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At EMPAUA, we work in a self-managed way, we bring our whole selves to work and look to connect with our colleagues, we strive for constant learning and personal growth, we value open and direct communication, and everyone is supposed to contribute to our organizational setup. In sum, it takes some superstar qualities to be a match for us! In this post, we would like to share our recruitment process, which we designed to make sure that we hire the right people.
EMPAUA is a Salesforce consultancy. Consequently, we generally look for people who have heard about Salesforce as a platform solution for business processes before ;). However, personal qualities are more important for us than experience. That’s why we also focus a great deal on values, passion for technology, inspiration and an entrepreneurial spirit in a person.Why culture is more important for us than skills? The reason for this is tied to the vision of our company: our goal is not to become the biggest Salesforce implementation partner in the world. We see EMPAUA as an academy and an ecosystem where talented and driven individuals can discover their full potential. We would love to see our colleagues leading exciting new projects within the company or even become founders of new EMPAUA Ventures in the future. So far, 7 companies have been founded out of EMPAUA, e.g. WeFox, provider of digital all-in-one insurance solutions and creating a lot of buzz in the startup world– they just collected a large round of Series B funding in 2019.
If we find an interesting profile, the person filling the Recruiter role will set up a short call to ask a few initial questions about the motivation for change, previous experience and salary expectations. We also talk about how we run EMPAUA with a self-management system based on Holacracy and the concept of being a Teal company. The first call is a really good first indicator and gives us an initial idea about the candidate.
If after the first call both the Recruiter and the candidate would like to proceed, the Recruiter will send out further information about Holacracy, which the role-based system we work under is heavily based on, the concept of Teal organizations and our company culture. The candidate reads the material and watches the videos we send to them and makes note of any questions they might have. It is really important for us to understand what the candidate’s perception of this new knowledge is. Can we see resonance or a boost in curiosity? Are people also questioning some of the ideas or can they see potential challenges, both in general as well as with their own working style? It is a strong sign for us if someone is eager to understand how we work and what we value. That is why we talk about it in the cultural fit interview, which takes place on the Discovery Day:
We invite the candidate to a so-called Discovery Day at the respective EMPAUA office. This concept was created for mainly two reasons: For us to get to know the candidate better and engage in discussions on several levels (both professional and personal), but also for the candidate to experience the company and as many of his potential future colleagues as possible in a real scenario, not in a „laboratory situation“.During this day, the candidate will have interviews with several team members. One is the already mentioned cultural fit interview, where we try to get to know the candidate as a person in a nice conversation, see what personality traits they would add to our team and what they think of the concept of teal organizations, and check if their values are compatible with our company values. Depending on the role the candidate is supposed to be hired for, they will do a case study or a coding test. Apart from that, there is also a team lunch. That way, the candidate has the opportunity to ask questions and see how we interact as a team. The Discovery Day is a great way for both sides to find out if a future collaboration will be successful.
The team members who conduct the interviews are part of the Recruiting Panel at EMPAUA. After the Discovery Day, every member of the panel gives feedback about cultural fit, role fit, skill fit and salary expectations. This feedback is also sent to the candidate, following our value of Transparency. Many candidates have been amazed by the quality of the provided feedback. Depending on the result, an offer will be made to the candidate. If they accept, we are happy to welcome a new Superstar PAUA-Ranger to our team!
We know that our recruiting process requires a considerable investment of time both from the candidate as well as from the Recruiting Panel, but it is absolutely worth it putting this effort into a relationship from the start: It is much more expensive and frustrating to go through a quick recruitment process, to later find out that either party’s expectations are not met. As with everything, there is always room for improvement and we would be more than happy to get to know the best practices of other companies! We would also love to hear the experiences of candidates who have gone through interesting recruitment processes in the past. Leave a comment below or write a message to elena.lange@empaua.com if you would like to share something OR apply for a job with EMPAUA :)
Written By: Elena Lange, Superstar Recruiter at EMPAUA.
