Week 30: a full-time recruiter
I’m working with GovTech Barbados to help them recruit their initial development team, so we can start delivering digital services, hopefully from sometime in August.
This week has been all over the place. I feel like I’ve done everything and nothing at the same time, but I’m sure I’ve made progress.
I’ve mostly been:
- thinking about the team we’ll need for the next phase of work
- arranging interviews for the tech roles we’re recruiting for
- trying to get Zoom and Greenhouse to play nicely together, without much luck.
Feeling like a full-time recruiter
My colleague and I had a big recruitment planning session earlier in the week about how we’re actually going to make this happen and who we might need in the team.
Alongside that, I’ve been scheduling a hell of a lot of interviews. I feel like a full-time recruiter at the moment. I guess that’s the gig when you’re trying to help build a GDS-like organisation for Barbados.
We’re using a tool called Greenhouse, which is, dare I say, an industry-standard applicant tracking system that’s supposed to make our lives easier. It’s one of those tech products with a lot of features, probably far too many. We’re only using about 10% of it, and then you figure out that the thing you need is in the 90% you’re not using, so you have to set it up and get it going. Once it works, it does a lot for you. It emails the candidate, they pick from some times that suit them, you get the times back and invite them to an interview. It’s fairly painless, and a lot less painful than going backwards and forwards by email and managing it all manually.
Designing how recruitment works
We’re moving very quickly at the moment, trying to get everything set up and make sure we’ve got enough time to do it all. We’re probably going to leave a bit of a mess behind with the recruiting. We had over 100 applicants, and we still need to work out how we let people down who aren’t going forward.
There’s a feature in Greenhouse for creating a pool of future applicants. We’re certainly going to do that for people who applied from Barbados, because in the not-too-distant future we’ll be recruiting people who don’t yet have the skills for these roles but are interested in them, so we can start to teach them how to do the jobs. We’ll be looking across government for these people too.
There’s actually quite a lot of design work in designing how recruitment works, as anyone who has recruited people or designed a recruitment process knows. It’s not as easy as collecting CVs and interviewing people. There’s all the tidying up, and being nice to people at the end if they didn’t get the job.
We’ve got a lot left to do in a short time. I want to make sure we get GovTech to a point where they are managing recruitment themselves in the future, although they’ll still need some help. So far that’s mostly meant making a big list of the things we need to do, knowing we won’t be able to do all of them.
Hopefully, as part of the next phase of work, we’ll start to recruit the senior management team for GovTech. It’s basically building an organisation, and it feels very rough and startup-y at the moment. My colleague reminded me that we can’t be too much like a startup, because we’re building a government organisation and we need to be careful with that.
Next week is pretty much back-to-back interviews. I’m only on this two days a week at the moment, and I’m trying to squeeze quite a lot into those two days.
Outside of work
I got out for a climb and a few runs. I’m training for a 50K race at the end of September, and I’m a little behind where I should be.
Have a good weekend.