The hiring process
Where are the opportunities to light a fire in candidates as they go through the application and selection process?
GroundTruthA culture diagnostic for companies with a mission worth carrying forward.
An outside read, in your people’s own words.
6 to 8Weeks
30 to 50Conversations
125+Page read
William Foster · Portlight Creative
The problem
Nobody knew what the office was doing.
In March of 2020, no one was prepared to send everyone home. Until then, your company’s culture relied on proximity, and it worked so well that no one paid much attention.
Remote work killed
- The five minutes in a conference room after the meeting ended.
- The hallway conversations.
- The new hire watching you handle an irate customer.
None of it was ever written down because it never needed to be. It was free and organic, so it was never thought of as infrastructure.
Now, six years later,
you’re still trying to get it back.
The problem
We call them Cultural Ghosts.
A quiet majority has settled in.
Competent.Agreeable.Reliable.
They never break anything. They just never break through. You know the potential is there, but they rarely find that fourth gear.
It’s tempting to blame them for only being motivated by the paycheck. But that’s not their failure.
Nobody designed something else for them to believe in.
The way of doing things and the policies that hold people at arm’s length from the mission were written by the company, not by them.
Why nothing has worked yet
You can’t read the label from inside the jar.
The person least able to see a culture clearly is the one who built it.
Why nothing has worked yet
You already tried.
- Offsites.
- Values on the wall.
- Engagement surveys.
- Free snacks.
- The Chief Culture Officer.
All of it worth doing. But the needle never seemed to meaningfully move.
Not because you chose wrong. But because nothing looks obviously broken.
RevenueStrong
TeamBiggest yet
ClientsHappy
TrendUp and right
And yet, it just feels… different.
Somehow sluggish, and in some ways emptier. It’s difficult to put your finger on exactly why or where.
Why nothing has worked yet
You shouldn’t be the one asking.
If you’ve ever tried to get to the bottom of this on your own, you already know the problem.
The conversations are pleasant.
People are glad you asked.
And you walk away with nothing you didn’t have before.
You built this place, and that makes you the last person they will tell the truth to.
All you’re going to get is answers they think you want to hear.
What you will know
Offsites and snacks are perks.This is culture.
Culture is the hard call made without you in the room. It’s the story a new hire hears in their first month. It’s what people do when nobody is checking.
What you will know
We’ll answer the questions you struggle with… and the ones you don’t know to ask.
The answers are not a scorecard. They are opportunities.
01/ 07
Do your people feel and live the mission, or do they just know the words?
Faced with a hard call and no way to reach you, would they do what you would have done?
Do you say you value an owner’s mindset but still want to own the final say?
What’s working? What’s not? What quietly stopped that people miss?
What breaks if you keep growing at this rate?
Where are the opportunities in hiring and onboarding for you to communicate the fire you want people to have?
Do people arrive already committed, or are you having to grow that in them after they get here?
What we examine
Culture isn’t written in the handbook. Here’s where we look for it.
An unbiased, ethnographic, outside read of the culture you actually have: where it lives, where it leaks, and where the best openings are to immerse people in the mission instead of an employee manual.
Onboarding
Where are the opportunities to onboard people into the culture as much as into the job role?
The spaces in between
The first mistake, the first review, the promotion that went to someone else. Where are people quietly deciding how much of themselves to bring?
Values, lived or laminated?
Where do your values show up in real decisions, and where have they become verbiage on a wall?
How decisions really get made
Who do your people believe they need permission from, and why is so much still routing back to you?
Newcomers and veterans
How does the story change with tenure? What do your earliest people carry that your newest never receive?
The stories people tell
The origin story, the legends, the cautionary tales. Which ones still get told, which ones faded, and which ones teach the wrong lesson?
Where growth will strain
What’s likely to break with the next fifty hires?
You’re not buying pages. You’re buying a map of where belief is won and lost.
How it works
Your part takes one email. Ours takes six to eight weeks.
You1
Send one note
Tell the company what we’re doing and why. That’s all the work on your end.
Your people30to60
Minutes per person
Everyone books a slot on their own. Nobody wonders why they were picked.
Us30to50
Conversations
No scripts, no forms, no right or wrong answers. A documentarian’s approach to find the true story.
Together125+
Pages, in person
We go through every hour ourselves, then walk your leadership through what we found.
We’re outsiders. That’s the point.
No stake in your org chart, nothing to gain. Since we won’t be here in three months, we get the version you can’t.
We go through every hour of it ourselves and hand you an outside read with nothing riding on what it says.
For the first time in years, you’ll know exactly what you’re leading.
Why us
No theory to prove.
No framework to sell you, no agenda of our own, nothing we need your culture to turn out to be, and no politics to sidestep.
What we have instead is pedigree. Between us, four decades of observing, finding the story, and creating a space for people to open up to someone they just met.
PhotojournalistOfficial photographer to Governor Schwarzenegger
MemberWhite House News Photographers Association
EnterpriseYears inside Intel as a preferred vendor
PastoralTwenty years as a pastor
That’s the whole job. Everything else is listening carefully with an authentic curiosity to find threads, patterns, and stories.
Straight answers
Straight answers.
What will I receive?
A deep-dive document. We have never delivered one shorter than 125 pages: a sharp prognosis up front, the full substantiation behind it. Delivered and walked through in person with your leadership.
Will my people actually be honest?
Every conversation is confidential, and findings trace to real voices, never to names. Your people are talking to an outsider with no stake in the org chart. That is the only reason this works.
What does it cost my team?
Between 30 minutes and an hour per person. Beyond helping us open the door, we work hard to minimize the workload on you and your team.
Will you tell us if our culture is healthy?
No. We don’t grade it healthy or broken, and we don’t hold it up against a model. We keep an ethnographer’s discipline: we show you what is actually happening, and you decide whether it’s what you intended.
Who it’s for
Founders and leadership teams who care about their people and already know that the impact they want to have depends on a team that believes in the mission. Most come to us for one of three reasons. Which one is yours?
Pick the one that fits. Thirty minutes will tell us both if we’re right for each other.
Book a fit call
Who it isn’t for: anyone hoping belief in the mission is a reason to pay people less or ask more of them than is fair. We don’t take that work.
The investment
$45,000
Terms
50% to begin, 50% on delivery
Timeline
Six to eight weeks
Availability
Two engagements a quarter
Ask about this quarter
Thirty minutes to determine fit. No pitch.
The invitation
It starts with a conversation.
Thirty minutes to determine fit. No pitch.
GroundTruth is an independent culture assessment for founder-led and mission-driven companies, built on confidential one-on-one conversations with the people who do the work. Portlight Creative is based in Sacramento, California, and works with companies across the United States.
GroundTruth · By Portlight Creative · Privacy