21 Mar 2022
Studio
4 min read

The recruitment experience with Adaptable

Dan

Dan

Managing Director

Let’s start by being honest, recruiting for roles is a hard thing to get right. When we’ve got it right, it’s been perfect and the team has gone from strength to strength, and when we’ve got it wrong, (which we have), it’s usually due to trying to rush the process, and that never ends well for either party. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen a vast reduction in the number of local candidates and it’s made us re-look at how we recruit and build the best team.

After a larger number of new partnerships signing up to work with us, growing our team is one of our top priorities for the next 6-12 months.

In order to be transparent and to give any potential new team member the opportunity to see how we run our hiring process, we’ve put this post and a number of others together, looking at how we do things here at adaptable. Our approach is fair in both balancing a potential new team members time and giving our existing team the opportunity to get to know them too.

So how does the recruitment process start at adaptable?

If you’ve applied for a role directly through our website, we aim to review any applications within 48 hours of them landing in our inbox. If the right candidate lands in our inbox, we won’t keep searching for further candidates just to be able to make comparisons.

Whilst we need to find the right person we don’t think it’s fair to ask a potential new team members to go through a long-drawn-out interview process, with six different stages of interviews and tasks that go on for months, like we’ve come across in other businesses.

If we think your application looks like you’ve got the right skills and experience, we’ll have an initial and casual chat over Zoom or if possible meet face to face for a coffee, just to get to know each other a bit better and run through some top-level questions. From here we’ll then review things internally before deciding whether to invite you in for a more in-depth interview and to meet some of the team.

What does the interview session look like?

Before the interview session, we’ll share an agenda outlining how the sessions will be structured and what we’d like to see that best showcases why they are the right person for the role.

We’ll hold a one-hour session that is split into two parts. For the first 30 minutes of the session we’ll run through a series of questions from us (Usually with a director and your potential departmental lead), this is also an opportunity for the candidate to ask us any questions too. Then we’ll move on to the presentation with a final Q&A round up. 

For the presentation we brief the candidates on what we’d like to see depending on the role they are interviewing for, here are a few examples –

  • Select projects or a piece of work they’re really proud of so we can gauge the type of challenges faced and how they have been overcome.
  • Get an understanding of how they’ve approached code in certain projects.
  • How they’ve put together a complex project plan or run a discovery sprint.
  • Learn from previous projects or situations what the candidate might have done differently if there weren’t any constraints.

In a nutshell, we’re looking to see a full understanding of that person’s capabilities and personality. For us, this is normally enough to be able to make a decision on whether they’re a good fit for the team and the type of digital product work we focus on.

How do we manage and take stock of the entire process?

Interviewing numerous people and keeping a record of all the activity also needs to be backed up with proper tools and processes. We use a recruitment platform to manage the entire process, it allows us to take potential candidates through each stage of the application process in a structured way that keeps everyone informed. For example, if we’re scheduling an interview session or wanting to update them with any relevant bits of information about the process, we’re able to push that out as an SMS or status update email – There is even the option to run screening videos through the platform.

If you interview with us and aren’t successful, we’ll always provide you with constructive feedback on your interview and presentation. We find this is super helpful for the person we are interviewing and also leaves the door open for future opportunities. For example, a member of our team interviewed with us a while back, at that time the situation just wasn’t right, for both ourselves and them, but a few years later when the fit was right for both, we hired them!

Sound like a good fit?
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