Week 26: back to basics on recruitment
I’m back helping GovTech Barbados recruit their first delivery team. This is a bumper edition covering the last two weeks.
Writing job descriptions
We’re helping GovTech recruit a team of contractors. Part of this recruitment will be a test of whether we can find the people we need locally.
My time in the first week went on writing job descriptions that mirror the DDaT roles. We’re looking for one of each of the following:
- Service Designer
- Interaction Designer
- Content Designer
- User Researcher
- Front-end Developer
- Full Stack Developer
- Cloud Infrastructure Developer
Designing the recruitment process
A simple timeline with a few decisions to make. Do we have a deadline? Do we leave the jobs open while we’re advertising? When and how do we interview? Who’s going to do all the coordination? All of this is fairly straightforward, but GovTech is starting from scratch, so we’re going right back to basics, to get to the point where experienced people will take the roles seriously and we can clearly communicate the interview process.
This has also been helpful in showing how long it’ll actually take to get seven people in position. We estimate it’ll take 36 hours of interviewing and discussing before we get the right people, and that’s not accounting for the time spent looking at CVs and arranging interviews.
Small wins
GovTech bought a licence for Greenhouse, the recruiting tool that’s going to reduce the time it takes to hire people and help them coordinate all the recruitment they need to do. It’s a very small thing.
Outside of work, I’ve been getting quite a bit of climbing done. Chamonix is bustling, as it’s the Mont Blanc Marathon this weekend.