Thread by @RachCarrell

We've been doing a secret hiring experiment.

and I think it's working ;)

THREAD ⬇️

I was dissatisfied with traditional hiring. You get tons of CVs, can't possibly interview everyone so choose some with prestigious employers/education and relevant keywords.

In so doing, your biases kick in and you exclude people who had a rough start to life or are different from you. Then you have 30 min chats, which tells you who's good at 30 min chats.

Unless the job is '30 min chatting' (sign me up!), this is a terrible predictor of performance. And you end up with a team of people who look much like you and are nice to chat to.

SCREW THAT.

So we started to turn the process on its head.

Now we don't look at anyone's CV until LATE in the process. Instead, we put tons of info in the job ad and answer questions by updating it so everyone's on a level playing field.

The ad links to screening questions which we separate from names and blind double mark. This surfaces candidates who really know their stuff. And surprise surprise, it's NOT the usual suspects.

We did this as an experiment, but it's worked so well that we're making it permanent.

If you're interested in joining our movement, check out korukids.co.uk/careers

We're recruiting engineers, product designers, and marketers :)

Post-script: LOL, now I am getting tons of inbound from recruiters saying "Great post on hiring, what a great innovation! Anyway I recruit for that role, can I send you some CVs?"

Post post-script: For those who want more detail... we also held a webinar for one of the roles. That felt scary but was awesome and we should do it again linkedin.com/posts/rachcarr…

Post post post script: Here's an upside for candidates that never occurred to me

PPPPS: For everyone who's DM'd me asking for more detail on this, I recorded a podcast on it with @jimmym

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rac…

I'm going to stop adding PPPPSs, since it now appears that this thread has turned into a repository of my opinions about hiring (and I have many)

One of my favourite things about our job ads (although some commenters didn't love it)

Unpopular opinion: Guesstimate questions can be part of a great hiring process

I'll be going into detail on all our hiring stuff here, do come along!

Love this -- imagine if you could have an honest transparent conversation about working styles during a recruitment process. We haven't cracked this .... #recruitinggoals

Update: our amazing CTO James has further innovated our process in a way that I LOVE.

Problem: how do you do 'blind hiring' on the phone? From a voice you can take a decent guess at gender, class, age, nationality, and probably other things.

None of these are helpful in evaluating whether someone's a great fit for your team and mission.

James' awesome solution: He asks the candidate questions on the phone, and then uses @otter_ai to transcribe the answers.

James THEN splits the answers up and sends them to another teammate to score. That second person has no idea what the candidate sounds like, so scores them on the quality of their answers alone.

As it should be :)

Update: some results

Delighted that Koru Kids' blind hiring process was featured in this Vice article

vice.com/en/article/wx5…