We had our first board meeting last week. One of the topics we covered was the status of the team. We have a great, small, core team at blist, but there’s no doubt we need to grow judiciously in a number of areas - engineering, marketing and product management for starters.
One of our new board members has a great deal of experience growing great teams and shared his thoughts. He prefers getting everyone already in the organization involved in growing the team. This includes sourcing new candidates, not just participating in interviews. Of course he suggested that folks think about people they know who might be a good fit. He suggested a small bonus for a referral that results in a hire. When employees go to events, they should allocate a small part of their time to casual, long term recruiting. Bring engineers and marketers, not (just) HR folks to university recruiting events.
Great tactical suggestions for sure, but the big one that really resonated with me was his opinion that the more and earlier you get everyone involved in building the team, the more pride of ownership they take in the culture of the company itself. At blist we all want to work with only the best, smartest people. How better to keep the bar high by making it everyone’s job to go find these great folks?
And this is one of the primary motivators I had for creating Catch the Best… to make it easier to include everyone on the team in the candidate selection process.
Many companies find this level of participation frightening — instead they cling to the notion that the process should be tightly controlled by HR — but I think we’ll continue to see more companies realizing they have a lot of talent in their existing teams that they can tap to improve their hiring practices.
Left by Benjamin Curtis on March 10th, 2008