“Flex your skills, grow your skills, try something new.” – How (and why) to get a job at Terramera

At Vancouver Tech Journal, we’re no strangers to Terramera – having profiled the remarkable journey of its chief science officer, Annett Rozek, from Berlin to B.C. – and neither should you be. The food science innovator seems to always be in the spotlight.

In May, the firm received $2 million as part of a federal agricultural clean technology initiative, and two months earlier, Karn Manhas – its enterprising founder – took home the industry icon award at the Foresight-hosted B.C. Cleantech Awards.

From the outside, it certainly feels like something special is going on there. To get the inside scoop, we spoke to Kim Haakstad, vice president of stakeholder relations.

Here are the highlights from our conversation with her, as part of our how to get a job series. This interview was condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

William Johnson: How did you end up at Terramera?

Kim Haakstad: I've followed Terramera since the very beginning, including having them as a client when I was a consultant for a period of time. I have always been really interested and excited by what they were doing. Eventually, Karn and I were catching up casually about a year and a half ago, and he was like, ‘Will you just come work for me.’” And I said, “Sure.”

There is no doubt that he is a leader who believes that there are many different approaches to cultivating your talent, and part of it is utilizing your own network and finding people that you know who have skills that fit a gap you see at the company. There are a number of people that have come into Terramera that way. But we also do lots of traditional hiring as well, because you have to look everywhere for people, especially in the job market that we have in Vancouver these days.

WJ: So you’re the vice president of stakeholder relations? What does that mean?

KH: When I came into the company, that title was created to encapsulate a job that focused on working with external partners, industry associations, other like-minded companies, and government and other funding bodies. But my role has evolved over time as things often do at a startup.

Now, I also am the head of communications and have responsibilities for our overall talent and culture team. So the title only partially reflects the role that I have. But you know, that's the reality of smaller tech companies where I think you need people that will do whatever needs to get done. And I think I've been one of those.

We have a lot of those types of people at Terramera, which helps make it a really great company. It also means that you can come into a company like Terramera, with a core skill set – which is what we hired you for – but if you show you've got the skills and attitude and ability to do more, then we give people those opportunities.

WJ: Where do your teams work?

KH: We're really hybrid, and hybrid in a true sense. Our plant growth operations team works in our bio and chemistry lab, and our soil science and soil technicians – they're here in our office and have been throughout all but a very small portion of time during the pandemic. But as a company, we did make a decision to get rid of our corporate headquarters and co-locate everyone with our hybrid working spaces, and our hot desking spaces. Our R&D workers were previously separate, but not anymore.

I've had some great one-off conversations with people in person that you'd have to set up a formal meeting with otherwise. So we do encourage people to come to the office, but don't mandate it. We don’t want to be one of the companies that’s trying to force their team back to work when many have actually found it to be comfortable to work from home.

There's still uncertainty even though we're in a different phase of the pandemic. Plus, gas is really expensive. Fortunately, we’re also really close to transit so that does certainly help. Being close to transit is important because we’re a company that really cares what our climate footprint is.

WJ: How would you describe your tech stack?

KH: We are a Microsoft Teams company. We use it pretty fully – document sharing, editing, and integrating it with our SharePoint.

We use the chat function in the same way other tech companies would use Slack. But it's handy that it's more integrated into your overall work environment.

We also have a number of other tools that we utilize, and we have a great IT team that really takes the approach that if there's something that you can justify, and has a business need to allow for appropriate collaboration, let's use it. So we use Miro, Figma, and other tools.

WJ: Mac or PCs, or both?

KH: We have a mix.

WJ: And what are your hours? Nine-to-five? Flexible? Depends on the team?

KH: Oh, all of the above. Nine-to-five would be the core hours. But we increasingly have team members in different areas, because like many others, we've hired more people that are truly remote since the pandemic than we did before. So we have people in different time zones.

We do try and make sure that there's some core flexibility; there are core all-hands meetings where we want everybody together at a specific time. But we do try and make sure that we have some flexibility.

I had a team member that worked for a month from Australia, so she worked afternoons and well into the evening, and we found that we could use it to great advantage. She was on the communications team. A lot of that is sitting in front of your computer alone, and frankly, we could finish with something and hand it over to her and it was ready for us when we got up the next morning.

WJ: What is a story that you think could only be told at Terramera?

KH: I don't know that this is only Terramera, but it's one of the things that has been most impactful for me – that is, the number of people who are still here that started as interns. We brought them in as an intern, and they've moved into management or leadership positions. There are a couple of examples of that. One of them is a woman who leads our high-throughput lab and is just an incredible talent. She came to us as an intern, and there's no doubt she had great core skills. But she's now a leader in the organization in her group. It’s pretty special when you have those folks.

There’s another thing that’s unique, which is people like me in my role. There are lots of other people here that will say, “Well I started in this, but now I'm doing this and this.” Here, the attitude encourages you to flex your skills, grow your skills, and try something new. That’s part of how we try to work.

WJ: Practically speaking, what's the best way to get a job at Terramera right now?

KH: Reach out to our talent-culture team and see if there's anything that fits. We keep all resumes on file.

People can reach out to me or others and have informational interviews. I think the leaders on the team would be happy to have those types of conversations. And I think making sure that we continue to do that helps build our network. It's never too early to think about coming to work at Terramera. We like to hire smart, talented, up-and-coming people.

WJ: Any last words?

KH: I think our biggest strength as a company is that we're truly values-driven and that every single person here is aligned on the fact that there are solutions to the climate crisis.

If you want to work at Terramera, you’ve got to be aligned with those values. It’s not that hard these days, but it was harder when Karn founded it 12 years ago. But certainly, that is fundamental here. If folks aren't aligned with that, they probably won’t find themselves fitting in super well. We're proud of that.