Two weeks ago I attended one of the biggest HR conferences in the world — Unleash. To say that I was impressed wouldn’t mean much, I’m still reminiscing the moments and experience of it. One of the key feelings that I’ve had and still have after the conference is the feeling of globality and expansion of my HR overview that this conference has given me. To be honest, I was sceptical before going for the conference on whether I can really learn something new. Because I anyway live and work in a pretty global environment, I learn a lot, and I have access to the best knowledge. These were my initial thoughts. And I’m very happy, that I was completely wrong :-)

My notes below are based take-away session I’ve conducted to our team here at Mindvalley. I hope you will find them useful and applicable to your organisation. In fact, these insights apply:

• If you have a larger company
• If you’re a small team
• If you’re solo and making your first hire
• Or if you’re building any sort of tribe.

They will work with:

• Teams
• Communities
• Schools
• Companies
• Small Businesses

Let’s start with the overview of world trends and technology

It was amazing to deep dive into the world of economy, job and technology trends. Some of the insights gave me goosebumps. Hereby I’m sharing a few that stood out for me, with the reference to the article and slides, shared by one of the speakers Jason Corsello in this article. For the original source of these pictures, please refer to Jason’s presentation here.

The unemployment situation has improved, and is well below 7 years average at the moment. At the same time the poverty continues to shrink globally, which gives a lot of hope for the world.

What experts also observe is that we have more jobs available than can be filled. Take a look at this graph:

As well as the hiring overall is a challenge for all the companies around the world. Check out the graph below:

How is your company solving these challenges?

interesting trend has been shared on the emerging new jobs. One of the current trends is that big tech giants like Google, Amazon and Apple are competing for the cardiologists. “… the more likely explanation is that tech companies are interested in health care, and they have all come to the conclusion that cardiology should be an early (if not initial) target.” Read the original article here.

The current trend about average tenure has been going through the gradual decrease, and keeps decreasing for all generations.

And lastly, a workforce stress is becoming a runaway train. Work is the #1 source of stress according to WebMD. At least 1 million people in China currently die from overwork each year. These statistics can be found in the book “Dying For A Paycheck” by Jeffrey Pfeffer, which has been mentioned at the conference as a reference for the workplace-related stress data.

HR Technology business is a booming area, but unfortunately the overall workplace productivity keeps dropping. This means, is that when you are building HR platform, see if it can contribute in any way to increase of productivity in the workplace.

What AI-based HR platforms does your company use? How has been your experience so far? I’d love to learn!

“We have moonshots about AI, but we don’t have moonshots about relationships” (Esther Perel)

And so from the technology and world trends overview, we moved into the deep topics of relationships, social connections, loneliness, belonging, empathy in the workplace. All these shared by the amazing Esther Perel.

As in our personal relationship we are in search of these 2 human needs, same for workplaces — we need them both in organisation. In my view, it also confirms the idea that both types of employees should be equally successful — those who drive innovation, change, as well as those — who are keeping the health, stability, caring, and love in check. The best relationships are those that harness safety and curiosity. Major change happening in the workplace: shift from productivity, to relationship, prior named as soft skills, feminine energy. These soft skills are rapidly becoming the new norm at the workplace. Transparency, trust, longevity, job satisfaction, empathy at the same level as performance management. Identity and belonging have been replaced by freedom and individuality. We as organisations must cultivate trust and belonging at the time where loneliness epidemic has become massive in the world.

Relational intelligence is the ability to be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses, as well as of others — and be able to build connections and work together effectively. In order to cultivate relational intelligence, we need to cultivate:

Self awareness

People who assess themselves honestly — that is, self-aware people — are well suited to do the same for the organisations they run.

~Daniel Goleman

Self regulation

Empathy

Social skills and connections

Motivation

Performance Management Redefined

I attended 2 workshops dedicated to the conversation of performance management. Oh, this forever hot topic among HR people :-)

It was amazing to see how such big organisations like ING and NN Group have completely redefined it for themselves. Which made believe that every organisation is capable of doing it for themselves.

