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May 2017 • The PCB Design Magazine 15 THE HIRING GAME ployees. Beyond this, by fostering a helpful and open culture among workers, the new person can find ways to fit in without it being stressful. We spend a large portion of our lives in the office. For employers, it is important to recog- nize this and to work toward a positive working culture where teamwork comes naturally. But it is also incumbent upon the new hire to also bring positive attitude and willingness to em- brace the change in workplace. Keeping the Good Ones Our company is built on retaining the good employees. Whatever it takes to keep them hap- py and motivated, we'll do it. We do our best to offer competitive salaries and excellent benefits, and each employee's motivations are discussed and put into place on projects whenever pos- sible. Something that I've always thought of as a nice perk is that we always upgrade the tools Getting the Cogs to Fit Together No employer should expect any new hire to be up to top speed right away. My estimation is that after the first three months, it's time to look back and see how far an employee has come. During this time, everyone is getting to know the new person's work habits and personality traits, and there is a bit of time needed to get to a level of familiarity and establish rapport. Being qualified for a job doesn't necessarily mean a person will fit into the team the way a company needs. For example, I have seen new hires from larger competitors come into Inter- cept, with everyone in the company feeling very positive. But Intercept is not a large bureaucracy in which people can do very little for large sala- ries; we expect hard-working, entrepreneurial, self-driven people to join our ranks. We have a small management team that accomplishes big things, meaning that we have no time to mi- cromanage anyone. So there have been times when we were happy to recruit from our larger competitors, only to be disappointed in the lack of output we saw from an individual. But this isn't to say all is lost. Another very important part of bringing on a team member is to coach them along and give them plenty of opportunities to "get on the bus," so to speak. Getting the new cogs of a team to fit together means giving people opportunity to change course when things might seem to be going poorly. This is accomplished by having a man- ager sit and chat with that person and offer some friendly insights that might help smooth things out. When I was first employed at Inter- cept, our engineering manager told me I was taking everything too seriously, and I might be happier if I tried to breathe a little. I didn't real- ize how uptight I was because I was trying so hard to do my job well. We like to make sure a new hire is included in lunch outings to help blow off any nervous energy and get to know the rest of us more so- cially. Often, this leads to questions and answers that ultimately help make that person a better contributor. This also exposes the new person to personalities and team dynamics. One overriding principle of helping a new hire to be successful is by having carefully de- veloped a good working team of existing em-