How we tried to change recruitment last summer...

Read on to see what happened when we decided to throw caution to the wind and run a different kind of recruitment campaign for Alkhemy’s Trainee Consultant.

So, here’s the thing, when I was younger I was great at interviews…?

I was able to memorise the person specification of any role I was interviewing for and recall the relevant and aligning examples from my working experience. I was also able to answer with a STAR (Situation, Task, Action and Result) account. I always got encouraging feedback from interview panels even if I didn’t get the role. Things were very black and white, question and answer, which made the interview process relatively easy for me. Maybe the roles were more simple and required simpler answers, or maybe it has something to do with brain development?

These days I’m absolutely rubbish at interviews…

When I taken a step up in my career it often comes as an internal promotion, having been given time in an organisation to prove my worth, skills and expertise. Crucially, I think it’s because I feel a lot more psychological safety.?

But back to interviews… Nowadays, I ramble, experience brain fog, panic and/or I’m unable to organise my many confusing thoughts. One reason for this could be that I’m at the beginning of a potential attention deficit diagnosis. But I will say it’s definitely harder than when I was younger because I no longer see things as black and white - there are many shades of grey. For example, if I’m asked a question about relationship management, I really struggle to communicate how I would navigate the nuances of relationship management and it seems a straight STAR answer is just not me, nor is it authentic or truly reflective of reality. Or even worse, “tell us about a time that you’ve managed change?” You can’t say, “Well I led on X project and it was messy as f*ck, traditional change management theory went out the window and I nearly had a breakdown before delivering the absolute sh*t out of it, cheers…”

Anyway, before I go off on a random tangent; here at Alkhemy we’re very lucky to have experienced some growth and have been in a position to hire our very first staff member. During late Summer and early Autumn we went about running a recruitment campaign for our Trainee Consultant.

We’re all about challenging the status quo…

It didn’t feel right to run a standard recruitment process for this role, as I think the way we do recruitment is often inaccessible for many. So, in true Alkhemy fashion we wanted to bring some “polite disruption”. We were recruiting for a Trainee Consultant, and whilst we very much expected them to be new to consultancy, we did expect them to be highly experienced in student voice, engagement, campaigns and project management. After talking to a few people across the HE sector and doing some market analysis we saw that a lot of Universities and Students’ Unions are struggling to fill these kinds of roles - there is an apparent “skills shortage” in this area.?

I called b*ll*cks on some of that and concluded that these comparative roles were long hours (35 - 40 hours per week), relatively low paid (sorry pals, but especially in SUs), hybrid working and worryingly the balance strongly favoured onsite working - which reading between the lines was more like, “we’ll let you work from home if you’re lucky”. To add some balance though, some roles were offering very healthy annual leave allowance. But overall, our conclusion was that there was actually a shortage of decent roles available, the skills are out there but people want more person-centred cultures. I was told that even working with a recruiter we would struggle to recruit. Loving a challenge, I wanted to model a new approach and fashion a unique offer.

Hold my beer…

Our offer was:

• A flexible working week which can be done over 4 days?
• ￡31,000 - ￡34,000 per annum (pro rata salary is circa ￡28,000 - ￡31,000)
• No cap on annual leave entitlement?
• A co-designed performance-related bonus scheme
• A new role title and description to be co-designed after a period of being embedded in the team

I’ve often felt that job descriptions can become out of date very quickly, which can lead to uncertainty and resentment when a role evolves past what was initially envisaged. Why not design a role description that allows for growth? We wanted a job description that strongly communicated and evoked our philosophy without being too detailed or off-putting. Here is a copy for reference.?

Flipping the recruitment process on its head

Here’s what we did:

1. CV (because why waste everyone’s time with application forms?!) and answer to the following questions:

• Why do you want to work for Alkhemy?
• What do you think are the main issues for students at the moment?
• What experience and skills would you bring to Alkhemy that would enable you to meet the expectations laid out in this document?
• What do you consider to be your main development needs, what do you wish you were better at? How can Alkhemy support you on that journey??

2. An asynchronous interview using an online platform, whilst sending all questions to all candidates ahead of time, making sure they have time to prepare. 4 questions:

• One was a scenario-based question responding to a request from a potential partner SU
• Can you give us an example of when you have built strong working relationships and how you maintained these?
• How do you envisage you would develop the role over the next year?
• One of the biggest challenges that we see in the student movement is recruitment and retention of student voice/engagement staff. In your opinion, how can Alkhemy help to solve this problem through services and programmes?

3. The final stage of the recruitment process was a live online interview, 80:20 Interview the Panel. Candidates were told to prepare questions for the interview panel and this would form the bulk of the interview. They were informed that they could have 30 minutes to ask us questions. They were also sent lots of different times and options to choose from to schedule their interview, so we could be as flexible as possible. During the interview, after we had discussion and answered all of the candidates’ questions, we then asked the same five standard questions to wrap up the interviews:

• Thanks for asking your questions. Tell us, why did you choose those particular questions?
• Having been through this process with us, what are your thoughts on the role opportunity?
• If we were to offer you the role, how best do you like to work?
• Is there anything else you want us to know? Or would like to know yourself?
• If offered the role, when could you start? Or, what is your current notice period?

What did we learn?

Number and strength of applications: For this role, we didn’t work with a recruiter or pay for any external advertising of the role. We relied entirely on getting the vacancy out through word of mouth and through LinkedIn connections.?

Whilst I was expecting a flurry of applications, we actually got around 13 applications. All 13 were very strong on paper and we were very hard-pressed to produce an initial long list. But we did, and this brought the candidate numbers down to 7 by the start of the asynchronous interviews.

On reflection I would say that I was being rather tight with our purse strings in choosing not to advertise or work with a recruiter. This is something that I would definitely reconsider for future recruitment. Solely relying on the use of networks is not as inclusive a practice as I would aspire Alkhemy to adopt and so there’s some learning there. Having said that we had a mix if applicants that we knew and many that we had not met before.

Asynchronous Interviews: We were slightly worried about not being able to ask follow up questions through this process. But we found that, because candidates had ample time to think and prepare, the answers delivered were very thorough and not really in need of any follow-up.

The feedback that we had from candidates was very positive, they appreciated having time to prepare their answers to the questions and felt slightly more at ease speaking to their laptop than to an interview panel straight away.?

This also saved so much time for candidates and for us as well so I would fully recommend this to be part of your recruitment processes.

80:20 Interview the Panel: This was so interesting, I think we were able to learn more about the candidates’ experience, values, approach to work and suitability for the role than from any questions that we could design. I’ve always thought that 5-10 minutes I’ve usually allocated to candidates’ questions to be really interesting, so analysing and reflecting on those questions that were asked gave the panel more to reflect on. It was a real chance for individuals to stand out - and they all did.

The questions that the candidates asked were insightful, challenging and really engaging. Candidates asked between 5 and 13 questions in their interviews.

Overall Conclusions

There was lots of learning for us for sure, but I was really happy that we ran a distinctly different kind of recruitment campaign for this role. All of the candidates were amazing and I’m so happy that I was able to meet them and learn from them.

Did we appoint? I am happy to say that we did and we are really looking forward to welcoming our new starter to the team in the New Year.

If anyone would appreciate a call to discuss any of this, please feel free to DM me