Because we need more humanization to discover talents
Strategies for recruitment, selection, and hiring in the design area
by Carla Haydée Leone Quaresma, Head of People & Culture
at Sensorama Design
Time-consuming processes. A thousand documents to fill out. Payments, increasingly diverse. Sabbath in interviews. Automated conversations. Feeling of being just a number. These are just some of the scenarios that people bring to us in the conversations we have when recruiting and selecting at Sensorama.
We are an experienced company. We sell problem solving to the client, with challenges that involve strategy, innovation, research and everything else that is needed in relation to services and products for B2B and B2C projects in order to improve people’s experience.
It doesn’t matter if this person is the project’s stakeholder, any other areas of the company, end customer (user of a customer’s product or service), among other possibilities. We are strategic partners for our customers and for the people involved in the entire ecosystem of what needs to be done.
What does all this mean? That we cannot be a company that promotes the improvement of people’s lives on the outside and not think about it internally. The humanization of processes needs to consider and emphasize the candidates’ experience.
As a result, in addition to attracting more talent attention, we reinforced Sensorama’s employee experience and employer branding. Which makes us not only strategic partners for customers, but also for all the people who live with Sensorama directly.
But what can be more special in something as basic as the recruitment process and selection in companies?
It is not new that in the recruitment and selection of people we have to have a thousand active ways of looking for new talents. Whether it’s application groups, social networks, ads focused on courses and events, we have to build a wide network of relationships and get to know people and the market better. It’s also not new that there should be a passive way to welcome candidates if they actively seek out the company.
In our case, in addition to active searches, we have a brief questionnaire to capture and understand people’s basic data such as their contact information, what are their main career goals and even what they think about diversity in companies. This last question is one of the questions we use to align the candidate’s values with those of Sensorama. We always seek to be a company with plural profiles, being multidisciplinary, multicultural and diverse professionals in many aspects.
So far there doesn’t seem to be anything new. It’s a form that anyone interested in working with us needs to fill out, but it’s the only step in the process where this happens. That is, we don’t work with endless tests and other documents to fill out even before you have the opportunity to talk to “human people”.
First contact: some important points before deepening the conversations
Taking a step back, a very important point before all this is to understand the company’s needs. What is the profile we really need? How to balance the team with different expertise so that people can exchange more knowledge? What are the main skills this person needs to have? What makes her different that can help the team?
We may have people at the beginning of their careers, but we also need people with more repertoire to guide the processes. In fact, this is a basic principle and a value of Sensorama: we are a team. We always prioritize collaboration. So nothing better than composing a team with diverse and complementary people.
With this in mind, we move on to the stage that is technically a screening but which we simply call “first contact”. With a humanized initial conversation, we better understand this person’s profile. Regardless of whether she came to us and applied or if we actively sought her out, we want to understand her moment in life and career. Does the candidate accept the challenge that we have proposed as a company? Does he/she like the style of our work? Among several issues that we were able to understand from a brief and friendly chat.
As important as choosing the person, it is the person choosing us
After the first contact and with the expectations aligned, we want to understand more deeply if the person is really interested in Sensorama and wants to be with us.
We then send a material talking about us. It’s almost a way of saying, “look at what you’d be getting into if you joined the team.” With just a few conversations, it is difficult to pass on all the information that can be crucial for the person to feel comfortable going to a company.
Just as we want to get to know the person, we want them to also get to know us in order to make their decision
In this material, we tell a little about Sensorama’s history, future thinking, main values, people who make up the project teams, what we do, our basic work framework, some rituals and day-to-day routines of the Sensorama culture and some that we do with customers, the tools we use on a daily basis and many other things that already provide a basis and broad vision of what it can be like to work at Sensorama.
From this, we believe that the person can already understand if Sensorama makes sense for their moment. And we understand who really delights in what we have to offer. With that, we always prioritize the win-win in the company and the feeling — even if embryonic — of partnership.
No Interview: a relaxed and friendly dialogue
We then move on to what we call a chat (and not an interview). Right away we show it and we want to explain to people that it is an exchange. In other words, it is not a quiz to find out if the “candidate is good for the company”. But rather a conversation to understand if the company is also good for the candidate. We take away all questions and curiosities. We don’t have “cliché” questions and each conversation is a different and targeted conversation based on dialogue.
A hit point but worth noting: it is important that the people who do recruitment and selection really understand the area in question. That is, know the context of the day to day work and be able to solve all people’s doubts. In all conversations we work with capable people with knowledge of day-to-day work.
We can have several chats. One that involves the intentions of the candidate and the company, also understanding if there is a cultural fit. We can still talk about the technical part, or we can arrange another conversation with another person from the company to delve deeper into a specific topic. We customize the process according to the needs of the person and Sensorama.
If all goes well, we finish with the hiring process
As the chats are being held, we will understand which profile best adheres to the internal team to bring the multidisciplinarity and plurality that we have already. Regardless of whether the process is short or long, we always send feedback at the end. We show the reason why at that moment we did not follow the process. To those who ask us for more guidance, we always delve deeper into the topic.
Regardless of what happens in the chats with the candidates, it is possible that we at Sensorama have already passed on to that person something that seemed interesting to them in the midst of the conversations: it could be a list of podcasts if the person likes to be educated that way, free market courses if the person is still new to the area, or other materials that may be of interest to that person. In this way, we spread the culture of design, UX and the like to people even more.
If, after all the conversations, we see an alignment and if the person chooses to work in partnership with us, a financial proposal is made in line with their role at Sensorama.
Only then do we have a more bureaucratic part. We send all arrangements by email, so that the person can feel more confident that they will effectively work with us. This includes how many hours will be made available, some initial information such as entry date, a virtual welcome coffee with the other members of the company, among others.
In addition, it manages already at that moment to kill some curiosities about the people with whom they will live on a daily basis with different information, making this entry lighter and more fun.
This process never ends and is not linear
This is a never-ending process. There may be the growth of the company in the areas already worked, the opening of other areas within the company itself. We may have people leaving the company because they are at a different time in life or wanting to acquire other experiences, so this whole process is not linear or rigid.
However, people are not “replaced” in the roles they played. We hire candidates as individuals, respecting their particularities. We understand that it is not possible for a person to take the place of another fully and one of the biggest points of Sensorama is that we have all this plurality.
We don’t want people to do exactly what other people in the company are doing. We want to enhance the talent of each one, so that they do the best they can with their repertoire, bringing authorial knowledge for cooperation between people. For us, there is nothing more human than that. Therefore, we insist that our process is humanized from end to end.
