Refactor your hiring process: a framework

Hiring is a critical point in influencing company and team culture and for bringing on folks who can really get the job done. Join us to plan an effective process that keeps company values, inclusion and the candidate experience, and the hiring team in mind.

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Full transcript #

Barr Yaron: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. And thank you for joining us at Coalesce. My name is Barr and I work on product here at dbt Labs. I’ll be the host of this session: refactor your hiring process, a framework, and we’ll be joined by Ilsa Ackerman, Ezinne Chimah and Rocio Garza Tisdell who joined us today from Brooklyn Data Company.

First, some housekeeping, all chat conversation is taking place in the #coalesce-hiring-process channel of dbt Slack. If you’re not part of the chat you have time to join right now, visit our Slack channel and search for #coalesce-hiring-process channel when you enter the space. what’s amazing about this team that’s about to present is that they all work together to make the hiring process great.

Ilse is the VP of data and analytics, a scientist by training, who is passionate about empowering clients through data and energized by building a [00:01:00] global and collaborative workplace. Ezinne is an engagement manager. Leading a team that delivers analytics success for clients. She’s excited about all things, data from quality to visualization, to analytics.

Rocio is a people operations generalist who’s worn so many hats. Empowering people is the driving force from recruiting and talent acquisition to compliance and operations, to training and employee experience. Whatever they’re doing, which we’ll learn about today is clearly working.

Brooklyn Data Company is a team of 42 members. As of December 1st, 2020 they were 18 people. And December, 2019, they were only six. They’ve scaled to team across eight times zones and seven countries with 46% of the company women led. This is so important because a team is only as effective as its people.

This is true everywhere. [00:02:00] And ultimately that comes from a strong hiring process. I’m so excited to learn more about how Brooklyn data company thinks about this problem today. After the session, all the speakers will be available in the Slack channel to answer your questions. Recruiting is a subject on everyone’s minds.

So we encourage you to ask other attendees questions, make comments, or react at any point in the channel during the. All right now let’s get started. I’m handing it over to you.

Ilse Ackerman: Thank you, Barr and hi everyone. I’d like to welcome you to this workshop on recruiting and hiring and data. We’re excited to share some of what we feel are some established and emerging best practices.

And our hope is that these practices become more and more commonplace in our industry. And in tech hiring in general with the help of this committee. So we’re happy for your interest in the topic. Hope you come away from this workshop with [00:03:00] some tangible next steps. And we’re eager to learn from you all as well through the workshop in followup today, our intention is to give you all, both a framework for reflecting on your organization’s recruiting and hiring process, as well as some examples of how we’ve applied it to our own.

Presenting along with me today, as you heard, are Ezinne Chimah and Rocio Garza Tisdell. Ezinne is in her second year of managing data and analytics teams here at Brooklyn data. She’s based in Lagos, Nigeria. Rocio joined Brooklyn data this fall as people, operations, general issues already having a huge impact. She’s based in Cupertino.

So it’s a little early in her end. I’m also VP of data and I’ve been building the team in the culture here over the first few. I’m based in Virginia. I also want to mention two other people who’ve had a big part in our recruiting and hiring process, but aren’t part of the workshop this year. And that’s Alexis [00:04:00] Johnson, Gresham who thought partnered on its development and Kelly DeRay who has been executing and refining it the last couple of years.

So throughout the workshop, we’ll be dropping some thought prompts, questions, and resources in Slack. And we’re grateful that Morgan Russell from dbt labs for their help with this. So if you haven’t joined the channel yet head over to coalesce hiring process in dbt Slack. Now where reserving 10 to 15 minutes at the end to respond to your questions and comments.

And we’ll also stick around afterwards for asynchronous conversation in Slack as well. And for those that won’t be following in the Slack for whatever reason, some broad prompts to note down for the selection here. If you’re thinking about what your recruiting and hiring goals are, whether that’s a high offer, acceptance rate, a healthy candidate, net promoter score, or particular expertise you’d like to add to your team.

The current, what the current steps [00:05:00] are in your hiring process, what’s working well. And what current pain points are in your process. First some additional quick context on our organization and team. Our main offering is a data and analytics team as a service, everything from data engineering, to analytics, engineering, to reporting and insights and strategy.

