Article: Reimagine hiring for tomorrow: Will culture-fit be the new pivot?

Culture

Reimagine hiring for tomorrow: Will culture-fit be the new pivot?

An exciting session by Ankur Warikoo, CEO of Nearbuy on practical tips and initiatives for culture-fit hiring and his experiences on how the hiring process doesnt stop candidates onboarding at TA League Annual Conference, 2017

“The true merit of starting the company is to build an organization where people would really love to come and work.” These were the opening lines of Ankur Warikoo, CEO of Nearbuy at the session titled ‘Reimagine hiring for tomorrow’ at People Matters TA League Annual Conference, 2017.

At the session, he gave practical tips on culture-fit hiring and shared his experiences of Nearbuy’s hiring process and candidates’ onboarding experience. He explained, “When it comes to HR – we are dealing with humans, we are not dealing with systems, processes or technology, simply we are dealing with human psychology. At the end, it all boils down to- how you make an individual feel at the end of the very exercise.”

Ankur Warikoo shared at the session the fundamental ideas implemented at Nearbuy. He elucidated that, “The job of every recruiter starts from the minus one month to plus 3 months when the individual has joined the organization - it is actually 4 months window period.  Whatever we do in these 4 months – it needs to be impeccably executed.”

The fundamental needs to be broken into 3 parts:  

  1. How do you source your candidates?
  2. How do you recruit them?
  3. How do you welcome them?

He avers, “I fundamentally believe-in 'sourcing needs' to look from leadership view of what hiring is all about. If your CEO, your manager, your founder is not aligned to how critical hiring sourcing process is- you will spend wasteful money and time running after people whether its campus hiring, job listing portals, Linked In subscription etc.  At Nearbuy, we began hiring by asking fundamental question – who is that we want to source and we created a persona. We identified three personas – three different types of people – we wish to have at Nearbuy. Then we chartered out to understand - where these individuals spend their time, what is that they do when they are not looking for a job. Then we figure out that most of the individuals we want to hire are spending time on social media be it Facebook , Linkedin , Snapchat etc. So, we thought it is important to create footprints on these platforms that will speak about us, our organization but is not selling us. 

How Quora and other social media platforms used for hiring? 

Ankur talked about very important platform Quora, where intellectual community basically the ones they want to hire in technology were using it. So, he explained – how Quora, a social media platform was used for the hiring of Nearbuy. 

“Lot of the community that we wish to hire particularly in technology was hanging around on Quora. So, I doubled down on Quora and experienced it for next three months. From Quora alone, we have received around 11,000 applications. We explored other mediums Linkedin, Snapchat and Facebook too. We never posted any job openings on these platforms we focused on building an identity for ourselves. We got positive responses from these mediums.”

People join set ups where they feel they belong 

Ankur explains, “People don’t buy what you do rather they buy why you do it. When candidates have two choices in front of them – one is very well funded startup and another one is perhaps equally capable but has a leadership or has a culture that has been very well established as creating a ‘why’ for the organization. This is where people will go.  People usually join communities where they feel they are part of. They just don’t want to be clinical.”

Candidate interview experience project 

“When people come to interview at Nearbuy,  we run a critical candidate interview experience project,  where every single individual who comes in  is treated with utmost respect because they have gone through our earlier processes. We share LinkedIn profile of people whom they are going to meet. We give them the tour of Nearbuy.  We give them Nearbuy credits which they can use. We give them some nice happy giveaways but more importantly, we take their feedback when the entire process is done. We grade the interviewer which flows back to their annual appraisal cycle.  

So, invite people rather than fetching them and go down to basics like – how to recruit and be very systematic, scalable, and reflective of checks and balances you wish to have in your organization and don’t stop hiring until three months. Most importantly, don’t use humans to predict whether that person is going to stay or not,” says Ankur Warikoo, Nearbuy. 

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Topics: Culture, #Hiring, #TalentAcquisition2017

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