by Janus Boye
It's tricky to find talented new colleagues and building the right culture takes much more than just academic qualifications.
Jan Zerkowski is Innovation & Design Partner at Roche in Basel, Switzerland and he was recently a guest star in one of our Future Workplace peer groups. In the session, he mentioned the idea of hiring using 'creative CVs', where you highlight life skills, like film making, music, or like me elite running and learning quite a bit from working in a supermarket.
In a recent member conference call, Jan elaborated on the idea and he shared how he encourages different applicants and what he looks for in a CV. Below you’ll find my notes from the call.
If you want different, hire different
As Jan said during the opening of the call, many organisations are thinking about what’s next and in particular, when working with innovation, it’s all about creativity, drive and vision. To quote Jan:
“We look for unconventional & different in the same traditional way we’ve been looking all these years”
It’s all about moving your “job ads” somewhere new. Advertise for your openings, where you encounter those talented folks you want to work with you. As Jan said:
“Someone like me would never look at a job advertisement site let alone get past the systemic check, but I would go to a hackathon and that might be where to find our next team member”
What to look for in a candidate?
According to Jan, he looks for four things when he is reviewing applications:
Any kind of exceptional ability or drive. Perhaps they’ve launched a startup in the past, opened a restaurant, played a musical instrument at big concerts, practised running for a thousand miles or something else. Anything that takes exceptional dedication and vision.
Strong cultural and purpose fit. It’s really important to be around people who share the same values and purpose. You don’t have to agree, diversity is super important, but the values and purpose have to align.
Mindset. By asking behavioural questions, like how do you tackle certain situations, you find out if the applicant has the right mindset for the job. Examples of questions could be: Tell me about a time where you got under pressure and how you dealt with that? Do you have any examples of when you acted as a visionary, architect, catalyst or as a coach? What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
Passing the beer test. Life is not just work and Jan prefers to hire someone, who he would also enjoy drinking a beer with in his spare time.
He also encourages take interviewees outside the offices to get to know them. Specifically, he mentioned the example of going to a coffee shop together to learn more about their personality and how they act with their environment & people around them. Are they friendly & attentive to the waiter or any other customers waiting in line?
Taking hiring outside the comfort zone
In closing, Jan also spoke about the courage to do what he called “pull the trigger” or in other words, actually hiring that unconventional person with the creative CV no matter their background.
During the Q&A, Anke Maibach from TCS briefly shared how they are moving from old-school hiring to being more human-centric. Anke also asked about inclusive language in the context of creative CVs. As she said in a brief follow up to elaborate:
“Words and images trigger women and men differently. By using the wrong language companies lose high potentials and diversity benefits on innovation.”
Learn more about creative CV’s
So, what do you write in a creative CV? The aim is to show off your experience, skills and achievements and perhaps rather than writing a long text, consider submitting a video instead?
Last year our US friend Joel Shapiro shared a related post with good points on building a talent pipeline.
Finally, you can also lean back and enjoy the 29-minute recording from the call