Designing A Self Organizing Interview Process
Working in emerging technology, I get a rare chance to envision and explore what the future might hold. Everything I do is essentially an experiment. Our process of building through failure allows us to see what will actually stick. One of the hardest parts of exploring new spaces is the desire to fall back on familiar processes. Today I want to talk about how my team and I rethought the traditional hiring process. The goal was to make it more human and collaborative when it came to locations, roles, growth, and salaries.
The Current State of Interviewing
If you have ever applied for a job, you know it is painful. As you read through role descriptions, you have to try and map your experiences to the 15+ bullet points that explain what this new role might be.
You write cover letter after cover letter trying to explain your “fit”. If you’re lucky, you get a phone screen from a recruiter. Articles online will tell you a good question to ask is “what are the next steps?” From that point, there is the tendency for this process to drag on. All of the back and forth communication makes you think by the time you are ready to join has the excitement of a new role worn off? My partner Eric Morrow and I wanted to change this. We wanted to remove the guesswork that comes with applying for a new job.
Assessing Need
Eric and I had only been at Consensys a few weeks as design thinking facilitators when we realized we needed help. The requests for workshops were flowing in. We had to take a good look at what type of new hires we needed; not just for today but for the future as the team grew. We went back and forth on this. When thinking about who we needed to hire, we decided to run a small workshop.
During this session, we went into Mural and laid out our skills and roles. What were Eric and I good at? What could we handle on our own and where did we need the help? What was our budget per facilitator? This process was collaborative. It allowed us to address our gaps in a realistic fashion and understand where we needed to grow.
The workshop was essential. Our original thought going in was we should stretch our budget and hire around 10 junior facilitators. The workshop surfaced a problem. Junior hires needed guidance and at that point, we did not have the time to provide it. We came to the realization that we would adjust our budget and instead hire four-strong senior facilitators. Their roles would be more robust and they would be in charge of the growth of facilitation for their region. This was the type of growth we needed for our team in the early stages.
The Interview Experiments
When building an experiment in design thinking, you seek to use a pain point to fuel a hypothesis. Below are our hypothesis, experiments and our insights of practicing self-organizing principles while recruiting and hiring facilitators.
Hypothesis One — Job Descriptions Suck
As identified in our as-is scenario, the job description experience is frustrating. If you have ever had to write a job description, it is really difficult. Eric spent a good few hours of time post workshop looking at our skill gaps. He then set out to try and create the best description he could. He tried to base it on what we knew at that time and how we saw the company and role evolving. This led to a medium article which we shared via our design communities and networks. In this job description, we wanted to test one specific thing. Does including an overview of the interview process allow us to recruit higher quality talent?
We knew that the process to vet a facilitators abilities was more than a glance at their resumé. We wanted to try our best to communicate to every prospective candidate that our interview was going to be rather involved (mural sessions, Zoom calls, etc.). Eric also pointed out in the article that this was our first time recruiting. We knew that every interview was a learning experience so please bear with us. By removing the smoke and mirrors we felt the candidate could see how we thought through and crafted the interview experience. Our goal was to allow every candidate to feel like they knew exactly what they were embarking on, no surprises.
Hypothesis Two — Cover Letters Suck
Cover letters are time-consuming and do not provide much value. They play up generic language and can feel cold. In our recruiting process, we wanted to understand a candidate’s personality. We wanted to lean into their experiences as facilitators and strategists. Our head of HR Danielle gave us an awesome idea. Instead of cover letters, we asked each candidate to film a one-minute “selfie” video explaining an insight that they uncovered during a workshop. This allowed us to test two things. First, brevity in compassionate storytelling. The work we do is complex and being able to play it back in a concise manner is crucial. The second was to get a general understanding of how they speak in front of a (digital) audience. As facilitators, we spend a lot of time in front of people.
