Hear me out – a company's culture is not something you put on a piece of paper, it is something that you curate and grow. So, naturally, it depends on the kind of people you hire. For growing companies, it means staying close to the OG team and carrying that ideology and philosophy through. Of course, sometimes the original team is not healthy and you set yourself up for failure. In that case, strategically adding leaders who can bring in the ideology needed (not the one you want) and then scaling up. This specific challenge is very common in agencies and companies that are maneuvering the 100-member milestone.

Nevertheless, the new leaders would not essentially land in with a culture and have everyone absorb it. The point here is to ‘cultivate’ the best aspects of the team and navigate the growth of the culture in the direction it needs to be.

The core idea here is that culture is curated, cultivated, and grown – it stems from the people you have and that is always a mix of people, and their personalities. In order to do that, you need to have an environment that encourages and celebrates moments of honesty, truth, expression, and opinion. A safe space for everyone to be their best and their worst.

This, of course, means a loud floor, arguments, and discussions on seemingly unnecessary things, and a tendency to clash almost every week between people of opinion. That is the chaos which is very much foundational to harnessing the best abilities of every team member.

This is specially easier in technology companies, where progress can always be judged from a logical perspective, so you are never in danger of affecting the end result. The focus can then be put on how you get there instead. The strongest feature of letting the waves ride is that it is a repeatable and predictable pattern, which can be measured. You can always have a clear understanding of timelines, possible issues, and the ways to solve them, when you clearly know how your team responds.

This does not mean that the ideology fails outside of technology companies – in creative agencies, for example, chaos gives birth to creativity which is otherwise siloed and sometimes even buried under policies about “how to do your job”. Systematic industries like production would not benefit from this, but any team that strives on innovation needs to have this dynamic of freedom among their people.

There are some drawbacks to this approach as well, but nothing that cannot be handled. One common trend that I have seen many times is that people tend to exhibit the toxic side of their behavior too often and others start feeling a lack of ‘professionalism’ – which is, in my opinion, an oversimplification. To successfully carry this culture, leadership at the grass-root level needs to have the buy-in and be able to handle tough situations amicably.

Another problem that is very common is being able to manage a wide spectrum of personalities. This means that company policies have to be carefully designed in a way to cater to everyone and that sometimes has a negative impact on the bottom line. The only argument that should suffice here is that the overall uplift in productivity and progress far outweighs this negative impact.

The human mind is designed to work, and designed to enjoy it. Unfortunately, most of our work-related ideologies have come from systematic labor management and that is not a healthy approach in managing dynamic people in innovative jobs. Loyalty, belonging, and a strong work ethic can only be achieved when the person working feels comfortable, at-home, and be able to fully express themselves in their work and around it.

The word interview comes from French and Latin origins, and it means to ‘see between’ and ‘see each other’. I don’t know who decided it is going to be a monolithic questionnaire which needs to be designed to penetrate the soul of a job applicant, but whoever it was clearly had the ego of a potato.

Cursing aside, we have started to think of interviews as screening sessions, and that ought to, almost always, bring out the gaps in someone, more than it shows you their qualities. You should definitely use such methods, if your intention is to hire them in a company or a team that is consistently under pressure and you have a cut-throat culture. If you are one of those, or want to be like that, now is a good time to close this tab (Ctrl/Cmd + W – no need to thank me).

Alright, now that we have gotten rid of the wicked, let me share the blueprint to a couple of interviewing techniques and tips that I have found to be useful. All of these are built on the premise that you want to have a meaningful and insightful conversation with the person in front of you and get to know their best qualities, both as a person, and as a professional. With the assumption that the work culture is going to continue this experience for the job applicant, if they are hired.

Start Casually

Set the tone straight – nobody in their right mind (specially in other-world countries like Pakistan) are expecting anything other than a grilling session. You have to loosen them up. Talk about their hobbies, their family, a book that they love, anything but work. Spend a good couple of minutes getting them to share things about who they are and try to find common ground between yourself, the kind of people you already have, and the applicant.

This immediately makes them comfortable, and in turn, tells them that this interview is going to be easier than they thought it would be. This also lowers their walls and makes it less likely that they filter their answers in trying to impress you. Honesty is what you are looking for.

The Journey

A big part of someone’s behavior, personality, and skills, come from early education and sometimes even childhood. Walk with them and understand why they chose the path that they chose. This can be something as simple as ‘why did you choose to major in this’ and as detailed as ‘talk to me about the subject you loved the most and how you did with it in college/school/home’.

Of course, if someone is a drop-out or a down-right un-formally-educated person like myself, you would have to tweak your questions. Be respectful, their exposure to a university or a school tells you about their background but not more than how they reacted to their overall circumstances, and that is what you should be interested in.

