Somewhere Blog

Hey lovely people, 

Somewhere’s on the road again!

While Luc’s visiting exciting companies in Hamburg today, we’re preparing our upcoming visits to new cities. And our next stop is Barcelona on April 3rd and 4th! 

We’ll be visiting some companies and hubs, meeting inspiring people such as TedXBarcelona as well as young professionals such as the amazing ESADE community, and of course, doing some feet-dipping in the ocean!

We’ll be also hosting a ‘Somewhere in Barcelona’ event at the brand new betahaus (which is not ready yet, but already looking great!) and we’re looking forward in meeting many old and new friends there. Come join us for a beer and let’s exchange insights about how we can create a happy world of work! 

Sign up here and join us! 

Get in touch with nina@somewherehq.com or duncan@somewherehq.com if you’d like to chat.

Cheers!

We speak to loads and loads of companies about how they find and recruit people. Suffice to say, most of them find it extraordinarily challenging and headache-inducing. They’re often locked in a cycle of hope-enthusiasm-desperation-dismay-disappointment.

It’s without doubt the biggest problem facing the majority of organisations. And the people at the forefront of such efforts probably need a hug as much as anything.

That, or milk and cookies.

The good news is that there ways to sooth recruiting headaches and tackle the two biggest challenges; that of quality and timing. Think of them as milk and cookies.

Quality (a.k.a milk)

Finding quality prospects (as the industry calls them) is not simply about finding someone who’s able to do a job. It’s about finding someone who will thrive and succeed at their job and with their work. 

CVs have traditionally been the primary tool to assess someone’s quality, and yet everyone pretty much agrees  they’re not good indicators of someone’s potential, value and quality. This is because they tell you what someone’s done, but not what they’re like. And what they’re like is a bigger determinant of a good fit and successful work.

An amazing number of companies still rely on CVs as the primary screening mechanism of people, typically channelled and collected in an ATS (that’s an Applicant Tracking System).

The typical story we hear from companies is that they promote a vacancy and get flooded with hundreds of applications into their ATS. Of that amount, usually there are only a small handful even worth considering. Many companies see this as a ‘cost of recruitment’, when actually it’s not only a waste of time but a failure to screen for quality from the outset. 

What’s even worse is that with all that quantity of clunky CVs, you’re almost guaranteed to miss some of the people who might be your greatest ever finds.

So if you’re relying on an ATS and CVs as the heart of your recruitment strategy, you’re likely not solving the problem of quality.

Timing (a.k.a cookies)

This is the one that is most thorny. Companies tend to actively recruit when they have the most urgent need. Which means now (or yesterday). So they’re effectively locked into the last minute hiring shuffle. This frequently becomes a stressful, time-consuming and expensive exercise as you get more and more desperate. The typical scenario being that you hire the least worse person (the so-called best of the desperate).

We often ask companies what they think the chances are of finding exactly the right person at exactly the point in time they need them. They get this faraway look as they realise that it’s probably quite close to 0%.

This facet of the recruitment industry, that it’s literally designed to fail, is something that continues to confound and inspire us. Suffice to say, the companies who take a more ‘always on’ approach to finding great people, so that when the urgent need arises they have good potential fits on hand, will win out over the addicts of reactive recruitment.

Where are my milk and cookies?!

Thankfully there are many inspiring companies out there who understand smart recruitment is about more than filling a pipeline. Hint: it’s also about telling your company’s story and working out a way to find, screen, engage and manage people who genuinely fit.

We’ve noticed that great companies often build their own custom way to address issues of quality of timing (and obviously we’re crafting a platform that helps any company address this).

So if you’ve heard of (or work at) a company solving problems of quality and timing in smart ways, send a tweet with their details cc’ing @somewhereHQ with the hashtag #milkandcookies.

We’ll start sharing some examples too. In the meantime…

Somewhere’s service manager Matilda had a chat with Duncan, co-founder and collaborator and Conor, product/service designer, about how it is to work together at Somewhere.

Why are you working at Somewhere?

C - I like trying to solve big problems. Finding the right people to work with and spend a huge amount of your time with is a big problem. For me, Somewhere is all about radically re-imagining something which is fundamentally broken.

D - I wanted to make a documentary about work - I remember being at school and having absolutely no idea about how to connect what I was learning with what I would do when I left. As it happens, I left a lot earlier than planned! So I relied on luck to find the places where I wanted to work, and once I did, I made a conscious decision to move between jobs as often as possible so that I experienced as many different things as I could.

A few years ago I realised that I was in a position to try to solve that problem, and I started to think about filming and interview people at work. After that, because I’m a collaborator at heart, it didn’t take long before I found the others and started to create Somewhere.

What’s the best thing with working at Somewhere?

D - We’re in a position to make a difference. What we do has already had a real impact on the lives of the people who have come to us in search of inspiration and help. It didn’t take much for us to create something which very quickly started to feel relevant to people.

When I talk to people and explain what Somewhere is, their responses always validate our decisions to do this. We’ve worked hard to get where we are, and, as always, the reward for hard work is more hard work.

C - We are very collaborative and we work quickly to test and release new features. We’re not burdened by any decision making process. When we discover what problems we should be working on, we pursue them straight away.

How do you guys work together?

D - We’re a small team at Somewhere and some of us knew each other already, but for each and every one of us it’s about sharing and trust. You have to trust people in order to share your opinions, and you have to trust one another in order to really listen to what they’re saying.

C - It’s important that you trust the people you work with. You need to be able to try ideas and not be afraid to get it wrong. So I guess you could say that Duncan and I spend our days getting it wrong! (and occasionally right)

What’s the biggest challenges you’re facing on a weekly basis? And why?

C - As you are responsible for you own work the big challenge is make the right decisions and then move fast enough to follow up on those decisions. It’s very rewarding to be shaping a new product that hasn’t existed before but that obviously come with it’s own challenges.

D - Some weeks it feels like a race against time, other weeks is a fight to remember there are other people in the room, but most of the time my biggest challenge is what to do next. There is so much we have left to do, we’ve made a tiny, tiny dent in the universe and now we need to make sure it’s a permanent impression. We don’t want to exist in the quantum state of startups, we want to create a company which explicitly exists and grows.



Somewhere’s looking for a ‘Code Maker and Breaker’ at the moment. How would you describe what that is?

D - The code maker part is someone who can write code. We use Ruby on Rails, so to be very specific it’s someone who has a decent amount of experience there. But the code breaker part is the harder part of the job. When we talk about Code Breaking what we mean is someone who can listen, interpret, embellish and improve us.

So, the Code Maker & Breaker we’re looking for is a collaborator and a translator. We’re not looking for someone to perform technical gymnastics, but we are looking for someone who can make a mental leap even if it involves “less code”.

What can a ‘Code Maker and Breaker’ learn at Somewhere?

D - It’s very open. Specifically we’re a very lean, iterative and responsive company. We aren’t ruled by metrics but we do look to them for understanding. We test and validate our assumptions as much as possible, but that doesn’t mean they always override our own opinions.

Come work for Somewhere and we’ll teach you some bad habits, plenty of good ones, and many ways in which to reach a decision. And there’s a world of tech to be built around Somewhere too. We have a decent framework with a lot of the dry stuff already made - come join us and skip the boring days..