CF and William Joseph use CV-less approach to hire a new developer
To inspire business owners to experiment with new ways of hiring, we wanted to share a little bit more about our unique and inclusive recruitment process we have put in place for William Joseph to hire a Web Developer.
Two people sitting at a desk working on computers
Over the next few weeks we’ll be supporting William Joseph to adopt inclusive hiring practices for their Middle-weight developer role, who will support charities, universities and businesses with their growing needs to create digital products and services. We wanted to share a little bit more about what makes this recruitment process unique in the hope this blog post will both support potential candidates to bring their best selves to the process and inspire other businesses to experiment with new ways of hiring too.
If you’re thinking of applying for the role here’s a quick overview of what makes this process different:
We’re collaborating with external experts from the FT and Futurelearn to assess technical skills
We won’t be asking for your CV
We’ll make space for candidates to tell us what they’d most like to talk about in the interview
We’ll share interview questions beforehand
We’re more interested in your approach than your specific experience
We want to find someone with a different perspective from our own
Keep reading for why we’ve chosen to do all of these things and what they mean in practice for how we make hiring decisions.
Collaborating with other senior developers
With collaboration and inclusion being key to the values we embody at both Collaborative Future and William Joseph it made sense for us to suggest partnering with others to run this recruitment process. We’ve been privileged to work with Tara Ojo, Senior Developer at FT and Nicky Thompson, Technical Manager at FutureLearn, on a freelance basis to define the assessment process and they’ll be helping us to shortlist too. As a small business that needs to build their capacity, providing William Joseph with this kind of external input will not only speed up the process but it will also give a fresh perspective on who might be a good fit for their team.
At Collaborative Future we also pride ourselves on creating change through action. Not only do we hope the outcome of this process will mean William Joseph hires a great developer, but we also hope that through working with others outside of our respective teams the lessons from the process will be spread far and wide.
“As a small business, we can design our hiring processes from the ground up. However we are limited in our skills, expertise and reach in this area. Tess and the team at Collaborative Futures make us the type of employer that we can be proud of.” James Gadsby Peet, Owner and Director of Digital at William Joseph
An application process that focuses on core needs only
We’re huge advocates of CV-less approaches to hiring as we know that there are huge amounts of bias with regards to the information people generally present. From hiring managers making assumptions about why someone stayed at an organisation for the time they did, to fast-tracking someone who has worked for a well-known brand, or taking shortcuts by simply filtering out anyone that doesn’t have the right job titles listed.
Instead we’re simply asking three questions which align directly with the core experiences and competencies we’re assessing for. In this instance we’ll be asking applicants to:
Provide a link to two live websites or applications that you have developed and are proud of. Explain why you are proud of them and provide a bullet-point list of some of the technology and approaches you applied in these builds.
Provide an example of a project you developed in collaboration with others (it can be the same as the above) and what you felt made that collaboration work well?
Provide an example of a technical challenge you’ve encountered on a recent project and what you learned from that experience which you think is relevant to this role?
We also include help text to explain why we are asking this and what we’re most interested in seeing. These questions give applicants much greater insight into what we’re looking for and makes it easier for us to assess people based on the most important aspects of the role. Based on our experiences of this approach elsewhere we believe it invites a far more diverse pipeline of applicants and also encourages people to highlight the most relevant parts of their experience to give them a better chance of being shortlisted.
Two people shaking hands near a white painted wall (Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash)
Shaping the process around candidates’ unique strengths, experiences and perspectives
Working in the diversity and inclusion space for many years we’ve seen first hand how job descriptions and recruitment processes are often devised by the dominant culture or norms. This then means that those who are able to assimilate with that culture, particularly those who use the same language, tend to be more successful in the process.
William Joseph first partnered with us because they truly valued diverse perspectives and wanted their team to be more reflective of the diverse users they are building for. It’s never going to be possible to have an entirely representative hiring panel, so instead we shift power to our applicants in our practices and invite individuals to bring their whole selves to the process.
From asking individuals to share what else they’d love us to ask them about in their interview, to explicitly scoring for unique or new approaches during the interview, we make diversity of experiences and perspectives core to how we seek the right person for the role.
In addition we believe prioritising shared experiences and language in the interview process is important to ensure you’re comparing like for like. Often we can find ourselves having an affinity bias towards the people that talk about the same experiences we’ve had in work, or we might like someone simply because they are really good at telling stories in response to scenario-based questions. This is why as part of this process there will also be a collaborative task that each interviewee does with the WJD team, and this will then be used as the basis for the interview, unpacking how the interviewees found the task and what they learnt from that specific experience.
Plus we always provide people with the interview questions 24 hours in advance. Not everyone is able to instantly think of their best examples or approaches on the spot, and we believe talented people are locked out of opportunities that are perfect for them simply because they weren’t as good at interviewing. We want to know what someone is really capable of and providing a little bit of prep time creates more of that space to bring their best selves.
If you’re a developer and you’re excited about the idea of working at William Joseph then you can view the full job description and apply here.