What if we did not recruit based on skills, but based on #spirit?
For the last two years, I’ve been involved in founding and running a startup which aims to enhance the career and recruitment ecosystems. We stripped the process taking it back to the fundamentals and went beyond the actual skill database source and matching mentality. Here is how:
Work incentives
On the most basic level, people work for money and with this money they procure the required resources to meet their needs. These needs wildly differ according to each individual’s circumstances.
Nonetheless, there are also other rewards for work:
- sense of purpose
- social inclusion
- contribution to the society one lives in
- self development
From a socio-economical point of view, as the number of individuals grows, economy develops and specialisation goes higher and higher at personal level to sustain the socio-economical environment. The more a society is developed (economical, technical, numerical), the more specialisation is required at individual level for properly micro managing every part of it.
Making an analogy, if we look at the social organism as a human body, there is a huge number of cells and organisms which perform very specific functions.
Dunbar number
Dunbar number states that, socially, a person can accommodate in a group of around 150, for all social interactions to be properly set, especially communication. And here communication is the essence.
If communication is not properly enhanced, then most of the functions the person performs in the system are altered as (s)he can not suitably communicate. Similarly, if a cell or organ in the body does not understand correctly what is required to do, problems appear.
As technology developed, more people started organising in larger and larger groups and the connection with the closed social group began to be distributed in many ways:
- geographically — no need to be in proximity
- cultural — I can connect with people from different cultures, across great distances
- economical —I can trade with people from other parts of the world
- emotional— I can have a long distance relationship with a person I have not even meet
However, this does not mean that I can do it well 😃
As companies began to scale, more people were needed to specialise and sustain processes. Departments were formed and specialisation appeared.
Nowadays, when a company needs to fill in positions, it resorts to searching through huge databases to filter the specialised people to fill in the gaps in that specific role or department.
But you are not getting only the skilled processing specialisation of that person, you are getting the whole person with culture, opinions, needs. And this person needs to be able to properly communicate to fit in.
Communication is tricky as it is influenced by many factors: language, culture, social status, interactions, emotional & psychological development, etc.
Many companies try to look into this matter when hiring, but they consider firstly the skill and only secondly the ease of cultural fit. Their need drives the process, and their need is to find a person for that specific role.
But the person has a different need, and here we circle back to what matters, beside money:
- sense of purpose
- social inclusion
- contribution to the society one lives in
- self development
From this point of view, you might say there is a conflict of interests and, to mitigate it, different scenarios come into place:
- if the candidate need for money is higher than her/his need for other aspects, (s)he alters the other needs to fit in the company’s culture and work environment;
- if the company need for candidates is higher than the need for cultural fit, the company alters the way it presents itself.
From these scenarios, the actual database systems appeared: to technically match the supply and the demand.
Dating
Let’s compare this matchmaking process to finding a partner. One can search databases like cupid.com or match.com for people who satisfy some criteria, but the cultural fit can not be searched online. Fortunately, these sites understand this factor and apps like Tinder do it correctly starting from the most basic impulse for a relationship to exist in the first place, attraction.
We tend to think that finding a workplace is not based on inspiration, but on mathematics of paying the bills, but it is wrong as this external incentive wears off in time and does little, if anything at all, to establish a true emotional connection between the person and her/his work environment.
Development
I will connect with someone based on emotions and not based on a proper technical fit, and afterwards I might strive to develop myself. Development is rarely a linear path, since one does not know what (s)he does not know. Mostly it happens when one stumbles upon something that appeals to his/her senses in such way that it generates the drive to overcome the effort of understanding, learning and changing. As long as recruitment is done based on skill set matching, it is a linear projection of something that already exists. Hence, the probability of development is low.
Money
Money is an indirect incentive — people do not work for money, they work to satisfy their needs. If they can not do that, they will work in a system which produces half of the results for the money they require and with this money they will satisfy their needs elsewhere. But, going back to our human organism analogy, this is like the cell in the body saying “I come here from time to time to remove toxins from the blood, and then I go somewhere else to spend the energy gained from your body. And if another body offers me more energy, I’ll just go there.” 😃 Sounds more like a virus, doesn’t it?
Filters
Any type of proxy through which the information goes to reach the intended part, alters it. When a manager needs another member in the team he contacts the HR, the HR uses a database app to solve the request, and from that database app it reaches the candidate. This is the usual scenario. Two proxies — the recruiter & the database app — alter the essence of the info transmitted according to their perception and structure, which allows them to interpret the input and model the output. Obviously, this is not the best scenario in terms of authenticity. Even if both proxies have the best intent, they still alter the information in a biased way based on the proxy’s own algorithms of interpreting the info received.
Communication is once again choked.
Skill
The skill, as we know it, is a capability of one person to create or maintain something in a specific area, a specialisation. But the skill is a blend of a person’s native abilities and the environment (s)he lived in. These are not dissociated. It is not that easy to take a person from her/his own culture, place her/him in a different culture and expect the skill to manifest in the same manner or even improve.
A skill usually refers to applied knowledge, the translation of abstract knowledge bytes in reality. This process manifests itself in an arranged manner. Lately, we have seen that machines have more processing power and continue to gain even more, being able to fully automise these type of skills. If this is the race we are entering and preparing for, it is lost from the beginning.
As humans, our greatest strength comes from the unity of spirit, which enables us to go further and strive for answers in a creative way, imagining what is not logical or obvious. That is what led us through centuries of development, not the known logical processes of how to get from here to where we want. Knowledge is a tool, but the spirit is the essence of finding answers, using tools or inventing new ones.
Mercenaries
Once a person is “detached” from her/his true feelings, mercenaries appear: armies of well trained executioners pledging their loyalty to the highest bidder. But when things get tough, they have no reason to stay, to find solutions. This is a very individualistic mentality, sometimes found in companies with no unity in purpose.
#culture1st
When the human spirit comes second, life can go on for as long as the body allows it. Skills can improve, but there is no reason to strive for something, to outperform and reach new dimensions deemed not possible or even unthinkable.
Our current ecosystem has its roots in this type of mentality, searching for the skill one needs to fit in properly. And as technology evolved, we perfected the way we browse through data (people) finding what we think we need.
We believe there is a different way, one that brings back the human part of the matching process. And, with baby steps, we started the journey to seek and find this model.
From this thinking process, we started our startup aiming at fixing this, by offering candidates access to the teams they will work with, giving them the possibility to see the group they will be part of, with whom they will spend 8–10 hours per day, and maybe be part of social encounters after work. If there is something inspiring for them or if, culturally, they will feel there is a connection, they will not feel like a hop in-hop off rider who chooses the optimal lowest friction service, with no conversation during the trip.
We are in the infant steps of our long journey. I have just started writing about it as many people might find this useful and contribute with feedback and ideas on how to properly fix this and not only creating an upgraded service, but a different one. A service that models, in a better way, our human nature considering all other aspects during our career journey.
