Many companies go through a stereotypical hiring process. They post their open positions to a job board or career site, wait for applications to come in, then run the submitted resumes through a filter. If the applicant doesn’t have the appropriate keywords in his/her resume, the candidate is not even considered. If an individual is lucky enough to catch the hiring manager’s eye, they’ll bring the applicant in for a series of lengthy interviews and potentially make them an offer. We have a very different approach.
We shaped our hiring process by looking at what made our “A” players most effective and discovered four key characteristics were responsible:
- Intuition: ability to rapidly gain insight and turn it into strategy, even when the whole picture isn’t clear
- Humility: ability to see past one’s own perspective, even when emotions run high
- Creativity: ability to turn clever ideas in one form into consumables in another
- Vision: a grand view of what the future holds
Although our recruiting outreach strategy is in some ways typical, we take a more proactive approach. LinkedIn, job boards, social media advertising and our proprietary media (email lists) are a few methods we use to get in touch with Jacksonville’s talent pool. Our hiring managers comb through LinkedIn profiles that include keywords such as; advertising, marketing, or public relations. During one attempt, we sent out 35 InMail requests and received 25 responses. Since there was such a high response rate, we decided to hold a career night. About 15 strong candidates attended the event on Wednesday, August 12th at our beautiful, new office.
When looking for potential team members, we keep in mind that the digital marketing industry is chaotic and ever changing, so it’s important to recruit people that can think on their feet and solve problems on their own. If there is a list of attributes that resumes don’t get at, that’s them. Some of this can be solved or uncovered in interviews and evaluations, but we wanted a way to start the process earlier. As a result, we created a careers landing page. This page includes three thought-provoking questions and the answers to these questions have been a remarkably good first impression of early interview outcomes.
Another strong predictor of qualified candidates is how applicants engage with our various published resources. Because of this, we use a lead scoring system based on clicks within response emails. This allows us to see how engaged a potential candidate is with our site and how interested they are in who we are. During interviews, we ask large and complex questions to allow us to see how the applicants think and approach problems as opposed to just regurgitating previous experience. If the candidate is brought into a final interview, a strategy session will be held with three members of our staff to work on solving a real client problem.
Hired! Now what? We believe it’s our obligation as a company to develop and grow members of our team however possible. This means immersing them into our expertise and culture, as well as by providing them with sound education of how we operate. All employees are given a curriculum with Hubspot, Google & Photoshop certifications. To help achieve these growth goals, the agency provides 1 to 1 mentorship with senior leadership through weekly goal setting. We also have a book of the month club, weekly sip & strategize and encourage traveling!
Interested in joining our team?
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Featured photo courtesy of: ContentEqualsMoney.com
