I almost didn’t apply to work at silverorange. It was a total coincidence that I came to know the company was hiring a Director of People Management, and even so, I wasn’t looking for a new job at the time. Something about the job ad and company’s blog kept me coming back to look again. After much internal debate, I decided to submit my application on the very last day the job posting was open.

Two and a half years in, I’m so glad I decided to take the leap. silverorange really is a special place to work and I felt a strong connection to its people and culture from day one. I find it incredibly easy to want to do HR well for such a great group of people.

Since I’ve joined silverorange, we’ve grown from a team of 29 people to a team of 38. This has meant a lot of interviews over the past couple of years, which has allowed me to notice trends in what candidates wonder about when they’re evaluating us as a potential team to work with. A common question that candidates ask our hiring committees is “What do you like about working at silverorange?” This is an excellent question, and one that I’ve found each member of our team to answer a little bit differently. Here’s my answer:

I like (love?) that this is not a company where I need to spend my time convincing leaders to think or behave ethically. This shone through during the hiring process for my role and is one of the primary reasons I was so excited to join the team. Check out Kristen’s blog post on Being Kind from 2019. Or, take this excerpt from our HR Handbook that existed before my time with silverorange. Since I didn’t write it, I can shamelessly highlight it as great:

We want silverorange to be a company where everyone feels supported. This includes both being as inclusive as possible, and a core culture of diversity, respect, and trust for each other and for our clients. We also think of the company as a platform to nurture and encourage individuals. If we can support you in your life, we will try our best to make that possible. Supporting you means either your professional goals, or things like travel, family, social activism, art, etc. Within reason, the company will try to support individuals instead of trying to get as much work from them as possible.

There’s a strong collective moral compass at silverorange that I came to trust very quickly. Major decisions are approached by asking each other what is fair—or the right thing to do—instead of what will make or save us the most money. We care about the needs of the people on our team, schedule our projects with enough buffer space for people to take vacations and personal days when they need, and in general try to ensure that each member of our team can achieve a healthy work/life balance. Our 25 year track record of success and the strength of our fantastic team prove that this approach has helped rather than harmed us.

I like that silverorange has a collaborative and intentionally supportive team environment where people pride themselves on being respectful and kind to each other. We’re not an environment where people compete with each other or are rewarded for competing with each other. We reinforce this culture by making our annual bonuses based on company-wide performance rather than individual performance, and any comparisons made in our employee reviews are to someone’s past-self rather than others. Leaders focus on giving credit to and lifting their teams up, rather than taking credit for their teams’ work.

I like that, as much as possible, our HR handbook offers guidelines rather than strict policies. As our team has grown we’ve recognized the need for more structure, but we never want to take the humanity out of decision making while hiding behind a piece of paper saying “Sorry, that’s what the policy says!”. If we’re eschewing logic and humanity in favour of adherence to policy that we ourselves created, we believe we’ve done something fundamentally wrong.

I like that our pay scale probably looks different from others that you’ve seen. We like to think of ourselves as a collective working toward a shared goal, and approach pay from this perspective. The top base salary at silverorange is the same regardless of role. We believe that each individual on our team is contributing a huge amount to silverorange’s success and we don’t value certain roles, or people, above others.

I like that we openly share almost all aspects of how we run the company with the entire silverorange team. Our financial information, pay scale, board meeting notes, etc, are open to everyone. Most conversations on Slack happen in channels that are open to everyone at silverorange. We’re constantly pushing ourselves to be even better about this, and regularly remind each other to share everything that we can with the entire team.

Lastly, I like that I’m hesitant to publish this post because I know that I could come up with 100 more reasons why I like (love?) working at silverorange if I had unlimited time to do so.