The Challenge

As a company, PROPSTER is set up around holacracy - a decentralised management and organisational governance method. Under it, there is no management hierarchy, meaning that getting the team right from the start is crucial. This is relatively easy with a small team, but as the team grows, finding the right people gets more and more difficult.

Another limiting resource, especially for a startup, is time. The worst thing that could happen is to hire someone and four months later come to the realisation that it's not working out. That's four months that the company is never getting back. And so, a solution that can decrease the hiring failure rate is greatly appreciated.

To decrease the failure rate, PROPSTER understood that they needed to focus on improving their recruitment processes and ensuring better organisation fit.

To tackle it, they started using a process they called speed dating for hiring. It involved selected candidates coming to meet the team to allow both sides to meet each other and ask questions. PROPSTER prepared the questions ahead of time to uncover more about the candidates on a personal level in a more relaxed atmosphere.

This process met its goal of getting a better understanding of the candidates. Still, it didn't give input to understanding how they would fit and work with the team and left too much room for biases and gut feeling when making the final hiring decisions.

The Solution

To get around bias and gut feeling based hiring, PROPSTER started using Wisnio's suite of decision tools to professionalise their hiring process and bring science and data into decision making.

• Team analysis - Based on behavioural science theories on values, personality, and competencies, team members complete a series of online surveys and review their Team Profile to learn more about their colleagues' traits, motivators, and core competencies.
• Job analysis - The tool guides the users through the first steps of a data-driven hiring process. Starting with outlining the essential requirements and objectives of the role to identify an ideal candidate's competencies. Together, these tools help the user objectively define candidate success metrics, reducing bias in the later stages of the hiring process.
• Structured hiring - The Hiring Dashboard brings transparency to even the most complex hiring process by giving a clear overview of shortlists, Candidate Profiles, and candidate evaluations based on job-specific requirements with a range of hiring decision tools.

The Result

Every new hiring project at PROPSTER starts with the Wisnio Position Mapping tool. It allows the company to think through and get clarity on who it is that they are looking for in terms of skill set, previous experience, required competencies, etc.

Next, the interviewing process is enhanced by candidate-specific behavioural interview questions and interview guide. These help the company have better interviews that lead to better hiring decisions.

And finally, team analysis and candidate-team fit. Previously, the biggest problem for PROPSTER was understanding if a candidate will fit into the company and get along with the team.

The problem was solved by using the Wisnio Team Analysis tool that analyses characteristics, behavioural patterns, and competencies of the current team and compares them against the same from the candidate.

This gives a true picture of how the candidate is likely to fit and be successful together with the team. It's not enough to have the best individual members if they can't get along. The team has to get along and trust each other to be truly successful.