Uncomplicate – How to build a team of top performers
Uncomplicate by Freshworks brings you crisp and insightful videos which will focus on answering one tactical question around sales & marketing, support & collaboration, employee engagement, and growth.
The concept of speed dating is fairly familiar today. A group of individuals meets potential dating partners for a very short period of time. But how is this concept relevant to the recruitment process of a B2B sales platform?
Mathias Thulin, founder of GetAccept, tweaked this popular concept to arrive at a process that simplifies yet strengthens the recruitment process of his organization.
When you have nearly 30 people in five different rooms, make them interact with various people including one of the company’s four founders, and toss up challenging questions, you get right into the eye of the storm, eliminating a tedious selection process. “You need to stand out, you need to be unique,” says Mathias.
Finding the right people for your organization is crucial, and Mathias has come up with many such innovations to narrow down and finetune the recruitment process.
GetAccept has grown from 27 employees to over 100 in just one year, with presence in seven countries. Mathias attributes much of this rapid growth to finding the right employees, or “stars” as he refers to them. He emphasizes the importance of creating “a home of stars” for an organization to scale successfully.
Look beyond the obvious
With methods such as the adapted speed dating, you scan candidates beyond the obvious hiring checklist. For instance, Mathias’ team makes note of how people interact with other candidates and employees of GetAccept while they are waiting for their interviews to begin.
On the other end of the spectrum, Mathias also uses innovative methods such as VR recruitment, where candidates are placed in virtual situations to sell the product to different stakeholders in different situations.
Finally, every organization has its own set of culture codes and a particular method to the madness. They are unique in their functioning, and checking to ensure that a potential candidate is a good fit requires a customized checklist. For Mathias, this is achieved by the GetAccept score – “a combination of cognitive tests, personal tests, and what we think is our ideal fit,” he explains. This score is the final step that decides if a candidate becomes an employee.
Recruiting is the beginning, retention is the journey
GetAccept boasts an amazing figure of less than 1% monthly attrition. All the effort you put into recruiting a great hire goes to vain if you do not have adequate benefits and processes in place that makes them stay. “The onboarding actually starts at the very first instance you meet a candidate,” explains Mathias.
With the rapidly changing business landscape, monetary rewards are not the highest gratification that employees seek anymore. “People are constantly looking for ways to improve their skills.” GetAccept offers weekly programs to make sure that all employees are constantly challenged and have scope for personal and professional growth.
Aside from this, the company runs “GetNext”, a program to ensure that every employee has a clear idea of where their careers are headed. “We want to hire people starting at the SDR level, but that is the hardest position. So we always put employees in squads to ensure opportunity for growth.” Mathias swears by forming squads and giving employees the opportunity to work directly with account executives, customer success teams, etc. This not only ensures that employees don’t get bored but they can also see their efforts being validated.
When you take adequate measures to ensure the comfort and growth of your employees, they will not only remain loyal, they are also more likely to refer good candidates to you in the future.
While these methods are crucial to building your team, the foundation upon which strong hiring culture is built takes us back to the basics. “First thing is to make sure you have a great vision that you are 100% transparent with, so everyone is aligned with your goal,” he reminds us. Mathias suggests working with objectives and key results (OKRs) to structure a lot of different tasks, thereby enabling visibility and alignment within the organization.
Ultimately though, all of this is secondary to how you treat your employees. People spend most of their time at their place of work, so it is your job to make sure they feel at home.
This is something that our CEO Girish Mathrubootham firmly believes in as well, and is an integral part of the Freshworks culture. You have to enjoy what you do, and coming to work every day should be fun! It’s the era of work-life integration, not work-life balance.
“It’s very simple,” says Mathias. “Keep them happy, and they will stay.”
(This post was co-produced by Praveen Ramesh.)
