Hiring humans without human resources

Weekly Ship #1 | Houston, we have a problem

People can exist, indeed did exist for thousands of years, without companies. But companies can’t exist without people. — Lazlo Bock

What we Believe

Last year, while working at For the People, my colleague Jo Roca and I began to take a deeper look at the interviewing & hiring humans in small teams without a human resources manager. As the name suggests, For the People operate from a core belief that people are our most important resource. Therefore, the most important thing we do isn’t the work we create — it’s hiring the humans who create the work.

But like many small creative teams, our hiring process didn’t reflect that.

How we behave:

• The kitchen sink problem: in a small team with no HR manager, hiring is everyone’s responsibility and no one’s priority…so things falls through the cracks and things get sloppy real fast, leading to frustration and a poor candidate experience.
• Death by admin: If someone does take responsibility for hiring, there’s a metric tonne of admin involved to keep things moving (checking calendars, reviewing resumes, making sure the right people are in interviews…) and most small creative teams don’t have HR people — so all this admin becomes cumbersome in additional to day-to-day roles.

Managing our hiring process fell to the hands of a few already busy people, which meant that hiring was a reactive process, not a proactive search for talent.

• Top down: For the first year or two, our founders identified, hired & managed the interview process. This is an essential part of growing a team — a great team — and startups must go through this process. As Lazlo Bock writes in Work Rules, “Building an exceptional team or institution starts with a founder.” Great for your first 10 employees. Ultimately, not scalable.
• The candidate experience. Candidates fall through the cracks, don’t get responded to, have inconsistent experiences, get disillusioned with how long it takes us to hire, and feel like a # — despite the fact that we’re a small team who wants to hire people. And the best candidates move fast — so moving slowly is almost a surefire way to lose out on great talent.

In the immortal words of T.Hanks…we had a problem.

Our behaviours weren’t lining up with our beliefs, which begged the question — how would we behave if we were operating form our core belief?

How we wanted to behave:

For the team.

We believe that creative work is a team sport. If we are to truly hire in a way that was for the team, we’d involve them in meaningful way in our hiring process. This means defining our hiring philosophy, training our team in how to assess candidates objectively, and providing the tools to ensure we were all on the lookout for great potential hires, all the time (Always be recruiting).

We needed a way to involve our team in the hiring process.

For the problems.

For the People exists to solve big, hairy problems. Research has proven that the best teams for solving big problems are diverse teams. But, we’re human. Humans are incredibly bad at making objective decisions, and in hiring, we fight an uphill battle to get past our own bias (unfortunately it’s very common hire people like us, instead of objectively choosing the best person for the job). If we are truly for the problems, we’ll be focused on objective assessments, not subjective ones. This means creating objective candidate assessments, training our people to avoid biased decisions, and searching for talent proactively rather than allowing a self-selecting process to occur.

“People…operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.” — Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

For the candidates.

We are for the candidates. This means creating a great experience form the moment they reach out to us (or that we reach out to them). It means getting back to them quickly. It means setting them up with the best possible chance of success with us. That means being clear in what we expect of candidates, & being clear in what they can expect of us. It means exploring new ways of assessing talent that doesn’t rely on a conversation — but instead gives them a chance to really shine in their area of expertise.

Our North Star

So we had a point of view, and our blue sky thinking looked like this: How do you involve an entire team in a hiring decision, keep the process moving, keep the candidate informed, and make objective, informed, data-driven decisions to build the most creative and capable team?

We see this as an opportunity to define, and design — how exactly, should we approach hiring, in a way that is truly for the people? In particular, the interview process — the pointy end of the introduction to what could be our next hire? How might we make it an exceptional experience for candidates, one where they truly get to know what we’re about? How might we involve our existing team in a meaningful way that reflected our belief that creative work is a team sport? How might we be objective in our assessment, and fight our own biases? How might we hire the best people around, and make sure all the people involved had a good time in the process?

Stay tuned — we’ll be writing about how we’ve prototype a new hiring process.

How do you manage your interviewing & hiring process?

We’re working on a better, more objective way to assess talent & hire awesome humans into kick-ass teams. Got ideas? Get in touch, or check out our Weekly Ship #2, here.