The results we received were great! Our job listing got around 326 views and around 82 candidates. For candidates who applied, met our criteria and sent a video, they received a phone call from someone on our HR team. During this brief 15 minute call, we would get a general overview of their experience. We asked about their timeline to join a new team (this was important because requirements differ globally) and a general overview of their salary range (more on this later.) The videos allowed us to feel like we were building a relationship from the first minute we saw them. Anyone who is recruiting can benefit from this simple change.
Hypothesis Three — There Are No Right Answers
Eric and I were new to self-organizing principles and recruiting. We knew we did not want to be the sole deciders which meant we needed guidance. Our idea was to design a small workshop with various people who could add expertise from other parts of Consensys. This process turned out to be phenomenal. By adding in outside viewpoints we were able to see how a new hire might fit into the larger organization. From our HR rep, we learned things like, “Pitch the ambiguity. Be part of creating things.” From our peers, we gathered desires for candidates to have humility since Consensys has no room for ego. For anyone who is developing a team, I recommend going through a similar exercise.
We took our insights from the workshop and created our third experiment. The third candidate interaction was a one-hour Zoom call with at least one but generally two members of our team. We broke this one hour into three 20 minute parts to make good use of our and their time.
We chose to base the first 20 minutes on scenarios. Pre-interview, we would send the candidate a prompt about a mock workshop request. Our goal was for them to come in with a plan and we would get a chance to go through their thought process. During this time we would also throw in some rapid-fire questions to see how they thought on their feet. The ability to test for problem-solving is hard. When it comes to interviewing how do you create a basis of comparison? The metrics we used were their ability to hold composure and how much time it took to process the problem to come up with a potential solution. We found this worked well.
The second 20-minute chunk was an overview of our company. Consensys’ belief in self-organizing is foreign to a lot of people. No bosses, no managers. In many ways there is no one telling you what to do. We pride ourselves on creating a pipeline of work that is interesting and fulfilling. For our team, we needed to hire people who were do’ers. This lead to a conversation about the different potential areas of work. At Consensys, the three main areas for facilitation were product work with our startups, external consulting with our solutions teams and evolving traditional internal operations. During this time we reassured the candidate there were no right answers. The core principles of self-organizing revolve around personal development and growth. Our goal as interviewers was to understand what the person wanted to do and how they planned to grow. Why were they attracted to one thing over another? What did they want to stay away from and could we accommodate that request? This is where we got to know our candidates as humans.
The last 20 minutes of the interview was for questions. I consistently told candidates, “I am painfully honest and will answer anything that I’m legally allowed to talk about.” I love this part of the interview. During this section, we got everything from, “how much money do you make?” to “how much do I need to know about blockchain?” The important part for Eric and I was to remain honest and to be forthcoming about challenges. We wanted to make sure our candidates understood what they were getting into. We did not want to share the sugar-coated, shiny parts of the company. The work we are trying to do was hard and we needed to make sure we were transparent about this.
Hypothesis Four — There Are Not Many Like Us
If you recall, we had 82 applicants from our first round. Of those 82, 18 people got one-hour Zoom calls. Of those 18, three people got asked to the final stage of the interviews. Vetting is one of the hardest parts about interviewing. Trying to make a long-term decision based on a handful of interactions requires reflection. Eric and I held ourselves to a strict, 5 out of 5-star mentality for passing to the next round. In every capacity from culture to facilitation ability, we needed to be confident in our decisions to bring on new teammates. Every hire we brought on was going to have complete trust. Trust to lead, facilitate and grow the design thinking practice at Consensys. By using a 5/5 mentality it removed any doubt we had about our future peers.
The last part of our interview process was a one and a half hour remote workshop. Roughly two weeks before the workshop, the candidate received a problem statement. We tried our best to build these prompts off of our experiences at Consensys. Our goal here was for them to get as real of a taste of the kind of work we were actively doing. During the planning time, Eric or I would act as a sponsor. While candidates established goals and planned, we tried our best to answer any questions without being leading. This proved to be good cadence and most questions were around the logistics of remote facilitation.