So I’m Scott Bright. Another started the company in Brooklyn, but the team has been fully distributed from the beginning. At this point, we’re collaborating across seven countries soon to be eight in the new year. And we’ve grown from three team members in 20, 19 to 43 here in 2021, expecting to double over the coming year.

So lots of remote screening and hiring to date and even more.

[00:05:49] Review framework #

Ilse Ackerman: So to organize our workshop content, we reverse engineered the criteria we’ve used to evaluate and iterate on our recruiting hiring process [00:06:00] over the last few years and use that as the scaffolding for the workshop content. So that’s the framework you see here. These are first avoiding information asymmetry between the hiring organization and the candidates, reducing opportunities for review bias, to creep into the process, broadening the pool of candidates, to be more representative of the population at large examining each step, for fairness to the candidate, finding ways to reduce inefficiencies in the process for us and for them.

Keeping group think out of the process as much as possible, maximizing the signal we get on the suitability of the candidate for the role and reducing the noise. Of course. And lastly, creating a feedback loop between the candidate and the hiring organization. So what you speak to a few of these points and for the first [00:07:00] set, I’m turning it over to Ezinne.

Ezinne Chimah: Hi everyone,

[00:07:08] Review hiring process for information asymmetry #

Ezinne Chimah: Ezinne Chimah here speaking to you from Lagos Nigeria. The first step of first review process that I wanted to highlight was reviewing your hiring process for information in symmetry. Have you provided enough information for your candidates along the process? Next slide please.

And one of the things, we’ve highlighted a structure, this presentation where we’re identifying some flags, some fixes and the impact for these fixes. So the first flag that I wanted to mention for this particular review process was your candidates know what to expect from your evaluation process.

Are they aware of all the different states? In your hiring process one of the quickest fix to this is just make this information available either in the job posting or on LinkedIn or on your website how many steps we’re going to [00:08:00] also share a poll in on Slack, just to, keep the conversation going.

How many steps are in your process? Are you currently sharing those with the different candidates, some of the impacts that this spec could help mitigate is it reduces nervousness of stress for your candidates because they know what to expect. And they’re also able to plan better for the different steps in the process.

So they know when the technical exercise is coming in, when the interviews are coming in and they’re better prepared for that. Excellent. The next plan that I wanted to mention was, do your candidates know what is going to cover in the interview? This is something that we currently implementing at Brooklyn data where we do share interview questions ahead of time.

So candidates are better prepared for the interview. If you have candidates that are introverts versus extroverts, it doesn’t really matter because you have those questions able to press,

And you’re able to. Do some research and you come in better prepared for that interview. Do you guys [00:09:00] currently do this at your company?

Do you currently share your interview questions or topics? In not necessarily the questions, but just the general topics ahead of next.

One of the last flag that we also wanted to instigate just discussed today was, do you also share salary expectations early on in the process? This is something that, traditionally, some companies keep towards the end of the process and what this does, is it.

Different candidates that go through the interview process, go through the technical exercise and reject the offer because that salary expectation isn’t what they had envisioned or what they had in mind. So sharing this compensation benchmark or the actual values early on in the process during the intro chats, before the technical exercise, before your company and the candidates have invested in the evaluation process will help.

Candidates that fall out after the pro, after they’ve gone through the process and help candidates know what to expect after they’ve [00:10:00] also got through the process and also self evaluate themselves and make that decision early on next.

[00:10:06] Reduce opportunity for bias #

Ezinne Chimah: Would you say an opportunity of bias? What this means is, are you currently where within your process are, you need to get an effect for potential bias? This is something that can be both implicit or explicit bias. And one of the ways that we’ve currently done this, or we’re currently doing this is are you sharing some candidates information such as location, previous employer college you know what this does, is it, if I know someone’s name and the person’s name sounds, I can enter your name. I’m more prone to be a little bit more biased towards that person. And not because I want to be, but just because I’ve seen someone a little bit more familiar to me and one of the ways that we’ve worked to fix this.

We’ve introduced like an anonymizer. And there’s some hiring tools like pinpoint that, help you anonymize your candidates information. But we’re also going to share [00:11:00] on Slack. Expel, Google sheet version that we’ve used in the past, where we collect that candidates like names and we anonymize it ourselves.

