Want to join the Meesho rocketship? Find out what makes a great “culture fit” at Meesho

“A company’s culture is the foundation for future innovation.” — Brian Chesky, Co-founder, and CEO of Airbnb

Meesho co-founders Vidit Aatrey [CEO] and Sanjeev Barnwal [CTO] also staunchly believe this to be true since the company’s inception and have taken great care to ensure that our work culture is not shortchanged for anything. Building the enviable culture at Meesho began with their interactions with each other and with the various stakeholders. They lead by example and the team followed for a while, but over time, the company formulated eight core values that determine Meesho’s work culture.

Five years into Meesho’s existence, work culture remains one of the topmost priorities of Meesho, and to ensure its safekeeping, culture fit is an integral part of the company’s hiring process. Rahul Massey, Talent Acquisition leader, tells all about how the HR team determines the culture fit on the candidates being interviewed for various roles in Meesho.

Read on learn more about how culture fit plays into Meesho’s hiring process:

Culture fit is one of the most important parts of hiring at Meesho because it is among the best ways for us to safeguard Meesho’s work culture. We have eight company core values that map out how we function and help all Meeshoites determine how to act in different situations. They come in handy while determining whether a potential candidate is a culture fit or not as well.

There are five Meesho core values that the hiring team primarily focuses on during the interview process:

• Speed Over Perfection.
• Think 10X
• Deep Dive and Solve Problems
• Making Entrepreneurs Successful
• Take Ownership

These are our reference checks in general, but we further divide them into primary and secondary values during the various hiring processes, depending on the candidate and the role that they are interviewing for. The three primary values are usually determined by the hiring manager and are given precedence, but all five values are pertinent in determining whether the candidate gets onboard the Meesho rocketship or not.

Trust the process

The hiring process at Meesho is pretty elaborate and involves multiple rounds of interviews. While it may seem tedious to some, this helps us weed out candidates who are not fully committed to being at Meesho. Every hiring process involves a hiring manager, a bar raiser, and an interviewer, whose focus is solely on the technical aspects of the job. The interviewer would easily determine the problem-solving skills of the candidate, and the focus on culture is brought in by the hiring manager and the bar raiser.

The hiring managers focus on evaluating and ultimately managing candidates for open positions in their teams. Bar raisers are skilled evaluators who function in a similar role as the one being hired for and are brought in towards the last lap of the interview process.

The hiring manager looks closely into the candidate’s employment history to get a feel for the kind of environment they come from and how they survived in that environment. The values we are looking for during this process are Think 10X and Taking Ownership. We try to understand if they have ever been part of an X to 10X growth and how they contributed to that growth.

Anyone who has seen scaling first-hand would be a great fit at Meesho because scaling is second nature to us.

Assignments are key

Similarly, Making Entrepreneurs Successful is the true north at Meesho and to determine whether a candidate can contribute to this cause can be easily determined during our assignments, which are evaluated by the hiring managers and bar raisers. Most of our assignments involve talking to our entrepreneurs, taking their insights, and trying to bring some solutions to the problems that you have understood while speaking to them.

If the candidate is able to successfully complete the assignment, it gives us an understanding of their approach towards making entrepreneurs successful. Anything that is discussed during the interview rounds therefore is validated through the assignments.

Irrespective of the hiring position, candidates are all required to give assignments.

Because our interview rounds are focused on problem-solving, we put a lot of emphasis on it. But, assignments are the best way to validate our findings.

Same rules for all

Regardless of the level of seniority, the importance of culture fit remains the same across all hires. When it comes to the more senior hires, though, the number of interview rounds increase, with vice presidents and general managers also getting involved, and in some cases, even Vidit himself gets involved to ensure the culture check.

Finding the perfect candidate

Our hiring process has been extremely essential in finding some of our best hires in the recent past. There are a couple of candidates who went through all the various rounds of interviews and their assignments and impressed us in every way. Our culture checks and hiring process has helped us recruit candidates who are great thinkers and problem solvers whose determination match Meesho’s own will to scale, and exhibit the foresightedness for 10X growth.

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Do you think you will be a perfect fit at Meesho? Find out if we are hiring for your role here.