Recruiting in a small / medium business can involve trawling through a lot of unprepared or unsuitable applications.
Many can be close to the mark, but require a bit of digging to see exactly where the gold nuggets are hidden.
As I wrote in “recruiting with a little help from your friends“, I try to look for the people part when sometimes the documents have little life of their own.
Currently we are interviewing for a PHP programmer, and no offense to any programmer, but there are a few who happily would live without social contact, or lights for that matter, and just love to be in small groups coding furiously for hours on end.
Thus finding who has the great skill sets and can also fit into a group like ours is not always readily apparent from the applications.
Our current advert is summarised here on our recruiting site [view advert]. I won’t go into the why of that particular site (it works for us), but today I got back an application that made me smile.
I had a good chuckle for nearly 5 minutes and appreciated the effort that went into it. You need to have read the position description to see the humour, but I felt I would share this as I enjoyed it!
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One of the lessons I learned last year was that not paying attention to our culture when recruiting, was to the detriment of my business. (see point 3 of Riding across bumpy ground).
Over my holiday this year, I have reflected on how I used to interview staff at an Aussie pub I helped run in London. The other manager and I believed the best way to work out if they were a fit, was to interview them 1 night at the bar when we were ‘soft’ working and fill them full of beer.
We reckoned that you got a much better taste of their real self when they were ‘pissed’ than you did at some mock interview. And the truth of the matter was after we did use that style of interview we got a better fit for our pub. It’s called matching people to your individual culture.
At ireckon, culture is as important as at any other workplace. While we do like attitude and creativity, not all people bring it in the same way. Moreover, not all ways are ideal as the organisation evolves either. We need people that fit in our culture today and will add to it.
So how do I preview / post interview potential job candidates?
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So I will set the scene first. Tonight I attended a special presentation of Picasso and his collection, at GOMA, in Brisbane. This presentation was for people associated with Queensland Leaders and was presented to us by the GOMA Director, Tony Ellwood.
Apart from the fact this unique exhibition of Picasso’s work and his own personal collection (well some of it), was a great exhibition Tony gave us an insight into the history of Picasso (view: BBC History) and some of the influences on Picasso and his artwork.
Picasso is different to many artists, in several ways;
- he made a lot of money during his lifetime, rather than his value being raised after his death.
- he tried, experimented with and successfully worked with many styles throughout his long career
- he collected art from many other artists, and respected and promoted art / artists throughout his life
While I am no Picasso expert, what impressed me most about this exhibition was the way he approached his art with an open mind and a desire to continually evolve.
So what sort of web designer would he be?
Systems are important for business. In previous posts I have mentioned that as we have grown we have tried to find ways to improve our systems constantly so that we can continue to maintain the service levels we aim to.
Any business owner knows this can be hard.
As your business changes sometimes you don’t change enough to see it at the same time, and have to keep stepping back to check what is and isn’t working.
Recently I was lucky to be provided some feedback by one of our customers that highlighted where the system had broken down for her, and that was worth gold!
Today I experienced it (I see it lots) at another business.
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So here is something which is hard for all service businesses. Losing a customer, or customers who want to cancel their subscriptions. Remember that customers who choose to go elsewhere, or just have no need for your service anymore are not necessarily lost forever.
We recently chose to use a Search Tool called Keyword Spy to do some strategic reviewing of a campaign. We subscribed for a couple of months, which was great, and got great value out of it.
But in good systematised cost control, my Chief of Search (yes that is his title), came and said we can cancel that sub for now because it isn’t needed at present. We regularly do this as we use possibly 50+ tools to keep up with a whole bunch of areas to do with Search Optimisation and Marketing, so hibernating the ones we aren’t using at present is part of the beauty of Software (or tools) as a Service (SaaS).
That is when the problem started.
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