What is important to adapt in your organisations is: a) performance management culture over the process; b) focusing on the future, rather than past performance.

Performance review and salary review are separated. Performance review = continuous conversations, 1:1s, regular feedback 360, appreciation, recognition. Salary review = salary benchmarks, regular salary increase (per company’s procedure), managers decision according to the above and budgets.

Such thought has been lingering in my head, based on the video shared below. If Singapore abolishes school ranking system, while do some companies still use ranking system to assess their employees? Watch the video for some inspiration if you still hesitate :-)

So my question to you, how are you going to transform performance management in your organisation?

There have been around 200 speakers at this conference, obviously that it’s impossible to attend all of them. However those that I attended, left an impact on me — and here, I hope, I managed to also contribute to some of you by sharing the most inspiring ones that provoked me to think deeply. I hope I managed to do this :-) Thank you Unleash 2018 for the amazing conference, and my team at Mindvalley for enabling me to be a part of the conference. I’m forever grateful for this ❤

Feel free to leave your questions or comments that you might have after reading through the article.

• Most companies are clinging to the established command-and-control system of top-down decision making by trying to jazz it up by fostering “employee engagement” and by “empowering” people. Compelling but misguided ideas about “best practices” prevail: bonuses and pay tied to annual performance reviews, big HR initiatives like the recent craze about lifelong learning programs; celebrations to build camaraderie and make sure people have some fun; and for employees who are struggling, performance improvement plans. These foster empowerment, and with that comes engagement, which leads to job satisfaction and employee happiness, and that leads to high performance, or so the thinking goes. I used to believe this too..I negotiated all kinds of tantalizing bonuses. I dutifully rallied my teams for the dreaded performance review season and coached managers through performance improvement process. But over time I saw that all of those policies and systems were enormously costly, time-consuming, and unproductive. Even more important, I saw that they were premised on false assumptions about human beings: that they need to be told what to do. The “best practices” that have been developed on the basis of these premises are, ironically, disincentivizing and disempowering”
• A company’s job isn’t to empower people; it’s to remind people that they walk in the door with power and to create the conditions for them to exercise it. Do that, and you will be astonished by the great work they will do for you.
• I’m going to challenge all of the basic premises of management today: that is about building loyalty and retention and career progression and implementing structures to ensure employee engagement and happiness. None of that is true. None of this is the job of management. Here is my radical proposition a business leader’s job is to create great teams that do amazing work on time. That’s it. That’s the job of management.
• At Netflix we did away with virtually all of the hidebound policies and procedures. We didn’t do it in one fell swoop. We did it experimentally, step by step, over the course of years. We approached developing the culture in the same way we approached innovating the business.
• As we stripped away bearaucracy, we COACHED of our people, at all levels and on all teams, to be disciplined about fundamental set of behaviours
• I’ve removed the words “policy” and “procedure” from my vocubury, I love discipline
• The most important thing to understand about transforming a culture, whether that of a team or a whole company, is that it isn’t a matter of simply professing a set of values and operating principles. It’s a matter of identifying the behaviours that you would like to see become consistent practices and then instilling the discipline of actually doing them.
• Great teams are mot created with incentives, procedures, and perks. They are created by hiring talented people who are adults and want nothing more than to tackle a challenge, and then communicating to them, clearly and continuously, about what the challenge is
• When I was at Sun we had 370 people in HR. 370! And virtually all of them were divorced from the business; they couldn’t tell you what we made. We were doing initiatives and off-sites and celebrations. We were half entertainment and half happy-face HR. It was really fun but somehow empty. We always wanted more respect and more recognition.
• When I accepted the job, it was one of the condition that I would not be soloed off as the HR lady; I would report directly to Reed and be part of the executive team.
• Truly understanding how the business works is the most valuable learning, more productive and appealing than “employee development” trainings. It’s the rocket fuel of high performance and lifelong learning
• How well do you think people throughout the company could describe its business model? How frequently do you show them your company’s P&L? Is everyone aware of difficult challenges your company faces? What areas of your business do you think your people know little to nothing about? Could you ask a leader in that domain to come and talk to your team?
• One of the most important insights anyone in business can have is that its not cruel to tell people the truth respectfully and honesty.
• Somebody asked me once: What would you fire me for? I said, “That’s a good question. Let me think. Well, certainly embezzlement, sexual harassment or breach of confidentiality. Wait, I know what I’d fire you for. If we were discussing something that went wrong, doing a postmortem, and you said “Oh, I knew that was a problem, but nobody asked me.”
• A study by Deloitte showed that 70 percent of employees in a wide range of sectors “admit to remaining silent about issues that might compromise performance”
• When leaders not only are open to being wrong but also readily admit it — as Reed did that day, and regularly did — and when they do so publicly, they send a powerful message to their teams: Please speak up!
• A study by the Corporate Executive Board found that companies that actively fostered honest feedback and had more open communication produced a return over a ten-year period that was an astonishing 270 percent higher than that of companies that didn’t.
• Beware of data masquerading as fact; data is only as good as the conclusions it allows you to draw from it. People will be drawn to data that supports their biases. Hold your data up to rigorous scientific standards.
• Debates among smaller groups are often best because everyone feels freer to contribute — and it’s more notatiable if the don’t. Smaller groups also aren’t as prone to groupthink as large groups are.
• Instead, build an ideal team by starting with the vision down the road. Identify the problem you want to solve, the time frame in which you want to solve it, the kinds of people who will be successful at that, and what they need to know how to do, then ask yourself, What do we need to do to be ready and able, and whom do we need to bring in?
• He wrote a great piece for First Round Review about his specific tactics for hiring great people: http://firstround.com/review/this-is-how-coursera-competes-against-google-and-facebook-for-the-best-talent/
• True and abiding happiness in work comes from being deeply engaged in solving a problem with talented people you know are also deeply engaged in solving it, and from knowing that the customer loves the product or service you all have worked so hard to make
• We didn’t understand right away at Netflix that great colleagues and tough challenges to tackle were the strongest draws to working at the company.
• Consider not only what you can afford given your current business but also what you will be able to afford given the additional revenue a new hire might enable you to bring in.
• Being transparent with staff about compensation encourages better judgment about salaries and undercuts biases, as well as offering the occasion for more honest dialogue about the contributions of various roles to the company’s performance.

