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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Employees
From Applicants to Making a Hire
Sit back and relax because this is going to be a LONG post Again I’ll pick up right where I left off at the end of Attracting Quality Job Applicants. At this point we had crafted our job application to act as a natural filter by making the application process take a little thought, and we had promoted the posting using our sites and social media accounts, the career center websites at local colleges, LinkedIn, and Craigslist. Reviewing the Applications Pretty quickly applicants started coming through. Not a gigantic wave, but we would get one or two a day. The … Continue reading
Attracting Quality Job Applicants
Picking up where I left off at the end of Why Most Hiring Processes Suck, the primary philosophical difference between our hiring process and most traditional hiring processes is that we want to first assess a candidate’s aptitude at performing the skills required for the job prior to conducting any interviews or making any job offers. For some jobs this is easier than others. Developers, for example, can be evaluated by their prior work and/or by giving them a small sample project to complete. A warehouse worker can be evaluated by having them come in and pack orders for a … Continue reading
Why Most Hiring Processes Suck
My partners and I are all too familiar with a “traditional” hiring process. We’ve all been on both sides of the fence – as the applicant and the one doing the hiring, for companies small and large, for companies old and new. The common theme amongst us was that every hiring process we’ve been through has sucked. So we set out to do something about it. While it’s impossible to pick the right person 100% of the time, we sought out anything we could do to improve our chances beyond just a shot in the dark. Over the course of … Continue reading
Welcome Reece & Bobby to the Pure Adapt Team!
We’re extremely excited to be welcoming two new full-time members to the Pure Adapt family. In September we set out to hire a “Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support Specialist” for Detailed Image. We recently made an offer to our leading candidate Reece for this position. He accepted and is scheduled to start in January. Reece is a recent graduate of St. Rose college. He handled everything we threw at him exceptionally (and believe me, we didn’t make things easy on our applicants). He’s also a great culture fit – his family owns a body shop and he’s a passionate sports … Continue reading
Teamwork in Action
I’m writing this on Wednesday morning. Up to this point my work this week hasn’t really resembled what a “normal” workweek looks like for me. At all. I’ve spent the majority of my time in the warehouse helping the guys pack orders (we had a really successful early early holiday sale), answering customer service questions (which spike during big sales like this), and interacting with job candidates for our customer service position. Kind of a far cry from the usual web development and web marketing stuff. Why? Because while I was away Greg closed on a new house. Mike and … Continue reading
New Pure Adapt Site and…We’re Hiring!
Over the years we’ve unfortunately neglected the PureAdapt.com website. Aside from changing a few bits of information, we hadn’t updated the design since the 2008 redesign. For better or worse there’s always been something more important to work on, and the old site got the job done, so we just left it. However, as we started to discuss our hiring plan, we realized that the Pure Adapt website all of a sudden became a more important piece of the puzzle. We needed something that showcased our work, our personalities, and our culture. Finally this past weekend we launched a new … Continue reading
The Inmates are Running the Asylum Today
Today, like many other days, I will be working from home. Mike and Greg however, will also be working from home. Meaning that for the first time in our company history, our warehouse will be run by our employees. In some ways this really isn’t a big deal. Charlie, our warehouse manager, has shown that he is more than capable of running the show. There have been many days where I’ve been in and haven’t had to do much at all to keep things moving in the right direction out there. I have all the confidence in the world that … Continue reading
Simple Gesture, Big Impact
Because of rain delays and extra innings, last night’s Angels vs. Red Sox game took over seven and a half hours to play. After a few hours of rain delays the majority of fans left the game. It looked desolate in the stands. Not many people are willing to stick around until after 2 AM on a weekday in the cold rain. But some did. What did the Red Sox do for these crazy dedicated fans? They announced over the PA system that fans could go sit anywhere they wished. Many people who could never afford seats behind home plate … Continue reading
Our First Full-Time Employee Started Today
Over the years we’ve had numerous part-time workers, both in the warehouse and contracted workers doing various web stuff, but today was the first day that we had a full-time, salaried employee. The position is warehouse manager, and the guy is Charlie, who has been with us on a part-time basis for just about year now. Through his consistent hard work he’s proven beyond a doubt to us that he’s the right person for the job. No one else was even considered. Given that we each only come in two days per week (everyone on Monday, one person each of … Continue reading
Don’t Fail Your Employees
Last night I finally went on to the CBS website and watched the first episode of Undercover Boss. The premise of the show is pretty interesting – presidents/CEOs of large companies go “undercover” and work as front-line employees for their own organizations. The assumption being that they’ll see things completely differently if they work in the positions that directly interact with their customers. And of course that’s what happened in the first episode. It featured president and COO of Waste Management Larry O’Donnell. WM is a great first company because 1) they are huge 2) Larry was really really excited … Continue reading