Below is a summary of key points that I gleaned from a workshop I hosted with Teresa Duke, former Head of Recruitment @ Unbounce.
The beauty of workshops, like books – What you take away from them depends on where you are in your journey, and what you pay attention to and interpret. What I observed/learned may be quite different from what someone else took away.
Defining Values
In a nutshell, what you FOCUS on is what you value. Companies may come up with theoretical values, but if they aren’t constantly a focus of attention, something that is lived and breathed, it’s not a true value.
It helps to have clarity on the top 3 values. A long list of 10+ values doesn’t help employees, recruiters, or job seekers. Priorities are diluted and it becomes too broad.
Focusing on value alignment allows you to find like-minded people who are motivated by the same mission it allows you to move away from a limited definition of culture which can stifle diversity & inclusion. This provides the opportunity for increased cognitive diversity in an organization as you are not looking for people who all behave the same way.
Interview & Recruitment Process
Audit your recruitment process. From how recruiters represent your company, your careers page, your website, through to your interview process, the interview itself, and your onboarding experience.
Are you being consistent with your values? Are they lived in the process?
Treat the recruitment journey like the customer journey, optimize for conversion.
Creating Interview Questions
Behavioural questions are best for teasing out values/culture.
Situational questions are good for skill and problem-solving assessment.
Signal =/= Match or Fit
STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Results) helps you get quality responses that make a better assessment of match/fit, but someone answering based on STAR alone doesn’t mean they’re a match.
Here’s an example of a Rubric that will help with assessing for Match/Fit.
It’s difficult to avoid leading questions so we have to constantly remind ourselves and our teams of them. The key is in the listening, are they exhibiting behaviours and attitudes that align? Do they answer in hypotheticals or from real examples?
Bonus Tip: Understanding Motivations and Tours Of Duty
Related to the recent podcast from Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale: The Reid Hoffman Story (Part 1 and Part 2) – Make Everyone A Hero.
For those of you who are unaware, Reid is the former Executive VP @ PayPal and is the Co-founder/original CEO for LinkedIn.
In the episode, his concept of Tours of Duty is alluded to:
Rotational – Designed to provide scalability; their programmatic approach can be widely applied, even to blue-collar workers. Pure value-add without direct relation to your company’s mission.
Transformational – Provide adaptability; their personalized approach requires a greater investment of management time, but allows them to tackle key issues and initiatives. These are instances where the employees stand to gain and transform themselves individually while adding value to your organization.
Foundational – Provide continuity; their permanent approach helps codify the culture and institutional memory of the organization. These are the people who align with your company mission and are personally out to create the change that you want to create.
The goal here is to understand that each role and each person has it’s time and place and to adjust the experience accordingly to ensure that you can best add value to the people you interact with while having them support you with your business goals.
Need help?
If you are looking for any training needs in the future, Teresa is also currently available. Options range from interview training, interview auditing, corporate coaching packages, workshops, consulting on best practices for recruitment and more. She will be launching a website that will detail more but for now, email is the best way to reach her.
Teresa is also available for Learning and Development/Organizational Development opportunities too. Feel free to refer on or recommend.
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