Waterloo, Web & Whimsy

Today we're trying something new in the interview process - I'm not sure what to call it (perhaps there's a term already) but for now I'm calling it collaborative interviews.

The point of the exercise is to start developing the right sense of culture early on within Lewis Media. I've got some pretty agressive goals for where to take the company over the next few years, but I don't want to loose track of the fact that we got into this because we wanted to have fun. Part of not loosing track of that I believe is having a strong corporate culture. To avoid bringing in people that would be counter-productive to the culture, I'm starting to have collaborative interviews where the second step of the interview is to have?a group session with the team (not me) so that they can ask eachother questions and talk about what we're doing right now, in an informal session.

I'm hoping it will give Derek and Dave the chance to get more involved in the hiring process, as well as let them flag any potential problems or strong plusses that I may have missed in my sessions.

There will be two of them today - we've got our selection narrowed down to two potential sales reps and so by the end of the day today I should know if I'm sending out one or two (or 0) offer letters.

Then the interesting stuff will happen - once they come onboard, we'll start the conditioning to try and make sure that the culture we want is fostered. Collaborative Conditioning - that'll be fun. :) I fully intend to fill these people with great sense of excitement and anticipation because great things are going to happen, and I want to make sure they're onboard 100% for that.

That, and I want to make sure they're up for coming out to Tuesday nights ;)