Останнім часом доводиться багато читати та практивувати (що дуже важливо!) здатність стійкості (resilience) та здатність процвітати як особистість (thrive). А все тому, що я дуже люблю свою роботу і життя. Не обходиться без стресу, невдач, розчарувань… І це ще не найважчі моменти, які може підкинути життя. Як розвивають у собі ці навики люди, які втрачають близьких, роботу, які тяжко захворівають або змушені тяжко працювати, щоб заробити гроші.

Що ж таке “стійкість”?

Коли у житті випадають труднощі, ти піддаєшся їм чи долаєш їх? Це по суті і визначає твою стійкість. Ніякий психологічний тест не здатен визначиити її рівень. Лише важкі життєві обставини, стрес, втома, невдачі можуть показати твій рівень стійкості. Як стверджують науковці та дослідники, цьому сприяють наша здатність дивитись на проблеми життя під різним кутом — ті, хто сприймає складнощі як виклик, здатність вирости та не як перешкоду до власного щастя, і мають найвищий рівень стійкості. Отже, сприйняття є ключем до стійкості: ти думає про подію як травматичну чи як можливість навчитись та вирости?

Які інструменти аналізу мого рівня стійкості я використовую?

• Аналіз та усвідомлення моєї реакції на стрес — найчастіше мені вдається це зробити ввечері, після роботи за допомогою зошита, куди я записую всі свої думки та події
• Медитація про стресову подію — буквально 5 хвилин кожного дня (зранку або ввечері) я присвячую медитуванню стосовно проблеми та погляду на неї зі сторони
• Молитва та прохання у Бога допомогти мені вирішити цю ситуацію
• Активний пошук зворотнього зв’язку серед людей, чия думка є мені важливою.

Рекомендую вам спробувати один з таких способів

Тепер проаналізуємо поняття “процвітаючої особистості”.

