Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'd like to introduce you to the CEO and co-founder of Truss, Mr. Everett Harper. Welcome to the show, Everett.

Everett: Hey, thank you. I really appreciate it and thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it and hope the listeners get a lot out of this one.

Max: I'm sure they will because from what I’ve heard, you've implemented some very innovative strategies in order to attract and retain talent, notably around the sharing the transparency around salary information, an information that is typically kept very very secret and that nobody wants to have leaked. And you found that it could be used by some organizations willing to make that leap as a competitive advantage in the world of talent. So, that's the conversation we're gonna have, if that's okay with you Everett, but first for our listeners who are not familiar with Truss, what do you guys do? Who do you hire?

Everett: Sure. So, we are a human-centered, purpose-driven software development company. What we do is solve really complex problems for large government agencies, such as Department of Defense, Center for Medicaid Services. We're one of the groups of folks who helped repair and helped save healthcare back in 2013, for example, for those of you who are familiar with that. On the private sector side, we have several Fortune 200 companies, and we will address issues such as supply chain software issues or how to enable military service members to move without many of the hassles that they normally experience by developing software that's really about being human-centered and human-focused. At this point, we're about 132 people and we are a remote-first company, so we are in, people in about 30 different states across the United States and have been that way since 2011. So, we have a lot of different things that we do with our company, and we'll get a lot more into that as well, but that's just the summary.

Max: Thank you. Thank you. So, you hire engineers, mainly.

Everett: Yeah, so good. Thank you for bringing that up. So, the people that we mostly hire are actually across a range of disciplines. From research and design to application engineering, infrastructure engineering, product delivery, because you can build a thing but you gotta be able to stand it up and make sure it delivers to the customer, as well as a lot of the support and operational disciplines as well. 

Max: Okay, and the remote culture since 2011, well, great for you for having that foresight, but now that great competitive edge is gone, everybody is doing remote so you can't use that as your main selling pitch anymore. Although of course, there are different levels of remote, and if you've been at it for 10 years, you're gonna be Level 3+. What are some new tricks or hacks that you have worked on recently to give you a new competitive edge, considering that remote isn't enough to stand out anymore?

Everett: Yeah, so I think the main one is that there is a difference between somebody who’s just doing remote, who's had a very strong in-office culture. It takes a while to figure that out and we have built this up to solve various problems for a decade now and so, the communications structures, the documentation structures, how we hire, who we hire from, the networks that we can hire from. All those have been a decade established. So, there's still a lot of built-in knowledge and mistakes that we've made that we can deploy as far as a competitive advantage. It's things that people will feel in some ways with regard to other companies. In terms of things that we do that might be, I wouldn't call them hacks, but as solutions to challenges, we have a really strong documentation culture and it sounds real boring until you think about how many things were in your office that you sort of just picked up because it was on a whiteboard somewhere or you could lean over someone and get a synopsis of the last meeting, or you could overhear it if there was an open office. If a documentation culture isn't established, who is gonna take notes, how is that being done, where are those published, are they done in a way that everybody can understand, are action items really clear, and are deadlines really clear? You can all of a sudden have a meeting, yeah it was all great, and then nothing happens. And it's probably because there's some missing pieces with documentation, so I can't emphasize how important that is for anybody, for any company, but that's something that we're practiced at. So, I think that's just one off the top of my head.

Max: Yeah, yeah. When hiring remote first, you would think you need people who are warm and great in front of the camera and fun to hang out with, but as it turns out you need people who are good with pen and paper and a keyboard and who are very meticulous about notetaking. I've found the same thing, my company is also fully remote and yeah, it's absolutely essential because it's asynchronous communication as well, you're working on three different time zones, so you might save a lot of time this way. 

Everett: And even to go further, whne you say you broaden it to talk about asynchronous communication, that's visual communication as well, can you draw diagrams and so forth that are easily shareable to show process steps. So, for folks who are in talent acquisition, clearly, it's a pipeline. How is that visually represented so that different groups can understand and plug in at the right time? We go through a lot of iterations of that. 

Max: So, the transparency theme, before we get into the touchy subject of salary, you talked about documentation. So, I assume you also sharing with candidates everything from the leave policy to benefits to how you guys run meetings. You just dump it all on the internet and let them kind of sift through it?

Everett: Um, well.

Max: Maybe dump is not the right word.

Everett: No, no. It's available to them. What I would say though is, we do have, you know we have GitHub repo where we have a lot of our policies people can read through and so forth. But I think one of the things that we do explicitly is we put our values and we put our operating principles on our website. My co-founders and I spent six weeks every Wednesday after work for three hours a time, honing those values really early in our history. The reason is because we knew the benefit of having strong cultures. And a good, clear, actionable value statement or operating principle statement is such a foundation of a great culture, in my opinion, and in particular, it repels the wrong people and attracts the right ones, before they ever get into the pipeline. And I mean repel the wrong people is people who aren't a good match, they may be brilliant at another company but not for us. Everybody needs to know that as early as possible. So, we have the benefit of people seeing and say hey this is a place that I want to be.

Max: Who are you trying to repel? It's a hard one. Because I know you're coming from a point of view of inclusivity as well, and so, who you wanna repel sounds like a gotcha question. 

Everett: Yeah, no no not at all. I'm happy to answer that. People who aren't interested in communicating. In a remote space, great communication written and verbal, and now visual, but written and verbal, is really important because it's highly...