In 7 Hours With, we explore the routines of leading professionals in their space to learn the when, why, where and how they work. In each diary, we will look at what they’re doing at seven different check-ins throughout their day.
Josh Millet is the CEO and co-founder of Criteria, an assessment company dedicated to helping organizations make better talent decisions using objective, multidimensional data. They deliver the most precise, comprehensive, and reliable assessments to help companies create the highest-performing workforce.
6:15 AM
I wake up around 6:15, and alternate mornings on the treadmill with my wife. When it’s not my day to exercise, I check and reply to email for 30 minutes, then get breakfast for the kids; we have two boys, ages 5 and 8.
I co-founded Criteria 14 years ago and have been CEO ever since. Criteria is a SaaS-based service that helps employers make better, more informed talent decisions. I created the company because of my experiences in hiring: I first had the idea for the company while sitting in a really bad interview.
We initially bootstrapped the business for many years, and as growth has accelerated in the last five years, we have raised two significant rounds of capital. We also acquired two related businesses in Australia in the past year, so now have 150 employees across offices in LA, Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne. An east coast office is probably next. I actually had a very nontraditional road to entrepreneurship — before starting my first company 20 years ago, I did a doctorate in medieval French history, intending to become a history professor. Who’d have thought this is where I’d be back then?
8 AM
During COVID, my work day starts earlier. Because the kids are doing school remotely from home and I’m working from home, there’s no school drop off, so whereas previously I would get to work at 8:30 or so I now am starting in on work around 8:00 and then sometimes taking a brief break at 8:50 to make sure the kids are ready for their Zoom school.
12 PM
My lunch routine has totally changed during COVID now that I’m remote. One of the best parts of remote work is that I can see my sons over lunch. Usually it’s a quick bite in front of a Simpson’s episode, or at the picnic table in the backyard, but it allows me to check in with them and see how their days are going. I’ll miss that when we go back to the office!
Another change that we’ve made since COVID began is a result of finding out that our leadership team was getting meeting fatigue during remote work. Because of that, we made the decision to devote one morning a week, Wednesday morning, to being totally free of internal meetings. It gives us all a chance to clear our inboxes, connect with team members, and get caught up midweek.
1 PM
I tend to have meeting-heavy afternoons and try to keep mornings less booked. We acquired an Australian business a year ago and more than ⅓ of our headcount is there now, so I check in with them in the afternoon.
For meetings, we use Zoom. I would also say one of the most indispensable pieces of our tech stack during remote work has been Gong, which our sales and CS teams use to do call coaching, but it’s so much more than that. I think they call their category revenue intelligence, and it’s got some really smart AI that allows revenue leaders to help refine our messaging, coach individuals, and keep up with themes that are emerging in sales conversations at scale.
3 PM
Around this time, we might have an internal check-in with the leadership team. For most of our history we have been focused on developing assessments designed to help people make better hiring decisions. This month we are launching Talent Insights, which helps our customers use assessments to build better teams post-hire; to grow and develop team members, facilitate team-building, and encourage productive collaboration. We are really excited about this, and early feedback from beta with customers has been great.
Overall throughout COVID it’s been so surprising — our team has responded incredibly well. From a productivity standpoint I would say we lost nothing being remote, maybe even saw some net gains. The challenge is around engagement and morale. When you see that drifting in this environment, it’s sometimes hard to disentangle whether that is something specific to the dynamic of their work lives, or whether it’s just general COVID fatigue or malaise. But either way we are focused on mitigating it as best we can and finding ways to bring teams together.
6 PM
I generally stop work at 6:00 PM so I can eat dinner with my family. The best thing about remote work is that I almost never miss dinner with the family, or at least get to hang out with the kids while they are eating – we tend to eat later. When they are seated at dinner it’s your best chance to get any intel on what happened in school that day.
8:30 PM
Our two boys are five and eight years old, so their evenings end with reading Harry Potter most nights, and about three nights a week I am on email for a couple of hours after they are in bed. Many nights I am back on email after 8:30 PM when the kids are in bed, to my wife’s annoyance.
But I really love what I do. My favorite part of what I do is getting to work with such an amazing team. The old cliche about it not being work if you really enjoy it holds true for me; as the company grows there are of course parts of the job I don’t like as much, but in general, founders are incredibly fortunate to be able to be doing something they truly love.
