HR In A Different Place

Somewhere in the world, there are regular kinds of companies who hire people with regular sets of skills to do regularly constructed and clearly described jobs in predictable and repeatable ways.  Somewhere in the world, having all that work out without surprises is the definition of success for the Human Resources department.

And then there’s Stokefire.

When your company is different all the way back to the “why”, you pretty much never get to paint by the numbers.  Which makes recruitment and hiring an interesting and – dare we say it? – different kind of enterprise.  Grab a standardized job description off the Internet?  Don’t check.  Use a blandly worded posting on the usual job sites?  Don’t check.  Look for folks with tons of experience in our own industry, who know all the usual ways of doing things?

Really.  Do. Not. Check.

Because lately, we seem to be developing a corporate personality that’s a little bit cowboy, a little bit missionary, a touch of Thomas Edison and a sprinkle of Bucky Fuller.  We’re turning advertising and branding inside out – and our clients seem to love how it all works.  But one thing about how it all works is that, no matter how entertaining and sometimes even magical it can look from the outside, this is not sleight of hand.  No puff of smoke, no hidden trap doors.  What we do is real.  And it looks like magic mainly because so much that’s done in advertising is everything but real.

What does real mean?  It means we don’t put anything in front of a client that doesn’t add value.  Pretty isn’t enough.  Nice sounding won’t do it.  Fits with the corporate color scheme?  Don’t even get us started.

We do the background work that allows us to spot what’s real about our clients’ products and services, often before the clients have spotted it for themselves.  And whether we’re answering the phone, refining a logo design, or creating a billboard campaign, we need to stay focused on the value proposition of real.  Oh, and of course on the necessity of being leave-you-winded creative and original so the ideas coming out of our shop don’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before.  That too.

So how do you pick new talent to drop into a mix like that?  The first thing is, you don’t look in the usual places and you don’t search using the usual “job posting” prose.  We’ve been experimenting with writing job listings that sound like Stokefire – such as the one we recently used to net our new support person who keeps the office, and the boss, running smoothly.  We placed the ad for only a few days, and got well over a hundred applicants.  Many of them were significantly overqualified.  Of course that’s somewhat a reflection of the state of the economy.  But we also had folks tell us that they wanted, more than anything, to work here.  At Stokefire.  Because of who we are, and why we are.  Because of the real.

Another thing we tried was to build a little test into the actual ad; we asked for some specific information in the cover letter.  Since this was an attention-to-detail kind of a job, we figured that would be a way to identify who paid attention to details.  And sure enough, candidates sorted themselves out (or in) by the way they responded, both to the tone and the specifics.  A few spot checks through the applications in the “no” pile confirmed that those folks who were just responding in a rote way to our ad probably wouldn’t survive a day in our ever-changing environment.

Do you notice the theme here?  All the “tricks” we used were real, specifically designed to elicit honest responses that may not even have felt like responses to the applicants themselves.

It’s a funny thing.  Once you make a commitment to the real, it snowballs until you are compelled to examine every aspect of your operations.  And oddly enough, “the usual” bureaucratic efficiencies rarely fit well with real actions by real people – the results of those generic procedures are all too likely to be generic results.  Just not good enough for Stokefire.