Getting to work at a company whose product was recently named by the
Huffington Post as one of the "Most Underrated Innovations of 2010" might be attractive to some people. That the company will soon have doubled its size in the past year may also be a plus. But how about sharing an office with a "giant talking doughnut"?
Freshbooks, the billing software company based in Toronto and taking the world by storm (see our previous articles on them
here and
here) is looking to add 17 new staff -- from a VP and a Chief Technical Officer right on down to IT support -- and to ensure potential hires get the tone right, they created an
unconventional video (scroll down after the link to see it). It features a talking doughnut (who likes the good looking co-workers), a staffer who's under the impression he works for Facebook, and a "Stereotypical Canadian Hockey Guy" chatting up the company's dental plan.
But the company's growth is no joke: when we wrote about them in January 2010, the company had gone from five to 38 employees in four years. Today, according to company "Firestarter" John Coates, they now have about 60 staff and are hiring "pretty much constantly." Coates notes that their number of users has doubled year-over-year pretty much every year since they launched, to a current peak of 2 million people using Freshbooks.
Now, about that talking doughnut? "It's a casual, laid back office -- if someone wears a suit, we ask if they have a job interview. But it's also not," Coates says. "We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we take the product and our users seriously."
Writer: Edward Keenan
Sources: John Coates, Freshbooks;
The Huffington Post