Week 5 - Designing hiring 🥷
Hiring, Internet-era payslips, buckets and leverage
I’ve worked at Made Tech for one month now and am cracking on with my goals.
Designing hiring 🥷
We advertised our first design and research roles this week. This is an important step – these first six people will grow a user-centred design community and culture at Made Tech.
We’re taking an iterative approach to designing how we hire people. As with salary bands, we’re going to be open. My intention is the hiring process we arrive at, will become part of the completely open Made Tech Handbook.
Lee and I have been working together to design a fair, open and reliable hiring process:
Review CVs and past work
Phone interview with Talent team
Second interview with me and another UCD person
Final interview with pre-prepared practical task
Offer and confirm start date
To get a shared understanding of what we’re looking for, Lee and I paired reviewed a few people’s CVs/past work. Lee has booked the first phone interviews for early next week, which is dead exciting.
Payslip data 🧾
To apply for a first mortgage this week, I’ve been sourcing, scanning and uploading payslips. It’s interesting how un-Internet payslips still are. Considering how many services need people to prove their income, I would expect payslip data to be simpler to share by now. Hopefully, Open Banking for payslips and employers payroll is on its way.
Buckets of time 🪣
9-11 am every morning I block out to focus - no meetings. This is when I’m most productive. Crucially it's when I can put things in place in response to the patterns and themes I see and hear about in meetings.
I’m going to go one step further and trial breaking my week into buckets of work. After a month at Made Tech, I have an idea for how best to divide up my time:
Bucket 1 - Communication and learning
Company and public communication (like this newsletter), onboarding new people and building shared habits for design and research
Bucket 2 - Habits and rituals
One-to-ones with designers and researchers, show-and-tells, weekly UCD community catch-ups, drop-in design crits
Bucket 3 - Hiring
Interviewing people, speaking to potential candidates, improving hiring stages, promoting roles, networking
Bucket 4 - Operations
Setting UCD roles and responsibilities, catch-ups with other leadership people, planning and managing team growth
Bucket 5 - Service assurance
Time with teams on critical client work, be that helping kick off work, team health checks, mock service assessments, meeting clients to understand their design and research needs.
These themes will likely change. Also, they might not split five ways or all match a weekly rhythm. But I’m gonna try it and see. Hopefully, this reduces context switching and gets the most from the time I have with teammates and myself.
Leveraging Principals 👩🏫
People across Made Tech want to learn more about discovery and alpha stages of service design, which is great. Tom made the suggestion I focus first on what Principal Technologists, Delivery Principals and Client Principals want to learn. I want to leverage the fact people in principal roles work with client stakeholders, service teams and people they manage. With the hypothesis that focusing on their learning will spread it through to teams and clients. Helping create a shared understanding of how and why discoveries and alphas work.