Here’s an applicant’s guide to considering a gig with Mockingbird. Regardless of your skill, experience and innate intelligence not all companies are a perfect fit for all candidates and vis-a-versa. A working environment is a unique combination of opportunity, compensation and culture and I’d like to do the best I can to describe our culture to help you evaluate if Mockingbird might be a great (or terrible) place for you.
-Conrad
Nerdy | Analytical | Proactive | Professional
We seek people with these four innate human qualities. It’s simply hard to fake a genuine love of technology, or know that just being responsive isn’t enough, or instill a curiosity that pushes someone to dig into the underlying data instead of accepting the first answer.
We are a Team not a Family
We expect employees to contribute, grow, and advance their careers while improving the company. Like a team, our culture is conditional on reciprocated support… i.e. we have high expectations of the entire team and share that success in our quarterly profit share bonuses. We’ve banded together to cover co-workers on extended maternity and paternity leave. Unlike the unconditional love in a family, the team requires performance from everyone… in the unlikely event that we make a poor hiring decision, we have removed that team member quickly. Read more on Teams vs. Families, from David C. Baker.
Non-negotiable Salary Offers
We believe in paying employees well and go out of our way to “price” each job appropriately. Additionally, we have full transparency internally about salary levels – this ensures that compensation and ability are closely correlated. Employees are compensation on their ability NOT their aggressiveness in negotiating and reduces the risk of unconscious gender, racial or other biases leaking into compensation. Non-negotiable offers also avoid a zero-sum-game confrontational negotiation as the first experience new employees have with Mockingbird. From Day 1, our Formal Offer Letters email includes this: “We base everything we do on data and transparency; therefore, the offer below is non-negotiable. This avoids any animosity between employees as we grow and scale our operations. We also understand that making a career move isn’t an easy decision, even with the negotiating aspect removed.”
The Small Business Career Stepladder
We are a small business… there’s no HR department dedicated to crafting elaborate career paths with promotional gateways. While the Digital Strategist Role has a clear career progression, most of the Mockingbird jobs have a less defined promotional path. You drive your own career and commensurate compensation by creating opportunities for personal growth, adding more value to our clients, extending your skillset – we call this “filling the vacuum”. It’s not just encouraged, its required. As Mockingbird grows, so should our employees.