Hiring and the hiring process

00:00 Hello and welcome to Perspective. This is a show by founders of small indie creative agencies giving our perspective on starting and running our own companies. The aim is to provide some useful advice and inspiration to others as well as learn from each other and others we may get to come talk on the show.

00:14 This is our fifth episode. My name is John Dark. I'm a director of Every Interaction and with me as always I have Dan Ghent from Lighthouse London. Hello Dan. Hey John, how's it going?

00:25 I'm very well. How are you? Yeah, good. Fantastic. Had a little hiatus over Christmas and New Year while we did the natural break holidays both forced and abroad.

00:42 Yeah, I think that was respectful of the season. Yes, nice to switch off. Do you guys shut down completely over Christmas and New Year?

00:54 We do, yeah. So we try and go from something just before Christmas Eve through till first Monday in January.

01:05 A little bit of work went on this year. There's a project which needed a little bit done on it and without any conjolment a couple of the lighthouse guys stepped up and said they wanted to do it over Christmas.

01:23 So I was in two minds about whether to let them really because I sort of want people to have holiday but at the same time they're young and have got more energy than me.

01:35 So maybe it's fine. Anyway, I just basically made sure to every day go you can say no, it's fine. You don't have to. You can say no now.

01:46 You can say no now. Why don't you say no? Say no to it. All right, you can do it. Thank you. So yeah, it's nice to shut down at Christmas. We do a similar thing on a usually the depends on Christmas lands, I guess, but usually the Friday before the Christmas, whatever it was this year, the 19th.

02:08 We shut down and yeah, I didn't start up again until the 4th. So it was a good two weeks off for everybody. Yeah, absolutely. We do still sort of reserve the right to say, you know, if it is completely choker, then, you know, there's some things we need to do.

02:26 Then we can't afford to take those days off, but we will always endeavor to try to do so. Yeah, it's not the kind of given that it will happen, but I just personally have never found much use in working every Christmas.

02:43 I think it's good to make make everyone take that time off. Yeah, I remember back in the agency days and one of the few people in the office, the non-family people, turning up and because I didn't want to take my holiday time during Christmas and turning up and literally having nothing to do, probably going to the pub at lunchtime and not coming back.

03:04 Yes, that obviously is great. But like you say, we're not much point in it. And yeah, just kind of give people time off and they get a load of energy and then they come back with that, I think.

03:17 Yeah, and it's a perk of the job, I think, just saying that, you know, we aim to always take Christmas off as well as whatever else you offer along with it. It's something enticing, I think, to someone working at a company.

03:30 Yeah, completely. And that leads nicely into our topic today, which is hiring and employees. Yeah. So just to give people a little bit of context about, you know, our state at the moment and our size and where we're at in our sort of company development.

03:50 Now, every interaction, we are currently a team of five full-time people and that consists of myself, my fellow director and two full-time more visual UI designers and full-time more user experience, information architect style designer.

04:10 Mm-hmm. So that makes up us today. What about you guys? You are five people as well, am I right? Yeah, same. Just became five people at the beginning of this year. Myself, co-founder Tom, then a designer and two developers, if you were going to draw a line in the murky waters of what constitutes design and development in web.

04:37 But yeah, that's roughly it. Yeah, so five people at the moment. Cool. You guys have been four for quite a while, haven't you? We had for about a year before that. So I think we last hired November 2014.

04:59 Okay. And then at the end of 2015, we started looking for a developer. Good. Glad you found someone.

05:09 Mm-hmm. We found one. So when the business, like you've just been through, decides that another employee is needed, how do you guys go about looking for that new person? What have you found that works for you? What have you tried? What doesn't work? What does?

05:26 I think industry job boards is how we've always done it. So different ones each time. The first couple of times, it was like authentic jobs, if you've seen that one.

05:40 I know and have used that one. Yeah. This time, actually, it was Unicorn Hunt. Yeah, I've used that too. That's the three beards, right? That's the three beards one. Yeah. And actually, we got our first ever hire using the three beards newsletter.

05:56 So we kind of, Unicorn Hunt is the souped-up version of that, obviously. Yeah. And that's a nice site and a nice, I thought, you know, you want where you advertise the jobs to be kind of on brand, I suppose.

06:11 It's very tech. Yeah, it's very tech. So it's good for a developer. We've tried Dribble. We've tried... So have we. Yeah, mostly. Yeah, I mean, a lot of... There's a lot of them, basically. And I think if you...

06:26 You kind of... They all seem quite reasonably priced. If you put your ad on all of them, that would become expensive, you know.

06:39 You've got to pick and choose them, yeah. And some charge a lot more than others. I mean, have you got like an upper limit that you guys would consider for a job board post cost? I think when we go out to put a job ad out there, we're sort of thinking we'll probably spend like 300, 400 quid.

06:56 Which isn't a lot, really. It's like spread betting, right? You can decide where you put that money. Yeah, exactly. So that will normally go on a couple of job boards and then we normally put ourselves in a couple of newsletters as well.

07:08 Good tactics. Yeah, well, it works. Although, like you're really just looking for the right mix. You're looking for just an amount of quality applications, isn't it? Like the worst thing is getting spammy ones.

07:28 Yes, that's unavoidable, I feel. But definitely a lot. I've definitely got a lot more spammy ones off some... Like I didn't get a lot of spammy ones off Unicorn Hunt.

