Future proof your business with holistic hiring

In a time where there is a huge talent shortage and gaps in skills, leaders should look to be hiring beyond the CV. Many businesses are focusing on employee experience and employee value proposition. Hiring the right people will impact both wider team experience, culture and in turn word of mouth on validating your EVP. Leaders should focus on factors that will support long term work culture to have your team stay with your business longer than what we're seeing, which is around 2 1/2 years. We advise our clients to take a greater perspective of hiring and to look at other aspects of work experience and education. 

What is holistic hiring? Simply put, looking at other skills, experience, personal attributes a candidate can bring to your team.  

What's the right mix for your team?

What are some things to consider when looking at holistic hiring? 

• Cultural fit: How will they fit in with your existing team? What is it that their personality could bring to your team? How would they add value? To. The weaknesses of your current team. Would they be happy, do you think, with the mix of people that you already have in your team? 
• Career story: Good candidates have career journeys that tell a story. Find out what has driven the candidate to take on the roles they have, what they are looking to learn, how did they fell into this space. Reading between the lines can bring up values that could help to decipher if they are the right fit. 
• Transferable skills: Having to look at nontraditional hires with skill sets that your team might be weak on. They may not have the exact experience that the previous person in that position did, but your team might be at a stage in their journey where they may need a different set of skills rather than what you had previously. It's a great opportunity to look at it to see how you can bring in someone that can add value to your business by providing a different perspective and creative problem solving and innovation to what your industry and your business might be used to. 

An example was a candidate with a range of experience in their career not aligned to one pathway. They were bright, personable, a pure technologist in that could use whatever language, framework, tool that is right to solve the problem! However, this resulted in a CV that was a bit of a mixture of different things – he didn’t fit the box. I had clients that didn’t want to recruit this person because they didn't fit the career box they were used to hiring within.  

I have noticed that international companies are better at hiring “outside of the box”, this is something I’d love for our New Zealand clients to take into consideration.  Having a more holistic approach to what the next hire could bring to your team could be an asset, especially as the technology landscape is changing so quickly.