Andy crosbie

“IF YOU DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY, YOU'LL GET DIFFERENT OUTCOMES -EVEN IF YOU CANNOT PREDICT EXACTLY WHAT THEY WILL BEAND DON'T HAVE EVIDENCE TO PROVE IT YET.”

Rethinking Recruitment

When we go through a recruitment process, either as the recruiter or as the recruited, it is easy to feel 'lost in the woods.'

For the recruiter it can be like trying to find the right tree in a forest largely entirely compromised of, well, trees. Choosing the right person to join your team can quickly feel like it just boils down to who has nicer moss on their resume, or trying to judge from the surface whether someone's roots might be deep enough to weather your team's particular storms.

In contrast, for the recruited, it can (all too often) feel like that moment when you were auditioning for your first school play and trying very hard to be an excellent tree. Stand still enough, with your arms out in just the right ways, and maybe you'll be the right sort of tree for this particular nativity and get to join all the other people carefully pretending to be trees.

It frequently feels both arbor-itrary (sorry, not sorry) and incredibly complicated, and more importantly it often doesn't work. Matching the right person with the right space for them to thrive is simply more complicated, and more messy, that it seems on the surface.

This has lead us to ask: What happens if you take a different path in those woods? What happens if you try to do recruitment differently, without the currently established systems?

Well it turns out you get me, Lara, the comms person writing this webpage - and my hiring was journey through some particularly interesting woodlands.

 

We hope that our experiences of this journey will help you to explore your own hiring practices through a more 'human-first' lens.

The

PROCESS

In early 2024 we set out to recruit a new Insights and Comms Lead. It was a new role for us, a new opportunity for the company, but also an opportunity to experiment.

We had previously talked many times about how dehumanised and dehumanising recruitment practices usually are and we wanted to play about with what a human-centred recruitment process would look like.

We drew on our past recruitment experiments and built in a strong focus on giving candidates agency throughout the process.

Some things we experimented with include: 

  • Building the job description (in our application pack) to be less around a specific model of what an ‘ideal’ candidate would look like and more around the qualities of a person who we think would thrive here. 

  • Holding open Q&A sessions where potential candidates interviewed us about the company - and about ourselves and the role. 

  • Not asking for CVs or the dreaded 'application form', instead creating space for candidates to show us what their version of doing this job would look like through activities.

  • Building in a ‘stage 2’ activity that would give each candidate an insight into what working in the company might actually feel like. 

  • Co-creating interview questions with candidates, with room for candidates to tell us what they wanted us to ask them about. 

  • Trying to actively develop relationships with candidates and demonstrate care for their emotions and interest in their experiences of the process.  

If you're interested in knowing more and you'd like to have a casual chat about this work we'd love to hear from you directly! Or, alternatively, If you're interested in exploring ideas like this as they are unfolding try our letters to our friends email community 🙂.