Stryker pays Gallup millions per year to screen candidates for specific behavioral traits, determined as those of employees identified as 'most successful' during the company's rapid growth last decade. This system creates three problems: (1) many of those "successful" employees received promotions just to fill vacancies during company growth; (2) many "successful" employees receive promotions by politics rather than for skills and competence; and (3) it creates a workforce of clones that have limited tolerance for diversity of thought or perspective.
Consequently, Stryker is a terrible place for those who value creative thinking, quality work, and learning new skills. Its one-size-fits-all culture creates a suffocating environment for innovative people; managers view employees as disposable resources, and the cloned workforce is seemingly unable or unwilling to try new things.
Stereotyping is rampant, so people with multidisciplinary skills are doomed to fail. The first warning sign will be on your first day when everyone asks "Are you EE or ME?" (as if that's a comprehensive or mutually exclusive list--but you have to pick one). The next will be during your annual review when you're told "We need you to be just like Mr. So-and-so" (wait a minute, I thought we're a strengths-based organization and focus on our Top-5?). The third will be when you decide to broaden your skills by asking for more management responsibilities or to pursue an MBA and are told by your manager "I don't see you being capable of doing that type of work" (so all that talk from HR about employee development was BS?--sorry, no tuition reimbursement for you). Eventually you'll either stop trying, start playing the game, or just leave.
