How we hire at Reborrn

⚠️ Note: This is Part 2 of a series of articles celebrating the 3rd anniversary of REBORRN: Part 1 (Purpose & Values), Part 3(How we pay)

As a leader at any company, hiring the right people should be one of your top priorities. I strongly believe that success at Reborrn (as well as at our previous companies) came by being good at 2 areas:

• Hiring the right people
• Building a great culture by staying true to our Values and Purpose. Here is a recent article about how “Culture eats strategy for breakfast and REBORRN’s purpose & values”

After 3 years at Reborrn and having built a team of nearly 30 people we are still growing fast, so recently we released an internal guide to provide clarity on how we hire the right candidates. I wanted to share some content directly out of this guide. I quote:

How we Hire

👉 See our live guide on Notion here

Often the recruitment process in Reborrn will be quite lengthy and exhaustive. Although it’s important to hire fast, it’s more critical to hire the right people even at the expense of time. Since you are reading this, congrats 👏. You are one of those right people that met our hiring criteria.

You can all act as a hiring manager at some point so we want to share what it takes to be hired at Reborrn and how to identify the next Star hire.

Criteria:

• Culture Fit: Look for people that are curious, doers, care about their work and others, want to have impact and make a difference. People that are team players: open, honest, and sincere.
• Potential to Learn & Grow: What got us here won’t get us where we want to be in a couple of years. That’s why we need people willing to continuously learn new things, and be open to take challenges even when they are out of their comfort zone.
• Brings real value to the team: Evaluate people on the potential value they can bring to Reborrn. Maybe they are exceptional at what they do (hard-skills). They could be amazing at brining in new business. They could have a network of people/partners we could utilize. They could have a very specialized knowledge that could give us a competitive advantage. Always ask yourself: “How much value this candidate will add to the company one year from now, and how?”
• Flexibility and tolerance for ambiguity: We are a startup, in a highly competitive space, in a fast-paced environment. Things will change. Things will break. Find people that are willing to create their own job roles. That are resilient, agile and will push forward no matter what. They must be totally OK without knowing what will happen in the next year.
• Brings something new to the team. A skill, POV, past experience, way of doing things. We are a collective of diverse people and this diversity gives us a unique & competitive advantage. Seek people with complimentary skills and not copycats of who we already are.
• No room for Brilliant Jerks: A brilliant jerk may do an exceptional job delivering competency-based results but typically doesn’t get along well with others. Brilliant jerks reduce their leaders’ credibility, lower their teams’ morale, and reduce their teams’ productivity. At Reborrn we won’t tolerate toxic behaviour even if you are the best in world at what you do. The cost to teamwork is too high.

Sometimes the above checklist seems like we are looking for super-humans. In reality we don’t expect to find someone who excels at everything. But we expect to find a healthy balance on ALL the above traits. So if someone is totally missing a trait don’t hire them.

✅ Things to do:

• We should hire for attitude and train for skills. Look for character before credentials. Hire people that fit our culture, values, and are inspired by our purpose.
• Make the hiring process as transparent as possible. Hiring someone should always be a win-win deal. If we hire a candidate by glorifying all the amazing aspects of Reborrn but hide any downsides the candidate will soon leave. During your interviews don’t be OK with textbook answers. Try to push candidates in order to get authentic and straightforward answers.
• Hire people much better than you, even if that scares you. Managers often are hesitant to hire people better than them with the fear that they will make them look bad and insufficient. At Reborrn we grow as a team. When your team is uplifted you get better as well.
• Follow our recruitment process and make sure you create a positive experience for all candidates even the ones that didn’t get hired. Follow up and provide feedback where appropriate.

⛔️ Things to avoid:

• Don’t hire people that are like yourself. Seek diversity even when it’s out of your comfort zone. But don’t seek diversity just for the sake of diversity (i.e we don’t like saying “we need to hire a woman just to have a X% of women in the company”. Hire someone different because of the value they bring)
• Don’t hire someone who does not meet our criteria just because we didn’t find someone better. Don’t settle and continue your search.
• Don’t promise things we can not deliver. Don’t promise very specific career paths. Don’t promise that they will work only on specific clients or projects. It’s better to be clear that priorities may change rather than raise false expectations.

So, that’s it. That’s how we hire at REBORRN. Oh, and one last thing before you go. Throughout the hiring process, we make sure that more people from the team are involved and not just the HR Associate, as we believe hiring the best people is the whole team’s responsibility.

Sounds interesting? If you feel you could become part of our culture here are our current open positions: reborrn.recruitee.com