You send some like basic Excel formulas, and by doing this, you’re leveling the playing field for all your candidates. You’re also helping. The folks that I evaluating the candidates and pitcher, beat your employees, your fellow employees, or senior level folks or recruit or hiring HR folks help them as well, where they’re just evaluating the person based on the quality of their work and not based on if they know the person or they went to the same college some years ago.

So I’m going to pass this on to Rocio you to talk to is broadening.

[00:11:44] Broaden the pool #

Rocio Garza Tisdell: Thanks Ezinne. Good morning, everyone. So our next step in our infant power refactoring, our hiring process framework is broadening the pool. So like many of us we know our kind of go-to boards where most people are searching, which is LinkedIn and Glassdoor and [00:12:00] places like that. But while that might yield a lot of applicants, it doesn’t always mean the highest quality or most diverse.

And so one thing we want to look at. For our first flag is you are posting through the regular mainstream job boards. And something that we’ve really taken time to identify are job boards that focus on groups of professionals that are marginally has are historically marginalized in technology and the types of roles that we’re hiring for.

Thinking about where you want to pose one of the types of groups that you’re finding missing in your applicant pools and how to reach them and targeting them through these specific boards would be really helpful. You can find in the chat, Morgan will be sharing links to some of our favorite boards.

We’ve often also included it in our worksheet on another resources tab. And what we found by doing that is we are able to really attract a more broad representation of applicants at the top of the funnel and making sure we’re not really missing anyone. As we go through that may have just missed what we were passing, put putting out there because [00:13:00] we’re in the mix of where everybody else is essentially.

And so doing that, it’s really forced us to really take a step back and say, what are our gaps? Who are we missing? And hence, I think that can be seen in what our community at BBC looks like. Now, next slide. The next flag that we come up against sometimes. And we’ve definitely examined here at BBC is the offering of team referral bonuses or individual referral bonuses.

So one thing that might happen as a result of that, and unless your team is already diversity begin with, is that your candidate starts looking very similar. So just as I was saying, she sees a name that’s familiar to her, or she’s there for, if we see a college and you’re like that we’re affiliated with, or a university or what have you you might suddenly have a bunch of applicants from one place and that doesn’t necessarily mean a good thing for your team.

And to fix options. The first that we do here at BDC is we don’t offer bonuses or incentives for [00:14:00] people to refer candidates. And so by doing so we really want to make sure that our referrals are again, Even periodically we’ll have a teammate say, oh, I referred someone. But our candidates do come through pinpoint anonymized.

So we don’t actually know who they are until later in the process we get, when we are doing those in person. Not in person, but virtual in person interviews. Another opportunity for teens who find that they’re working, but maybe not working as well as they’d like them to is to continue offering referrals, but I’m only really offered them very specifically when those hires are meeting your hiring goals.

So if you have goals from the previous step where you’re trying to reach more diverse groups whatever demographics are really important to you to really fill your gaps in your team. Making sure that those referrals are aligned with what those hiring goals are. Again, when you eliminate or make sure that your referrals are tied to those hiring goals, it can really help bring that break.

Those trends of [00:15:00] where your pool starts to look. One in the same in again, particular demographics or networks, whether it’s workplaces or schools. Excellent. Oh, and you can see in our Slack that there we have some. Oh, poll about candidate referrals.

That’s other flag and you can see where we’ve put a lot of thought into how we’re broadening the pool.

So is, screening for culture fit. So a culture fit is. Often, vaguely defined in organizations. So often if you’re not training your team properly or at least articulating it in some way, it can be easily internalized as, oh, I can see myself, having a beer with going out with this person.

Having fun in that context, we were joking in a recent kind of social hour with our team about how online gaming seems to be a trend among various BBC people or cat ownership. I don’t know. There’s a lot of things that come up in our team. But we don’t, that doesn’t necessarily obviously qualify someone to be a good worker.

So something you want to think about is. Really looking for [00:16:00] candidates and screening specifically for what contributes to the culture that you’re building. They’re very intentionally. So as a startup, as a, we’ve been around for a few years now thinking about, we want candidates. Take time to document their work because we’re building that.

And I think for me coming in just a few months ago, it really shows and really being able to say, wow, I can’t believe how much documentation and how mature this is for how young the organization is. And it’s really shows in the way we’ve been hiring. And another piece is, open to learning new technologies.

