We're just about to welcome our new Customer Success Manager - the first of 4-6 roles that we'll be adding this year and I thought I'd share a quick run-through of our recruitment process.
For any future candidates reading this, I hope this gives you a bit of insight into how we work at an everyday level and make decisions. And, for my peers who've gone through a few nightmares in their search for good candidates, I hope some of this is easy to replicate!
Step 1: The JD
We're now at a stage of development where we can give candidates a really clear idea of what they'll actually be doing as part of their role and how their core objectives relate to the wider success of the organisation. Being as clear as possible on the tasks that make up the day job help candidates to gauge if the job will genuinely be a step forward in their professional development and if they'll enjoy doing it!
Step 2: Advertisement & Automation
We use an affordable platform called Workable (www.workable.com) that has a really good UX for applicants and us to create a branded web page, push the ad out to other recruitment platforms/sites and automate various aspects of the hiring process that would cost us a lot of time. Like template emails for scheduling interviews, bulk contacting unsuitable candidates and the ability to connect with your inbox/calendar so that everything can be kept in one place but synced with your other workflow. This keeps us very very speedy in moving through all the stages from advertisement to offer letter when filtering hundreds of candidates.
Step 3: Including other team members to remove personal/unconscious bias
This next bit will sound complicated but if your team is well-aligned it's really just a case of multiple actions, well compartmentalised. I've included names of who does what in our process to make it easier to follow!
Initial evaluation: carried out by two team members (Joey & Stella) who read through all the CVs/covering letters and choose who gets put through to a phone screener
20-minute phone screener: carried out by myself (Charlotte) to give the candidate the chance to learn more about the organisation and get a general sense of what the person could bring to the position. And, if after a few minutes it's clear that they won't be a good fit it gives me the chance to explain why which can be very valuable for them. You can view the template questions here.
Assessment: I take notes on every call but I don't share them with my fellow senior managers at this stage so that we can avoid colouring the process. I simply pass on a shortened list for them to follow up with an in-depth interview.
Interview: Depending on who will be line-managing the position / most involved in working with that person, two senior managers will then carry out the main interview. One will have had prior knowledge of the application / prepared any specific questions related to their background (e.g. Joey or Stella); the other (Peter) will not have had any sight of the candidate list or applications so that they can be really present in their assessment of how well the person answered our questions.
Written assessment: Straight after the interview the candidate will receive a written task from us that will be graded by someone on the customer-facing side of our operation. It gives more junior members of the team a chance to be part of the process and their instincts are super sharp! Again, they have no visibility of the candidate's name/background so are purely going off their work product.
Final evaluation: At this point, I'm looped back into the process to compare my initial notes with the recommendations of the interview team and the review of their written work. Often they'll be two people with a slightly different balance of skills /experience that will be good for the role so we tend to place our bet on who will deliver best against immediate organisation priorities.
Offer discussion: The prospective line manager will then follow up with our first choice candidate to go through the JD in detail, make sure they understand all aspects of the role and give the chance for them to suggest adjustments before making an employment offer.
Step 4: Feedback
Using the Workable platform to administrate the applications means that we're able to save enough time to be able to get back to everyone and with later-stage candidates provide more in-depth feedback. This is a huge step-change from the manual process I used to run solo that no doubt left some candidates falling through the cracks. Now we can be sure that any employment conversation will be a genuine two-way street that helps both sides to get the information they need to make the right choice and set the incoming candidate up for success.
So that's it! All our tricks in one nifty article.
If you choose to try out some of these steps, let us know how it goes or if you're interested in joining our team, please keep an eye out for upcoming roles in comms, operations and product on our LinkedIn company page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/carefreespace/.
