Building a Tribe — 3 approaches taken at TribalScale to recruit the right talent
By Jean-Bernard Yung
Recruiting can at times be frustrating and time consuming for a company in a rapid growth stage. At TribalScale, we’ve gone from 6 to 65 employees in 12 months, and have yet to exit that rapid growth. We leverage every channel at our disposal to attract the right talent to work with us. Here are 3 differentiators in our approach to building a tribe.
Screening vs. Courting
Sending a generic email or LinkedIn message to the masses is sure to drum up a pool of interested candidates. The question is — are these the right candidates? Much like a sales funnel, you can fill your hiring bench with a mass of candidates that have not been well qualified. Within this pool of candidates, there may lie a handful of gems, but the process to identify those gems among the pile of cubic zirconia will be rigorous and time consuming. Within that vetting process many of these candidates will have been scooped up by one of your competitors.
An approach that has worked wonders for us, is qualifying those individuals more thoroughly before the first screening process. A more strict upfront stance on qualifications and culture fit, will increase the work at the top of the pipeline, facilitating the process further down the hiring funnel. You will have less candidate churn later in the hiring process, and elevate the quality of hires coming into your organization.
Break the Fake-it-til-you-make-it Cycle
A common practice at TribalScale is to have a multitude of touchpoints. Rather than the traditional 3 levels of formal interviews, we invite candidates to join us for less formal activities. Candidates are invited to Friday Demos and Social, or our weekly Lunch & Learns. Through less formal encounters, we’re able to get a better sense of a candidate’s true personality. After these touchpoints, we’re able to more effectively identify candidates to move on to more formal interviews.
What Motivates your Candidates?
We can’t understate the importance of motivation when it comes to hiring. What motivates one candidate will differ greatly from another. At TribalScale, we attract people that want to do important work. Like any other tech company, we have a ping pong table, free food, and weekly socials. However, in our hiring process, these perks are mentioned only in passing. The true attraction for most of our employees, is working on digital products that will touch millions of users. There are few companies in the world that offer this experience to their employees, and at TribalScale we have this privilege.
The most essential element to innovation is the people driving the efforts. Take pride in your recruitment process and take the time to refine it. With some simple shifts in how your organization approaches recruitment, you’ll acquire the right talent to join your team.
Jean-Bernard, or JB as he prefers, has led the development of mobile solutions for a multitude of Fortune 100 companies and is experienced with creating digital solutions touched by millions of users. Companies he’s worked for include Xtreme Labs, Kinetic Cafe, and Wattpad. In his current role as Director of Engineering at TribalScale, JB is driving the shift from mobile to connected experiences.
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