At Sourcebooks, we hire for Growth Mindset. Our dedicated People and Recruiting Team actively looks for candidates that exemplify our values and mission. When hiring, we look for a lot more than just work experience and whether someone can “do” the job. We look closely at candidates’ attitudes, their ability to innovate and experiment, and their willingness to learn. We train managers in behavioral interviewing so that they’re best prepared to hire candidates who are ready to learn and grow with us. This creates a culture of learning at all levels, and ensures that values like agility, ownership, author care, innovation, and more are ingrained in each employee from the start.

Our CEO is extremely accessible: for example, she speaks to the company regularly, meets with every single new hire to welcome them, sends two all-company emails every week where she specifically thanks people and celebrates the innovations happening across the company (in all departments, so everyone feels seen), and is a visible presence at industry events and in media spaces that align with our Books Change Lives mission. All of this combined with her outgoing personality and passionate demeanor inspires collaboration and agility within the organization, and encourages all employees to embrace Growth Mindset as she does. She is open about her own challenges, mistakes, and Fixed Mindset moments, and leads open discussions where she is willing to be wrong in order to reach the most creative solution with the team. In our entrepreneurial environment, she models our values and regularly reminds us all that we are not a “top-down” organization: everyone contributes, and everyone is important.

Our managers take time regularly to celebrate their employees’ achievements in front of the whole company, whether in an all-company email (which we’ve received feedback that most people do read and enjoy) or at one of our bi-weekly all-company virtual meetings. Additionally, we regularly survey all employees to get ideas and feedback on new initiatives and experiments. These surveys often lead to further discussion live in our all-company meetings, where we can workshop ideas together and employees can see their feedback being heard and acknowledged by the CEO and other leaders. We also encourage everyone to actively participate in meetings, no matter their seniority level: EVERYONE gets a seat at the table because we want everyone’s voice to be heard.

We’re committed to a hybrid work environment, which has allowed us to hire exceptional talent from anywhere in the country. Being intentional about this model has helped our employees work across teams, whether they’re in one of our offices or working virtually. The language that our leadership uses prioritizes collaboration, Growth Mindset, and togetherness, which helps solidify our ethos at all levels of the organization: that we are a community of book lovers working together towards our mission. We have bi-weekly, virtual all-company meetings that celebrate examples of collaboration and impact, and regular emails from our CEO to the whole company highlight moments of book joy, company news, outstanding examples of collaboration, and other reminders. The themes of collaboration, breaking down silos, and togetherness all help keep us rooted in our mission, and this mindset is what drives results year over year.

While we offer a competitive salary and benefits package (for example, in the last year we increased the percentage that the company pays for healthcare premiums, bringing the cost down for employees), we also offer 6 weeks of paid parental leave for both parents, which can be added to the existing FMLA benefit for new parents so no one has to take any of their parental leave unpaid. We’ve also added several additional company holidays since 2020, and are closed the week between Christmas and New Year’s to give employees more time with their families. Just this past year, we expanded our paid sabbatical eligibility from 20 years with the company to 15, which made the program accessible to many more employees (and they took advantage of it!). Culturally, we encourage people to honor their time off: managers make it a point to NOT expect people to answer emails after hours or while an employee is on PTO or taking a sick day. This is modeled at the Leadership level as well, so it integrates into the culture.