What specific programs do you offer to attract and retain talent? Please share about your culture, benefits, DEI initiatives, internships and fun perks.
We have a very flat culture at Edge, where all are encouraged to challenge the status quo in favor of improvements and progress. We are also a culture of learning. For example, the team participates in a bi-monthly book club discussion having read books covering a wide range of topics from thinking probabilistically to DEI. Other hallmarks of our culture are incorporating decision sciences into our processes and learning from data.
When hiring new team members, of course we make sure the person is a fit for the role, but we also make sure also that the role is fit for the person. It is important to us that people are happy in their roles, both to maintain our culture of positivity and because generally people do their best work when they are happy. Everyone who goes to advanced stages of our hiring process is asked to take an assessment which looks at their communication style and workplace motivators. We then analyze their results to determine whether what that person enjoys working on is in line with the role for which we are considering them and whether how they naturally communicate is a fit with the communication style of the group they would be joining.
For existing employees, every manager at Edge is tasked with understanding the interests and long-term career goals of their direct reports. Especially because Edge is permanently remote it is important that we take deliberate action to expose employees to other parts of the business and the skill sets they will need to achieve their long-term goals.
We do offer internships! If you are interested in applying, please contact us.
What makes your company stand out?
Our mission is to modernize the asset-based lending industry, an industry which has been largely unchanged for decades. We have incorporated innovative data analytics and automations into processes that are typically manual at most specialty finance companies. Our team is comprised of both long-time industry professionals and people with objective perspectives on asset-based lending. We are more than 50% female. Our decisions are not driven by hierarchy, intuition or “the way things have always been done.” Instead, we are committed to objective truth-seeking and challenging each other in order to get the best answers. We provide edge to our borrowers through flexibility and customized problem solving as situations arise. We also actively seek to provide capital to companies whose verticals or collateral makeup may be disfavored by banks and traditional ABL shops for non-credit related reasons. We are committed to having a growth mindset, listening to the ideas of our colleagues, being open to change, moving things along efficiently with as little bureaucracy as possible, and to constantly be innovating.
What would you say are the best things about the industry you work in? What are the challenges?
One of the challenges we face is striking the right balance, on a deal-by- deal basis, between giving our borrowers fewer hoops to jump through to streamline collateral monitoring processes and protecting ourselves against situations where a business does not meet projections or employs a bad actor (fraud). One of the most interesting things about asset-based lending is learning the nuances of many different types of businesses – what has made them successful, the challenges they face, their business cycles, and their processes – and then coming up with creative ways to solve their working capital needs. Often, we work with multi-generational family-owned businesses and provide them the capital they need to save jobs during challenging times.
