 Okay, so I guess we're core eights, are we core eights? A few more people coming in now, that's fine. The tweets gone out. I'm not from much of the day I've been tweeting on the sessions as they go. Not gonna be doing that right now, so I'm relying on you, gentle audience. You are our voice, our link to the outside world. You are our spirit creature, our animus, set free amongst the ether. Please do tweet, we are track B, and this is your panel. Your panel is. I'll introduce you to my name and then perhaps, actually, you could maybe say a little bit about yourself. Then that would save my voice, which has been running quite hard all day. So, Mr. David Lockie. Thanks, aunt. There we go. Sometimes just looking at them does the trick. So I'm David Lockie, founder and director of Pragmatic. We're a Brighton-based specialist WordPress agency. Super cool team. She should come and work for us. Mr. Matt Buckland, ladies and gentlemen. That's way, way too much to live up to. My name's Matt Buckland. I'm head of talent at a fashion tech company, as you can see, called List at the moment. You should all spend all of your money on List because it helps my options. Before that, I worked for Facebook, Bloomberg, ThoughtWorks, Getco, in Australia, China, India, always in hiring and always in tech. So that's me. Mr. Sam Cameron. Thanks, aunt. I worked in tech recruitment for many years. Externally, agency site. Refrain from spitting on me, please. And internally for startups. Most recently, Datasift. And I'm the founder of a job advertising startup called Allude2. And completing our panel this afternoon, Ms. Jessica Rose. Whoever's going, woo, that's great. Sounds like there's a very polite ghost going, woo. So I'm the head of developer relations with Dream Factory. But before that, and I still do quite a bit of consulting around talent, usually either one-on-one with non-traditional talent looking to get into or back into tech, or companies who have done something that they need to fix. OK, so this is your panel. And this is our audience. Now, our audience will be a key part of this discussion today. We're going to open up the session with an expiration of some ideas that we, amongst the panel, have been discussing over beer, ping pong, sort of burgers that went cold, that kind of thing. And then we're going to open it out to the floor and we get to the halfway point. We'd like to know a bit about you. We've told you about the panel. So could I have a quick show of hands? Who here has come to this session because they are interested in hiring people? OK, now, who here has come to this session because they have an interest in getting hired? And you're allowed to raise your hands for both. LAUGHTER OK, that's interesting. It's a very... Yeah, it's a... What's any hands on the panel? Anyway, it's a well worthwhile thing to do. I've often found that the best way to know how to get a job is to know how the people are going to hire and vice versa. So, what we thought we'd open up with is looking, and I'm going to give each of the panel a few minutes to discuss and think about what, from your point of view, is particularly special or maybe not that special, but we think it is because I know some of you work not just in WordPress, but what is particularly special about hiring in the WordPress space? David, do you want to kick us off with that one? I'll have a go. Go on. Thanks, Ann. So, where to start? Let's talk about how people get into WordPress because I kind of fell into it by accident. I learned to build sites myself, and anecdotally, I'd say that's how a lot of people get in. There's no WordPress GCSE or A-level. There are some courses online, but it means that we're hiring against a sort of unstandardized workforce. There's no competing for the graduates of a WordPress degree course. So, that's quite an interesting challenge in that we find people have come to WordPress from a content angle or a front-end angle or a back-end angle, or however they found their way to WordPress in the first place, that's kind of where their core skills often remain. So, then it's taking that core skill set that makes them attractive and helping them kind of spread their skills out to cover the gamut of what you need to be an effective overall WordPress developer. I think that's an interesting challenge. You never know who's going to apply for a job. Another, this is not so special for WordPress, I guess, but like any kind of growth sector, is that there's a lot more demand for talent than there is talent available. So, that's the challenge that we're all facing, I think, when we're looking to hire is, you know, you just don't find five-year-plus well-rounded WordPress developers kicking around very often, you know. When you do, it's a pretty easy decision if they've got the right fit with everything else, but we have to kind of help nurture and create the talent as well as just stumble across it, wait for it to come for us. So, confession time, I've never hired a WordPress person. That's terrible, isn't it? I feel I should get stoned at this point. Not stoned, but stoned. We could do both. We could take the edge off of it. Later, party later, that's why I'm at the end of the day. So, yeah, at the moment, my world is data science and Python and horrible big data in inverted commas, solutions and all this kind of stuff. Before that, it's been anything. So, as far as Bloomberg and C++ and all this kind of stuff, I think there are communities around each individual technology and each skill set. I think what I found in my short sojourn into the WordPress community is that it's great. You know everyone. Everyone's really friendly so far. This is cool. I guess it's just this conference. It might have been a caveat of buying a ticket or something. But it's great because you all know each other and