Our Hiring Process

Decision

Hiring begins by confirming what role the position is being hired for. Are we hiring an existing role that already has defined responsibilities or is it a new position and we need to define it? Once we have confirmed who we want to hire and what their primary responsibilities are we need to review the hire with the company and in particular the meta-scrum. People are expensive and that expense comes out of profit sharing so ideally the majority must be in favour before we move to hire a new person.

Referrals

We don’t pay a referral fee to anyone who refers a person to the company. We hope that a person is referred because they are a good fit, the person making the referral thinks they will do well here, and the person being referred will substantially contribute to our overall profitability and as such everyone within the company will do much better. Recruiters, something to keep in mind if you are contacting us.

Hiring Committee

Once the hire is agreed to, the lead for the team that is making the hire selects 2 additional people to form a hiring. These 3 people must unanimously agree on the final candidate.

Job Posting

The job posting is written by the team leader and confirmed by the committee. It is written in the style of a letter to a friend and it includes our salary and experience expectations and a video introducing us and what we are looking for in terms of the person that we would like to hire. The posting explains our interview process:

• We would like them to submit with their resume (preferably hosted online rather than a PDF or other document) a short video on why us, why they think they are a fit, what they would like to achieve with us, and what excites them about their profession.
• If we are looking for a developer we would like a link to their GitHub profile and 3 examples of open source code they have contributed to if possible.

Questions

The team leader compiles the questions to ask potential candidates during all interview stages and, once agreed to by the committee, a scorecard is created to rate every question for each candidate at every interview stage by each committee member, individually. The goal is to capture each committee members insights, in a quantifiable way, for each question, as they are answered so that we can be as subjective as possible, limit group think, and remove the problem of the last person spoken with is the one we remember the best.

Scorecard

The team leader compiles the scorecard that the hiring committee will use to evaluate candidates at all three interview stages. The committee reviews and agrees to the scorecard and once confirmed it is shared with the company to solicit further feedback and improvement.

Posting

The posting and the scorecard are shared with the company to solicit as much feedback as possible. Once agreed to the committee posts the position to our community, on our blog and relevant job boards - we have had our best success with Stack Overflow and We Work Remotely - sometimes too successful so be absolutely prepared to receive more applications that you expect. Clear your calendar.

Compiling

The team lead qualifies all initial responses. Everyone who responds to the post with a video gets a response from us regardless of whether or not they are moving to the next round in the hiring process. All those that the team lead decides to interview are added to a Trello board that is shared with the company.

Each candidate has initial scores on the scorecard as determined by the team lead from their job post response and they are further tracked on the Trello board as a card moving across the various interview stages to an offer is made and finally onboarding, whatever columns at the time tracks the workflow correctly.

Offer

If the hiring committee can unanimously agree on 1 candidate an offer is made in the form of a letter to the candidate to join the company on a 3 month trial contract. If the committee can’t unanimously agree, then the search continues.

Acceptance

Upon acceptance of the offer letter, a contract for the initial 3 month period is drafted and provided to the candidate for acceptance.

Onboarding

Upon acceptance of the contract, onboarding begins and we have one card on the Trello board for each of the following tasks and the lead person on the hire is responsible for coordinating moving all cards to Done.

Before the new person begins the following cards need to be completed.

• Contract to Accounting
• Banking and payroll information to Accounting
• Hours spreadsheet set up by Accounting if part-time
• Computer hardware and software purchases
• A picture for software profiles
• Account setup for all systems that we use 

Trial Period

Over the next 90 days these cards need to be completed:

• Fresh eyes; the new person goes to our website and signs up for our applications and and they compile their feedback on the process
• Rise Vision product training
• Company overview training
• Expense submission training
• Blog post writing, branding, and social media posting training
• Support training
• Support shadowing (3 Business Days)
• One-On-One Interviews (1 per business day till done)
• Support (next 7 Business Days)
• Your team training day (Business Day 11)
• 90 Day Decision - Are We A Good Fit? And if so, sign up the final agreement, if not, no harm done, arrange to get everything back and close out their accounts