Reference no: EM131716309

Founded 2006 Skookum Digital Works is a rich technology development company whose produce include mobile apps, business software, and hardware fir Internet-connected users. Its co-owners, James Hartsell and Bryan Delaney, have a strategy to grow while maintaining the company’s distinctiveness. They don’t want to do good work and design basic websites. They want to do great work and become the preferred partner of top companies aiming to achieve strategic goals through innovation. Hartsell points out that a company with the best people can do the best work, delivering more value to clients and thus enjoying better profit margins.

To that end, as the company’s headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, has grown Hartsell and Delaney opened another location in Denver. With just 50 employees in Charlotte and fewer than 20 in Denver, the company can serve clients with the best talent living in or attracted to both locations. Delaney says he envision up to 100 employees being able to collaborate well in one office, after which the company needs to open more offices, rather than keep growing in that location. Collaboration is important to Skookum’s focus on the building solutions, a process it kicks off with teams brainstorming ideas together.

Hartsell and Delaney developed their approach to hiring as a result of learning from experience. After they had earned their computer science degrees and worked for the Defense Department for several years, the founded Skookum. When they were ready to hire for the first time, they assumed they would want someone like them---someone they would enjoy socializing with. They tried that approach through more than a dozen hiring decisions. Eventually, though, they realized that by, in effect, cloning themselves, they were stifling the company’s creative potential. They redefined what it meant to hire someone who is a “good fit” by defining the company’s values and looking for those values, rather than hobbies or other signs of personal compatibility. This has helped the owners build Skookum into a more diverse company that is better positioned to meet its objectives for customer service and growth.   

Summarize two or three principles from this chapter that could help Skookum ensure it is hiring the kind of superior talent the founders say is essential to the company's strategy.