As a part of the repel and attract philosophy we have adopted at IDR we believe in disclosing some of our “dirty laundry” during the early parts of our interview process. Traditionally every business brings in a potential employee and spends the day learning the best things about that candidate as they are learning the best things about that business.
We feel like this is a flawed and dishonest model for attracting quality candidates to a place of work. By only talking about the great things your business has to offer the candidate is told a lie by omission. Everything is not great at your business. Each business has weak areas, each person has weak areas.
By not disclosing these items you are actually weakening the power of your time with a candidate. This has often been explained away in conversations I have had by assuming that the candidate realizes that everything is not perfect and doesn’t expect a business to talk about weakness in an interview. (Note: We don’t want candidates that expect us to keep things hidden.)
We, obviously, take a completely different position than most businesses. The only thing we hide during an interview are trade secrets. We tell each candidate the issues and requirements of the position they seek. We tell them that we sometimes get calls at 4:30 on Friday afternoon and that we expect them to not only field that call, but also put in some time on Saturday if necessary to handle issues related to that call.
We tell them all of the reasons that they should stand-up, leave the interview, and never come back. But, before they even sit down in front of us we add one more layer of repellent to our interview process.
Our biggest source of repellent is our weekly boot-camp. As a company we are focused heavily on the health and fitness of our employees. In each of our branches we provide personal training and a weekly boot-camp. We decided in late Fall 2010 to start our interview process at a boot-camp.
We determined that if someone was really going to be a good fit at IDR they would enjoy participating in a boot-camp. We have such a health conscious culture that this has turned out to be the best weapon we have to saving time meeting with candidates that aren’t a good fit. If they don’t want to participate in the boot-camp then we don’t waste time interviewing them.