Unsettle Them

I know, defeats the purpose, right? It does not. The sole reason why I like to switch subjects between every 1-2 questions is because I want the applicant to remain open and honest and not form constructs in their mind about where the conversation will go next. A surprising question not only give you a brutally honest response, it also makes it feel more like a casual conversation.

Of course, the key here is to make the connection between the two subjects you jump but it doesn’t have to be too obvious. For example, after asking why the candidate chose ‘software engineering’ as their major, and getting a response like ‘I did it because I was good at logic and I could see that I can have a successful career in it’, you can safely expect them to think that the next question can be about their current state of mind with it, or about building logic. Instead, you could ask them about their decision-making and if it has evolved from then to now. A subtle connection, and a highly valuable question, that you could not have asked straight.

Personal Lives

A person is not just a professional – nobody in their right mind can leave their emotional baggage at home and come to work with a singular focus. It is inhumane to expect that, and it also inhumane to try and separate the two parts of a person. It is very important to understand what drives a person to go and work. And it is always more than a bunch of things.

For example, people who would say that I work because I like it, haven’t really thought about it. Do not settle for less detail, ask them to dive deeper into their motivations. We don’t have Maslow’s pyramid tattooed inside our frontal lobe, human beings are complex and they need multiple factors to form loyalty with their work. It is important that you, your team, and your company has a good amount of overlap with this person for a long-term relationship.

Open Up

The most important ingredient to all of this is a two-way dialogue. Open up yourself – if they share something about their life, work, education, previous experiences, try and give them something back as well. It should never, I repeat, NEVER feel like an interview. Anyone is 100% more likely to be honest and open with you if you do the same with them.

Ask them to ask you questions, and not about the company and how many sick leaves we allow, we have documents for that. People are hesitant in asking too many questions but it is important for them to have the same level of clarity as you to make a sound decision. At the end of the day, if they do not have enough buy-in, they will eventually quit.

Benefit of Doubt

Here comes the controversial part – I want you to see the best in everyone, give them the benefit of the doubt, give them 100% trust right off-the-bat. Yes, it is risky and dangerous, but the other person is doing the same. No matter what financial terms they settle on, they will give this company blood, sweat, and tears – and they deserve to be seen at their best.

This gives birth to a larger culture, where people bring their A-game to the table, every single time. It brings ownership and responsibility and no serious team can operate without it.

No matter how many employee-friendly policies you have, if the people and the culture are not aligned with each other, retention will always be a challenge.

Afterword

Before you be all judgy, this blueprint comes from taking more than a 1000 interviews (I kid you not), in different organizations and has a very high success rate of understanding and developing meaningful connections with people from the interviews.

This is not a perfect recipe, but it will hopefully give you enough to stand on. What techniques do you use in interviews? I would love to hear about them and if you think this is absolute bonkers, let me know. I would definitely not agree with you, but it is good to know that there are other mindsets out in the wild, and how I need to do my best to avoid crossing paths with them.

But my perspective has changed in the past few months heavily. I have been working with some pretty dope brands and products in the past few years, as a full-time employee, as a mentor, and as a consultant. And I found that SEO is failing these businesses. These are content pros, who are actually producing good, tactical, and helpful content. Yet, their products are not growing through organic means.

Why? I started doing an analysis of how Google is evolving search and how many websites have lost traffic to those updates. The more I saw, the more I could see the monarchist rule of Google and their plans of evolving search from the user's perspective.

Let's break it down.

Google focuses on fast answers

We have all heard this one, give your visitor the answer to their question, as fast as possible. This is the equivalent of someone asking a question while driving past a billboard, and that billboard should have the right answer to that question. People will literally spend seconds on a page before deciding if it is worth their time or not.

This gives you a very short time to:

1. Convince the user to read more (which is exactly what they want to avoid)

2. Take some sort of action to get the answer (somebody else is highly likely to be competing with you to give that answer without the action)

3. Sell yourself or your product as the answer and hope that they convert then and there (this, at best, manages to convert impulsive buyers)

So, what do you do? A popular argument against this is that blogs are supposed to be this way, and blogs are just a foundation that helps you build the right authority, so that your landing pages, which are focused on commercial queries, can rank better.

It doesn't work that way.

What you rank for, is who you are

We did an experiment at a company I worked for, we wanted to find out how Google ranks us for different topics. As to say, we needed to understand which category our website falls in, as far as Google's algorithm is concerned.

This website had some serious organic traffic, a leader among its industry. The user experience was not awesome, but good enough. We posted two new articles, one of which was very closely tied to the product that they were selling and talked about how to solve a specific problem with their software.

The other blog focused on giving information on a topic related to their niche, and did not focus on converting the user at all (besides the CTAs in the header and footer of the website).