To make the workshop feel real, we reached out around the company and asked people to volunteer. We sought out people from other disciplines to join us as participants. We wanted to make sure we checked our bias around the relationships we had built with the candidates. We ended up with 6–7 participants from places like HR, marketing, engineering and product design.
To end each workshop, we took an opportunity to retro. Eric or I would facilitate the last 30 minutes to talk about what worked and where improvement could happen. It was also an opportunity for the candidate to share their feedback on the interview process.
Hypothesis Five — Salary Negotiation is a Lose, Lose
The last and most stressful part of the redesigned interview process was the salary negotiations. For full transparency, we have only hired two people since building this process. The first person we hired went through a very standard salary negotiation. She received an offer, went back and forth with HR and ultimately came to a compromise about her salary. The second hire, we opted to try and run a different style of salary workshop. We wanted to make it less of a negotiation and more of a discussion.
Before the workshop, we sent our potential hire a salary which we thought was appropriate for the role. She communicated before our meeting that she was asking for almost 50% higher. Woah. Seeing as this was outside of our budget, we would take this workshop as an opportunity to experiment with self-organizing principles when deciding on a salary.
We designed a 1-hour mural session that went through three major activities.
1. Overview of comparable salaries and roles definitions.
When deciding the pay for a role, it’s easy to use comparables. Many of us go into Glassdoor or Paysa, type in a role and grab the first few numbers we see. The realization that we made during this process was that our role was not yet well defined. We could not find 1:1 comparables so we instead had to gather data from other role functions. What the research lead us to was a huge range for pay. We spent time during this workshop with our candidate going through what we believed the job responsibilities were at every pay increment. This process allowed her to see how we came to our initial offer. It also created a conversation about how we were currently working and how we could grow with her addition to the team.
2. The roles of the job and opportunities to grow
In that same vein, we wanted to make sure that every person who joined our team was given room to grow. Using Mural we laid out a spectrum of responsibilities and gave the candidate an opportunity to read over and identify the areas that she found interesting. From there we were able to facilitate a conversation about how to gain more responsibilities within the company as well as grow in our careers at Consensys.
3. Six self-organizing questions about salary.
This by far was the most eye-opening activity. By going through the Hanno playbook for self-organizing companies, we were able to talk openly about why our candidate was advocating 50% more. Through this process, we found out how expensive it was to buy a home in her city. Hearing this from another person as opposed to a cost-of-living calculator was far more impactful and useful in the process. She told us about how as a freelancer she was charging a higher rate because this role was so needed in her city. During this conversation, we also got opportunities to ask her critical questions. We wanted to know about what her plans were to stay accountable seeing as we would be paying her a premium. Ultimately, we came to an agreement that made both sides happy and did not require emotional capital.
This process could have been very awkward but instead, it was honest. The idea of trying to justify and advocate for your salary is scary for both parties. What we found was it removed the anxiety of traditional negotiation and made the process more human. It was not perfect. We identified areas for improvement like the next time we run this workshop we will include our team’s salaries and show our responsibilities to better communicate what we do and how they will fit into our team. Every iteration we will try and make this process better and more human.
Conclusion
This process was hard and time-consuming. It took a lot of effort for Eric and me to think critically about the work we needed to do at Consensys. What roles did we need to build a design thinking practice? Who might those people be? We spent a lot of time revisiting our artifacts. We looked at what types of hires we needed as the company changed and evolved. While it did take effort, it was worth every moment. To have great teammates join who align with the larger mission and understand what they can provide to the company is invaluable. I cannot recommend enough taking a hard look at your recruiting and interview process and exploring how you can make it more human by using self-organizing principles.
Naveen Raja is a design thinking & strategy facilitator. His passion for design has allowed him to vision, scope and scale design facilitation programs for companies both large and small. Through helping various teams at IBM, Fidelity Investments, Citibank, Marriott Hotels and more he is perfecting his recipe for how to help people to achieve more by using design. He is passionate about how people, places and cultures intermix and the significance it can play on creating an experience. You can find more at Educate and Iterate, a design thinking resources website.
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