Welcome to Recruiter Q&A, where we pose employment-related questions to the experts and share their answers! Have a question you’d like to ask? Leave it in the comments, and you might just see it in the next installment of Recruiter Q&A!
Today’s Question: What makes your hiring process unique?
The answers below are provided by members of FounderSociety, an invitation-only organization composed of ambitious startup founders and business owners well immersed in the employment market.
1. Value What Sets Candidates Apart
As a web development agency, we try to think about how each candidate can contribute their whole self to working with us. We encourage potential employees to share different sides of themselves during an interview. If you’re bilingual, were born in another country, and also know how to code and design, we see all of those things as assets you can bring to problem-solving.
As a small team with a shared mission, we find it really important that everyone understands the “why” behind our work at Salty Girl. Each of our current employees spends one-on-one time with a prospective hire, getting to know them and figuring out what makes them tick. This has been a great way for us to determine how someone will operate in the existing team dynamic, what motivates them to drive our mission forward, and what they will contribute beyond their job description.
Most of our team has been in the shoes of an applicant before. They know what it’s like to never receive timely, honest feedback on an application. Because we have had these experiences ourselves, we make it a point to reach out to each candidate who applies for a position with our organization, regardless of whether or not we intend to move forward with them.
We have automated our application process. When someone uploads their resume to our database, they automatically get an email with a short form of simple questions. People who fill out that form will automatically get a personal email asking what else they’d like us to know about them. This process rises the ambitious candidates to the top, weeds out resume-blasters, and saves us a ton of time.
When a potential applicant applies to my business, they are asked to record a video in which they answer a few questions. The advantage of doing this is that we know which candidates are great with technology and which are willing to put in effort.
