Emma Burleigh
4 min read
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The CEO of the cookie dough empire Sweet Loren’s gives a personality test to all prospective hires. Loren Castle says she’s looking for positive, passionate people with the energy to work at the sweets startup set to rake in $120 million this year. Corporate stiffs who can’t keep up with the craziness won’t make the cut.
Myers-Briggs has found that many entrepreneurs have extroverted, intuitive traits—ENFPs like Quentin Tarantino, and ENTPs like Thomas Edison. When it comes to astrology, the biggest U.S. CEOs are most likely to have the Taurus sign, like Mark Zuckerberg.
Certain qualities can be linked to success, so one chief executive is using a personality test to find her star workers and weed out the bad candidates. Loren Castle, CEO of refrigerated cookie dough empire Sweet Loren’s, runs her business with the energy of a startup—and needs her workers to thrive off that craziness. Castle hands out the CliftonStrengths assessment to every candidate she interviews to sort out the bad eggs.
One red flag that she’s always looking for? Corporate stiffs: “People that have too much corporate training and no experience with startups or fast-growing smaller brands,” Castle explains to Fortune.
“I just don’t know if they’re actually going to like this world. It’s totally different.”
The millennial CEO says she looks to snag talent who have both corporate and startup experience so they’re prepared for the intensity of running a fast-paced small business—which rolled in $97 million in gross sales last year, and has a projected $120 million run rate this year. Sweet Loren’s has expanded to 35,000 retail locations, taking over the refrigerated aisles of Target, Whole Foods, Publix, Kroger, and Walmart.
Castle says she hasn’t always had a solid team behind her. In the beginning it was difficult for her to fully understand what the culture at Sweet Loren’s would look like, and who would be the best people to work there. But now she has a keen eye to spot those applicant green and red flags.
“It’s hard to hire the right team. That’s the hardest part of this: to really understand what your culture is and attract the best people,” Castle says. “Not everyone wants to work this hard. It’s definitely not easy—this is not a coasting job.
“We’re really mindful now when we’re building out teams,” she says, adding that when a candidate completes the test, she’s looking at: Are they analytical? Are they really strategic? Or perhaps, they’re empathetic?