З ним я стикнулась вперше прочитавши книгу Аріанни Гафінгтон “Процвітай” (англ. “Thrive”). У ній вона описує важливість дбати про себе, своє здоров’я, сон, спорт, особисті та сімейні зв’язки. Ми так часто женемось за професійними успіхами, досягненнями, що не можемо більше розділити наше життя на рівні частини, і дбати однаково про інші частини життя. Це призводить до вигорання, стресу, нездатності відключитись та подумати про щось більше. Вона також стверджує, що ті люди, які гармонійно збалансовані і досягають більшого у житті, є креативнішими та здатні краще вирішувати комплексні проблеми.

Рекомендую подивитись її ТЕД-виступ на тему сну. “Виспіться на вашому шляху до успіху”, стверджує вона. А ще — хвалитись, що ви спали всього 3 години є ознакою поганого тону.

https://ted.com/talks/arianna_huffington_how_to_succeed_get_more_sleep

Які інструменти розвитку себе як процвітаючої особистості я використовую?

• Біг та йога — вже не можу уявити своїх ранків без хорошої практики. Я називаю це зняття стресу через хорошу дозу пропотівання. І вам рекомендую
• Вихідні дні насичені навчанням та саморозвитком — не роботою, а активним навчанням та читанням. Вони дозволяють переключити мій розум та думки та сконцентруватись на чомусь іншому
• Сон — тривалий, добрий 8-ми годинний сон.

А як ви розвиваєте свою стійкість та здатність процвітати як особистість? Що вам допомогає ставати кращою людиною, незважаючи ні на що? :)

Формула розвитку особистості was originally published in Ідеї Персонального Розвитку та Росту on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Human Resources and managing your people is a huge part of what makes your businesses work.

I have selected these TED talks to show you that the most prominent and successful people in the world recognise the value of HR and people in the organisation and that the future is quite bright :). I sincerely hope, that they will help you to enrich and strengthen your company culture as well.

1. Adam Grant: The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers

Organisational psychologist Adam Grant tells about different models of peoples behaviour and how they impact the success of the organisations and the world overall. He also gives good tips about smart team-building. After watching this TED talk, perhaps, you will start 5-minutes giving session in your organisation. So who are you: a giver or a taker?

2. Rainer Strack: The Surprising Workforce Crisis of 2030 — And How To Start Solving It Now

Human Resource expert Rainer Strack urges companies to look across borders for mobile willing to relocated job seekers. But to do that, they need to start by changing the culture in their businesses. They must embrace mobility, bringing more women to work and most importantly change their perception of people in the organisation and treat them as the most valuable resource they have. It sounds counterintuitive, but by 2030, many of the world’s largest economies will have more jobs than adult citizens to do those jobs.

3. Ricardo Semler: How to Run A Company With (Almost) No Rules

The famous CEO Ricardo Semler is the pioneer of revolutionary forms of corporate democracy, self-organisation, rethinking everything about management, working with people, and running a business. He promotes the idea that your employees are smart, brilliant and can be trusted 100% to organise their working days, reporting, taking vacations and everything else by themselves. All his life he has been a promoter of the idea that work should be fulfilling and fun.

4. Mary Schaefer: Putting The Human Back Into Human Resources

Discovering your peoples’ worth at the workplace, recognising the “human” in every person, who is longing to belong, be heard, recognised and appreciated. In this short TED talk Mary shares her belief that we can create work cultures where organizations and human beings can both thrive.

5. Patrick Vermeren: The (Uncomfortable) Truth of HR and Leadership Development

Patrick Vermeren set out on a mission to reveal the truth about the many HR theories, models and questionnaires and how useless they might be. The academic literature revealed that most HR practices (in recruitment, assessment, development, coaching) are very problematic and some even dangerous. He argues leaders to critically question all HR practices and policies and apply only proven and statistically validated approaches.

6. Jason Fried: Why Work Doesn’t Happen At Work

One of authors of “Rework” questions the traditional model of work when you need to go to the office to get things done. He is an active supporter of collaboration, productivity and the nature of work that doesn’t require an office.

