June 20, 2016

Ep 90: Talent Practices Of One Of The Bay Area's Hottest Companies

1 hour

Jessica Mah is the founder and CEO of inDinero, one of the bay area's hottest companies. We met in Israel in 2009 when Jessica was just getting started building the company's software with her computer science background. Today, inDinero has 200 employees across 5 locations. Their purpose is to help businesses with accounting and taxes, like an outsourced finance department. One of Jessica's goals for her organization as it expands is to handle growth gracefully and retain culture along the way. One thing that sets inDinero apart from other companies is their interesting and unique talent practices. Jessica coined ABF talent as a way of rating team members and their performance. A employees are ones that she would enthusiastically rehire given what she knows about them today. B employees are ones that she might rehire but need to show improvement. These team members are put on a program to enhance their performance. Then at the end of the quarter, they will either be fixed or be fired. Jessica is a firm believer that harboring mediocrity is not conducive to good results. Her ranking system has proven very successful in transforming B players into A players. Another unique practice at inDinero is that they do not use e-mail internally. Instead, they converse via group chat rooms and messengers. This prevents employees from being held hostage in group email threads that unnecessarily fill up their mental bandwidth. All of the executives also use a special calendar grid that is tailored to the way that they want to spend their work week. This helps reduce stress and increase productivity. inDinero has a distinct hiring process to improve the odds of successful hiring and they also have high employee referrals. Jessica attributes much of the organization's growth and triumph to their values, such as radical candor and transparency. What you will learn in this episode: