HR in startups is hard — what if we made it simple?
In HR, the very human-ness of our work means that the conversation is often more important than the tool, the time spent with an employee more valuable than the process itself, and the hand-typed message infinitely more likely to succeed than the automated one-size-fits-all.
In short, in HR we spend most of our time doing things that don’t scale.
Add to that the fact that culture and context vary enormously from one business to the next, from one startup to the next, from one post-series-A-B2B-SaaS company to the next — and it’s not hard to see why HR in startups always seems to start from scratch.
But what if it didn’t have to be this way?
Increasingly, HR and Talent Managers in the French startup ecosystem have been seeking each other out for advice, to share best practices and for support. We have Slack channels, and lunches and roundtables. Don’t get me wrong, having a community is essential. But often what these groups and discussions lack is a clear answer, a template, a how-to.
What are the 4 essentials of onboarding? How should we tackle the question of equity? Is there a wrong way to pay people? How do you implement a remote policy when you didn’t start out remote-first? Is there another way to hire besides WHO? (Hint — YES!) These questions and more get answered one-on-one, but there is no easy way of sharing that information efficiently, and at scale.
Until now, that is.
Here at Sqreen, our mission is to democratize security for developers, to make hard things simple. One way we do that is through our product, another is through our open-door policy which extends to our Sqreeners speaking openly at conferences, meetups and in blog posts about their work.
But what if we applied the same thinking to HR? That is, what if we effectively ‘open sourced’ our internal policies and processes? Shared the basic building blocks for others to start from, adapt, evolve and then share back? What if we shone a light on a subject that is so often kept in the shadows?
What if we open sourced our internal policies and processes?
At Sqreen we believe that philosophy > policy most of the time. That’s why all of our internal ‘ways of doing things’ can be distilled into one simple sentence.
We call them Sqreenosophies, and we’d like to share them with you.
We’d like to share with you our philosophy on a number of common subjects, like remote work, our onboarding and trial period approach, our hiring process (including a cheat sheet on how to get hired at Sqreen), and our compensation philosophy.
I think people get put off by the idea of transparency because it feels like an all-or-nothing kind of game. If we start sharing our internal policies, do we have to publish our salary ranges? What about our super-secret interview content? And what if we’re not yet perfect at something, like diversity, what then?
Well, our philosophy on philosophies is this:
If it’s helpful, we’ll share it.
What would you like us to share about next?
