The art of interaction: How to find and keep top employees

1. Joe Griston
Director, People & Talent @ freelancer.com
The art of interaction:
How to find and keep top employees
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Joe Griston
Director, People & Talent, freelancer.com
Over the past 4 years I have hired 600 of the world’s most in-demand
people. I source, architect and scale world-class teams for a tech company
that is disrupting the planet. I have achieved this without a large budget and
with a very small team. Hopefully today you will all take away actionable
outcomes which will help you achieve the same.
Today’s speaker

4. The Problem
The Situation
The Solution
The Future
Agenda

5. The situation
All teach the same idea regarding running any business.
• People
• Product
• Market

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The problem

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Today:
• There is no ‘War For Talent’.
• Awesome employees are not hard to find.
• The backbone of your business is ready to work hard and
wanting to be found.
The issue is that the recruitment process is
completely broken.
• CV’s are the most useless document ever created.
• Sending CV’s to an email address does not mean it will be
read.
• Corporate SLA’s dictate stupid process.
• Interviews are sometimes a farce.
• Decision makers may have no ability to make a decision.
• Over-selling is rife.
The problem
The recruitment process is the only internal
business process yet to be fully disrupted. It
is a hangover that is centuries old. The world
of work today is very different to how it was
years ago, therefore why is this ancient
activity still happening???

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The situation

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The situation

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Why am I telling you this?
The actions, thoughts and behaviour
of others can be dictated by you.
Don’t believe me?
The situation

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Finding a candidate:
You own and operate a small business, money is everything. Why spend it on expensive job boards
hoping the right candidate sees the advert and applies? You have other choices.
• Headhunt yourself – technology makes it easy. Candidates
are savvy to bad recruitment techniques.
―Never ever ever send a mass mailer.
―Never ever ever over-sell your opportunity.
―Never use words like Dynamic, Ninja, Rock Star, Guru, Gun etc.
―Be as different as you possibly can be to everyone else.
The only important aspect of headhunting is to start a
conversation, thats it. So how?
In a world full of over-eager recruiters promising the world, do
the opposite. DO THE OPPOSITE! Understand the less you
tell someone about a subject, the more intrigued they become.
The solution

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The solution

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Take your mind out of the past!
Why look for someone with 10 years plus experience of a certain subject or a certain technology or a
certain CRM?
If it takes someone 10 years to become good at a subject, then they surely cant be a good employee.
If I do something every single day for 6 months, I should have mastered that subject after 6 months,
otherwise I am terrible at it.
Education is now very different to years ago.
The solution

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So I have their attention, now what?
The first interaction and the first office visit forms the ultimate opinion of any
candidate, don't mess it up!
• Compliment skill sets, this has never upset anyone.
• Do not cancel interviews.
• Do not make candidates wait to be interviewed.
• Do not take a long time to arrange an interview.
If a candidate is good then they will have a choice of where to work.
Understand you have to make a positive impact. Do it subtly.
The solution

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The interview is obviously important, its not only about the questions
asked, but how you ask the questions.
Soft skills can be easily proven – ask the right question, the right way.
Examples
• Fake pound coin.
• Hammer and nail.
An interview process reflects what a company is like to work for. If you
interview 1 person 7 times over a 3 month period in order to come to a
hiring decision, potentially your company is filled with bureaucracy and
a frustrating place to work.
Treat candidates nicely, make decisions quickly.
Offer effectively and differently, understand the emotional impact of a salary.
The solution

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The end result of a successful recruitment process is either:
• Traditional
A candidate expecting the ultimate job experience, and ok with what
they are getting paid.
• Modern
From following the steps as outlined, a candidate is starting a new job
highly excited by the challenge, looking forward to making their impact
and excited by their new colleagues, at the same time ecstatic about
their salary.
Which is better?
The solution

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How to manage employees - from a recent article on www.startups.co.uk
Joe Griston, European regional director at Freelancer.com, feels the same.
His crowdsourcing marketplace has implemented radical candour ever since the company’s inception in 2009 and has extended
this technique to its open disclosure approach – employees see all of the information that the CEO sees, including revenue:
“Every single employee has access to all this data and they constantly analyse this information. It is a real meritocracy where
everyone’s opinion is equal, as every opinion is provable by data”; Griston tells Startups.co.uk.
For Griston, impromptu and open feedback helps make workers feel more reassured and relaxed, because they know exactly
where they stand:
“I have never understood yearly performance reviews. Why would I wait months to tell someone they did a good or bad job? [It]
makes zero sense to me. It also creates a culture of fear as these reviews make employees nervous.
“If every employee always knows their exact value to the company, they feel empowered and are easily rewarded, or they know
exactly where they need to improve. This creates an amazing culture, without the need to hire middle managers, usually of
dubious quality, to try and fix culture by implementing processes or games, this rarely works.”
Griston’s advice for a start-up considering adopting radical candour? Go for it – “The world of work today is very different from
how it was 20 years ago, so why are you using 20-year-old management techniques?”
The future

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The 2 Pizza Rule - The Jeff Bezos secret to productivity.
The more people in a meeting, the less productive the meeting will be.
The more people in a team, the less productive the team will be.
Think about this.
freelancer.com is a company comprised of 23 Product Teams.
These teams push code to the live site on average 40 times a day.
15% of revenue spent on marketing, no more, marketing is SEO and Adwords.
All other growth to 23 million users by machine learning, ai, a/b testing and
funnel optimisation.
The future

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The future: freelancer.com office

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