Recruitment as dating

Published in

LeadWise

5 min readJan 4, 2017

Before getting into serious relationships, people generally date in order to get to know and see if they actually like each other.

Dating involves a pleasant process of doing social activities, starting with dinners, movies and parties and escalating to meeting friends, family and so on.

After few months or weeks, once you feel you’ve gotten to know each other past simple online dating profiles, you feel confident enough to take this relationship to the next level and announce your commitment.

If things keep progressing, you might move in together and perhaps even get married.

The bottom line? When facing the serious decision of finding a life partner, we escalate our commitment over a period of time.

If we act like this in our personal lives, why not do the same in our work? Why is it that work arrangements usually start as marriages? Why do we skip the dating part?

We at LeadWise have been experimenting different practices on recruitment and onboarding over the past few months.

The process we’ve developed process involves 6 steps:

Full transparency
Autonomous exploration
Short assignment
Reality check
Compensation agreement
Hands on start

1. Full transparency

From the start, we wanted to be open with our recruitment process.

When we’re looking for additional people to join the team, we set up a video call with the candidate. All current team members are invited to join this overview of our company and needs to be addressed.

It’s more an exploratory chat than a formal interview. We want to know about his/her story, experiences, beliefs, dreams — in other words, we want to get to know them as a person, and we introduce ourselves to them to see if we like each other as people.

This is also the first opportunity to explain the company, our purpose, golden circle (Why, How, What), values, structure, ways of working and invite the candidate to start exploring and collaborate with us.

We invite them to our basic platforms and communication tools (Trello, Slack, Wistia and Google Suite) and guide their first steps.

Exploring our Trello, the candidate will have access to all company information — financial projections, team salaries, strategy documents and others.

2. Autonomous exploration

As self-organization and autonomy are part of our core values, it’s important to let the person explore, be curious, ask questions, engage with other colleagues in order to get a better vision of what our company is and what we stand for.

We expect a proactive posture and we don’t want to micromanage the candidate.

It’s a very good test to check their ability to self-manage.

There are people that just don’t connect and organically disengage from the process, at which point, the recruitment dating process comes to a natural end.

3. Short assignment

The best way to measure engagement, specific skills and connection with the team and ways of working is to ask the candidate to start collaborating with a short assignment.

It can be an ongoing or new project.

Depending on its length and complexity, it can be remunerated or not.

Here are some examples: build a landing page, edit a video, manage a community for a month, co-design a course structure, write a few pieces of content, design an e-book and so on.

4. Reality check

After delivering the assignment or spending enough time to get the feeling of working together, we organize another video call for first impressions and feedback.

We believe that after few weeks collaborating within a project, candidates get to know the company for real and vice versa.

Team members are invited to join the discussions, otherwise the recordings are available for all.

5. Compensation agreement

If all stakeholders are satisfied and confident after this first experience, the candidate suggests their own compensation proposal.

We agree on a full-time or part-time commitment depending on our needs and their availability. Note that this is just a guidance of how much brain space LeadWise will take up — we don’t track anyone’s hours.

If we find proposal fair and we’re able to afford it, the conditions are set and agreed on Trello. If don’t, we negotiate until finding a good option for both sides.

Most team members work as freelancers with great autonomy and freedom, taking other projects that they wish.

6. Hands on start

After the agreement, there are a few Onboarding task to be completed on Trello, like setting-up all key platforms, writing your bio, adding profile a picture, and so on.

We ask new team members to watch important videos from previous onboarding meetings and virtual tours like the “How to start with Drip” (our e-mail marketing tool) to help the newcomer to get more familiar with tools and processes.

They’re also invited to all team meetings, have access to all platforms and passwords, get a company e-mail address, calendar, etc.

Basically, the newcomer is fully equipped to work with us!

Benefits

The main benefits that we’ve seen so far are:

It’s more transparent and trustful process — no lies, no seduction games
It minimizes big surprises and disappointments in both directions
It’s easier to identify values and culture fit
There are more concrete elements to sustain the final remuneration agreement
It’s more friendly and informal process
It’s easier to build a sustainable relationship since the beginning

We are still learning every day and improving this process, but the learnings have been great and we are very confident to keep this approach while scaling up.

I hope to share more learnings and new practices soon! ;-)

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LeadWise believes that we need to change how work works. We do this by developing online and in-person courses, workshops and cultivating peer-learning through our international community. Join the movement at www.leadwise.co.