New recruits & recruitment processes

Tagged with innovation teams | learning | prototyping | Recruitment

Good people.

That’s what it all comes down to. Spreading the methods we use, and the solutions that come from those methods, requires awesome people. People who hungry to learn, ready to take risks, critical questioners, energetic doers, and able to draw on all of their different life experiences.

We’ve spent about 100 hours over the past four months finding these people – first, for the new Radical Redesign Team at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation and then, for the Family by Family start-up team.

Meet the 7 new radical redesigners on page 14 of our latest TACSI paper. Meet the 3 new Family by Family coaches in this video here.

In both instances, we ran a pretty rigorous and quirky recruitment process. We didn’t just want CVs, cover letters, or portfolios. We wanted applicants to show us how they worked. We asked applicants to answer short questions using whatever medium they liked, to respond to hypothetical situations, and to show us work that prompted change as well as work that missed the mark. At interviews, we asked applicants to critique policy, to generate ideas, and in the case of Family by Family, to be interviewed by families themselves.

Doing all of this meant we were able to look at people as people, rather than filter people by professions and qualifications. The Family by Family start-up team includes a visual artist, a hairdresser, and a teacher. The Radical Redesign Team includes a business analyst, an educationalist, an engineer, a fashion designer, a graphic designer, a jack of all trades, and a community coordinator. They are (hopefully) bringing all of themselves to the role – not just what they were ‘trained’ to do.

And we are (hopefully) bringing out everything they have to offer by structuring the work environment differently. Learning is an inbuilt part of all the roles. Radical Redesign team members will take classes 1 day a week, attend immersive learning camps, be part of reading groups, and have access to bespoke online materials. That’s all alongside doing a real on-the-ground project.

The ‘learning’ offer is what seemed to attract people to apply. We had over 100 applicants from 15 countries for the radical redesign team. They wanted to work somewhere that invested in them – not just in the work.

And, sadly, that seems quite novel in the ‘social change’ field where the work is so important and under-resourced that the people behind the work can be forgotten, or worse, deemed expendable. All of the ‘social innovation’ organisations I’ve previously worked with innovate in their work product, but not in their organisational practices. This is even more pronounced in the public sector where rules and regulations too often prevent managers from thinking differently about their best resource: the people that do or could work for them.

We talk about the solutions that come from our approach as co-produced – as tapping into people resource – so it only makes sense to find new ways to unlock people resource in the workplace. Over the next 12-14 months, we’ll prototype some new ways to do that inside both innovation organisations and government organisations. Soon we’ll release our draft learning framework. And in October, we’ll host our very first immersive learning camp! Expect some missteps, and loads of learning. Our hunch is that by learning how to develop teams, the solutions teams come up with will be more effective and scalable.

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