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Company culture plays a crucial role in job satisfaction and success, especially for leadership positions like CTO. This article explores strategies for evaluating a company’s culture during the job search and interview process to ensure happiness.
In general, candidates do not ask enough questions during their interviews, they seem to think the interviewing process is some kind of Spanish Inquisition. It’s not! It’s a dialogue. Both sides need to learn about each other, and then both sides need to make a decision if they have a common future. If as a candidate, you want to make a decision, you need to have facts to base the decision on. If it’s a hard decision, you probably haven’t asked the right questions.
One important task is to find out about the company culture, to learn if you’re gonna like it or not and if you’re gonna fit in - and want to fit in. You need to find out if the company culture enables you to do the things you want in the new job - make the changes you deem necessarily and support the direction you’ll take. Because while you can change the engineering culture as a CTO (and you probably should!) - you can’t change the company culture - it is what it is until a new CEO joins.
First of all, research the company’s mission, values, and public reputation from their website and from company recruiting platforms. In startups, which change a lot and people grow, only the most recent entries are relevant to your assessment. Beside that, do they host meetups? Hackathons? Are people from the company speakers at conferences? A lot can be deducted about their culture from a companies public actions.
A way to find out about the company culture is how they treat candidates. Does it feel like they think recruiting is important or just an unpleasant necessity? Observe interactions during emailing the company - listen to the tone and how they treat you. If they take a long time to reply, if they don’t care about you, this is their culture. There are no two companies-one during interviewing and one where you work. There is one culture and what they show in interviewing-especially the CEO-will be the way you work together.
During interviewing, ask some questions:
- Who were the last persons (roles) they fired (especially in the tech team), how did they do this, why did they do this?
- How are the culture and values lived? How do they impact day to day operations? When was the last time a decision the interviewer made was impacted by the culture and values of the company?
- What is the company vision and strategy? Can the CEO tell you without referring to a slide deck? Do the persons you interact know? If not, there probably is no vision and the company has a culture of following every opportunity
- Does the CEO value quality over speed? Is throughput more important than everything else? Is this a feature factory? (RUN!) How do they plan to prevent derailment?
- How is life work balance? Ask targeted questions about it (do you get emails and phone calls on weekends?)
- How are decisions made? What is their decision-making processes? (Do they have one? Or is it dictator-style?)
- Is Innovation important? How do they innovate?
- Evaluate the company’s approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Is it on paper or do they live diversity? In tech?
- Observe interactions and communication styles during interviews
After the interview, again watch how they act. Do they keep you informed, ignore you, do they stall you? Go on LinkedIn and reach out to current employees for insider perspectives. Reach out to former employees, why did they leave? How was it handled? This gives deep insights into company culture.
Assessing company culture is as important as evaluating the budget, technology growth and the technical aspects of a CTO role. By thoroughly investigating the cultural fit, you can make an informed decision that aligns with your values and working style, setting the stage for a successful and fulfilling CTO tenure.
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