If I was looking for a job right nowwhat would I want to see from the ideal company?

An interview with Rick Perreault,co-founder & CEO of Unbounce

Key Highlights:

•  Unbounce gives every employee a $500annual budget to spend with colleagues outside the office, as well as $500towards gym membership and $1000 towards taking a vacation, every year.

•   Unbounce saves $1.5m on recruitmentfees through its hiring process.

•   The company believes in fulltransparency, where nothing is off the table — including the financials.

•  Startups recognise that their successhinges on their ability to hire the right people. The challenge in a talentmarket that is only going to become more competitive, is that the best people knowhow good they are and therefore can pick and choose which companies they wantto work for. If you really want to be able to attract the best of the best andconvince them that your company is the right partner for them in the next phaseof their journey, you need to be able to put yourself into their shoes.

I recently ran two workshops, one for LBSEntrepreneurs and the other at the Landing.Jobs Festival in Lisbon. Thedifference between these and previous workshops or presentations I haveconducted isthat the audience consistedmainly of employees, not entrepreneurs. In preparation for the workshops Ilooked back at my 16 years of interviewing thousands of candidates and hundredsof companies and asked myself, “If I was looking for a job right now what I would wantfrom the ideal company?”

Here’s what I came up with. I would want tojoin a company:

•  Where the website communicates whythey are doing what they are doing and why they are different. The more I learnabout the company through the interview process, the more I want to work there.

•  That demonstrates clearly that theyonly hire the best and have a very high bar for hiring.

•  Where I recognise that the hiringprocess is designed to bring in smart, passionate, creative people who get treated well.

•  That seeks excellence, rewards merit,encourages solution thinking, and gives employees the autonomy and freedom tomake good decisions for the end user.

•  With a high-performance culture thatis NOT right for everyone.

•  Where the team is truly passionateabout solving a real and significant problem.

•  Where they don’tmeasure me on how many hours I work, rather on the great work I accomplish.

•  Where candidates are chosen forinterview based on ability, technical knowledge, and cultural fit.

•   WhereI won’t be micro-managed: the companytrusts their people to be self-motivating, self-aware, self-disciplined andable to make the right decisions.

•  That can clearly articulate anddemonstrate how they nurture, develop and live their culture.

•  Where the culture and values arelived by the company, and I can tell that they are a good match for mine.

•  Where I am able to grow and developas a person.

•  Where if for some reason I decide toleave, I will be an asset to any other company in the future, by virtue ofworking for this company.

•  Where the company has a broaderpurpose than to make money or exit.

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Rick Perreault, the CEO ofUnbounce, has — together with his co-founders — built a strong company culturethat ticks all the boxes above for the type of company that I would want towork for, were I looking for a job. Unbounce helps marketers and digitalagencies increase website and campaign conversions. Their landing page andconversion marketing platform allows marketers to quickly create, launch andtest high-converting landing pages and website overlays without developers. Todate, Unbounce has powered over 250 million conversions for marketers aroundthe world.

When did you first startthinking about company culture at Unbounce?

The Unbounce founders started talkingabout our culture from day one. We had all had experiences at companies thatweren’t the best places to work, where the culture wasn’tthe greatest and employees were treated like commodities. We all knew what itfelt like to work in a bad company culture, so we set out to build a positiveand strong one from the outset.

 Initially our culture evolved anddeveloped organically; we didn’t define orwrite down what our culture was but we knew that we wanted Unbounce to be atruly awesome place to work. We started to really focus on defining our cultureand work environment when we reached about 30 or 40 people. We knew we weregoing to continue to grow rapidly and in order to do that effectively andefficiently we needed to have our culture clearly defined. Today, Unbounce is ateam of 180 people operating across three offices (Vancouver, Montreal andBerlin). Defining and embedding our culture continues to be the foundation thathas allowed us to scale effectively so far.

What did you do to define yourculture?

The Unbounce founders went on astrategic planning retreat where we discussed what really matters to us, andwhat we want to stand for as an organisation. We looked back at the businessand realised that we had created an environment where our values were for themost part being lived by the team already. This was undoubtedly because as thefounders, we had such strong feelings and agreement about culture from thestart of the business.

