people over the course of those three weeks. And you’re hearing the same consistent message over and over again from everybody you work with. A few weeks into this, you’re either bought in or you’re self-selected out.

And I think this kind of experiential interview is a way to really drive home your purpose driven culture, in a way that’s different than any brochure or website, speech that a CEO can give at the front of an auditorium. It’s the real effect of doing work side by side with a team you’re going to be working with potentially for years.