Category: Team

Moz Personal Team

The Expectation of 100%

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s 4:36am. I’ve been awake for an hour, stumbling through email and catching up on reading. G and I flew back from London two nights ago, and although I slept great last night, I crashed at 10pm tonight and only managed 6 hours before the jetlag kicked in. Casey, who runs the inbound engineering team at Moz, and I had…
Hiring Startups Team

What Company Culture IS and IS NOT

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Frustrated. Disturbed. Disappointed. That’s how I feel after reading a recent article that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek called “Job Applicants’ Cultural Fit Can Trump Qualifications.” I don’t typically like to rant against stuff on the web, but I’m worried this is a case where the popularity of the piece (note the thousand upvotes, 600+ comments, and hyper-negativity in the Reddit…
Hiring Startups Team

Startups Cannot Afford to Have Indispensable Employees (and not for the reason you think)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“Become indispenable to your employer.” That’s the advice I see from job training and professional coaches all the time. And I can empathize with why it exists. Many employers are not supporters of their teams, and treat human resources as, well, resources that just happen to be human. That fleshy cognition thus imbues them with all sorts of problematic and…
Psychology Team

The Uncomfortable Balance

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Every CEO, founder, manager, and probably most all of us at some point in our professional lives have asked these two questions: Am I pushing the people on my team too hard? Am I not pushing the people on my team hard enough? These two nag at me all the time. There are days when I marvel at what Mozzers…
Moz Startups Team

7 Ways We Try to Make Internal Emails Better

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Email is a tough communication medium. Conveying tone, voice, attitude and disposition are all stymied by the the format. Efficiency is a good thing over email, but it can lead to suspicion of dismisiveness or even contempt by a reader. And the cycle of misinterpreted emails leading to bad blood between people is something we’ve all experienced. So how do…
Moz Team

Weaponized Humor

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
There’s a constant fight raging at Moz, and every other scaling startup I’ve seen. On one side are the forces of corporateness – trying to make the workplace a more stodgy, inauthentic, TPS-reports-to-be-filed place. On the other are the defenders of humanity and authenticity – the people who built the company and are, by and large, doing their best to…
Hiring Marketing Moz Team

Why Every Company Should Have a Marketing-Focused Webdev Team

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Ask any marketing consultant focused on inbound channels (SEO, social media, conversion rate optimization, email, etc.) what the most challenging part of their job is and 75%+ will say: “working with the engineering team.” This should come as no surprise. Engineering and webdev resources are, along with web marketers, the biggest scarcest and hardest to hire for web-based businesses. We…

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