Obviously we partner with People like dbt labs and others. And that’s really important to us to keep pushing the needle on what data technology looks like. And so of course, by doing so we aren’t eliminating candidates who may have cultural differences from ourselves and. Making sure that again we are building the team.

We want to based on what everybody’s bringing to the table. And I think even in this presentation alone, you can see how different our backgrounds [00:17:00] are and even not just geographically, but where we’re all coming from, into building our team.

[00:17:05] Review for fairness and accessibility #

Rocio Garza Tisdell: Okay. Next slide. The next flag we have is reviewing for fairness and accessibility.

So really thinking about your process is any step in particular fair to all possible candidates? Is this really give everyone an opportunity to participate? So our first. Flag here is the technical exercise. I think it’s pretty rare to probably enter a hiring process for roles. Like the ones that we offer at Brooklyn data, where there isn’t some kind of technical exercise.

We want to know that our candidates. No there’s stuff. And often for candidates, this is often the most stressful piece of the interview process. It’s, time-consuming, it can be unpaid something that we’ve implemented at BDC and we recognize, certainly an organizations progressives to decide, but it’s something that we’ve chosen to do was compensating and letting our candidates know upfront that you do.

I will say from my experience, even as a people ops generalists, [00:18:00] finding that really surprising and refreshing to say, okay, you recognize that. Important to me. And when you’re a candidate who is working full time or has other responsibilities at home it’s a really good way to say we do respect your time and value you.

And so as an impact, I can caregivers like myself, parents, other candidates who don’t have that discretionary time because they have an existing demanding job can find that can justify, like this is a good use of my time and efforts, because I feel like I know that. Even if I don’t get to move forward, I know what I’m getting out of this.

And as a bonus, we’ve actually found skin candidates. We’ll prioritize our company’s hiring process over others. It’s feedback we’ve gotten from our recruiters and we’re pretty proud of it. And really wanting to make sure that people are focused and feeling good about the time they spend on our technical exercises.

So in Slack, you’ll see, we have a poll about how much time you expect your tech exercises to take. And it’s something we’re constantly reevaluating and trying to refine over time as well.

Next slide.

[00:18:58] Identify inefficiencies #

Rocio Garza Tisdell: Another area that we [00:19:00] look at is identifying inefficiencies. So like our little mouse print here in the gift sometimes the hiring process can feel like an obstacle course not just for your hiring candidates, but also for the team that’s involved with it.

So what we want to look at here is, are the interviews valuable signals? Are you uncertain about what you’re actually evaluating? So in our first. Flag here is candidates are going through the entire evaluation process. So I’ve seen processes where people are taken from start to finish, regardless of whether or not how they’re doing throughout the process.

And one thing that we’ve really been intentional about at Brooklyn data is having really clear off ramp block criteria along the way. So if they if we get to say even the intro chat and we say, okay it sounds like you’re looking for. X in your next career move. We don’t offer that. Let’s just have an honest conversation of whether or not this is a good fit for you.

If they make it to the technical exercise, but they’re nowhere near where you need them to be. Or you [00:20:00] find that. They have gaps in skillsets that your team just simply can’t support. You need to be able to again, be upfront with them and say, we need to decline you at this stage rather than pushing them through.

And then at the very end saying actually, three steps ago or two steps ago, or however many steps ago we, I figured out we didn’t, you weren’t going to be a good fit. And again, really making sure that the candidates know that their time is being used. Your team’s time is using, being used well, And, if you’re using references, which we’ll get to later that time is useful as well.

Next slide

So another piece of this is the use of live in person or virtual interviews. Thinking about what are those true screening questions what are the things you can capture in writing that don’t need lifetime? It can be done. Async and we do that by prioritizing our Or application process so that candidates can address some of those things that can be captured.

And then we use that live interview time very specifically. And you can see in the Slack from Oregon, we sharing where we have live interview [00:21:00] time and why we’re using them. So we really want to be really intentional about that. And the impact there is that live interview time is optimized for gathering information that you can’t discern from just a written application or maybe information that you can’t just take at face value from a tech perseverance.

