Under New Management: How Leading Organizations Are Upending Business as Usual by David Burkus

Author:David Burkus [Burkus, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2016-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

Different Teams Require Different Team Hiring Methods

Whole Foods started hiring as a team because teams work closely with each other on the store floor. But surprisingly, even companies that work entirely with teams distributed virtually across the globe benefit from a hiring process that allows them to gain experience working closely with their future colleagues. The web development company Automattic does this by holding auditions for new candidates, a step in the hiring process they call “trials.”

Founded by Matt Mullenweg, Automattic is the maker of WordPress software, the most popular blogging platform on the Internet. The 450-person company has employees in thirty-seven countries around the world, though it keeps an office in San Francisco that functions like a coworking space.11 In the early years, Mullenweg hired the traditional way, screening résumés and conducting interviews. While Automattic would sometimes have candidates interact with a panel of current employees, Mullenweg was disappointed every time someone who seemed like a good fit ended up not being one—and sometimes up to one-third of new hires didn’t work out.

Mullenweg needed a better way. He concluded that the traditional process allowed too much influence from factors that didn’t really contribute to performance once a candidate was hired. What mattered was not just how well candidates would work, but how well they would work with their team. To get a sense of this, the best thing to do was to get them working. So Mullenweg overhauled Automattic’s process and made the cornerstone of the new process the trial.

“Trials as a hiring technique really came from trial-and-error,” he explained. “We noticed in the early days that some of our best people were coming from our open source area. They’d built things that worked with WordPress, and when we hired them, they did great work.”12 Candidates applying to work at Automattic still have their résumé reviewed by Mullenweg, and they still receive a fairly traditional initial interview. However, the next step breaks drastically from tradition. Candidates who seem like a good match get a chance to try out for their position.

Automattic places them on a real project team and even gives them all of the security access and permissions they need to work like an already hired employee. Candidates applying to work in customer support are put right in front of customers. Engineering candidates write real code. Designers design. While one person supervises the candidate during the trial, candidates interact with more people in the company as it progresses. Because Automattic is a distributed company and teams work virtually, candidates can work anywhere and at any time. Most work during their trial for ten to twenty hours per week, often before or after their current job. Automattic pays every candidate a standard, and fair-market, hourly wage.

The trial period can last anywhere from three to eight weeks, depending on the person and the project. The intent isn’t necessarily to have the candidate complete a project. Instead, the trial period takes as long as is needed for the team to make

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