What we are looking for when we hire a new employee

One and a half years ago I joined my acquaintance in his newly founded company. I was enjoying my old job but when I got the offer to try something new it was an easy change for me. I came to a new home and some great colleagues.

In this case, I didn't need to show what I could do when it came to my work experience. They trusted that my 14 years in the business were enough to hire me.

But was this all to it? Was it just because I did know him before I got hired?

The quick answer is: No.

I will try to explain a bit about the thought process behind how I got hired and how I have been using the same process to help our company to hire more great people.

Our company is a smaller company that is part of a bigger corporate company, but we have our agenda and doing our interesting projects and so on. We are now roughly 25 people working here and we have been growing fast but still manage to keep the culture and the group feels energetic and motivated.

The goal has always been to build a group that works together and build the company as we want it. The focus has been more on the individuals rather than the skills of the candidates that we have met over the last year.

And to achieve this we started to look in our network to find what people we want to work with and bring them into the team to build the foundation of the company. And during this process, we invite people to the office for a shorter meet and greet where everyone that wants can say hello to the candidate and get their first impression of the person. This is helpful for us to go forward with the person or not. We want to have a good feeling about the person, we want the person to be someone that we think will fit in the team and bring good things to the group and the culture that we want.

And if they pass the "social test" and they feel like good people then we invite the candidate for a more formal and technical interview where we dive more into what the person wants to work with and what the person has done in the past.

This might look normal to many people but I hear a lot that companies just want to hire people to fill a chair and they don't care about the group or the culture at the company. They just see the money that the new employee can bring to the company. And this way of doing recruitment usually tends to make people come and go more often than when you take time and find people that will help out building the company as the main objective.

This way of thinking when recruiting new coworkers has been successful for us, we have not had many people leave the company after joining us. And also the team spirit is really good, everyone is enjoying their stay in the company and bringing their parts to the culture.

So to conclude this in a few words is that we are focusing on the personal side of the recruitment, we rather go with a candidate that feels like a perfect fit in the group rather than someone that does not feel 100% when it comes to the personal parts but are awesome developers. It's easier to learn a new skill in development rather than learning and adapting your personal skills.

A good and happy group of people will deliver better work than a group that isn't satisfied. This will be a better solution in the long run.