 For example, take our value oftransparency: we areand always have been transparent in terms of the business financials. There isnothing off the table when it comes to the numbers. We have always been veryopen about where the business stands so that our team can make more informeddecisions. It turned out that our values, although not written down, were notartificial in any way; they were things we were already living. We defined fiveor six key things that were important to us, parts of our culture that wevalued and didn’t want to lose. It took us about aday’s work to define our values and we were unanimous. Wewrote them down and rolled them out to the company. Our values were invisibleand subconscious before we wrote them down and when we got them down on paperit was like an “Aha!” momentfor the team. It simply made sense.

 Writing our values down and gettingthe collective agreement from the team allowed everybody to start to live bythese values.Equally important, it ensured we weren’tworking against them. Once we had collective understanding, we could integrateour values into our business decision-making and how we evaluated our teams.Four years in, our values are now second nature to us.

 We also developed our mission statementand vision a year ago. Our mission is to empower and enable marketing teams andagencies to grow their business with the best conversion tools on earth and ourvision is to help businesses grow faster.

What are the company values?Give me an example of a value you are pushing to integrate into the company andthe impact of that value.

Our values are:

- Delightful

- Courageous

- Empowering

- Transparency

- Humility

- Generosity

Courage is something we continue topush internally because it helps us strengthen and build our feedback culture.We want our people to be able to attend a meeting and have the courage to speaktheir mind, or to have the courage to test things and make changes for thebetter. We want people to ask for and give feedback on a regular basis; if youare courageous you will be comfortable in either the giving or the receiving offeedback.

We have been discussing whether weneed a seventh core value to describe what it means to give effort over andabove what is expected. We are about high performance and high quality, andthis is a behaviour that we see in our people that we don’tsee represented in our list of values.

Give me an example of how youuse them now

The Unbounce people and culture teamintroduce our values to potential candidates during the hiring process. Theleadership shares the financials with new employees and with the entire organisationat our monthly Town Hall meeting. We also take the opportunity during these TownHall meetings to discuss what’s going welland more importantly where things are not going well. We try to be astransparent as possible.

Outside of what we share with theUnbounce team, we write a blog post once a year and share the business’ financialswith the whole community. Sharing the financials via the blog is a greatexample of how living the transparency value can have a positive effect. Hiringis very competitive in Vancouver and we have had situations where candidateshave chosen Unbounce over other companies because we deliver on ourtransparency value in this way.

Our team has gamified our values withcompany core value cards. If someone notices a fellow employee living a value theyare encouraged to write it down on the relevant core value card and share itwith that person. This has turned out to be a very successful tool because ourpeople are now collecting the core value cards and you can see them piling upon people’s desks. Noticing one of the values,like a courageous act, writing the act down on the card, and giving the card tothe person is a fun way to remind people that these values are really importantto us. Work can get tough at times and it’s a reallynice surprise when someone notices what you’ve done.

We use Slack for our internal commsand have developed our own core value icons in Slack where people are able togive the generosity icon instead of the thumbs up. It’sa small thing but they all add up.

Courageous seems to me to bean interesting value to aspire to. Can you give me an example of a courageousact?

The Unbounce pricing page is a greatexample. We hadn’t changed or improved it in ages andone of the team suggested that he could improve it. No one else wanted to touchor mess with it because it worked and people thought there was no point indoing anything that could end up breaking it. It was also so important to thebusiness that people thought it better to leave the page alone. The team memberwent ahead and made the changes he’d been imagining and he was right — westarted converting better. That’s a goodexample of being courageous.

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How do you handle onboarding?

Onboarding is a two-week process. Dayone of onboarding sets the stage:

•  I do a presentation on the history ofthe company and where we are headed, which includes a presentation of our corevalues

•  There is a presentation on the stateof the business

•  We have presentations from the headsof department

•  I meet with the new joiners at theend of day one for an hour so that they can ask me anything about the company.

Most, if not all, candidates gothrough the customer success training when they join the company. One of theactivities they learn is how to handle customer support. It’simportant that our people learn about and build empathy for our customersbecause customer success is a major focus of our business.

If the new joiners make it throughthe probation period, I will meet again with the whole cohort to welcome themfully to the company and answer any additional questions they may have. I wantevery employee to know that they can knock on my door at any time if they havesomething to talk about. This helps creates an open environment forcommunication — if you ask the CEO anything and talk to the CEO about anytime,then you can ask questions or talk to anyone in the company at any time.

How would you describe the wayyou build and manage the Unbounce culture?

