Working at Applied

If we are going to help organisations hire the best candidate every time,

it has to start with us.

Applied came about as a passion project on the side of our day jobs, and we’re now taking that idea into a sustainable, inspiring and rewarding business.
We guarantee that won’t be easy, but we can make it easier by taking the time to create the right kind of company, and finding people who care as much as we do about that mission.
To us, this comes down to the big stuff and the little stuff.

On the big stuff, we have a couple of rules of thumb that guide us:

100 points rule

We have a loose philosophy that everyone has 100 points of talent. Some people are excellent at detailed analytical tasks - poring over data sets to uncover new insights. Others excel at the part where these insights need to be communicated to diverse audiences. Others still are fantastic at creating work environments where people are their most innovative and creative.
Those with luck have figured out what their talents are. Those with luck and hard work have probably already optimised their 100 points of talent to do one thing very very well. But not everyone is quite there yet, and most of us have yet to discover where our 100 points lie, or how they should be used.
At Applied, everyone should have an opportunity to deploy what talents they know they have, and explore new ones. We care about this as a team, and it informs how we design our product, too.

Talent (+ hard work) over ego

A wise person once told us that the only real metric that matters for deciding who to work with is talent over ego. We like that, but being believers in ‘growth mindsets’, we’d add hard work to the numerator. The bigger the ratio of talent and hard work over ego, the better.
We don’t want to ban ego: sometimes it can be used for good, but it can be the cause of wasteful work stress and politics. We believe that anyone with a big ego needs to outweigh it with an even bigger dose of talent and hard work.

Empiricism

We’re a platform built off the back of research, from insights born out of someone’s desire to find out what works. So it should be no surprise that we aim to make team, product and business decisions in four steps.

Design
Analyse
Iterate
Repeat

We work to carefully design tools, content and interactions that we think will work. We then analyse and test these assumptions till we can break them. While lots of time and effort will go into design, we end up with a bias for analytics and empiricism.

Publication bias

Whether your publishing goals are academic journals, Github or Medium, we actively support our teams to share their work beyond our walls. Our biggest fear is that everything we do exists only on our computer screens, we want everybody at Applied to create and distribute as much learning as possible.

But to stick, we know these things need to be reflected in the practical day to day.

So here are some of the ways we have operationalised this ethos:

Fair hiring and performance management: It should go without saying, but Applied understands deeply the value of hiring on merit and teams with diverse skills and experiences. That means: all openings go through the Applied platform, and we aim to hire people better than us every time.
Good ideas really do come from anywhere: It goes hand in hand with hiring people better than you, that your best ideas often don’t come from the top. We try to live as flat a structure as we can to help foster this.
Transparent pay and equity: from interns to the CEO, we keep no secrets.
Flexible by default: some of the team live at work, others work where they live, either is fine. This also translates into a 'just-don't-take-the-piss' unlimited holiday allowance: some kind of time off is a requirement not an optional.