Our 5 Year Vision - Part 5: Foster a culture of opportunity and professional growth
Recruitment is broken. We’re on a mission to fix it.
However, we can’t do it without our candidates, clients, employees, investors or business partners. And since we are all about transparency, we decided to share our 5 year vision in a blog series with you.
Let’s fix recruitment together.
Our vision is centered around these 4 points and over the next several weeks different members of our leadership team will focus on each point individually.
Growth happens through a network of remote but connected recruiters.
Foster a Culture of opportunity and professional growth.
In part 4 Kristine Ayuzawa, Director of People Operations, shares how we developed our company culture and values, and defines the atmosphere we need to keep growing.
Getting to where we are
Kristine Ayuzawa, Director of People Operations
When I joined Wahl+Case nearly 10 years ago, we went to work each day in a redbrick building in a quiet neighborhood. Since our workspace had expanded gradually, we were scattered across three small apartments-turned-offices on separate floors. It was a little bit quirky and had an intimate, homespun atmosphere where we built IKEA desks together in preparation for new starters and traded our shoes for fuzzy slippers at the door. Each room was home to a different team, led by a different manager, and was developing a different culture.
It took us a few years to define our new, unified approach once we moved into a larger office and began implementing systems that would be consistent across teams. It was a time of growing pains and constant recalibration. We had to decide who we wanted to be as a company, as recruiters, and how to convert those ideas into a way of working.
During that time, we changed everything from our recruitment software to our areas of specialization. We created a competency system that would shape our training, promotion, and performance management processes. We pushed ourselves to find effective approaches to hiring and training for various roles within the teams while also building a leadership pipeline.
And as early members of our business moved on, we found that the foundation was solid. Our culture had become bigger than any one of us and we codified its tenets in our values.
We are not a perfect company but we strive to live into our values of staying humble and development-focused; steadily taking imperfect action on the path to getting better. Our one rule is to do what is in the best interest of our customers, always, and this has shaped everything about us from our business model to the way we communicate with each other internally. For any of these things to work, we need to share information openly and trust each other. These are things we do especially well.
Going through changes
Looking back over the history of Wahl+Case, I’d say 4 turning points had the biggest impact on our culture.
The first two are the office move and values creation mentioned above. The third was deciding to stop working on administrative, retail, finance, and legal positions, and focus our recruitment efforts entirely on tech.
It meant walking away from business opportunities in the short term, investing in re-training our consultants, and betting on a strategy that leveraged our relationships in Tokyo’s startup community. It’s a bet that paid off for us in many ways, not least of which was the gradual foray we made into becoming a tech startup ourselves.
With the launch of Justa and then Attuned, we went from being a boutique recruitment firm to a company with a unique set of offerings for our customers. We moved beyond placing great talent to helping companies communicate better with their teams and cultivate an atmosphere of psychological safety that would help them retain their best people too. What we have learned from being an HR tech company helps us to make work more meaningful for both our customers and our employees.
The fourth, and most recent, pivot for Wahl+Case was the decision to become a remote-first company in June of last year. We had previously experimented with remote work but felt nervous about the impact it would have on our culture, especially teamwork and knowledge sharing. It seemed like things would work better if we sat side-by-side like we always did.
But the pandemic forced our hand and, thanks to an infrastructure already built on trust and flexibility, we made the switch to remote work without any disruption to the business. That’s not to say there haven’t been challenges, especially as we move through the different phases of learning and continual redefinition of what safe looks like in a world still battling Covid-19.
The key for us here, as ever, will be continually asking ourselves what is working and where we can make improvements.
Where we are going from here
As part of our 5-year vision, we will continue to foster a culture of opportunity and professional growth.
To achieve this, we must be an organization that is not only diverse, but inclusive and equitable as well. We will need to take care of the whole person on our team, and not only during working hours. Our environment needs to be psychologically safe, where team members can make mistakes, share ideas, and take risks that will move us closer to our goal of fixing recruitment and making work more meaningful.
We will also continue to invest in the people who make up Wahl+Case, looking at ways to build onto and transform our existing programs to provide even more routes for personal and professional development. And as we grow as a company, this will include more flexibility to co-create new career paths for our teams.
Overall, the goal is to subvert traditional limitations existing in recruitment and give people the power of choice in their development, and to facilitate growth and fulfillment while achieving great things together.