I wrote a post on theInside Unbounce blog where I related creating a greatculture to growing tomatoes:

 “You can’tcreate culture, but great culture may develop as a result of a handfuldeliberate actions. Let me elaborate. I’ma bit of a hobby gardener and I’m starting toget pretty good at it. However, I can’tgrow great tomatoes. What I can do is create the conditions that improves thechances that I will have strong healthy tomato plants that produce a plentifultomato harvest.

 You can’tcreate culture (though you can certainly ruin it pretty fast), all you can dois create the conditions for a good culture to sprout and grow.  Just like my tomato plants, it’sthe employees that create the culture.”

What else are you doing toimprove the culture in the company?

We are building a ten pointmanifesto, which is basically a guide to what it means to be an Unbouncer, overand above our values. The question we have asked ourselves is:

“If the founders weren’there anymore, how would you want the company to develop and what would you wantthe company to do such that in five years, the company would have continued toevolve and grow and would still have a powerful culture wherethe people in the company live the values every day?”

The manifesto will contain everythingyou need to know, who you need to talk to, why we exist, our history and so on.It’s in the alpha stage and is a work in progress,

We are also looking for ways to helpfamilies because a lot of people in the company are starting to have kids. Weoffer a salary match up for the first month so that the father can take sometime off. There is a government-run employment benefit scheme in Canada butmost men don’t take it because it would cost thefamily money. With our salary match offer, fathers can take a month paternityleave fully paid and spend the time supporting their family. We have receivedletters from wives telling us how amazing it was to have the full support ofher partner.

Everybody gets an annual budget of$500 to interact with colleagues and new people outside of the company. The aimis to make a new valuable contact and learn something new and then to bringtheir learning back in to share with the company.

We buy a keg of beer every Friday andat the same time we encourage a healthy lifestyle by giving everybody $500towards gym membership.

We give everybody four weeks’vacation and we give each member of staff a cash bonus of $1000 to actually dosomething during their vacation. Rather than have a staycation we prefer forour people to go out and experience something exciting. We know that peopleneed to take a break and when they do, they come back refreshed and moreproductive.

We are considering opening an officein Victoria, which is 3 hours west of Vancouver where house prices are morereasonable. We want to create a situation where some of the younger people canafford to get on the housing ladder. It’s still earlydays but we are starting to do some experiments with fully remote teams to seehow it works. The key, if we do decide to create another office in Victoria, isto maintain the company culture in the new office.

We are also exploring childcareoptions where we make it easy to share the cost of daycare. Our aim is to makethings as easy for our people as possible; we don’twant to disrupt their lives.

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How are your investors dealingwith the amount that you invest in your people and culture?

One of my investors asked me why weinvest so much in our people. I explained that the numbers speak forthemselves. For example, last quarter we had less than 1% turnover, which isincredible. Not only that but 99% of all our hires are made without theassistance of a recruiter. That means, at a 25% recruitment fee, we save in theregion of $1.5m annually. When we do lose an employee, they are rarelydissatisfied with their role or the company, but often are going to join acompany where there is an opportunity we can’toffer them. We do employee surveys twice a year and 95% recommend Unbounce as agreat place to work. Our glass door score is 4.9/5.0. Ithink the investor was pretty happy with my answer!

How are you building awarenessfor Unbounce in the local talent market?

We have quarterly open house where weinvite people to come in, experience the company and talk to the Unbounce team.We encourage our people to bring a friend and during the day we share theUnbounce experience with them, so that they can become ambassadors and spreadthe word to their friends. We also have a 200-seat space that is the lunchroomby day, and weoffer that space to the local tech community so that they can host differentevents, such as the monthly Ruby developer meeting. We often have 200 engineerscome to listen to or participate in a talk and we keep them fueled bysponsoring the pizzas and the beer at these and other events. The idea for thecommunity space came about through a funny situation, which we experienced whenwe were about 30 or 40 staff. At the time we were really struggling to hire newpeople as we had maxed out our networks and we couldn’t figure our why weweren’t getting a great response to our ads.

Around that time I went to speak at astartup event and when I left the stage one of the attendees at the event saidthat the next time we were in Vancouver we should come and check their companyout. This surprised me as I told him that we were based in Vancouver. Heactually thought we were from Silicon Valley, and it turned out that this wasone of the main reasons why nobody was responding to our ads — they didn’tknow we were based here! We have now changed that with our event sponsorshipand community space.

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