What is the best part about working here? How does the company support professional development? How do you acknowledge employee success?
These typical interview questions not only provide job seekers with a chance to impress potential employers but also serve as a window for them to assess if their company culture aligns with their values and work style.
Highly sought-after companies understand the significance of a strong company culture to cement employee values, the company’s trajectory and the actions taken to realize it. Put simply, company culture is more than just a list of buzzwords; it influences every facet of success, starting with the hiring process.
Recently, Built In Chicago caught up with employees from MoLo Solutions and Affinitiv to discuss how company culture has influenced their success and professional development, as well as the caliber of new talent their companies attract.
MoLo Solutions is a third-party logistics provider that connects businesses with transportation to get products delivered.
Describe your company culture in one word.
Authentic.
The positive aspects you hear about our culture are real — our teamwork and collaboration are unmatched.”
The positive aspects you hear about our culture and witness in the office are real, and our teamwork and collaboration are unmatched — I see it firsthand every day. We recently held a new hire class for which countless members of my team volunteered to be shadowed, which not only helps expedite the learning process but also allows our new hires to witness this supportive culture right away.
What's the coolest project you've worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
Recently, I was lucky enough to organize and host our very first Carrier Sales Awards. This will hopefully turn into an annual ceremony during which we celebrate the achievements of our carrier sales representatives from the previous year. These accolades ranged from sales and metric-specific awards to fun awards such as Best Office DJ.
This brought the team together to recognize and celebrate all of the hard work our employees put forth day in and day out, and it was great to collaborate with many different departments. Everyone’s teamwork and support made these awards go off without a hitch, exemplifying the trust leadership has in its managers to take on something new and run with it. I was excited to be given the reigns to put something together that our carrier sales teams would be excited about and proud of.
Affinitiv is the largest provider of end-to-end, data-driven marketing and software solutions exclusively focused on the automotive customer lifecycle.
Describe your company culture in one word.
Curious.
Whether you work in product organization, engineering, sales, support or business development, software companies that cultivate and encourage curiosity are planting seeds that drive self development and continued education. Allowing curiosity to sprout into a core value of company culture ensures team members will find time for personal growth and look for opportunities to challenge themselves. Product organizations tend to obsess over the problem and focus on the why, but organizations that can extend that value to the fabric of their larger culture will develop teams that are constantly looking for creative new ways to address the day-to-day challenges.
Affinitiv has taken that organic sense of curiosity and has provided its employees both the freedom to explore and the resources to do so. Introducing paid subscriptions to educational and training resources across a myriad of subjects for all team members has been both met with positive feedback and has further cemented curiosity in the company's DNA.
Affinitiv has taken organic curiosity and provided its employees the freedom to explore and the resources to do so.”
How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
As industries develop over time and the competitive landscape shifts to adapt, companies need to evaluate their position in the market and make long-term bets on where they need to compete to continue to be successful.
With emerging technology quickly impacting the space and a growing portfolio of diverse products, we had to identify the need for the brand to complete such an exercise to evaluate the brand position, the competitive market and the strategic categories needed to compete and build market share to achieve the next wave of growth. Taking a top-down look at the business landscape and our core competencies forced me as a new leader within the organization — less than four months in — to become a student of the business, and it accelerated the onboarding process. Such strategic and forward-looking thought exercises both challenged my perspective of the space and helped develop the important muscle of mapping short-term initiatives to a defined and articulate long-term vision.
