Steve Agrees With Me! aka Why We Give Our Employees Autonomy

At zipBoard, we believe in letting our employees do their thing and choose the best course of action in their individual tasks. This makes for a much better office environment and works culture.

Steve Jobs agrees with me here. You see, it doesn’t make much sense to spoon-feed smart people and tell them what to do at each and every step. You have to trust your employees and give them enough authority to get the job done in whatever way they see fit.

Continuing on the same train of thought, let me tell you why we follow this policy.

Employees are the MOST important asset of a startup! It’s worth your while to spend a lot of your time finding the most passionate resources!

In our opinion, resumes are memories from the past. We DO NOT use them. Actually, we hate them!

Much rather, we use a live coding assignment to assess the technical acumen of prospective candidates. We make sure that we include at least some portion of new technology into the test. This helps us to also determine the motivation of candidates to self-learn: a core skill required in any startup development team.

In our face-to-face meetups, we focus on two things: (a) the ability of a candidate to quickly grasp on conversations: can he or she pick up on interview discussions, and understand what’s going on? And (b) their overall fitment into the team. To determine this fitment, we try and judge if we can picture the candidate in the same conference room with all of us co-founders, and have the same level of conversation with him.

-Pranab zipBoard