And so really being able to assess those pieces on, I think some of the things we think about our communication because, written communication can be great. But maybe. They’re not as strong in, in presenting. And especially if the, say on our end, we have a lot of client-facing roles, so let’s make sure everybody really can communicate both in writing and in, in live calls as we need to.

And that we’ll pass it over to back to Elsa.

Ilse Ackerman: Thanks Rocio,

[00:21:43] Eliminate groupthink #

Ilse Ackerman: Group think, I think keeping group think out of the. Is super valuable for making a fair process. And the nice thing is it’s really easy to implement as well. I always think of this time at a previous company where I flew in [00:22:00] a candidate for a long day of interviews and I convened the interviewers at the end of the day to debrief and discuss a senior person at the table spoke first was like, Yeah, I know.

And everyone around the table was like, oh yeah, no. And quickly fell in line. So I never found out what individual’s feedback was going to be and whether the decision to reject the candidate, which they did was aligned with it. So I think we can do way better than that.

Something easy to review your process for is whether reviewers share their impressions before everyone has reported their feedback individually.

So instead you can manage permissions in your applicant tracking system, such that reviewers can’t see each other’s reviews of scorecards. When you view in process wise, you can remind team members just not to discuss specific candidates [00:23:00] before they recorded their future.

And subsequent reviewers then are no longer being influenced whether consciously or unconsciously by being prematurely exposed to their teammates opinions. If in the case I mentioned everyone had recorded their feedback before discussing. I like to think the decision would have been a bit more robust, nuanced, and fair to the candidate.

[00:23:24] Maximize signal #

Ilse Ackerman: Next maximizing signal. Yeah. This, unlike some of the other review points is both super important and requires effort. The first thing I’d note is that if you rely on the experience on someone’s resume or someone’s verbal interview responses for determining if they have the skills for the job, you may not be getting an adequate signal.

Okay. Everyone takes different amounts of time to master skills on the job. So making that leap of inference from years of experience [00:24:00] can be inaccurate and risky. So instead we recommend investing in developing a relevant exercise that simulates work on the job. It takes, thought and effort. I will say that the time you spent upfront designing a good screening for qualifications is time you save yourself in each review, discussing, navigating uncertainty, drawing up decision-making and ultimately potentially making a poor decision.

And I think it’s worth emphasizing the word relevant because I’m thinking of a data analyst hiring process. I was in where the technical exercise. Timed 120 minute exercise. And the first 16 minutes you had a data set to explore, analyze, develop recommendations from an assembled presentation. And the second 60 minutes, you joined a room and made that presentation to the C-suite.

It could be [00:25:00] that workplace truly needed to screen for that piece of insight and breezy confidence, which is good too. But more likely they were just unnecessarily narrowing their pool of good candidates with a job. Another option here, which we haven’t used, but I think it’d be interesting to explore is using a third party surveys for assessing particular skills.

And that could help us a bit with our internal bandwidth for the use. So ultimately a good technical exercise should help ensure that you hire candidates that are poised to be successful in the. And the bonuses that it can give applicants a sense of day-to-day work in the role for better or for worse.

Another good way we’ve found to get signal on a candidate is through references. If you skip this step or treat it as a rubber stamp after offer, you’re missing out on a good chance to get additional information on a candidate [00:26:00] suitability for the role. And if you’re using backdoor reference. But reaching out to candidates colleague without their permission, you’re violating the candidates expectation of privacy in your job search.

So you can make this a real step before extending an offer. You can use the candidates choice of references, a standard set of questions, and also use this chance to follow up on any areas of concern from your evaluation process. So you get more signal, create an opportunity to surface any red flag. And the bonus we’ve found is that you may also get valuable information about how to best support the candidate in the job and so hired.

[00:26:44] Reduce noise #

Ilse Ackerman: The other side of maximizing signal is finding ways to reduce noise in the process. And this is another easy, invaluable thing to change. If your job requirements specify a particular degree or area of study for data. [00:27:00] You’re probably inadvertently eliminating some qualified candidates because people from all different backgrounds are successful in this field.

You can just make sure you’re not adding requirements that aren’t directly tied to success in your job. And then I’d say the bonus here is this can broaden the pool in an additional way as well. And then have been shown to be statistically less likely than men to apply to job postings in which they don’t meet other stated requirements.

