In the view of transparency, below is an excerpt from an advisory email I sent this month:
As a big advocate for using advisory newsletters to leverage your network and help your further your goals, I’m starting one of my own. I promise future emails will be a lot shorter.
You’re receiving this because I value your input and I personally thought to include you in this email (no I did not copy-paste the Spring email list over). Feel free to unsubscribe if you are not remotely interested in what I’m up to.
And yes, I’m still fulltime and wholly focused on Spring nor have plans on leaving anytime soon. I spend about a day a week on this and check this inbox about 2-3 times a week so appologies if I’m slow to respond.
Quick reminder, what is ValueHiring?
- The premise is a recruiting platform that allows companies to take a mission+values first approach to hiring instead of the current skill/role first approach.
- Imagine a platform where you can search and filter based on causes instead of roles, then read more into a company and their mission before applying.
Why ValueHiring?
- Employees that are passionate about your mission+vision are top-performers that require the least amount of management, self-initiate, are passionate about growing and learning, and are willing to work on the mundane things because they know they’re a part of something bigger than themselves, and stay with an organization the longest + evolve best with a growing and changing company.
- Candidates often find that after starting a job and working at an organization for a few months, their roles, responsibilities, and projects are largely different from what they were recruited for.
- This is because companies should be hiring to solve a problem, not to fill a position.
APPROACH 👷
- No work to start on the digital platform until Q3/Q4 this year. Do it manually before resorting to tech.
- MVP: Impact Career Fair on May 29th to validate if companies are aware of and care enough about a values-driven approach to recruiting.
- MMVP: Monthly workshops leading up to the career fair to determine if I can build interest from both companies and job seekers on this approach to hiring.
PROGRESS 🎉
- Been manually tracking job postings from impactful companies on this Job Matcher spreadsheet since 2016.
- Started as a sheet to support Spring’s mission-driven startups and now includes non-Spring companies I come across.
- The sheet is frequented and constantly shared by job seekers (no exact analytics but I usually see 3-7 people viewing the doc every time I open it).
- It’s still skill/role first, but the intention is to work towards changing that in the future.
- The first workshop happened on January 22nd.
- Topic: How to find a more meaningful & purposeful career.
- 12 people attended (all job seekers).
- Reviews were positive and attendees felt like they got a lot out of it.
- Created a partnership package for Impact Career Fair.
- Reached out to a bunch of potential sponsors/vendors/marketing partners.
- Meeting with UBC Career Services today and D-Wave on Friday.
- Unbounce and RED Academy are potentially interested in sponsoring/taking a booth.
- United Nations Green Corps, SFU, UBC, BCITSA are all interested in promoting out to their students/job seekers.
- Started this project in early January, interviewed and spoke to 29 hiring managers/entrepreneurs/recruiters/job seekers so far (that’s almost 1 a day!).
LESSONS 🎓
- On companies:
- There are a lot of other recruiting platforms/boards to post to already, companies don’t want yet another place to create a posting on.
- Most people/companies don’t do recruiting for a living, so they’re not good at it and rely on tech.
- Skill-based recruiting is the easiest and what we’re familiar with so we default to that.
- Culture and mission changes as a company grows.
- Certain companies care less about values (B2B, struggling startups), but those that don’t won’t be my ideal customers anyways.
- Companies that have a clear mission and values don’t struggle with finding talent, a lot of people already naturally come to them. That said, they would still value this if it helps them with improving the quality of their candidates and the efficiency of their recruiting process. Quantity is not a challenge.
- Value+Mission based hiring is about creating a strong employer brand and involves not only HR but also Marketing+senior management.
- Skill first recruiting is important for highly technical roles. Values+Mission first recruiting would work well for generalist type positions like sales, marketing, business development, operations etc.
- Would be nice if this platform can also filter for mindset and personality of candidates.
- Hiring through their network (referrals, introductions, posting on personal LinkedIn/Facebook) has been the most effective for many companies. Because like-minded people know other like-minded people.
- Traits of the manager/direct supervisor are often a bigger impact on work experience/retention than values/mission.
- Job seekers:
- Not many are aware of their own values, but that’s fine as a platform like this would help with filtering out those who don’t.
- Those that do might still struggle with communicating their values and finding alignment on the definition of those values. Having a platform that helps with recommending and matchmaking them would help.
- Business Model (Big thanks to Mike Winterfield for insights on this)
- Still relatively vague here, but the premise is to start operating as a recruiter/consultant.
- For a recruiting platform, companies are usually willing to pay $500++/mo if they get good value out of it.
- To explore a blend of subscription+success fee basis.
SUPPORT & ADVISORS 🤝
- Daniel Perrett and Chris Gordon are interested in supporting and we’re exploring further how we can work together.
- Daniel is the Business Development Manager at CONTI and is passionate about creating impact, investing, and eliminating human trafficking.
- Chris is a journalist and founder of Vancouver Small Business & Pioneer Digital Media, he believes strongly in living true to your values and creating impact in your wake.
- Special thanks to my informal board of advisors for the interesting insights this month: Keith Ippel, Mike Winterfield, Allison
Guld , Bijan Vaez, and Matthew Corker. - Special thanks to the companies that took the time to interview with me this month: Playficient, Bizpearl, My Seven Chakras, Nada, Coast Protein, Hoovie, ThisFish, Keela, Embrace Orthopedics, Paul Lean Consulting, MeatMe, Veza, Naked Snacks,
Awecademy , New/Mode,Quupe , Traveller Collective, Upptack Studios, PROtect, F*NANCE, and See Together Media. - Shout out to Sarah Boland from Lifelapse for the newsletter format.
ASKS 🙏
- Looking for more sponsors to either provide a venue that can hold 400-500 people or support me with covering the cost to cover that.
- Looking for impactful and mission-driven companies that are recruiting who’d like to present + booth for the evening.
- Looking for volunteers for the career fair (registration, ushering, set-up/tear-down).
- Still continuing with customer discovery and welcome any conversations to help me shed light and understand the HR/Recruiting space better.
Welcome any introductions or suggestions, if introducing please connect them with me at chin@valuehiring.com. Intro blurb below:
Chin is working on a new HR Venture called ValueHiring.