What's It Like to Work at firsthand Health Inc?

How is firsthand currently expanding its remote workforce?

Firsthand is a truly unique company, blending our community-based — meaning in-office — teams with a remote support team. While our primary focus remains on expanding our community-based teams across various markets, we’re also making strategic investments in our support roles. These positions are essential in providing the necessary support to our community teams, enabling them to excel in the crucial work they do each day.

Within our support team, the support “ops” function has seen the most significant growth this year. This newly centralized team plays a crucial role, handling key responsibilities such as member selection, value delivery, billing, medical records, SSI/SSDI outreach, access and recovery support.

What is the core strength of your team’s remote culture, in your opinion? 

Our core strength is rooted in community-based work in mental health care. Although our support function is primarily remote, it’s an integral part of the company. This structure allows for significant cross-functional collaboration. While our support team members may not be physically present in an office daily, they maintain strong connections with our community teams through regular, virtual meetings and in-person visits to our various communities.

As our remote team has grown, localized groups have naturally developed across the United States. While the majority of our company is currently concentrated on the East Coast and in the Midwest, we’ve also expanded into the West Coast, in Tacoma, Washington. This has prompted us to be more strategic in ensuring our support teams are distributed across all U.S. time zones to better serve our expanding communities.

What unites us — regardless of whether we work in a community or within the support team — is our strong and consistent corporate values, visions and employee benefits.

How does hiring remotely enable firsthand to build out a more diverse, talented workforce?

We believe that exceptional talent can live anywhere in the world — though we’re only able to hire from within the United States. We have been able to bring in team members in parts of the country in which we may be unlikely to have a physical office presence. We are proud to have a distributed and diverse workforce that helps shape our company.

What is your role and what attracted you to your company? Describe the moment when you knew you’d found the right fit.

As an analytics engineer, I was attracted to firsthand as a company that is doing amazing things for the community. I’ve seen the personal impacts of serious mental illness in my family and know how misunderstood and hard to treat these illnesses are. Firsthand is using an innovative and empathetic approach in its care model and I knew I was in the right place after my first ride-along in the field. Individuals see us as partners in their recovery and health and seeing continual approval is rewarding.

What’s your favorite part about working at your company? The projects, the team culture, the opportunities for career advancement?

The engineering team here is highly collaborative. “Dumb questions” are encouraged and curiosity is high in meetings. We pair on projects for knowledge transfer and agility and have fun in our scrum ceremonies. The work we do is diverse and there are many opportunities to flex into tangential (infrastructure, data engineering) tasks to build new skills.

What advice would you give to jobseekers looking to join your growing team?

Let your personality and creativity shine! We are always looking for unique personalities to round out the group. Curiosity and humility are as important as knowledge and confidence. It’s a great place for someone who wants to round out their technical skillset in a strong mission-driven environment.

In one memorable line, how would you describe day-to-day satisfaction on your team?

We end each day knowing we’re building something that truly matters: a business that dramatically improves people’s lives. It’s simple but really meaningful.

Would you recommend working here — and what proof backs that up?

I really would, not because we are perfect or because the work we do is seamless, but because everyone here genuinely believes in what we’re building. We have had some really difficult moments as a company, and in spite of that, many people are choosing to come back after a reduction in force last year. We have had an incredible number of “boomerangs” join us as we prepare for our next phase of growth, and to me, that is the highest compliment an organization can receive. Working at firsthand is not just a job — it is a calling, and I know everybody here feels that way.

How are you perceived externally right now, and what signals support that?

We do not spend that much time thinking about that honestly. We have received awards that we are proud of. We have been named Modern Healthcare’s Best Places to Work three different times. We also earned the Platinum Bell Seal recognition from Mental Health America for the third year in a row just a few months back, which recognizes commitment to employee mental health. Both are a few of the distinctions we are proud of, among others. 

But frankly, we spend all of our time internally thinking about, “How do we do the right thing for the individuals we serve, and then how can we make this the best place to work possible for all of the teammates who honor us with their talent and the value of their lived experiences?” When we do that, external validation comes — but it is not our focus.