Imagine you’re trying to put together a winning team – your Ocean’s 12, your Avengers, your A-Team – yet the only way of convincing other players to join your cause is over distance, via emails, video and phone calls. Imagine your great looks suffering from terrible webcam quality, and poor bandwidth swallowing every second of your warm and reassuring words.
What sounds silly has become a reality for recruiting professionals over the past months, as the COVID-19 crisis has forced companies across the globe into home office and remote work.
But, like for Danny Ocean or Natasha Romanov (aka Black Widow), resigning is not an option and vacancies need to be filled.
In this edition, our Head of Recruiting will share some insight into how the team managed to transition from a heavily onsite-driven process to remote recruiting.
100% Remote Recruiting
We realized relatively soon that we weren’t going to be able to continue with our usual hiring processes. Even though all Kolibris had been sent into home office, we wanted to continue hiring without delays – fully remotely. So what had once been a heavily onsite-driven process, turned into a full-on virtual hiring experience.
The hardest thing to replicate in a virtual environment were our two onsite trial days. Our trial days cover two days during which applicants join us in our Kreuzberg office, meet lots of Kolibris and solve a number of tasks. These days represent a great opportunity for people to find out whether Kolibri Games satisfies their own expectations towards a workplace. At the same time, they are a great chance for us to get to know applicants better in person, to find out how they interact and work in a team environment or even under stress or pressure.
Check out this story if you’d like to find out more about our trial days.
We worked closely together with our IT Team who helped us automate processes and create the necessary IT infrastructure to provide everyone with access to the data or information they need to successfully solve their trial tasks from home.
We found ways to introduce everyone to the team virtually and connect applicants with their hiring manager or other Kolibris who could be of support during the two days. Our main goal was and is to make people feel that even though they are not physically present, we are doing everything we can to set them up for success.
A Virtual Office Tour
If you work in a full-time position, chances are you will be spending a significant amount of your time at your workplace. As an employer, it’s in our best interests to make every Kolibri feel at home at the HQ and to provide an overall comfortable working environment.
When transitioning to remote recruiting, we were trying to think of ways to make applicants not only familiar with the team but also with the office. With the help of our colleagues from PeopleOps, we filmed an office tour video for all the applicants who could not join us for trial days in person. Our Front Desk Officer Eva took some time to walk through each section and provide insights into how we work at the office and where.
Our goal was to bring people closer to their potential working space, even if not directly in person.
Virtual Lunches
Applicants who reach the final stage of our recruiting process – the trial days – are now invited to go on virtual lunches. They get to meet two additional people from the company and get the chance to hear a bit more about our culture, people and working habits. Our goal here was to give every applicant the chance to make cross-departmental connections and get a better feeling about what kind of people they can expect to have by their side at Kolibri Games.
Like any other company, we have our own set of values and ways of approaching work. We realize this may occasionally contradict people’s preferred way of working, which is why the trial days and lunches are an opportunity for us to show everyone exactly what we have to offer and, in turn, for people to figure out if they can see themselves working here.
These elements are cornerstones of our recruitment process that we wouldn’t want to compromise due to spatial restrictions.
Keeping Applicants Informed
Finally, we’re all impacted by the current situation. An easy way to fight uncertainty is with communication – even over-communication, if necessary.
From day one, our main priority has been to make our new processes as transparent as possible to everyone interviewing with us and to inform people of any changes or delays as soon as we become aware of them.
It’s incredibly important to understand the position of everyone looking for a job in these hard times and we are now more than ever aiming to be as respectful of everybody’s time as possible.
In 2019, we welcomed a lot of new Kolibris (we cracked the “100 Kolibris” mark in June). Our Recruiting Team worked incredibly hard to find the right talent to join us in Berlin.
Have a look at some interesting insights into a year of recruiting data at Kolibri Games.