you wave to the same people on the stand, you probably see the same people at the same conference the next year, but as a recruiter, that's absolutely terrible because now you can't be horrible. You can't know that your mate's company has that guy that you wanna hire and if you did, he wouldn't be your friend anymore so you can't hire him. Although you said there aren't exactly five year WordPress veterans kicking around, I bet you could name hundreds, but potentially there's different reasons and your moral compass as to why you couldn't do that. As a recruiter, I don't have a moral compass. Or, it's available for hire and I will shun that compass. But that's true. I think we get to a point where the community is great. When I was at ThoughtWorks, the open source community was brilliant where ThoughtWorks was brilliant is because if we wanted to get into a technology, we would hire the person who invented that technology. It's a great way to do it and bring them on board with enough resources behind them so we could go and staff them in a horrible banking project but we'd let them do cool stuff as well. I think it's interesting that we have a talent pool which is both what makes it great is also what makes it hard to source people within. Always got his own, he's brought his own. Got my own one. I'm going to echo what Matt said a bit there, unfortunately, and that I'm not the most experienced WordPress hire here. So I'm going to maybe take a step back. These guys tackle that. That I think a big problem is educating people where to look for talent effectively. I think a lot of people, and especially in this room, no offense to you, you're thinking, oh, what does a recruiter do other than just sit on LinkedIn? They're just spamming out messages, doing that kind of thing. There is a lot more to recruitment than that, and I can promise you that, and hopefully, I know he's looking at me, that's what he does, he sits on LinkedIn. But there's a lot of stuff that you can do to access these kind of folk who necessarily aren't the ones sitting on LinkedIn and something that I was taught in my years of recruitment is the best people aren't the ones you can easily find because they're not looking, they're not around. So hopefully we can shed some light on that in this panel and give some of the secrets. It's my two cents. Cool, I'm gonna sort of echo a lot of what you guys have said. So, David, I really loved you talking about sort of the multi-level talent you find in WordPress. And I think that's one of the most valuable things about WordPress is you've got, the onboarding's incredibly easy and the community really facilitates that. If there isn't somebody who has your specific skillset that you want to do something with right now, you can get somebody in the pipeline, and as long as you give them space to grow within your organization, you can have them ready to do the next task before you could potentially hire somebody who's already off the shelf for it. So folks who are hiring, who's hiring for big companies, like more than 50 people? Who's hiring for smaller shops? And that's something else I really like about WordPress is you've got people coming into the pipeline who start as building their own content and then becoming developers and then running their own businesses. So you've got really, really beautiful ecosystem where you've got talent all the way through, but like you said, you've got to look a little bit harder. So the people who list themselves as the person to know in WordPress are not always the people who are going to be the most helpful for your team. Okay, right, they've answered the question. That's fine. They all look at me. Okay. We've kind of touched on it here. David, you had some thoughts about, there we go. So that probably didn't translate easily. Some thoughts about training and bringing people on. I say, so to paraphrase what you've sort of said is that people come into a career in WordPress. Lots of different sorts of levels. They might come in completely cold. Never have done anything else. And WordPress is the first thing they've done, but they may have come in at different stages of it. Do we find that a lot of people come into WordPress proportionately? A lot of people come in with other programming or IT-based roles in their background. That maybe, okay, has anybody done stuff other than WordPress? I mean, radically other than WordPress here. Yeah, that's quite a high proportion, which is interesting in something which is so like monolithic and it's got a big function. Jess. Who started with WordPress though? Who started with something that wasn't WordPress and moved into WordPress? Oh wow, I did not expect that, awesome. Okay. So we kind of got multi-talented people with a very, very different range. And I guess this is something that you've touched on a few times in the past over this idea that how do you get, if not necessarily standardized, you don't want standardized people. Standardized people are not what anybody's looking for. But you do want some touchstone, some, something you go, well, they're at least that good at these specific things. So do you want to expand on that? What a terrible question. Do you want to expand on that? There we go. No, on what? The training thing with the, the certif... Yeah. The training stuff. Yeah. Terrible at this. About WordPress. Yeah, WordPress-y hiring, go. Sorry. Okay. I mean, there's a lot of eyes on you. Yeah. It's important, I was thinking, it's important to look at training, not just as in we're onboarding somebody and we'd like them to have these skills by the end of their probation period, but also training in terms of continuous professional development. So it can be quite easy when you're in the thick of lots of projects going on to just be doing the whole time. One of the things that