The informative blog started ranking in 3 weeks and the other blog took 3 months to rank on the first page. Both the keywords had an almost equal amount of keyword difficulty and search volume and mostly had the same competitors ranking for it.

The conclusion – if you start scaling your organic traffic too fast, you can be considered an informative blog website and you won't get the recognition you need to rank what you actually want to sell, your product.

I know I am going to get a lot of 'nays' for this, but this is the reality for many businesses out there. The SEO spend has risen for the past few years and if you think about it, it costs way more than paid search marketing now. You cannot scale SEO beyond a certain point without heavily sacrificing your ROI.

Publishing massive amounts of content is bad for the industry

The perfect example of this is Zapier and monday.com – they post so much content that they have their weekly newsletters full of new content. Their strategy revolves around ranking for anything and everything in their niche. And while their content is awesome, you will find that they are indirectly using the same philosophy as Google, crushing the competition.

You cannot even think about competing with these two giants on organic channels. They have shit ton of more money than you, and their organic marketing channels are way stronger than you can ever be. A lot of new brands focus on organic marketing in the start because it is cheaper and they really strive to highlight the innovative new idea that they are bringing to the market. Only to find out that they need to target the same topics as their competitors do, with 20 times more money than them, it is impossible to beat them.

Google has always been vague about what makes a piece of content 'good', but even if they told us, these giants would easily capitalize on that to squash the innovative newcomers in seconds.

Google does not want you to rank for commercial queries

Let's assume that all of the points I made above are utter superstition and false. Google rewards good content and you can change the destiny of your newly founded SaaS company by writing dope content.

How will they make money? They cannot.

Searching on Google is free, ranking on Google is free, and there is no layer in between the search done by the customer and eventually purchasing your product that benefits Google.

Now, let's assume that Google does care about both factors and they want you to do the best by trying to rank for a commercial query, but you can also leverage their paid marketing features if you have less time or resources to work on SEO.

In that case, organic search results should be visible higher up than ads. Not the case, the advertisers, no matter how shitty their product or page is, are displayed above the organic search results, it is a clear preference.

And of course, Google is not the evil here, after all, they are profit-making company that needs revenue, one way or the other. I just think it is hypocritical of them to promote and glorify the 'organic way' when it is clear that it always has second dibs.

All your hard work writing 100s of blogs and establish topical authority goes down the drain against $10 that a shitty product company with loads of cash pays to Google for an ad for that keyword. What's the point?

SEO is a lot more expensive than Paid Search

Start by calculating the man hours put to get a website to a reasonable DA, all of the content that needed to be produced to reach there, the failed experiments, the overpaid agencies, the freeloading employees, and then add up the costs of retargeting the people who land on that blog with email marketing, other blogs and whatnot, along with the cost of everything that was involved in helping convert that customer e.g. a kick-ass website design, that video above the fold, all the plugins you paid for to achieve high website speed for better rankings and whatnot.

Now compare that cost with setting up a landing page and working on some nicely written copy to target the same keyword with paid search. When done at scale, you will find that many of these keywords would have a much better ROI when compared to exclusively-organic marketing.

Most of us fail to understand the cost of SEO. Sure, there are masters out there that are able to get a better ROI than you, and there are many SEO agencies that do the job very well.

But mostly, it is a bargain. The average Joe cannot afford good SEO when building a startup. They also have no way to forecast if it will work or not. While PPC almost always has a clear ROI, SEO is vague and you cannot plan on it effectively.

Does this mean we stop doing SEO?

No, SEO would continue to remain at the center of your marketing strategy but it is no longer an independent channel. SEO can only be a starting point for a user's journey till they convert with you. Because of how Google works, you can only be the bearer of quick answers for your visitors. But that also gives you the ability to target the same users with ads on social media and on other websites.

That said, all startups, big or small, should consider moving the better part of their investment in PPC. PPC helps you establish the base ROI for your product or service and it will give you perspective about your numbers, what you can achieve, how quickly you can achieve, and what will be the cost of it.

A good marketing strategy involves refining your PPC campaigns with the help of SEO, and not vice versa. It will be the most predictable, and it will be the most sustainable, regardless of competition.

Last words

I always caution people against it, and always give the advice that these channels are not perfect for business, and they will never be. At the end of the day, Google is a profit-making enterprise that will sacrifice what you get as a business to earn some extra cash, any day of the week.

Always have a strong marketing communications strategy that is able to adopt to any channel on any platform. Search engines are just one way of doing things, there are lots of other ways you can market your brand.

If you are curious on how sites that are not optimize for Google work, here is breath of fresh air with the awesome people at Fibery – the website is a work of art and reminds us how good copy should always come first. Check it out here: https://fibery.io