07:40 Anything that's free, you get 95% spam. Yeah. We did try a LinkedIn one as well this time. Had that go.

07:50 Oh, horrible. Really? Okay. Absolutely. Just basically just a recruitment pylon. Essentially it's like sticking it as... Well, I imagine in the first world war putting your head up above the trenches and just being just being absolutely bombarded with...

08:10 That's disrespectful to people for supporting the first world war. But it's just being absolutely bombarded by recruiters, like adding you just instantly... Basically automated.

08:27 "Hi, sorry, you're looking for a job. You're looking for a developer." And you just think, "Well, I know how recruiters work, so thanks." But no.

08:43 We get those anyway, like at least once a day, sometimes several times a day, we have a phone call from an unknown caller and it's a recruiter.

08:55 And we have to explain that we don't need their services and we don't have any open positions. I had two today. Yeah, it's so depressing. And I have a fundamental policy to be nice to people.

09:14 Yeah, I don't be nasty. I don't hang up. No, I know if I was rude, it might feel good in the moment, but then I would instantly not be proud of myself.

09:27 I know that would feel bad. But you do just think, why is that the tactic in that industry? Like it's just such an awful sales tactic.

09:40 They're just middlemen and it's a necessary part of their job, I think. But what other industry attempts to sell something like that without any qualification of you to them or them to you?

09:59 That's true. But yeah, so anyway, job boards. And yeah, a couple of newsletters which I used, primarily because, and this might be something we touched on later, but I'm keen for Lighthouse to hire a mix of people.

10:17 And by that, I mean men and women. We're five men at the moment, which I'm sometimes painfully aware of in terms of, I think in tech, diversity is quite a big thing and an important thing.

10:35 And although we've become five men, I hope through a very normal process that could easily have been two men, three women, we are still five men. And I see that on our website and I think it would be nice if we all looked a bit different.

11:06 So every time we hire, I put an ad in Women Who Code newsletter and, oh, forgotten the name of it, but I think it's Girls in Tech newsletter.

11:18 So I was thinking those two, just to try and get a spectrum. Yeah, I want to, I want, you sort of want to interview equally, I suppose. I don't think you can make a decision based on someone's gender or race or anything else.

11:37 But you're not going to get to even get to make that decision if you're not interviewing a mix of people. Yeah, yeah, that's a good policy to have. I mean, two of our five are women right now.

11:51 And I actually found this 50/50 initiative the other day, which we're pledging to try and abide by. I think it's 5050initiative.org.

12:01 Interesting sort of campaign to try and encourage a more equal gender split through, especially in our industry and tech industries.

12:12 Yeah, I mean, you know, part of me wants to, I definitely think it's important because of that equality side of things.

12:23 But just purely from our business, I also look at it and, you know, over half of our clients are female.

12:33 And I just think it will make Lighthouse better. Not trying to make the world better, although that'll be lovely as well. I think just purely from a raw business perspective, if you want to hire good people, you need to project that anyone can come and work for you.

12:50 And I look at, I think, you know, my worry is that we hit a limit, right, where it's five men.

13:01 Now, how many men until a woman wouldn't want to work there? You know? And that's, yeah, I mean, that's one of my stresses of doing it. I mean, overly stressed by that, probably.

13:16 It makes a big difference to our team, I think, in that it really changes the team dynamics and also the type of work we produce, especially in being very design focused. You find that having a woman's perspective on design can change your outlook and actually the type of work you produce to some extent, especially when you're designing for specific target audiences. Sometimes the actual target audience you're designing for may be more shifted in the female end of the spectrum.

13:48 And so it's useful to have a woman's perspective on what you're doing. But just in general, in the team, it makes a massive difference, having a bit more of an equal gender split. Absolutely. I will check out that 50/50 initiative. I like the sound of it.

14:03 Yeah, I think it's a good thing to aim for. How about yourself? What other ways do you get the job out there? So obviously, a lot of very similar job boards that we do use, again, will assign a certain budget to it to try and get somebody.

14:23 We have dabbled with agents in the past. There are a few select ones that we've struck relationships with and will try using, but they are purely as backup.

14:33 We truly try to avoid them at all costs. Yeah. Just because it's extremely expensive exercise. So there was one process we went through, it would have been in 2003, where we thought what we wanted to do was to, at the moment, we were using a lot of, and now we're using a lot of external resource to do the development that we do. And that development was on the web site work that we do, which has become a smaller and smaller part of our everyday business. But as the whole responsive movement was really taking hold, we felt that having things remote was taking up a lot of time to do all the QA and management and communication back and forth and having it in-house would be better.

15:30 So we tried hiring a developer in-house. Turns out that wasn't the right decision to make. It didn't work out and that arrangement ended within the trial period of the job. But we used a recruiter in that instance to find that person.

15:51 And they did a very good job, to be fair. They did find a good candidate and we were quite happy with it. But the fees are expensive. I think we negotiated it down to something like 18% of the annual salary as a fee, which worked out at about six grand. And it was a lot of money.

16:14 Or maybe it was 15%. I can't remember. Anyway, it was around about six grand mark. And it was a lot of money to put on fees and it would have been worth it if it stuck out. And the person stayed with us for three years or something. But as it turns out, it didn't quite work out. And after three months, we had to part ways.

16:32 And because of that, it was a very expensive experiment. And the terms of these guys are that they do have a sort of refund policy of sorts.

