Are we the right fit for you?

We are constantly looking for ways to improve our hiring process(or dating as we’ve called it) at Mavenhive. We do it partly because hiring is always a challenging and fun problem to try and solve, but mostly because any process that resulted in bringing people like us together shouldn’t really be allowed to continue!

Now that I’ve opened the post with the customary joke(I wish!), I must take you back to a bright sunny day in Bangalore where our tale takes place.

We got an email from a friend at a recruiting startup, with whom we have recently begun to partner, saying that he wanted to come and discuss our recruitment pitch with us. We decided that we’d share our standard, neatly formatted, double spaced, recruitment pitch document with him when he came over. This was a great plan, except for the fact that we didn’t really have a standard, neatly formatted, double spaced, recruitment pitch document to share.

When we began working on the pitch, we had two clear goals in mind:

• we did not want it to sound like a hollow, buzzword-filled, impersonal description churned out by the recruitment department of most companies
• we wanted it to be brutally honest(we like to save the lying for our Mafia sessions)

So, all of us got into a room, grabbed some stickies, and asked ourselves: Why would someone join MavenHive?

Everyone wrote down their own set of answers and we ensured that no one could be influenced by the other responses. The glass wall we put the stickies on ran out of space very quickly. After categorising and grouping the responses together, we discussed each one to ensure that everyone got an insight into our collective thoughts.

This is when we noticed something significant. Most responses revealed why MavenHive would be a great fit for a candidate, but some also answered the more important question: ‘Why would MavenHive not be a good fit for someone?’ We decided to group these under deal-breakers — we’re probably not the right fit for you if any of the following things sound concerning. Evaluating the deal-breakers early is great for both of us, even if it means that we lose the opportunity to work with you.

We quickly realised that we would be crazy to try to rewrite or mess with what was in front of us in any way. That glass wall full of yellow stickies WAS our recruitment pitch. The only way we could avoid it from turning into a generic, buzzword-ridden travesty of a document was to just leave it alone. So, that’s what we did.

The easiest way we could think of representing that wall of stickies was to turn it into a mind-map. We found that the answers broadly fit three different categories — learning, compensation and work culture. The text has not been tampered with, except to fix the odd grammatical issue or to make the phrasing clearer. You can zoom in on the mind-maps by clicking on them.

We set out trying to come up with a polished ‘recruitment pitch’, but as we got deeper into the exercise, we felt that leaving it in its untampered, original form was the best way to express our thoughts. We hope we have achieved the two goals we set ourselves before we began this exercise and this blog gives people more insight into whether MavenHive is a good fit for them. If not, you can always drop in and hit us up for coffee and some conversation!

If you’ve actually read this far(whoa!) and you’re still interested in us, please apply at http://www.mavenhive.in/#contact-us and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

Originally published at www.mavenhive.in on June 5, 2015.