WalkTheChat

[Hiring tips] 7 Ways WalktheChat Finds New Talent

Thomas Graziani

Since the beginning of 2020, WalktheChat experienced accelerating growth: we became the first Shopify Sales Channel enabling sales to China, started offering Douyin and Kuaishou marketing services to our clients, and expanded our Tmall operations.

This growth came with a lot of pressure on our operations team. We quickly realized something: our recruitment process wasn’t on par with the company’s momentum.

We dived in, and from interviews with other entrepreneurs to HR books, completely revamped our hiring methodology. Here are some of the changes we implemented.

Goodbye Job Descriptions, hello Performance Profiles

The first and most momentous change we made to the recruitment pipeline was getting rid of Job Descriptions altogether.

A Typical job description usually follows the following format:

This format is boring and undifferentiated. Our job descriptions looked the same as any other one in the industry. Why would talented people choose us?

Taking inspiration from Lou Adler’s book “Hire with your head” (thank you Jess from Kaiterra for recommending!), we converted our old job descriptions into Performance Profiles.

What are Performance Profiles? They are not a boring list of what people will do. Instead, they are a concrete description of the KPI’s the new hire will be expected to achieve on the job.

Here’s what our old Job Description for Account Managers used to contain:

Responsibilities

Instead, the performance profile takes a much more down-to-earth approach (this is just a fragment of a much longer profile):

Account manager performance objectives

This new Performance Profile approach had several benefits. First, it attracted a much higher breed of candidates. Talented candidates would get excited by the clear and demanding requirements, while subpar candidates would get overwhelmed and give up before even applying.

Another benefit is that it triggered conversations when candidates would not perfectly match the Performance Profile. In which case, we would re-work the profile to see if we could make it match the candidate.

Sometimes, it meant that we had forgotten some elements in the profile. Other times, we discovered a brand new position that we didn’t know we were trying to hire for (that is how we hired our first Revenue Manager, an expert in charge of increasing the sales of WalktheChat clients).

Provide substantial referral bonuses

We found that referral bonuses, both internally and externally, are an excellent way to source candidates. We offer between 5,000 to 10,000 RMB bonus for different positions to anyone who introduces a candidate, and we’re thinking of increasing these amounts.

Referral bonuses are great on many accounts:

Make it fun

Your hiring strategy should, to a large extent, reflect your culture. We had taken the first step by creating the Performance Profiles, that reflect the demanding work culture at WalktheChat.

But working at WalktheChat is not just demanding. We also offer a fun, relaxed, people-friendly working environment (our track record speaks for itself: in 6 years, only 3 people voluntarily left our company… and some of them still drop by to attend our monthly meetings!)

Given the fact that we were pretty desperate to hire, we jokingly mentioned that we would take new talents dead or alive. WalktheChat early employees are also huge Rick & Morty fans, so our new recruiting campaign was born.

Of course, we do not expect all of our new recruits to be Rick & Morty fans, or even to have heard of the show.

But even for people who haven’t seen Rick & Morty (though, really, they should) the job ads give a feeling of a quirky company, where people don’t take themselves too seriously and are overall a bit weird. That’s us.

Design a real interview process

We use to have an unstructured interview process, which had more to do with “fit” than a real assessment of capabilities. Often candidates would have the feeling of going through the same interview several times, without much coming out of it.

Instead, we started taking a much more scientific approach to interviews:

Conduct a proper reference check

The first point about reference checks is that too many companies skip them. No matter what, you should conduct reference checks.

There is a reason why reference checks get skipped. All too often, reference calls can turn into a pleasant conversation about how great the candidate is. No one likes to ruin opportunities for their former colleagues.

However, you can gather a lot of information by calling a candidate’s past employer and asking some real probing questions. Here are the types of questions we are asking during reference checks:

By asking job-specific questions, you will get some insights about the candidate’s capabilities. Don’t miss this crucial step.

Leverage headhunters

We hadn’t leveraged headhunters in the past, and from my conversations I realized that few entrepreneurial company do.

That is a big mistake.

We hired tremendous profiles from headhunters. And we found these few rules to help:

Stay organized

The last thing you need to do is to stay organize. Many companies keep track of their hiring process via out of date excels that nobody has access to. Interviewers give feedback to the HR department that no one else can check, and meeting notes get lost over time.

It is crucial you keep detailed data about candidates performance during interviews. Sometimes, you will want to get back to an earlier candidate and you will have forgotten pretty much every detail of the interview. Other times, you will want to check back on the interview performance of someone you hired (usually because they’re performing exceptionally well or poorly).

The system doesn’t have to be complicated. At WalktheChat, we simply use an Asana board (but some more specialized solutions such as Recruitee also exist, although they are costly)

After each interview, be consistent about writing the reasons for rejecting the candidate or moving them to the next round. This will save you a lot of time on the long run.

Conclusion

Recruiting is hard, but it can be made easier. By designing a solid recruitment process, you will truly build a company where it feels good to work.

This article is heavily inspired by two books: “Who: the A method for hiring” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street and “Hire with your head” by Lou Adler.

Thank you also to Liam and Jess from Kaiterra for sharing insights about their own recruiting process. You can check more about their own positions via https://learn.kaiterra.com/career

And of course, WalktheChat is still hiring. Here are the links to some of our latest job openings:

And much more: designers, front-end programmers, back-end programmers… interested in joining us? Feel free to reach out!