16:46 But in this case, the terms were there's six weeks and every week a sixth of the total cost is removed. So after one week, you can get five, six of the money back. After two weeks, you get four, six, etc.

17:02 Until there's nothing left. And that's not enough time to determine if it's the right person for the role or not. That's why we have a three month trial period. And ever since that experience, the two agents that we have decided to experiment with since, but not actually employ anyone through, just see what they come up with.

17:25 We've forced them into agreeing to a lower rate, but also a three month cancellation policy. And tip to anyone out there who deals with agents, you can negotiate this stuff. They are all reasonably desperate for your work, as it seems.

17:44 As it would seem, as they're constantly calling you up and trying to get new business. It's a commission based industry. So it's very competitive and people are willing to do what it takes to get your business and secure more of it in the future.

18:00 So you can negotiate this stuff. Don't take whatever they tell you off the bat. But that's the only experience we've had with an agent so far. And we were burned by it, basically. So that's put us off for the future.

18:14 Yeah, I agree. We haven't used them, but I can see as you grow, it maybe becomes a necessary evil when the time to actually hire, I think, is always longer than you think it is.

18:33 Yeah, you think, oh, I need a new person. And actually, effectively, you're probably not going to have that person start for three months. And an agent could probably bring that down to six weeks, eight weeks, essentially.

18:50 Possibly. It's also your own time and resource in the business, right? So you're running the business. You haven't scheduled time to go hire someone. And over the course of the month where you're thinking about it, it may take up to an entire week of company resource to write the job post, to get it out there, to post it in all the places, to review all the candidates coming in and do the first round of filtering before you even get around to talking to people.

19:20 Yeah, it does take ages. Or emailing them back. And you feel guilty. You want to reply to everyone who took the time to reply. And you got to. I mean, one thing that we tried recently in the past couple of hires that we've made is actually upping the time that it takes on our behalf to hire someone and doing a bit of direct outbound recruitment.

19:50 So I've been actively searching for people, hunting them down and just approaching them out of the blue and seeing what happens, doing some research, basically.

20:00 Yeah, OK. Found that you can get some incredibly good results. So I just started looking around at portfolios of designers and the last designer we hired, I looked around, I think I found him on Dribble actually and checked out his portfolio, looked and found everything online I could have found.

20:19 And he was in a job at the time with another agency. And you'd be surprised how many people, if you make the effort to be courteous and just approach them, you know, it's quite flattering, I guess, to just be found out of the blue.

20:33 And you have no idea what people's situations are and if if they would even consider moving jobs. So it doesn't hurt to ask, basically. And you'd be surprised. I found with doing a bit of research and the direct direct approach approach, I found that I've probably got like 95 percent reply rate from people.

20:59 Very, very few people didn't reply. And out of the people that did reply, nearly about half of them, I'd say, were interested in talking further. Yeah, OK. Wow.

21:11 So it's not it's not a bad way to go. And the past three, maybe four, highs we've made, I think we've taken this approach. Sometimes it's through programs.

21:21 So I'm a big believer in short intensive programs to skill up general assembly is one that I am quite high regard. And they do a really good course in user experience.

21:33 And the past two user experience people that we've hired have come off of that course. Oh, right. Straight off it. Straight off that course, they had a background doing something else previously in all cases and they decided to sort of pivot in their career essentially and thought this is this is what I want to do.

21:51 And it's a good place to find people. And those courses are really good at actively promoting their recent grads. Yes. So our experience there is for developers. What it does is actually it hides how good the person is. So we were looking for a junior developer.

22:14 And so you get a lot of people that have come out of General Assembly and obviously General Assembly do a good job. They all have the same GitHub page. They all have the same projects on the GitHub.

22:26 They've all worked on the same project together. Yeah. The GitHub looks very active. Obviously it is because they've made it so you know what I mean? So actually as someone trying to choose, you kind of lose that pre-filter.

22:40 Yes. Of who's into what does this person know about this? Because General Assembly basically make everyone look like someone you want to interview.

22:51 So you end up you then have too many of them and go I can't interview all these people. So it's not I mean, God, it's not a bad thing. I'm not saying General Assembly shouldn't do that. My thing of it is like in the last round of interviews, it was like, all right, you've been to General Assembly.

23:08 I know what your GitHub looks like. I don't know anything about you now, you know, because I know someone I know you were coached through those things. So all I've got to go on is basically your your cover letter essentially.

23:24 I know what you mean, but I feel that could be the case with almost anyone who's worked in a team. Yeah. Because General Assembly team people up. So they put a couple of UX people, a designer, a developer, perhaps all on one team to do a project.

23:41 I think they actually cluster the classes by skill type. So there's often mostly developers in one class and they're all grouped together and work as a team to come to a conclusion and everyone takes a different role in that team.

23:51 And what you've got to do is you've got to delve in and find out what each person's responsibility was and how involved they were. Yeah. Naturally, in any sort of group environment like that, you're going to get someone taking the lead, someone doing a lot of the work, someone not doing as much of the actual production code in that example and doing maybe more of the planning.

24:13 Yeah. Everyone sort of falls into their natural position for that project. But I find the same thing when I'm looking at portfolios from people with experience from agencies and they've got a client project in there, but they've done it as part of a team that they were one of 10, you know, maybe 10 people working on the project.

24:33 And it's difficult to know exactly what they did. Yeah. I always find that a bit of an issue. It's just about, you know, interrogating the person to a degree and I guess they call it interviewing and waterboarding them until they tell me the truth.