Okay. Lastly, from my part, and this may be the most provocative item in our workshop but a great way to reduce the noise in the process is to not accept. That’s what we do. So we don’t offer a resume upload option in our applicant portal. And instead we use application questions that target the particular skills and or experience for success in the job.

So resumes [00:28:00] are another opportunity for bias to manifest. So for example, seeing a big name, educational institution or previous company. And if your inner curmudgeon to borrow Meg colon sprays, you’re saying, how do I get the information I need without a resume, ask yourself what information in particular you’re looking for and consider.

If it’s not something you can elicit some, an application question so that the impact here is that it helps you focus on the requirements you’ve outlined for the. Avoiding bias from extremist factors. And I will say the bonus here is that it saves reviewer time and the process it’s much easier to review targeted questions against a rubric then to scan a resume and you can find.

Okay, I’m going to turn it back over to [00:29:00] Rocio to finish up.

[00:29:01] Ensure a feedback loop #

Rocio Garza Tisdell: Okay. Thank you. Our final step and what we think is the most important is really ensuring that there’s a feedback loop. Every time you engage with the candidate every time the team contributes to that process, an opportunity for us to learn and from the candidate in particular we ourselves may be dreaming up like this is the experience we believe ourselves to be shaping, but the reality may be not actually playing out the way we had envisioned. So taking the time to collect feedback from the candidates and whatever they’re willing to provide. It’s something that we know we’ve really benefited from across the years.

And that is everything from our technical exercise, instructions turned demographic surveys, and really being able to look closely at how our process, I’m not just looking at the outcomes of what our hiring looks like, but also knowing who are those candidates we may miss out on for whatever reasons or even those who came on board and understanding, Kept them in our process.

So our first step here is taking a step back and saying, how is your recruiting and hiring process [00:30:00] static? Has it actually evolved? Since you initiated it, if you’re doing the same thing that you were doing a year ago, six months ago, even, or even in, in the last few months I know our process has changed in just this past season since I’ve been with BDC and making sure that.

You’re taking that time to, to review as important. And so again, the fix here would be to not to survey your applicants again, both hires and non hires about the process and really helping yourself identify areas for improvement. We do our best to review these results on a weekly basis and take action on them and monitoring our applicant NPS . I can, we can see on our end that’s been pretty, pretty steady in recent months, and that is with the changes we’ve been making. And so it’s something we want to take a closer look at and how do we move that needle a little bit? More steeply over time. Cause we do want more people are having a positive experience.

That’s how do we make this even better? So the impact of course our team is growing and changing our recruitment process needs to be doing the scene.[00:31:00] And those candidates surveys are really important source of data to gather and learn how to be more thoughtful, intentional about every interaction.

So you can see in Slack, I can see that Morgan’s posting some of the screenshots of candidate feedback and know love this probably at a glance looks super positive. We’ve also have candidates. I think there’s always a couple in there that do give us feedback. This was great. A few of these are coming from people we did hire And I think it definitely shows for the people that we did hire that those are the ones who gave us some of the constructive feedback.

Truly appreciate to say, let’s do, let’s make this better for the next hire. Next slide. Okay. Another piece that we, oh, you can go back again. Sorry. Thank you, Elsa. Oh, you can go back to the feedback that we don’t provide candidates feedback on why they didn’t advance.

So are you actually communicating to your candidates along the way? If they don’t make it past a certain step? One way that you can fix. This is again, developing a lightweight way to respond to requests for feedback. So something that we do is built [00:32:00] into our scorecards for when team members are either interacting with candidates or reviewing materials, whether it’s our initial application or their tech exercise.

Putting in our scorecards, a section for our team members to actually say, do you have feedback for the candidate? Cause they might have notes here and there, can we package them in a way that is really clear and thoughtful and we do this in a way that we ourselves would want to get our feedback delivered to us.

We ourselves are very invested in being growth minded. It’s one of our core values. And we want to see that in our potential future hire. So being able to provide that our front, when we can really helps us stay true to our values, but also can hopefully help candidates grow as well.

Initially, as we were building our team, we were focused primarily on, on senior level. Technical hires, but as we grow, we’re having greater capacity for some of those non senior hires. And so wanting to make sure that those non senior hires who have might’ve applied earlier on in the process, know that we are an organization that values that, and really wanting to see them come back [00:33:00] again and apply.

