Week 27: a small, momentous step
I’m working with GovTech Barbados to help them recruit their first delivery team.
This week we’ve:
- implemented Greenhouse, their new applicant tracking system
- talked realistically about how long it’ll take to get a team of new people up and running
Greenhouse is an applicant tracking system. I’ve used it before to hire people, but I’d never actually set it up. I felt it was easier to figure it out and do it myself than to try to coach someone else through something I’d never done before. We then had a call to show the CEO how to post jobs and make them live, and I’m trying to make sure GovTech own it from now on. It’s all part of my continual effort to remove blockers and get some forward momentum, so there’s a team around the CEO. Getting some jobs live is a small, momentous step for GovTech. So far, they’ve received 51 applications across seven roles.
Alongside that, we talked through the timeline for recruiting people and everything that’s involved in building a team (forming, storming and norming) before it’s ready to deliver. There are no right or wrong answers here. GovTech will need to recruit people to fill these jobs anyway. The idea is that they’d recruit people locally, and we’d help build the capability for that.
On that note, I had a really good chat with a Public Digital colleague this morning about the apprenticeship schemes they worked on with Hackney Council. Interesting stuff, given where Barbados is now, and great to know we have this capability. I’d love to get something like this going in Barbados in the future.
Outside of work, I’ve got a couple of good days of climbing in. It’s been amazingly hot here, with temperatures pushing 30 degrees most days. You can feel the glaciers melting. From here you can see Mont Blanc (the big rounded mountain) and the Bossons Glacier, and below it the gap the glacier has left as it’s retreated over the last decade or so. It’s mind-boggling to think that this glacier once came almost down to my apartment, and it’s never coming back.
I hope you all have a great weekend.