24:57 Yeah, I generally put them in a stress in a stress position for about half an hour and then we find out how much they know about GitHub. But this leads on to what I think would be good to talk about next, which is, so, you know, fine, you've got the job out, that's gone well.

25:18 So these things are coming into your inbox normally. How do you do that selection process? So when they're coming into my inbox, in our scenario, everyone always has a portfolio for a design news experience. They have their own website.

25:34 If they don't, you're honestly not a serious contender because you don't care about promoting who you are. Yeah. I don't care what their website looks like. It can be a templated thing that you put no time into actually selecting the design of yourself.

25:51 It could be a Squarespace site. It could be a completely bespoke custom build job, which honestly, I think is overkill and probably been an insane waste of your time. But as long as you have something up there in some form, that is the first prerequisite in my books.

26:11 Yeah, OK. If you don't have anything online and you just have a cover letter and a PDF, that to me is a lot harder to dig into who you are, what you do, how you do it.

26:26 I think the same for developers. I know it sounds sort of silly, but if you're applying for a job and you haven't got stuff out there online, just an all.

26:36 I don't know why, but like, as you say, the other people have. So it really stands out when you haven't. So, yeah, even for a developer, you know, a site which just says, here's what I am, here's what I do.

26:50 Yeah, normally I link to their GitHub or something like that. Yeah, well, GitHub is its own developer portfolio of sorts, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, that's it. You sort of do a first pass on them and you have to be quite bad for me to ignore your application.

27:10 I mean, I don't really ignore ones, but, you know, to not make to not get proper consideration, it has to be fairly obvious that you've done a one sentence cover letter or something, which sometimes happens.

27:28 I never quite understand that my heart sings when people start them with DSR or madam. I don't know why people like really normal people suddenly become completely overly formal in a cover letter.

27:42 I don't know, do you get DSR or madam ever? DSR/Madam. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you tend to find the younger and more inexperienced they are, the more formal they feel they need to be in official introduction emails.

28:00 Because their parents have told them to be formal. Here's how you apply for a job. You're sincerely. Oh, you're going to love a bit of yours sincerely. Absolutely.

28:12 But that's it. You can't you sort of learn that you can't actually filter on that. No. That could just be someone just... It's been experience and nerves.

28:23 It is. It is. But the good ones, the ones that make you really engage are where it's written as an equal. You know, it's written as...

28:35 Yes. You know that. I mean, the guy we hired... It's got personality. Yeah. And it's not about please, please, interview your job. It's about like we could work well together.

28:48 Because that's what people have got to remember you want as someone hiring, isn't it? You're actually quite desperate for someone to fit that mold that means you'd hire them.

28:59 Like it's not a case of, oh, I'm recruiting. I hold all the power at all. Like I don't feel that when I'm recruiting. I feel nerves that I'll find the right person. They won't want the job. You know, I'll find the right person.

29:13 They won't want the right money. Or, you know, it's just as nerve wracking, I think, from... You know, I worry about emails I send back to these people. I worry about, oh, am I being flexible enough about interviews?

29:30 You know, like, because I, you know, if I can't work late, you know, I need to get home. And then I think, well, I really do need to start. You know, I need to spend a few nights where I get home late to interview people.

29:43 Because that shows that we're flexible for them. You know, we'll get someone better if we do that. So yeah, I think it's always a case of someone that enters into it as an equal with you is always much more...

29:56 You're instantly engaged to that person, you know? Yeah. Well, you're hiring people and you want to know what the people are like. You want to know their personality. If they're sort of hiding it behind, you know, social pretense and tradition.

30:10 And you know, it's... you don't get a sense of who they are. And the more personality people put into something, the more of themselves they show, the more open it feels and you get a better idea of the personality you might be speaking to. And I think that's important too.

30:28 What's the best application, like email, like first pass application you ever saw? The best one. Any that you remember.

30:38 Hmm. That's a good question. So I'll give you mine. A guy, when Tom and I had our website where it was just us two on the homepage, if you remember such that website, the one before this one.

30:53 Thank you. We had a guy who photoshopped himself in as the third person. Okay. Which was pretty spot on. And he did it. That's good effort.

31:04 It was good effort. And he did it in quite like a self-deprecating way, like because it said Tom, Tom, he designs, Dan, he codes. And he wrote something like he makes the tea or something, you know.

31:15 So it could have come off as slightly arrogant, but instead it was actually perfectly pitched. And it was just like. Nice. Yeah. You know, that's a brave move. But, you know, more often than not, you're not going to want to work somewhere that's not going to take the way you project yourself, you know, your sense of humor.

31:37 And find it also funny. It's almost like a good way of qualifying, like, if we got the joke or if we were to pompous about our own website, you know.

31:48 Yeah, I think a bit of humor is okay. It's good, especially if the people you're applying to, you know, have got that sort of tone of voice on their website as well. That's it. I can't think of any specific examples, but the ones I've had quite a few good applications and every time that person has taken the time to find out more about us.

32:10 The worst ones are when it's clearly a cut and paste job, right? Yeah. They're just blitzing it to a whole load of people and they're just, it's impersonal.

32:20 Sometimes they even haven't bothered to change the company name. Yeah. They've got the wrong company name in the application form. And they just haven't taken the time to think about who they're applying to and what they can do to increase their chances.

