When I started at Baudville, I was working part time here and part time at another job. But, I really wanted THIS job to be full time and the other one to eventually become someone else’s problem. Over time, that’s what happened. (Yay!) In the mean time, I felt a huge responsibility to Job A to get someone in place who could seamlessly take over for me when I made my final exit. So, I put out a job posting and started my search.
You know what? A lot of people in Grand Rapids want a part time job, or at least they did in 2009! My mailbox and inbox overflowed with résumés—and, quite honestly, I was way underequipped to sort through them all. I ended up employing my arch-nemesis Microsoft Excel to create a skills and qualifications matrix to rank each person based on which qualities were most and least important to us. Sound crazy? It was. And it was time consuming. But, it was worth it. I pared my interviewees down to a manageable number and was able to conduct more comprehensive interviews with those select few. To my knowledge, the person we hired is still there, which is a pretty big feat these days.
Why am I telling you this? The same reason I tell you all of my old workplace stories—because I have a point! And, this time my point is: when you’re hiring, knowing what you need most out of the person filling the position and taking time to find the one who can fulfill it really pays off. We’ve even used my handy matrix at Baudville, plus we have a lot more tricks up our sleeves. What are they? Find out in our Interviewing article in the “Why Onboarding” issue of RecogNation!
Allison is currently living out the elaborate fantasy she described to her now-former staff and colleagues in early 2001. With a hearty dose of courage and absolutely no plan of action, she abruptly left her middle-management job to become a writer—and today she is doing just that in her role as Baudville's Senior Content Writer. She's here to tell you everything she's learned in her 20-years+ professional life, plus a lot more. She's wordy like that!
