Our culture document is only two principles
Hire.Inc culture.
Most companies fill pages with their culture. They print posters, handbooks, and slideshows to ensure everyone “gets it.”
At Hire, we have just two tenets:
1. Customer Obsession as a Standard
We don’t settle for customer satisfaction. That’s table stakes. Ask yourself:
Did I make a decision that clearly shows the customer I understand their problem better than they do?
If your customer isn’t openly surprised at the depth of care, effort, or personalization, the job isn’t done yet.
2. Quality Over Comfort
Good enough isn’t good enough. Comfort tempts us to ship average work. Push back against it.
Ask yourself: If my toughest customer watched how I built this, line by line, detail by detail. Would I be proud, or would I feel exposed?
If it’s not unquestionably the former, raise your standards
That’s it.
Why?
Because culture documents usually hide more than they reveal. They feel comforting. They suggest completeness—but they rarely drive behavior.
We don’t want comfort or completeness. We want clarity and sharp edges.
When faced with a tough decision, we don’t want vague guidelines. We want crystal-clear criteria. If a decision doesn’t lead directly to deep customer delight or to undeniably high quality, it isn’t right.
We stop and rethink.
Two tenets are uncomfortable. They exclude a lot. They explicitly put aside other good-sounding things! collaboration, balance, growth, diversity, speed, innovation. Those things matter, but we trust they’ll naturally emerge from obsession and quality—or they won’t, and that’s okay.
This isn’t a culture that tries to be everything. It’s a culture optimized for performance, not consensus.
Customer obsession isn’t about making customers merely happy. It means knowing their problems better than they do, solving their needs before they arise, and doing things that surprise even our toughest critics.
Quality over comfort isn’t about doing good enough work. It’s about knowing that if our toughest customer looked closely at our process—line by line, detail by detail—they’d leave impressed, never skeptical.
These two principles don’t make life easy. They create pressure, accountability, and relentless focus. They might repel people who prefer comfort or softer boundaries. We’re comfortable with that.
Because in our experience, two things done relentlessly well will always outperform ten things done acceptably.
That’s why our entire culture boils down to two sharp, demanding lines.
We wouldn’t have it any other way.