32:36 Those people have a no chance. Yeah. If people have taken the time to look at what we do, they've read a blog post or two. They just write in and they reference something that we've done recently, a project or a blog post or a tweet.

32:52 They just spent, you know, it takes 10 to 15 minutes. Look around, see what they've done, reference something, just make it personal.

33:03 It just latches you on and it just shows, it demonstrates that they've taken a bit of care in their application and that goes a long way. And that's why DSO or Madam is so disheartening, isn't it?

33:17 Because, well, one in our case is like you haven't looked to check that we are both SIRS. Or even what your names are.

33:28 Yeah. And then after that, you know, on our website, it doesn't say Mr. Tom Johnson and Mr. Daniel Jett. Do you know what I mean? Like we call Tom and Dan on the website. It's fine to email hi, Tom and Dan, you know?

33:42 Yep. And that actually is the same language we use. So of course that's going to make you stand out straight away. But yeah, I think the time it takes to go through, like I normally pile them all up and then spend an hour going through kind of trying to work out who might get an interview, who might not.

34:03 But again, I get paranoid that it's taking too long. So I sort of do you do a thing where you say, okay, applications, you know, job ads out there for two weeks, then we're going to do a week of interviews, then we're going to decide.

34:18 Or you much more ad hoc as they come in. Yeah, we keep it a lot more ad hoc as it stands. I sort of, I sort of, it's mainly my responsibility at the moment.

34:31 So I scan them as they come in and pre-filter them. Is this a serious one or not? If it is, I do some research. I start looking up the person. I look for them on LinkedIn.

34:42 If they haven't got links to things, I'll find them everywhere. Yeah. I'll search Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. The hunter. Just a quick sort of, yeah, really creepy online employer.

34:56 Scanning for every online scrap of evidence I can find to get a picture of who this person is and what their passion is basically.

35:07 Because it will show if they have a passion for this type of thing. And I want to find out more about who they are and their personality. The fastest way to do that is just a couple of quick searches.

35:19 See if you can identify them in a couple of key places. How many Twitter followers they got? I don't care about that. I just want to know if they're actively tweeting and if they're doing so about, you know, they're just using Twitter as a personal thing.

35:32 If so, I can learn something about them from that. Or are they actually doing, you know, industry specific stuff and tweeting about work and that is even more interesting. In recent years, we've taken to doing some initial phone interviews.

35:47 Just try to limit it to 30 minutes. Sometime in lunchtime, middle of the day, just schedule it in and just get a quick phone call in and have a chat to the person. Okay. Because quite often, you know, traveling for an interview takes a lot of time.

35:59 Quite often, you've got to do it out of hours if they're currently employed. It just gets the first barrier out of the way. Okay. So I'll pre-filter the emails down to a selection.

36:09 I think for the last role, I may have done about between eight and 10 phone calls people in interviews. Just 30 minutes pop. I tend to slip into a bit of a monologue because you do so many of them.

36:21 And it's more about telling them about the role and the position in more detail in person. Yeah. And trying to get an honest answer from them, or an honest reaction to see if it is of interest to them still.

36:37 Yeah, okay. And gauging a reaction from that to ensure they're excited about it and it doesn't put them off. Okay. And sometimes, like out of those 10, at least two of them, after going through that experience, were like, "Yeah, that doesn't actually sound like that for me. I misunderstood the job application." Yeah, that's interesting.

37:02 So that phone process I found is pretty invaluable just for getting past that first gate. And then we'll move from that, about half the people who go through the phone interview will bring forward into face-to-face interviews and just schedule those in for whenever everyone can make it.

37:20 Okay. Yeah, yeah. And so what sort of stuff do you then ask at interview? Do you get them to design something?

37:32 No, no, no, no. Not on site. No, but we talk through their work. We talk through the type of our setup, how we do stuff, and sometimes recent projects and how it went and what we did.

37:48 And then we'll get them to talk through a couple of pieces of their work and try and get out of them, specifically what exactly what they did, because quite often it's part of a team, and then what they really enjoy in particular, what they're most passionate about, trying to understand in that face-to-face interview what drives them to be in this industry.

38:13 Yeah. At the same time trying to draw out as much of their personality as possible to understand what a sort of cultural fit they're going to be and if that will work. And I haven't actually done this yet, but for the next role, because of its importance, and just because I've been wanting to do this for a while, I want to do an exercise in the interview, the next role.

38:40 Okay. It's not a test, but the purpose of it would be something we do together as well, and I wouldn't want it to take more than like 10 or 15 minutes.

38:50 Okay. But I've got to come up with a problem that we solve. So I would pose a mini brief and whip out a couple of A3 pads and some pens and whiteboards, whatever, and we all just sit down and try and solve a problem together.

39:09 Because of what we do, everything is about problem-solving, designing, how they go about... It doesn't matter if we solve the problem either, it's just about understanding the process they go through to try and solve it.

39:21 Completely. And to understand their problem-solving ability. I know people do this in tech a lot more. There's often sort of a series of tests that you guys put people through, but it's less common in UX and design.

39:33 It's something I want to try in the next role that we hire, just to see what sort of results we get from it. Yeah, completely. I think you're right.

39:43 People do do programming tests in tech, but we don't actually. I just think you don't get a lot of time with someone, and to me it's not as useful as maximizing the time getting to know them.

40:00 Makes sense. I always thought it sounded a little bit cold, perhaps a little bit robotic. I can imagine they do it at large places where they've got to pre-qualify people to a certain standard in order to be able to do the job.