And really being honest about it when we do notify them as important. Something else we do is especially for candidates who made it, like later in the process, isn’t even offering to jump on a 15 minute call and say, walk through a tech exercise to give them feedback of kind of, this is what we were looking for.

And this is where your submission aligned up.

Okay. Next slide.

[00:33:23] Trade offs #

Rocio Garza Tisdell: All right. So with any recruiting process, there are trade-offs and in recruiting, those typically fall into three buckets whether they’re cost time or quality of hires. And so I, when I was putting together the slide I thought about if you’re in the U S or maybe you see this in other countries as well, breath, a lot of those hole in the wall restaurants you’ll find we offer three kinds of service.

Good, cheap, fast, but you can only pick two. Take a moment to revisit your hiring goals and rank them. And then, some go back to those things we had posted earlier. If you want high quality higher, it takes more time and expense to acquire prospects, to be [00:34:00] selective. You’re focused on reducing costs and moving more quickly, your hiring process will need to be simplified.

And so the quality of your hires might actually suffer. So you really want to decide what’s negotiable. What’s not what you can flex and what will save you from wasting time or making poor hiring decisions in the future.

[00:34:16] What’s next? #

Rocio Garza Tisdell: And then. What we’re tackling next. So a little insight into what we’re working on for our hiring process.

And again, that evolution really thinking about how we’re clearly defining English thresholds for different roles. Again, we’re hiring internationally. Expectations of communication or are going to be, need to be flexible and recognizing what is, what’s going to be important if you’re on client facing versus not, making sure that people can communicate.

But of course, I’m having a little bit of. Flexibility there. Making sure our process doesn’t create various barriers for people disabilities because we’re fully remote and so much of what we do lives online. Those with visual impairments or other challenges, and it made me very hard to make our [00:35:00] process accessible and inclusive.

Another thing piece that we want to do is. Yeah, what are we looking at when we hire globally? We don’t want our say ethnic minorities exist only outside of the us. How do we make sure that we’re looking at diversity in every country defined by what that country looks like. And then internally really looking at how we can scale our internal review and again, we’re growing some things that we’re doing now, aren’t going to be fully scalable.

So how do we. Improve that for the future. And then again, working with our recruiters, we do work with a small handful of them. And how can we make sure that they’re aligned with what we’re doing as well? Next slide as to Ezinne.

[00:35:45] Q&A #

Ezinne Chimah: Hi everyone. Questions. So we’ve been policing some of the questions that you guys have been asking on Slack. So I’m just going to read through and select just the first. And we’re going to respond to the rest on Slack as well. So I think and we’ll see you in [00:36:00] alpha, please feel free to jump in, just kicking off with some that have most of the most reaction, Eric Robinson from a life insurance.

How do you balance the benefits of versus internal referrals, which we’ve historically found to yield higher quality candidates?

Oh, fair. Do you want to pick that one or?

Ilse Ackerman: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think I can’t speak for your case, but I would say that we’re getting high quality candidates, not through internal referral processes. So I don’t think I ever want to speak to there. I did notice the next question was on salary ranges for remote hiring.

And the question was, is it practical to share them early on because that salary range can be highly dependent on the location of the candidate. And there, I think maybe you don’t have room on your [00:37:00] website or job application portal to share all the salary ranges by. Especially important to commute, communicate that upfront.

Presumably you know, what the salary range would be for that location. In our case, we use a cost of living adjustment for each country. And so sharing that in the initial conversation, I think is really helpful, so that we’re on the same page with the candidate.

And I know I have two minutes before we have to move to asynchronous.

So Ezinne, did you have another picked out?

Ezinne Chimah: I think just one person.

Ilse Ackerman: Sorry, I didn’t get that. Go ahead.

Ezinne Chimah: Oh, okay. No, I was just going to just add in to the remote. I’m also like remote in a different location. I think a lot of people do know what the cost of living adjustment for the location.

So if you just share that as a disclaimer about that, that would apply to [00:38:00] whatever, like if you’re always based in USP or pounds, and then you’re able to calculate what the cost of living adjustment is. And I’ve also seen from faces where you can share what if I read you use this flat, so folks are just able to like benchmark at the same time.

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