7. Regina Hartley: Why The Best Hire Might Not Have The Perfect Resume

Regina Hartley, HR Manager at UPS, coins the term the “Scrappers” — those who flourish in the darkest spaces and can survive the deepest challenges of life. As someone who grew up with adversity, Hartley knows that herself very well. “Choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose,” she says. “Hire the Scrapper.”

8. Carol Dweck: The Power of Believing That You Can Improve

The big believer that everyone always has the second chance and that the mindset can be changed, the famous psychologist and researcher Carol Dweck, introduces the idea of the “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain’s capacity to learn and to solve problems. Applying this idea to HR can fundamentally change how we train, develop and promote people in our organisations.

9. Daniel Pink: The Puzzle Of Motivation

Business thinker, author and researcher of motivation Daniel Pink challenges the idea of traditional rewards (bonuses, commissions etc.) which all businesses use to motivate and retain their employees. But there is a big mismatch between what business does and what science says. The science shows that our employees are longing for autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives; mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters; purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

10. Bary Shwartz: The Way We Think About Work Is Broken

In this short talk Bary Shwartz asks the audience a simple question: “Why do we work?” Not in order to make a living. When you ask people who are fulfilled by their work why they do the work they do, money almost never comes up. Fulfilled workers have a measure of autonomy and discretion in their work, and they use that autonomy and discretion to achieve a level of mastery or expertise. They learn new things, developing both as workers and as people. And most important, satisfied workers are satisfied because they find what they do meaningful. Their work may make a difference to the world.

How do you make sure you set your new hires for a long-term success?

I was inspired to write this article after my conversation with one of my former colleagues, who was trying to convince me that on-boarding is yet another term invented by HR people, who usually want to make themselves important in the organisation and in their free time create complex processes.

Why on-boarding should be a big deal in your organisation?

As a doctoral student, Tayla N.Bauer started studying the process of on-boarding newcomers by looking at freshly admitted research scientists at Portland State University. It wasn’t surprising to see that scientist with prior research experience and a better understanding of their organisation’s culture were more productive, engaged, and committed after one year. What was surprising was that these effects persisted in the long term. She followed these scientists into their research careers and found that mentoring connections they made early on were related to their productivity and confidence levels five and a half years later.

Bamboo HR surveyed over 1000 employees in the US, asking about their experience getting new jobs and what strategies they had found to be most effective and helpful for settling in.

52% of employees responded that receiving organised, relevant and well-timed content was the single most anticipated and helpful part of their on-boarding into the new organisation.

What seems to be the biggest surprise is that no one [new hires] seemed to care about free food and extra perks. New hires want to learn how to do their job and the inner workings of your company. In short, they want to start doing meaningful work and contribute fast!

So what can you do right now to reinvent on-boarding in your organisation?

Below is the detailed 3-steps process, that you can apply immediately to improve on-boarding in your company and set your new hires for success:

1. Create strong bonds and strong connections

Few would disagree that relationships matter. However, when on-boarding new employees, many organisations don’t do enough to help them make connections or foster a sense of belonging.

What can you do? (practical tips)

• Meet with them, make sure someone takes them to lunch, and that the atmosphere is welcoming. This simple connection matters for success over the long run.
• Assign a buddy who will show them around the office, teach the new hire how to operate office coffee machine and others.
• Introduce your new hire to the whole company — if you have company Facebook group or email introduction to all employees. Be creative: besides which team they’re joining, share about their hobbies, interests and funny facts about them
• Have your CEO spend time with your new hires. A dedicated meeting or lunch time will make a great difference in the experience of your new hires)

Remember new employees are anxious to make a good impression. Tell them how happy you are to have them join your team. Doing this early on has a much bigger positive impact than waiting until later.

2. Strengthen your induction program

Your induction program is the best way to introduce your culture, business model and organisational structure. It’s not your training ground where the new hires are gaining the skills, it’s the space where your new hires can experience and understand your company by speaking to some of your best employees.

