News2 October, 2024

HOW OVERJET BUILT ONE OF AMERICA’S MOST LOVED WORKPLACES

Besik Mikhelashvili, Head of Talent

HOW OVERJET BUILT ONE OF AMERICA’S MOST LOVED WORKPLACES

News2 October, 2024

Besik Mikhelashvili, Head of Talent

I’m thrilled to share that Overjet was included in Newsweek’s prestigious list of America’s Most Loved Workplaces! We ranked #8 in the country — alongside big brands like Databricks, Ally, and Hilton.

This recognition is worth celebrating for any company. But as a startup with less than 200 employees, it’s especially cool to know that others see Overjet as an example of what the modern workplace should look like.

So the question is, how did we get here?

Lots of companies brag about their perks and benefits, but many of these have become standard table stakes for tech companies that want to attract talent.

Ultimately, I believe there are 5 key reasons why people love to work at Overjet:

1) WE WANT TO BE A WORLD-CHANGING AI COMPANY

The truth is, you can’t build a beloved workplace unless your team is doing genuinely impactful work. Foosball tables and free snacks will only get you so far.

At Overjet, we are already revolutionizing dentistry with AI. Our mission is to improve oral health for billions of patients around the world — and we reiterate this mission every single time we meet as a company.

As the world-leader in dental AI, our ambition is not far-fetched. We have built and will continue to build products that our customers love and that improve oral healthcare for all. As an employee here, it is easy to wake up in the morning energized by the mission, proud of what we have already created, and motivated by the critical challenges in front of us.

2) WE MOVE FAST AND WE LEARN FAST

One of our foundational values at Overjet is velocity. We’ve created a modern, digital workplace that’s designed to help us move forward quickly — whether we’re sharing feedback on Slack or updating our progress in Notion.

We know that speed is a major strength: not only in our success as a team, but in our personal growth as individuals. This focus on speed toward value is, in our opinion, the right formula for supercharging your career. We believe the hard work and resilience required to maintain Overjet’s desired pace helps empower our people — especially our young professionals — to grow faster and achieve more of their potential than they could in a traditional, corporate environment.

3) WE REALLY CARE ABOUT HIRING THE RIGHT PEOPLE

We care a lot about hiring. We consistently receive feedback from our team that our new hires are not only talented, but also committed to our mission and eager to learn, which have been keys to our rapid growth so far.

Building Overjet is a team sport, and we know that our employees want to play with the best possible team — so we double down on hiring the best. Our hiring process has candidates meet with several potential team members and complete some kind of assessment that is relevant to the job they’ll do when they are hired.

The signal we get from this assessment is important to us, and may require a nontrivial time investment from the candidate, which we know is not for everyone. Our aim is to have candidates get to know what it’s like working with us just as much as we get to know what it’s like working with them.

When submitting an application to Overjet, we generally also include application-specific questions. The intent of the questions is not to make the process more onerous for the sake of it. Instead:

  1. We’re a distributed company, so writing is an important skill, and this is a helpful way to get signal on writing chops.

  2. Especially for more junior roles, it can be difficult to distinguish between many resumes that are very similar, so asking questions around motivations is helpful to gauge who is more likely to be passionate about the work we do.

  3. For some roles, asking direct questions related to the candidates experience will help qualify the candidate based on our target profile.

  4. Some people have resumes that aren’t that totally on target for the role, so asking questions gives those people a shot at winning a chance to interview!

4) WE COMMIT TO TRANSPARENCY

If you’ve ever worked at a fast-paced startup, you know that every employee is a leader who wears a hundred different hats. And as leaders, our employees deserve executive-level transparency, so they’re able to take the right risks and make informed decisions.

That’s our policy at Overjet. We share company financials, discuss our successes and failures together, and everyone has visibility into our company’s progress. Our people are aligned because our company is transparent. We believe that every employee can meaningfully contribute to our collective success, and the more they know, the better equipped they are to move the needle.

5) WE’RE ALL DIFFERENT KINDS OF “TECHNICAL”

The word “technical” has different meanings at Overjet. We take clinicians and have them work hand-in-hand with engineers. Software development and dentistry are very different worlds but there’s something magical that happens when a dentist who models Overjet’s values & an engineer who models Overjet’s values get in a room and tackle the same problem from two very different lenses. 

We combine technical abilities to solve really hard problems that haven’t been solved before. As an employee, this means you are adding value using your technical skills while learning from your peers’ technical or clinical skills. It’s pretty fun seeing one of our machine learning engineers count teeth the way an experienced dentist would. Ditto for seeing one of our dentists make a game-changing product recommendation.

Interested in joining the dream team? Check out our open roles →