40:14 And it's important to have that on paper, otherwise it's somebody's responsibility and neck on the line in a larger agency.

40:25 Yeah, at your guy's scale, I can understand why that might not be as valuable. And that's it. We need people to be good, but actually people can be good at lots of different things.

40:40 They can always get better at coding, right? Of course, absolutely. And I've got my set of difficult questions to ask to sort of tease out.

40:51 If they're bluffing about knowing what programming is at all. We did what you were talking about then for the most recent hire. We had a couple of interviews, and then we just thought it was something we'd wanted to do.

41:09 And the timing was right that we didn't have to make a decision straight away. We had a bit more time, and I think we were interviewing someone else as well at the same time.

41:20 And so we just were like, we want to, we think this guy's right. And it's either a case of like making him wait two weeks to find out, or we kind of, we've got time there to do this extra thing, which was an exercise.

41:39 So we actually paid him. So we used to come in for an afternoon, so three hours. And we just kind of came up with a rate just so that it wasn't like...

41:51 It's proving that you value the person's time, right? Yeah. And I wanted it to feel that take that off the table, you know, take the, take the, oh, you want me to work for three things away and just be like, no, of course we don't.

42:05 And yeah, what we did was we just set, we set a task which had different components for different people in the company.

42:18 So I think the task was, you know, that we had a couple of projects on GitHub, and we wanted to show those projects on our website.

42:31 Okay. And that was it. That was the brief. And so the, then so he sat with me and Tom and discussed, like why we wanted to show them on the website, like who was going to see it?

42:46 What was it going to do for Lighthouse to have them on the website? So the sort of the strategy, the kind of audience stuff, you know, the sort of defining why on earth we're doing what we're doing.

42:59 He then went and sat and Y-framed it for a little bit, came back, talked through the Y-frames, and then he chatted to the other guys about the kind of how would you technically implement that?

43:16 So are we going to the GitHub API? If we're doing that, what sort of calls are we making? And then just at the end, it was like, just sat here and said, look, just start building this thing, you know, doesn't, don't finish it, but like just start approach.

43:35 Like, you get something on the screen and then we'll talk through it. So it was kind of like almost like an end to end mini project of requirements.

43:47 And I think you're right. I think requirements are such a, with what you're talking about doing, I think requirements are where you're really going to see how they think. You've got to give them a complex problem to solve where there's absolutely a lot of possible solutions and you're going to see how they, how they begin getting from A to B.

44:07 Absolutely. What are they asking about it? And that will tell you if they work in the way that you want to work. But yeah, I think, I think, you know, there's, there's companies that do full days and, you know, it's, yeah, I've heard of this.

44:24 Yeah. Sounds a bit much. Yeah. You know, unless you've got the dream job for them, you're asking them to like, take a day's holiday or something from their current position.

44:37 I think if you said no after it, I'd feel even worse. Well, I really know you now and no, you know, but it was a, That's harsh.

44:52 Yeah, but that's what it would be like, wouldn't it? You know, it would. You're right. It would. But then at least you both know that these think, you know, you're making the right decision.

45:03 It was absolutely. And it was really useful. It turned it from, it just took away any doubt. It was like, yeah, this guy absolutely fits.

45:14 Yeah. He can do all this stuff. He works in a good way. Even under that pressure, he, you know, he just went off and did the wireframes. There wasn't any kind of like, how do you like your wireframes to look?

45:26 It's like, it obviously doesn't matter to us, you know, it's a wireframe, it's a wireframe. It's not, it's not a set way of doing it. It's about communicating. And that was, that was a great way of finding that out.

45:40 So yeah, I definitely would set them to task. What's the most difficult UX question you can ask someone? Is there like a particular methodology you can like do them on?

45:54 Not really. You just have to set a, you have to give them some materials to get going on. And a clear problem.

46:04 So we're working on a project right now and a client has actually done a lot of good background research and dumped an extremely large and complicated spreadsheet on our maps, basically, that shows a process or all the things they know they need to be asked in a process.

46:19 And it's a lot of conditional sort of questions, basically, in this, this form capture process. And it would sort of require a pretty clever solution to make it a usable experience, basically, just because of its volume and all the conditions and variances and items within items that need to occur.

46:44 So something like that might be interesting where you just give them a bit of a data dump and say that here's all the raw information that we know are the requirements for this job. How would you go about trying to structure this into a usable experience?

46:57 And that sort of thing is probably a good problem. And we wouldn't leave them to do it in isolation either. Something we would we wouldn't do much of the work for them, but we would try to entice it out of them in this process and lead them a bit, I guess, to an extent.

47:14 Depends on their level of experience. And acknowledge the circumstance, you know, that they're in the pressure of an interview and their general may of thinking might go out the window because of nerves or just because it's weird.

47:29 Yeah, it's just about making it feel relaxed. You don't want to put on too much pressure, you just got to lay all the rules out in advance. And it's not it's not about solving the problem.

47:40 It's about seeing how you might try to solve it. Absolutely. So, yeah, that that's going to be interesting when we get around to trying it and report back.

47:51 When we do. And do you normally do two interviews? It depends on timing, I guess, and how we feel.

48:03 So if we've had one interview and it's in our minds, there's no doubt then we'll just go for it. Make an offer.

48:13 Yeah. OK. And do they meet the team? Yes. Yeah. So that will that will usually happen beforehand as well. We'll try and do something. If we have a second interview, we will get more people from the team involved.