What can you do? (practical tips)

• Create 1–2 days induction program where you talk only about your company culture, business model and organisational structure.
• Have the highest performing team members and great public speakers (!) share the wisdom on these topics.
• As your company is changing and evolving, same for your induction program content — keep it flexible and review the content regularly.
• Make sure your values and culture are projected in how you treat and greet your new employees. Tell the real stories of your successes, failures, prominent employees — they will tell who you are and inspire your new hires to strive for the best.

3. Recognise that the manager plays a special role

The research shows that the new hires want their manager show them the ropes of their new role, establish guidelines, expectations and milestones of the new job. The proactive stand of the manager is the key for success of the new hire.

People want their own managers, not HR, to take charge on-boarding them.

What can you do? (practical tips)

• Set clear measurable goals and expectations for the role. Be very specific and detailed. This will serve as your roadmap for further check-ins and measuring success of your new hire.
• Establish time-based milestones to check in with new employees to see how things are going. For example, 30, 60, 90, and 180 day milestones are good markers to consider.
• During these check-ins you can ask questions and share insights around these 4 areas:

Top learnings of the new hire in their role and company

Top challenges or roadblocks in their role

Performance and role alignment — how well are they performing and what can be started / stopped / continued

Feedback — share your own feedback as a manager and feedback you’ve gathered from their peers and colleagues

By following these 3 steps you can help your new hires and your organisation to tap into the potential of your people to the fullest and achieve your company’s growth in revenue, creating new break-through products, employees engagement and their happiness.

If you are seeking for guidance or help on how to design the best on-boarding process for your organisation, feel free to reach out to me at Talent Code.

If you liked this article, click the💚 below so other people will see it here on Medium.

This article was originally published at Mindvalley Insights — blog where Mindvalley is open-sourcing it business and sharing all marketing insights, ideas and strategies.

Mindvalley takes great pride in its people and culture.

It’s our unique company culture that inspires our team to be creative, productive, innovative, and — most importantly — happy. We define our culture through the 10 values of our Code of Awesomeness, which you’ll see on the walls of our offices.

We expect all our new candidates to rise to our “Bar of Awesomeness” (where their values match that of our Code of Awesomeness).

And when this bar is met, that’s when the magic happens.

But here’s the real question:

How do we hire someone who is a cultural fit for the company?

How can we determine whether a candidate’s values match ours?

The answer: we designed a series of questions that revolves around our Code of Awesomeness.

Firstly, we dissected each of our values.

We’ll use one of our values, “I turn customers into raving fans,” as an example.

How do we, as a tribe, understand this value?

To go above and beyond the call of duty to help. And to serve a customer to such a level that they become brand ambassadors for the company.

What incident or story within the company best exemplifies this value?

One of our customers emailed us about how he was a little behind financially over Christmas, and needed advice on how to make Christmas special for his 12 kids.

We regularly receive emails like these, even when it’s not related to a product or a normal support request.

We were stumped as to what to do in this case… then an idea hit us. Since it was Christmas, a season of giving, we decided to personally buy gifts for each of the 12 kids, and send them via Amazon.

But there was one BIG problem: the gifts would not arrive in time for Christmas.

So we decided to do something else… We set up a Santa Claus scenario while Vishen was on holiday in Northern Europe, and got “Santa” to personally pass a special message of love to this customer’s 12 children.

Who was/were the employee(s) behind this incident or story?

Our customer support team and our CEO, Vishen Lakhiani.

After answering these questions for each of our ten values, we asked ourselves one final question…

What were the common traits and characteristics of the people in each of these stories?

This helped us create an avatar of our ideal candidate.

The final step was to design interview questions that would best give our candidates an opportunity to share real life examples that represent our values.

Based on the previous exercise, these were the questions we created to determine whether a candidate shares the same value of “turning customers into raving fans”:

• Give an example of a customer that you turned from a position of unhappiness to sheer joy.
• The customer is pointing out a big known problem with your product — what do you do?
• What does great customer service mean to you?
• In your last job, how did you know that the customer was satisfied?

