Jacob Babcock Reveals How NuCurrent’s Unique Interview Process Builds a Successful Purpose First Culture

By Jacob Babcock, CEO and Founder, NuCurrent

To me, what happens after dark is the clearest marker of the real culture of your organization.

When I think about building a Purpose First culture at NuCurrent, I measure our success in the decisions people make when no one else is looking.

As a leader, you might have a vision statement that you can hire a great agency to write for you. Maybe you even believe it. Maybe it's ten words, and every single word is perfect. But success lives in the actions your team takes that uphold your company's purpose and align with your team’s personal values.

When your values have to be blasted everywhere in order to get people to remember them, when that’s the only way you can get people to remember them, I think that’s evidence of a clear problem.

Culture should be the grounding point of every decision your team members make. When they’re the only person in the office at midnight, and they need to make a decision—like “Do I ship this late so that I can get another piece of performance out of it, or do I ship it on time but not have it live up to my performance expectations?”—that decision should be clear from the cultural values at your organization.

Reading Pete Wilkins’s book coincided with a moment when I was thinking a lot about the consistent pursuit of ensuring that our work at NuCurrent is meaningful, not just from a shareholder perspective but from also from the perspective of our team, so that they’re deeply invested in our purpose. They pour a lot of effort into our company, and I want to make sure that it’s valuable to them.

When you have leaders whose individual purpose aligns with the business purpose, you’re going to have more motivated performance. You’re going to be able to use that purpose as a force multiplier for good. But if you can find employees whose purpose matches the organization’s? That when you can really capitalize on the exponential magic Pete distills in the Purpose First Performance Equation.

Purpose First Performance Equation from Purpose First Entrepreneur

When I look at that equation, what stands out to me is that purpose is an exponent. The impact it has on your business and on individual performance is not linear; it’s exponential. I look at the Performance Equation as a way that I can evaluate our strengths and weaknesses by looking at each of those individual variables. But the starting point is purpose. If you don’t have a strong purpose, you’re missing the biggest opportunity in the entire equation. Everything else—abilities, actions, circumstance—is just linear.

The best companies define their purpose and find people that match it. But that purpose doesn’t have to be a one-to-one match. Just because someone’s purpose is making a better environment, leaving the earth in a healthier state, that doesn’t mean they need to work for Greenpeace.

They can work at a company like NuCurrent, for example, where we are helping customers specifically reduce the carbon footprint of their materials, of the products they build, by reducing the amount of rare earth metals that need to be mined from the earth. How you weave the personal purposes of your team—some conscious, some unconscious—with the company purpose is an art.

To build a sustainable Purpose First culture, I believe those cultural values have to be the basis of hiring. I know that’s a controversial stance. When used improperly, making cultural values the main criteria for hiring can lead to homogeneity in your team. For example, you hire people who believe the same things you do, which is how you know they’ll fit with the team. They might be a lot like you. They have the same interests as you; they have the same background as you.

That’s a trap you can fall into. But I think it’s an absolute misapplication of using culture as the main criteria for hiring.

At NuCurrent, to get the benefits of culture-based hiring without falling into that trap of homogeneity, our hiring team fills out scorecards for each candidate. There are five elements at the top of the scorecard, and they’re the same for every person, whether we’re hiring a CFO or an intern. Those five elements are our cultural values. But rather than measuring for the cultural value itself, we measure the leading indicator to the cultural value, and that’s how you avoid homogeneity.

I’ll give you an example. One of our cultural values is “Customer First.” It can be tough to ask an intern, “How do you put customers first?” So instead, we look for people who are collaborative in their coursework or previous employment and people who are willing to give credit to others. We ask questions like, “What’s something you’re really proud of accomplishing in college?” We want to hear whether they’re going to talk about what they did to get it done or about what happened on the team, how they were a part of the team, or what it meant to the researcher they were able to hand their work off to.

Our theory has been proven over time through our hiring and retention of a diverse group of top performers who are well aligned with our purpose: People who prioritize putting themselves into the shoes of the “customer”—whether that is a partner who is going to use your portion of research to further the overall project or an actual customer—are much better at living our core cultural value of “Customer First” when they are at NuCurrent.

During employee reviews, managers grade employees on performance, potential, and cultural values. In this case, we grade directly for the cultural value. To evaluate cultural values, the manager grades each employee on a scale of 1-5 based on how the employee embodies each of our five core cultural values. All three of these criteria—performance, potential, cultural values—are documented and shared up the manager’s chain of command so there is high visibility on each team member. This helps us with decisions on promotions, development, compensation, hiring needs, and more.

Whenever hard questions come up or hard decisions need to be made, whether as a company or as an individual, if your team can look back at the organization’s cultural values and use them as a way of making a decision, then I believe that’s a clear indication you’re fostering a healthy culture.

The more we can keep our purpose at the forefront of our consciousness, the better we’ll fulfill our purpose, the better we’ll perform, and the happier we’ll be with the results in the long term.