Pamela wrote:
> I imagined that one of the functions that teams might want to be
> involved in is recruitment of new team members. Whilst the upfront
>'screening' would most likely be outsourced, the inside interviews and
> final selection could be conducted by members of the teams. As I don't
> have any practical experience of this it might be just a pipe dream.
>
> Any comments?
Just a couple of comments, Pamela. I worked for a company for several
years where virtually _all_ hiring was done by the groups wit= h whom the
candidate would primarily be working. With respect to hiring, the role of
'HR' was minimal; basically, to handle the pap= erwork, the logistics of
getting candidates in to interview, etc. Our (somewhat unique) approach
to hiring had a number of implicat= ions. For one thing, we had the
reputatioin of having the longest interview process in the industry.
People would often come in fo= r a half-dozen or more 'interviews' (we
thought of them more as 'culturalal fit-testing' than traditional
interviews). For another = thing, we almost never had to fire anyone
because we (or they) subsequently discovered they 'didn't fit'! By the
time people got hi= red, they had typically spent a signifiant amount of
time with the people that they would be working with, they had learned a
lot ab= out the unique culture of our company, and they had been exposed
to the kind of work they would be doing (and the work settings with= in
which this work was done). The result was that people typically
self-selected themselves out of the hiring process rather than u= s having
to reject them. Likewise, as a result of this process, we knew a lot
about the people we were interviewing (to use the con= ventional term). A
key to all of this was that we did not view people as interchangeable cogs
in our organization. We looked at ea= ch candidate as a unique
individual. We _assumed_ that they had the technical skills we were
looking for (and HR did do some initia= l screening in this regard based
on our statements of need). What we were looking for was people that
would 'fit in' to our rather = unique culture. The results were actually
pretty amazing!
-- Duncan Sutherland dsutherland@gc.net