Category: Careers

Growing and Grateful

Mercury Systems

By: Emma Woodthorpe

Last week we celebrated another milestone at Mercury when Boston Business Journal named us one of the “Fastest-Growing Public Companies in Massachusetts.” Earlier this year, we ranked No. 27 on Fortune Magazine’s “100 Fasted Growing Companies in 2018” list. It’s worth noting that we’re the only aerospace and defense company to receive either of these accolades. And just this week, we made the “Top 100” list compiled by Defense News, which identifies the world’s biggest defense companies.

As I reflect on how far we’ve come in just a few short years ago, it’s both exhilarating and humbling. We often chide ourselves for being results driven, but our ability to achieve four straight years of double digit revenue growth, which has taken us from a $350 million company, when I joined three years ago, to almost double that today, is nothing short of amazing.

As I reflect on Mercury’s many accomplishments, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few of the unique factors that have contributed to our remarkable growth and success:

  • We’re fortunate to be in a market that is growing
  • Our culture and values are foundational to who we are and why we win in the market
  • We have an incredible team that drives our vision and works to achieve ambitious goals
  • Our employees embody the scrappy mentality of a start-up despite our continued growth

I am proud of the team we have created and all that we continue to achieve. I am also incredibly thankful for the dedication and hard work of our team members. Mercury has a bright future thanks to all of them!

We believe our hyper-growth is proof positive that there has never been a more exciting time to be a part of Mercury. And in fact, we just hired our 1,665th employee this week! Interested in joining our team? Check out our Career Site to learn more about the opportunities that exist at Mercury.

Women in STEM

Leadership Team

A few months ago, Mercury partnered with the Society of Women Engineers to host our first Women in Technology Night at our headquarters in Andover. I was fortunate enough to have panelists Star Dargin, CEO of Star Leadership and Susan Macchia, Senior Manager at Endeavor Robotics join me in giving insight on our career progression, experiences, and steps taken to earn leadership roles. I was thrilled to see a room full of participants networking and hearing our stories, as well as an engaged audience on our livestream and Facebook Live.

I walked away from this event thinking more about two important topics: women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and work-life integration.

From left: Susan, Lynne, and Star

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The Three C’s of Talent Attraction

Jamie Durkin

As we embark on the digital age of recruiting we must, more than ever, ensure we are delivering on the key elements of talent attraction that serve to optimize hiring manager satisfaction, while also providing a best-in-class experience for the candidate. Having careers in both agency (3rd party) recruiting and the corporate world (scale operations, early career, executive recruitment, sourcing and leadership) for 15+ years, I have found successful recruiting organizations have the following three elements ingrained in each of their recruiters to serve at a high level on a consistent basis.

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The Secret to Amplifying Your Impact

Leadership Team

On my LinkedIn page, I posted an update inspired by the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, by Angela Duckworth. Motivated by the response I received, I wanted to explore this topic further in my first blog post!

No matter what job title is listed on my email signature, I’m an engineer by training and at heart. You can imagine my surprise, as I was reading Grit, when I came across these equations I’d like to share with you:

Achievement = Skill * Effort   (Eq1)

Skill = Talent * Effort   (Eq2)

Combine both equations, and you arrive at a formula that is the subject of today’s post:

Achievement = Talent * (Effort)^2   (Eq3)

Duckworth adeptly refers to this as “Effort counts twice.”

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Finding new opportunities with Nashua Community College (NCC)

Claire Breton

Part of the job of a talent attraction professional is uncovering ways to find talent with the right skill set to meet an organization’s needs. But what if the roles you’re trying to fill are in a niche market or the industry you’re searching is struggling to find, motivate and train skilled workers? Recently we ran into this very issue among our RF/M manufacturing and production workforce at our Hudson, NH Advanced Microelectronics Center (AMC). We had many qualified employees, but we needed more and that external talent pipeline had waned.

Enter the Microelectronics Bootcamp at Nashua Community College (NCC).

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Culture and Values: More than Wall Décor

Leadership Team

If I knew 10 years ago, the power of an engaged workforce and a living, breathing culture and set of values to influence the success of an organization, I’d have prioritized them above all else back then.

In recent years, I have worked with my leadership team and employees across the board, to define Mercury’s culture and core values and subsequently, to bring them to life, make them more than just wall decor. We’ve simplified them, and in return made them more achievable and more meaningful. We have woven them into the fabric of our business through our commitment to lifelong learning, employee engagement and baking them into our strategic operating plan. But we could not stop there. We’ve also made them measurable by aligning them to our personal contributions in our quarterly performance evaluations and by asking employees to rate the organization against them in a recent culture survey.

Teamwork, Execution & Communication

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RF Engineers Co-op Program

The Next Generation of RF Engineers

Mario LaMarche

Along with the warm weather and long days, summer means a new group of co-ops. Here at Mercury Systems, where innovation drives each subsequent generation of new products, we depend on our high-performing engineering teams, and one critical element behind developing these teams is our co-op program.

When it comes to RF, there is so much theory to learn in school that there is often less opportunity to apply that theory to specific RF/microwave design challenges. Spending a summer working through actual designs and troubleshooting in the lab kicks off the process of developing the intuition and experience critical to becoming a successful engineer. At Mercury we take that one step further by putting co-ops to work on real projects where their contributions make a measurable impact on the final product.

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