bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

My favourite page in 37Signals latest book Rework.

Give it a read, at least once, if not twice.

A few people messaged me yesterday when I mentioned if I hired someone here is what I would do (Obsess about your employees).

A common thread is that there can be a lot of dissent amongst employees, especially those that receive extra perks because they have a family vs those that don’t.  When some people put off having a family to have a career or unable to, bringing up these kind of issues would be very very difficult.

My idea would be to have a pool of perks (kind of an employee loyalty style programme) over time you receive these perks, you can swap as you please.  Thus if you choose something like day care you are giving up something else.  Not a be all end all solution but would allow employees to fairly allocate their own rewards.

(Oh and also you can get employees to make up their own perks or provide them within the scheme…)

Leaders.

Seth wrote a post a couple of weeks back suggesting what graduates can do if they can’t get into the workplace.  You can read it here.  Essentially he is saying have some fun, learn something new and be interesting.  Jobs will follow.

I couldn’t agree more.

In an evolving business you strike problems or challenges that you cannot even quite describe – let alone find a solution.  What do you do? You can’t place an ad or ask your friends.  You talk to local leaders in that niche.

Have a Twitter problem? You talk to that person whom you see as a thought leader on Twitter.

If you are one of these graduates doing something interesting that’s how you get these jobs.  And at the moment this is a huge market – the market of ill defined problems.

So as critical as people have been on Seth, he couldn’t be more than right, the problems are evolving and so are who we are hiring.