Quick primer. At boc we have no formal process for hiring. Some may wrongly assume that’s because we’re small, immature, and haven’t locked things down yet. While all those things are true, don’t mistake our lack of formal process as being unintentional.

Okay, we don’t have any rules but we do have a history:

• We’ve never hired someone from a resume.
• We’ve only ever hired people who’ve been referred to us by someone on our team.
• Since I’ve been involved, I have yet to seriously read someone’s resume. Man I love that! I wasted too much of a previous life reading resumes.
• We don’t consider someone to be a full-on boc’er until they’ve attended one of our retreats. At a retreat they’ll have no choice but to meet most of us, cook and eat food with us, talk about work and non work, roll an ankle or blow a knee etc.

Anytime I attempt to explain how we hire to someone with more traditional ideals I always feel like a hippy flake. Look, the bottom line is that we literally hire like cavemen, err cave people? New people must gain acceptance by our established group and it’s more about admitting members to our tribe than hiring new recruits. Is that crazy?

Ummm…no. These tribal leanings have a much deeper history than any new HR policy created last week. We hire in a time tested, tribal fashion. What’s crazy to me is companies that leave hiring decisions to a small group in HR, provide limited exposure to the people who must accept and help make these newbies succeed. The most I’ve ever had in my experience of hiring, or being hired, is a quick lunch with a select member or two of the team. I’ll stick with our caveman ways thanks….

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Office Gossip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.