By applying these practices, we were able to create a series of interview questions that are now helping us gauge whether potential candidates share similar values to us, and will fit into our unique work culture. This, in turn, has helped us preserve our unique company culture with every new hire.

Here you can download the examples of questions that we use for interviews: Mindvalley way of hiring based on values.

This article was originally published at Mindvalley Insights — blog where Mindvalley is open-sourcing it business and sharing all marketing insights, ideas and strategies.

Here at Mindvalley, we are developing multiple technologies that will revolutionise how people learn and consume education around the world.

Understandably, our developers team consists of the most talented developers from around the world. As a recruiter, I need to understand not only the vision and business needs of my company, but also how developers think and work. In doing so, I have learned some interesting hiring lessons which can be applied across the board.

Recruiters and developers are different types of people. However, what I’ve learned from my work with developers is that they possess the necessary skill set that can help you scale your recruitment process.

Open communication

How do you tap into a developer’s mind?

Well, the developers team is not the most extroverted team, so the standard brainstorm-style sessions that recruiters are accustomed to will probably not be the most constructive way to get the best ideas.

We have a dedicated “tech-hiring” channel on Slack (our current company-wide messaging app). The members of this “tech-hiring” channel are the chosen developers who we have involved into the hiring process. You should see how much buzz is going on there! There is a constant flow of ideas on how to scale hiring, tools that we can try, and never-ending feedback.

Developers themselves initiate all of these. Open communication is an essential part of developers’ jobs, and having the right communication tool will allow anyone to communicate most effectively with them.

TIP: Experiment with the various tools to find the best environment for open communication with different “archetypes” from your teams.

Innovative approaches

Previously, we used a standard recruitment process across ALL teams. But the one thing we have learned is that “One Size Does NOT Fit All.”

Different teams have different requirements — which may need a unique approach. This becomes most apparent when recruiting for developers.

Now, we have implemented innovative approaches to our tech recruitment, such as a programming test that each candidate gets to solve before the interview process, peer review which we apply for the candidate’s code, programming tests, and finally, the interviews.

Most importantly — the hiring decisions are made by a majority of the developers (through peer review) rather than by a single person (manager), and we ensure that the candidates pass our culture and team fit.

TIP: To get the best people for your specific teams, you need to allow the teams to own the hiring process and all innovations should come from the teams.

Model thinking

Developers think in terms of models, and they are solving problems by applying different thinking frameworks.

Model thinking is an interesting concept because it teaches you to think more intelligently and clearly about the world in which we live.

The more you work with the developers, the better you understand how these models can be applied for your hiring.

Thus, our developers team designed a set of interview scores and weights to each aspect of the hiring process to help evaluate skills such as — communication, critical thinking, problem-solving, and experience with Mindvalley’s technology stack. Therefore, right after the team has an interview with the candidate, they decide on the scores together and I receive timely feedback on the candidate.

This kind of selection method brings fairness to your selection process and eliminates biases since the same method is applied over and over again to everyone who is being reviewed.

We now use this practice when hiring for the rest of the teams at Mindvalley.

Process-oriented

As a recruiter — where you are busy networking with people, meeting potential candidates, interviewing, and so on — it’s easy to get lost in the series of these events. When processes are discussed, documented, and followed in a straight line, you can scale your processes and apply them to a wider network of candidates. The developers team will help you make sure that processes exist and will only be changed after being discussed and agreed upon.

You can imagine — our developers team have their processes documented and followed through, and then replicated across the remaining teams.

Technology-savvy approach

If you want to implement recruitment or HR technology, get your developers team to look into it. Even better — get them to select the one that they like playing with! It will be the best software for your organization and your HR team.

This point may look obvious, but sometimes we as recruiters might not leverage on the talent which is already under the same roof.

What do you as a recruiter bring to the table?

As a recruiter, you can serve as a role model of strong connection and networking skills with candidates, quick follow-up, and ability to connect pieces when it comes to the big vision of the company in terms of hiring and business needs.

These and many other observations can happen only when you learn to accept the differences between recruiters and developers and be positive about the impact they make on the job of both teams.

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