48:25 Yeah. And just get get them talking. Interestingly, we had one of our employees leave at the end of last year for personal reasons.

48:37 She had to take a leave from the company. But before she went, we were hiring her replacement and we got her to come in and do a lot of the interviewing with us on all of the people we we invited to come interview, which was a really good experience both for her and for us and for the people coming in.

49:02 Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that worked worked really well. She did us a big favor being involved in that process. And she helped us make some decisions and just good to have another opinion.

49:14 But it's also important to to get everyone in. So we did an annual end of year team retrospective, which nicely tied in with with the new person accepting the role.

49:29 And she was able to come join us as a team and go through our sort of warts and all retrospective of everything that we've gone through in the year and everything we thought had gone well and not so well and what we can do to improve in the future next year.

49:47 And it was quite good for that new person to come in and see in advance of starting and meet the team and even contribute a bit. So that was all good. Yeah, it was nice.

49:58 Have you guys had anybody leave you yet? No, not yet. The closest we came to it was we we thought we'd found someone great.

50:13 We offered them a job. They accepted the job and then we got gazumped by their work. And that was that was pretty gutting. Because also they were a lady as well.

50:23 Okay. That would have been the first first female lighthouse member. So yeah, no, that was gutted. But no, we haven't we haven't had any of our staff turn around and and hand in their notice.

50:39 And I think I will probably cry when it happens. At the point. Yeah, it's quite emotional.

50:51 I've gone through it twice now. We had to let someone go in their trial period. I nearly cried right. I think that was the first time you had to let someone go.

51:02 I guess it isn't a firing of sorts because it's sort of no trial. It's within the terms of trial period, but really nice guy and didn't want to do it. And yeah, I was really upset having to go through that process.

51:15 I do everything I can in the future to make sure that doesn't ever happen again. No, since we've had two people leave had a designer who was with us for a year and a half leave and our recent UX designer who helped us hire for our new role starting this year leave us.

51:37 And yeah, it impacts you like the first time you do it. It's just like a punch to the gut. Yeah, it's it actually feels pretty awful.

51:49 You know, they come to you and just say, I've got an offer from another company. I think I'm going to take it or I have taken it. And then yeah, your mind just fills up with all sorts of thoughts like, what do we do wrong?

52:02 Am I a bad boss? You know, didn't we create the right kind of environment to make them want to stay? And it's just it's just a fact of life. This stuff happens. It's business.

52:12 Yeah, of course. It's not personal. You know, people are complicated things. They leave for all sorts of reasons, personal reasons.

52:23 You know, maybe they outgrow the role that you've given them or the business itself, even maybe they just fancy a change. Do you think it's because every time we personally, like you and me have left jobs, it's been because the place has been rubbish.

52:38 The place has gone to crap. And that's why in our head, that's why people leave.

52:49 But you're absolutely right. People leave for all sorts of things. I'm always amazed when people are on good terms with where they've left. I mean, not not good term, sorry, but that it's not a kind of secret.

53:02 And it's all done behind behind the back of the current company. You know, the latest guy, his company were, you know, they were sort of fine with it.

53:13 It was it was odd. Yeah. And I think that's that's the right way to be. It's about being grown up and mature about it. I mean, you take it personally because it's your business and you're small. And every employee makes a big difference at our scale.

53:24 And it feels personal, but it really isn't. And and yeah, even the people, you know, when the people are telling you and they're going through themselves, it's an emotional experience for them.

53:37 And, you know, they're dreading telling you, even when we were when I was working at the same, you know, at 26 with you. And I was nervous about handing you my notice.

53:49 I think, you know, I had a little bit of nerves. By the by the time I got around to doing it, I think I was incredibly gleeful and did it with a big smile on my face at the time.

53:59 But I was I was still nervous. But I mean, you know, since I've left positions which weren't permanent, but, you know, a contract and every time I've I had a long nerves about doing so, because it's a big thing to do.

54:15 And, you know, people don't make these decisions lightly. They've thought this through a lot. Yeah. And they're sure they're making the right decision for them. I think all you can do is accept that that's what they're doing, that they're making the right decision for them.

54:28 You wish them all the best and you better mean it because, you know, you don't want to hold any any hard feelings against anyone. No, completely.

54:39 The good, the right thing to do is to do everything you can to help them with that transition. And, you know, if possible, you can maintain contact with them. You know, maintain good relations.

54:51 If your friends, you know, you had a good friendship out of it, it's worth staying in touch and even meeting up again in the future. Because those people, if they have a good experience at your agency, they're going to they're going to become an ambassador for you.

55:04 They've got friends, right? They probably know people who do a similar thing to them. They could be a good referral source for you in the future. And who knows them even come back and work for you at some point.

55:16 It happens. It all sounds good on paper, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to cry and then be incredibly bitter about it and just blank them for their entire notice period.

55:28 Yeah, I'm sure you are. I'm just I know I'm going to take it personally. Well, I mean, there were only five people now, right?

55:41 But, you know, so like, you know, to put the person we first hired is still there. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think the day that he decides not to be at lighthouse will be. Yeah, that's going to be tears all around.

55:54 Yeah. But that's it. You know, you're right, though. It's I think one of the things about growing is you realize that it is all like business and, you know, the the probation period, trial period or whatever is there to reduce risk to your business, you know.

56:27 And if someone is wrong, it's best for everyone then and all the people in your business that you do like cut ties with them.

