When we go through a recruitment process, either as the recruiter or as the recruited, it is easy to feel 'lost in the woods.'

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For the recruiter it can be like trying to find the right tree in a forest largely entirely compromised of, well, trees. Choosing the right person to join your team can quickly feel like it just boils down to who has nicer moss on their resume, or trying to judge from the surface whether someone's roots might be deep enough to weather your team's particular storms.

In contrast, for the recruited, it can (all too often) feel like that moment when you were auditioning for your first school play and trying very hard to be an excellent tree. Stand still enough, with your arms out in just the right ways, and maybe you'll be the right sort of tree for this particular nativity and get to join all the other people carefully pretending to be trees.

It frequently feels both arbor-itrary (sorry, not sorry) and incredibly complicated, and more importantly it often doesn't work. Matching the right person with the right space for them to thrive is simply more complicated, and more messy, that it seems on the surface.

This has lead us to ask: What happens if you take a different path in those woods? What happens if you try to do recruitment differently, without the currently established systems?

Well it turns out you get me, Lara, the comms person writing this webpage - and my hiring was journey through some particularly interesting woodlands.

 

We hope that our experiences of this journey will help you to explore your own hiring practices through a more 'human-first' lens.