Mentored, Season 2 Episode 1, Rebecca Ricco
Rebecca Rico was one of the brave ones who participated in parallel18’s first generation with her startup, Talentank, which helps companies align their strategy with people based on their culture. Here she shares how it all started and what she’s learned along the way.
Becoming aware of the problem
I co-founded Talentank along with seven founders (partners) which is… quite a different start. We were college students. I was studying Business and Law. Though we all came from different career backgrounds, what we had in common was that, when we started the university, it wasn’t what we expected and we suspected that that’s what would in the work field as well.
You spend three to four years working really hard to score a good job and then when you get it, it just wasn’t what you thought. And so we said, “this can’t happen to us again, we need a system that helps us find the perfect job for us”.
We knew that what made people happy with their jobs didn’t have much to do with what they studied or with their salary. Why? Because what made us happy in that moment didn’t get us any money and none of us were working in our field. That’s when we started researching and set off for Boston to find out what was it that made people happy with their jobs. We discovered it was who you work with. Based on that, we realized that when you work with people who share the same values as you, you feel more committed and that makes us feel happy.
To share this with people, we had to create a system, which captures the values of the employee candidate and the values of the company and it matches them to calculate compatibility.
Our recommendation is that people do this at the very beginning of the hiring process, because if there’s no compatibility, in terms of value, it’s not going to work out.
Talentank works as quick online poll, meaning it’s a fast and simple resource that tells the candidate if they should be in that company and, in turn, tells the company if they should consider that candidate.
What they learned
Our experience in Boston taught us something we didn’t know and it’s that the recent college graduate doesn’t care about being happy within their job. They care about a company’s prestige and the money they’re gonna earn. (Yup, it is what it is). BUT, after they have that first work experience is when they say “wait a minute.”
Turns out, it’s the people that are already on their second or third job experience that they start looking for something more. My partner always says, “earlier generations were looking to survive. OUR generation just wants to be happy.” Those are two entirely different contexts. When you need to survive, then you need stability and a recurrent salary. That was norm. At 23-years-old you started working for a company until you retired. Now when what you need and what you’re looking for is BEING HAPPY, then what becomes important is feeling like what you’re doing has a purpose and is making an impact on the world. That doesn’t necessarily have to do with the activity of the company, you don’t have to work for a charity. However, you do want to feel like the people — and the place — that you work with help you be the person that you want to be. (Meaning they share your values).
On working with IBM, Toyota and Coca-Cola
The first step was analyzing the culture within each team. As you can imagine, they were completely different from one another. We’re talking about very successful companies, with different products and personalities and that all has to do with the people that work there. The workforce culture is alive and it varies.
A strong startup culture can be achieved through solid leadership. There has to be someone that gets to be the role model and represents the company’s values making sure that they’re always present and everyone carries them out.
Exploring the corporate world
It’s very different from the startup world. First because of the hierarchy, the processes, the systems… And because startups are, in essence, small businesses, the founder’s culture is visible everywhere. In a big company, is very hard that every employee reflects the company’s values. Having a bunch of people with nothing in common with one another or with your company complicates the job. We’ve found many corporations were their enterprise’s culture and values aren’t present their strategic plan.
Your company’s culture is what’s gonna help you compete in the market. A company’s culture is like your health, if you don’t take care of it, in a way that the people and the processes of that enterprise is aligned with what you want to be, the culture is not gonna be good and the company will end up being something entirely different from what you say it is.
The problems that we found with corporations were that they’re not conscious of their own culture and since it’s not well defined, processes within the companies can’t based upon on it.
Defining a company’s culture
It’s like a balance. For example, you can’t be very structured and very flexible at the same time, you have to choose one value. That, of course, goes hand in hand with the type of business you have and what the market expects out of it.
Values are made to guide the team, so that everyone is moving in the same direction to achieve the company’s purpose. If the values and the purpose aren’t well defined, then nobody knows where they’re going.
I always tell my clients, “you have to be conscious of what you are, understand where you’re at and where you wanna go”.
How is it different with startups
Startups are their founders. For example, my first clients bought the service because they met up with me and they thought “well, if Rebecca is the company and I trust Rebecca, then I can trust the company.”
So, with startups, when you have 10 to 15 employees, you’re in a stage where people are not gonna buy your product or service because of the company’s name, but because of the team’s values.
Advice to founders
A strong startup culture can be achieved through solid leadership. There has to be someone that gets to be the role model and represents the company’s values making sure that they’re always present and everyone carries them out.
Founders should also be very clear about what makes the company special. You have to have a clear value proposition in terms of what the company’s culture is.
At the end, culture is in how the team dresses, how they treat their customers, how they speak… values that have to be in between every aspect of the startup.
Recommendations
Book
Leaders Eat Lasts — a guide to leadership by Simon Sinek