56:41 Yeah. Oh, yeah. The worst thing you can do is is keep someone in a role that they're not right for because it's going to create a bad environment for everybody and no one's going to get what they want from it.

56:57 I think the best you can do is learn from the experience and, you know, do what you can to get from it and make a better workplace for all your future employees.

57:10 Really. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But it is I suppose it's such a big step, isn't it hiring? It's such like an exciting thing to do and a terrifying thing to do.

57:21 I suppose that's that's why it's you get so emotionally involved in it. Yeah. When Tom and I decided we should have another person, it was kind of like you think, wow, we're going to meet someone new.

57:34 You know, they're going to become part of this adventure. But also, oh, my God, this person's basically getting a guaranteed wage. You know, and though Tom and I touch would have never really gone without paying ourselves or anything, it's sort of like the safety net you think of in your head, isn't it? It's like, oh, you know, you do that before you went out of business. But then when you hire someone else, it's like, well, actually, that would mean we'd have to like, like, you know, get rid of someone because you can afford them. It's like, no, that would be so bad. So, yeah, it's kind of I suppose it's just it's a it's just a really big deal, isn't it? That's the thing about it. And it seems crazily how you only spend you spend such a short period of time assessing people really for how big that decision feels. Yeah, I guess you can spend you spend what you can afford to spend on it. Yeah, so I mean, that's yeah, that's that's quite a good summing up of hiring, maybe. You guys are expecting to hire anyone else in 2016? Yeah, definitely. Now we have people doing all the work, you know, good designers and developers. Tom and I are basically realizing how much other work there was to do that we never really had time for. So, you know, I always assumed that I'd stop developing and that that would be like, whoa, retirement. It's going to free myself up here. But no, in fact, it's just caused more and more stuff to do. And I think, you know, I never thought it would happen. But I think the next hire won't be like technical or design a person. It will be someone to help the running of projects of Lighthouse. So either a project manager or, or someone to make it so that Tom and I can project manage more by taking away some of the other stuff we maybe have to do. Yeah, less production, more administrative. Yeah, you accumulate so much asmine just to service that you suddenly need you just need an extra pair of hands. So, yeah, I think we're going to either hire a project manager or someone who can assist us who then might grow into being a project manager. You know, we have projects with someone quite junior could probably start managing and then assist us on managing the other ones. And then, you know, I need help doing new business stuff these days, you know, there's that there's that many things to deal with in terms of inquiries. And we only want that to get bigger. So, you know, if it's already too much to do, it's like something's got to change. And I don't again, I don't think we're in the position where we go and get a salesman. I think if someone could ease the pressure on me and Tom a bit, that might help. So, yeah, I think that might that might be the one and then and then, you know, no doubt, if we if we grow the same next year as we did this year, last year, rather, then, yeah, we'll need to add some more doers as well. You know, how about yourselves? Yeah, we definitely know that we're going to grow the team a bit this year. I mean, we've literally just hired similar to you guys, but we haven't really put the thought into where the next role is going to have the most impact just yet. We've got growth targets based on our growth plan, and that would involve adding another two people in 2016 exactly where those people are going to sit in the team is really up for grabs right now. We're doing some exercises at the moment to try and figure that out and get an understanding of where additional skill sets are going to have the most impact and also give us the flexibility to put the effort in where it's needed to grow in order to facilitate growth in the following year and hit the targets that we put in place then. So right now, a bit of an open book, but growth will be happening, we hope. Yeah, and I suppose the key thing is you need to choose to go for them ages before you actually need them. You know, there's no, you can't be reactive. That's the thing, isn't it? No, you can't. Or you'll make the wrong decision. You've got to have money in the bank. You've got to invest in people and then make a concerted effort to make sure that they've got enough resource or enough stuff to work on so that they're not twiddling their thumbs. Yeah. So it's a complicated thing to do. It takes a lot of planning. Absolutely. That's running businesses. Yeah, completely. Cool. Anything else to add? The next thing would be onboarding and stuff like that, but I think that's probably a separate topic. I'll talk about that another time. Yeah. Great. So thanks for listening, everybody. That was a good one. Happy new year, everybody. If you want to check us out, we are at perspective.fm and we are underscore perspective.fm on Twitter. If you have any question, comments or feedback, please hit us up there. I am at Dark John, D-A-R-K-E-J-O-N on Twitter, and every interact is for every interaction. And Dan, where can people find you? On the tweets, I'm gentasmaximus, and on the work one, it's @weallighthouse. Fantastic. And we'll speak to you all in a fortnight's time. Awesome. Speak to you then. There's a cat arse in your face. Yeah, completely. My knees are getting very hot because of this. It's a big black cat on your lap. Yeah. Very considerably not purring into the microphone. No. I locked mine in the kitchen. Mine are a lot noisier. Right, yeah. No, she's normally noisy, but yeah, she just loves, these days, she just loves her lap because most of the time we're ignoring her to look after our child. I'm important too. Yeah, it's a sad fate for a cat, I'd say. You're a kid coming along. God. Yeah, ours are our surrogate children. Yeah, it's very happy. Yeah, completely. It's like they go from being totally pampered to like, "Get away from me." I'm like, you know, you really are just literally in the first bit, especially when you're just trying to get sleep. It's like, "Nope, go away." You know, you're throwing them off the bed and stuff. It's really bad. It's really bad, isn't it? Oh, dear.