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Is your organization newly remote and looking for some inspiring ways to recruit future teammates? At InspireHUB, we do "paid auditions" instead of interviews. This allows both our team and the candidate to discover if we click, from corporate culture and communication style to work approach.
When I was coming aboard, I loved this! It gave me the chance to figure out if InspireHUB was a good fit for me as much as it allowed them to find out if I was a good fit for the team. It's a meaningful litmus test for the truest indicators of future productivity and retention: our shared goals and values, and our ability to "play together" as well as we work.
To that point, an aside: now more than ever, play is important! So much so that we even have a Mandatory Fun Officer :)
(Yes, really!)
Why does having fun at work matter so much?
- Tweet This ▶ Economists at the University of Warwick found that happy people are 12% more productive!
- Tweet This ▶ A study by BrightHR found that employees who have fun at work are:
- less likely to take sick days,
- more likely to report feeling creative at work, and
- are more committed to their organization!
So how do paid auditions work?
Our first meeting happens through a video conference with our team and the candidate and includes playing a game together. It’s been a really interesting way to see how a prospective teammate approaches problem-solving and connects with us.
We toss the usual HR questions out the window in favour of things that invite a little fun while once again giving us the chance to see how someone approaches a challenge. One of our favourites? It’s a question we share with our “Big on Small” podcast guests. Want to see just how fun and unusual the results can be? Have a listen to our mini-podcast where we ask the question here:
Our entire team is involved in the first meet-and-greet, the game and the Q&A, and the candidates are invited to ask us questions too (which turns out to be both as insightful and often as hilarious as the results of the Horse and Duck question can be.)
One of my favourite moments from this practice arrived in the form of a candidate who actually turned our company into a live musical! True Story! (Why not? After all, we’re InspireHUB!)
When we find the candidate(s) that feel like a great match, we offer them a paid audition in the form of a project with our team. Again, it gives both our prospective new teammate and us a chance to see how we work together and really find out if we’re a good fit.
Sound a little unconventional? It's worked for us! Here's why ...
⯈ We believe successful hiring has less to do with the paper or initials behind someone's name and more to do with the right fit.
That's why we are so effective and so committed to each other. We've passed on highly-credentialed candidates in favour of a junior recruit that better fit our culture and ended up with some of our strongest team leads ever.
The result? We've got everyone from rocket scientists and tech pioneers to human trafficking fighters, adventure divas and professors.
Guess we'll keep doing more of that ...
With one the most significant pandemic pivots being the global switch to work-from-home/the remote workplace overnight, the talent pool—and opportunities—just got a whole lot bigger!
Being part of a corporate social experiment designed to prove that putting the bottom line and people first are not competing ideals makes for some very cool "Aha! Moments".
Want to see some of the other experiments that have paid off at InspireHUB?
What are some of the cool things YOUR team has discovered power up inspired recruiting?
⯈ We'd love it if you would tuck a comment in below and tell us about it!
Looking for more small business help?
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The Ultimate Small Business Survival Guide is Here
We've been helping InspireHUB clients not just survive during this time but THRIVE! We collected all of our advice and made it available for FREE as our great big give-back during this difficult time. Included in this FREE Guide:
- Transformation Readiness Assessment
- Practical Marketing Help
- Proven Strategies to Pivot Your Company
Lead an Inspirational Remote Work Culture that Employees Love!
At InspireHUB, we get it. We've been a 100% remote workplace for more than 7 years, and are the first to admit we were UN-InspireHUB while we learned to grow into it.
because we saw so many people struggling as they've had to adapt to this new way of working overnight.
Here's how you can use it to grow YOUR small business too ...
Included in this FREE Guide:
- Why your remote team is experiencing fatigue.
- Understanding how leaders and employees have vastly different remote experiences.
- The lines you cannot cross with employee privacy when working remote.
- How to gamify your remote workforce.
- The rules of virtual engagement when it comes to working remotely.
- How the rules of meeting etiquette change in virtual meetings and why you must understand the difference!
It's one thing to make policies that put people first in company culture. It's another thing entirely to model them. But being part of a corporate social experiment designed to prove that putting the bottom line and people first are not competing ideals? Better buckle up!
Getting beyond lip-service often means a lot of falling down and getting things wrong before you find your groove. Our Founder, Karolyn Hart, jokes about our being "UnInspireHUB" while we fumbled through the transition from a more traditional workplace to the 100% remote—and empowered—workplace we have now. She's bent on disrupting some of the most toxic foundations of corporate culture, starting with ours.
While the sign-off on rebooting might happen at the top, the biggest changes often start from the bottom up. Buy-in has to be across all teams and pay grades. "Ask me anything" style collaboration, a willingness to kill sacred cows and valuing "impact" over "hours" may make great sound-bytes, but feel like very risky business when it comes to the bottom line.
And yet something funny happens when you treat people like capable adults.They tend to rise to the occasion, and so does your ROI.
Here are some of the experiments that have paid off best at InspireHUB...
Have you ever been in an interview and been asked a fun but somewhat bizarre scenario question? When we interview people looking to join our small business, we always ask them this one, specific question:
Would you rather fight ONE horse-sized duck or ONE HUNDRED duck-sized horses?
We thought it would be fun to pose this question to three former Big On Small podcast guests in our first ever Mini-Episode. You'll hear from Donna Stoney, Chris Byers, and Lale Kesebi. Their answers may surprise you! If you're intrigued by their responses, be sure to check out their full-length episodes below.
Big on Small, The Official Small Business Podcast, explores the big ideas that are helping small organizations survive and thrive. Hosts Karolyn Hart and Samantha Castro interview the inspiring people who are running small businesses, agencies, towns, charities, schools and teams.
This mini-episode gives a fun glimpse into the creative problem-solving and leadership styles some of our guests bring to the table!
We want to know how YOU would answer this question! Comment on the official podcast episode page and tell us which you would choose and how your fight would go down. If you call and tell us your answer, you may just be on the next episode!