In a podcast with Marius Vetrici from WPRider, we dove into his agencies culture. Host Ronald Gijsel asked him, “How do you find out if somebody is the right fit into your culture? Is that something that you are very conscious on when you’re recruiting somebody?”
Recruitment into a culture of values
Between 2003 and 2013, I had another software company, and there we failed with five different products and made all the mistakes that you can do. That was a product company. So that’s why this time when we are approaching the new product, we did some research, we looked at positioning and the market and the needs that customers value.
Now coming back to the recruitment, we start by trying to attract the right people. WPRiders was just starting up when it was founded as a company. I wrote down the values that I would ideally have that would run our company. These were not only just some words but an explanation of values, what was my understanding of those values at that time, and how does somebody objectively know if a person lives up to the values or not?
When we started hiring people, I would just add those values into the job ad because that would communicate to certain people that, hey, these guys are like this, this is their values. And throughout the years we had people telling us that they had created the resume just to apply to your job. I have never had to apply to a job, but something clicked and I wanted to just meet you guys. So this is the effect that you are getting when you are consciously sending those messages, almost like a subliminal message on a certain wavelength. And then during the interview there are questions designed to discuss examples of this or that value, for example, integrity, honesty. And every six months we do evaluate ourselves with a performance appraisal and look at the values again to make sure we allocate some resources and budget in order to support and to foster those values.
How reviews are done for team members
Throughout the years we’ve designed a process for this. Actually, that’s one way that helped me convert myself from a freelancer, one-man show, into a team. Every time I would do a repetitive task, I would just write down a checklist, like a guideline, a procedure. And then I would run it based on that checklist just to make sure I’m not missing anything. Later on when new colleagues came in, they would just pick up on those checklists and would develop them further.
So yeah, we are doing these reviews internally based on these processes that we’ve developed. And we have our director of operations who’s evaluating most of the people because they are in the operational department and I am still doing the performance appraisals for the other areas like sales and recruitment.
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