How Do You Hire In a Self-organizing Company?

When organizations introduce Holacracy, structure and processes become open for change and emergence. Holacracy provides organizations with a set of overarching rules that are continuously used to create structure and processes best suited to the present circumstances. Over time, the same overarching rules stay in place, like a meta process, and allow people to sense and support the emerging character of an organization.

As such, Holacracy doesn’t come with a predefined approach to hiring. Each self-organizing company grows their own, custom approach. This article shares one example of the hiring processes in a Holacracy-driven organization based in the Netherlands. Devhouse Spindle started their self-organizing journey in March 2015. Joris Engbers, a backend programmer and Holacracy Maven at Devhouse Spindle, shares his insider perspective on the hiring process.

What roles are engaged in the hiring process?

Quite a few! It’s a collective process. The first role that comes to mind is the Nerd Hunter, who has the clear purpose of “actively finding and recruiting the best colleagues”.

Developers sense whether there is a need for a new person and they deal with the recruitment themselves. We don’t rely on HR here. We know that the only way to get the right fit is to have technical people fully engaged in the process. So developers, aside from their tech roles, also hold roles connected to hiring. They engage with the candidates and examine their fit, not only in terms of skills, but also mind-set and culture, what we think of as their ‘soft side’.

So if one of us notices that there is a need for a new hire, this person goes to the Lead Link to check what resources we have available to allocate for potential new colleagues. The Lead Link in his/her role has the best knowledge about this since it’s one of the role’s accountabilities, so all other roles may expect this kind of answer from the Lead Link.

Another role engaged in the process is the Salary Crafter. This role is held accountable for the negotiation process with a potential hire and for gaining an understanding of what salary offer is appropriate. This role has a domain on salary levels. That means that no other role may influence this area of decision making unless given permission. It makes a lot of sense. The last thing we need is a never ending conversation about who should make how much. This role is also obliged to collect data and information from the group of existing colleagues and learn what salary range they deem appropriate (taking into consideration the skillset of a new hire).

Another role is the Interview Coordinator, with an accountability of matching the candidates’ availability with our schedule.

How does the final decision take place?

Any potential hire is invited to Spindle for a full day, just to hang out, chat, see the office, and get a feel for how we work here.

After that, the whole team uses the Holacracy-style Integrative Decision Making process (IDM), the same process used during governance meetings. So we go through rounds and share our findings and thoughts about the potential new hire. During the objection round, anyone can object to the proposal of hiring this person. It’s here that we modified the IDM process a bit: If anyone during this meeting objects, we automatically drop the proposal. That’s it. The decision for a new hire is too important, so if any of us feel that something is off, we decide to trust his/her gut feeling and say no to a potential hire.

So this is how you’ve grown your own recruitment approach with Holacracy. How do you think this has influenced Spindle?

Thinking about this now, I guess this is what has allowed us maintain our culture and grow so fast (Devhouse Spindle scaled from 7 to 30 people since March 2015). Objections, if they happen, are not related to technical skills. If someone got so far in our process, we know they have the right skillset. So it’s about the tribe, personal space, and preference we have at Spindle. Personally, I’m very happy with the people we’ve hired.

Another thing worth mentioning is a rule we’ve developed recently: Whenever we meet the right tribe fit, combined with good tech skills, we always say yes to that new hire, even if we don’t necessarily need those specific tech skills at that time. This rule brought even more transparency into the process as we don’t have to wonder about this kind of case anymore. It’s very sharp now, we know we can say ‘yes’ if this scenario occurs. We adopted this approach because there is a scarcity of developers in Groningen, so we concluded that saying no to an applicant we deem gifted and get along with is almost a crime :-)!