Good, Nuggety, Peoples.

It’s Holiday Season for most, but for us at Nugget, it’s also Hiring Season. It’s that time of year when we look around and realize that we’ve grown 300%+ yet again, that ours is among the most in-demand products of the COVID era, and we have unmet personnel needs in just about every arm of the company.

It doesn’t help that one of our founders is spending time posting to his personal blog rather than helping out. But that’s another issue for another day.

If decades of business thought leadership is worth the reams of ultra-white paper it’s printed on, this is when the going gets tough. This is when a culture that was intuitive and self-sustaining at a small size gets hastily multiplied out in 20 different directions, and everything falls apart. Not all of a sudden, of course. It might still be another year or two of good times and fawning press pieces before reporting emerges that behind the curtain, employees are being bullied into working long hours and not using vacation days, women are not being fairly compensated, and raising grievances has been rendered either impossible or essentially pointless. 

I don’t imagine these things ever taking place at Nugget, but then again, the founders of Away, WeWork and Outdoor Voices probably didn’t either. Then change happened. They entered their own Hiring Season (maybe in Month 6, rather than Year 6, but still), and along the way, something went very wrong. In all of these cases, a shiny, positive external perception was revealed to be not nearly as pleasant on the inside. 

We’ve still got a lot to learn. We still have many more processes to put in place. Over the past weeks of evaluating and interviewing candidates, though, I’ve come to an encouraging discovery: the upbeat, good-natured spirit that defines our online presence is already infiltrating our applicant pools — delivering candidates to us whose fit for a specific role may still need to be vetted or probed, but whose goodness and decency does not. Whoever we end up picking from these processes, it’s clear that they will be zero-ego teammates, empathetic listeners, and patient, understanding human beings. We’ve never officially defined the word “Nuggety,” but somehow our applicants already seem to embody it.

That alone won’t be enough to prevent Nugget from becoming another cautionary startup that forgot its humanity on the path to scale, but it’s a start. And I think, as I push forward on what are still some of the first few hires of my professional life, that’s worth celebrating.