we're working hard to do is to make sure that everyone in the team knows where the next level is for them, what they can aim for and how we can help them get there so that there's a continuous development in them as a developer in the direction that they want to go to. So we don't expect everyone to be like full spectrum, I'm not gonna say the word full-stack developer, full spectrum WordPress skillset. It's natural for people to prefer a particular area, front-end or database. It's JSON REST API stuff is gonna take a pretty specialized skillset. So as well as getting that foundation in place, understanding what all the components are. So we have like a, just gonna give our website a plug here, but on our website, if you search pragmatic WordPress developer skills matrix, we've tried to brainstorm everything that we think's important to a WordPress developer and that includes things like understanding project management, understanding time logging. You know, to be a WordPress professional doesn't just mean that you can write code that follows the coding standards. It includes skills like being able to talk to a client, being able to communicate effectively, being able to manage yourself, being able to look for help right effectively. Collaborating a team, mentor peers as well and share the knowledge that you've got. So that's the foundation that we want everyone to get to, but then it's a case of looking at what do people love most about WordPress and how can we nurture that? How can we give them the structure, the courses, the training, the mentoring, the projects that they're gonna need to develop those skills on? I won't say like we've totally nailed that 100% yet. It's definitely a work in progress, but I think it's something that's important to us. Is that the sort of approach that you can see being valuable if it's shared across more agencies and employers? Well, we've opened, you know, we just put the developer skills matrix on the blog. It's nothing particularly proprietary and we'd welcome any feedback on it. I think there's lots of things to think about. The other, so I'm rambling on here, panelists, just like give me a kick under the table or something. But as well as having that kind of range of skill sets within the individual that you're looking to develop, it's also true that especially as an agency gets bigger, the number of roles within the agency is quite different. So yeah, we are, you know, most of us are developers, but project managers are super important as well. Account management, design, UX, you know, it's... App sales. You know, yeah. I guess. No, it's totally true. Marketing sales have, they were pivotal in us growing. And so that means that you can be looking for talent outside of even the kind of developer pool that's around. Unexpected talent. So if you're, especially if you're hiring for junior roles, one of my favorite things to do, because you mentioned you can't really scalp people who are already established in the community. No, you're not. If you're a nice person and you have a soul, if you're not a full-time recruiter, one thing I've had a lot of luck with both helping source people for companies and for the talent looking to move into a more technical role is if you're here in Britain, ICT staff at schools, do the website, do front-end design, do front-end development. They build and manage databases. They handle networking. If you have a junior role, they get paid almost nothing and work crazy hard. They're really, really... You're fine with not damaging another agency, but they are children's futures. They should probably pay them more and appreciate them more. Should we pay you for that, Sol? No, like looking outside of established talent is a really, really great way to find people and to find people that are going to be non-traditional and potentially stick around for quite a bit longer. Yeah, just adding to that as well, and something I think people don't really think about is that if you're hiring, you should be hiring all the time. If you're at the pub, you're speaking to someone and you don't know who they are, but you need to be thinking about, is this person, would this person work for me in the day? And people think that it's restricted in the nine to five and, oh, well, when I'm at work, I'm going to look for this person and it'll be solved then. Yeah, look on Twitter. You can hire people on Twitter. You can hire people on Facebook. You can hire people walking down the pub. You might hire someone who you've walked a dog with. I don't know. But just try and get out of this habit of thinking that it's just limited to these places where these career websites, these places that you'd think to look. I mean, a good example is meetup.com. Who uses meetup.com here? Anyone? Look at that show of hands. Perfect. Have you been through a meetup list before? And look who's attending. Any show of hands? A few people. That's a hiring list right there. That's, these are people that aren't, they're not necessarily going to be on LinkedIn, but they're interested in the things that you are interested in. Why would you not be thinking about them? And, you know, I don't want to touch on the experience, you know, these are the people who experience the WordPress community, but. They already have jobs. They already have jobs. They might do, but this is why you get the recruiter to, you know, nudge them. No, no seriousness. But, you know, it's, there's nothing wrong with having that friendly chat. It's not about poaching people. And I think, it sounds like that's going to be a topic that's coming up quite a lot here about poaching and, you know, how do we avoid this? Well, I, it's interesting for me. I'm only about 18 months to years into the WordPress community, and poaching is like such a loaded term. But WordPress has been around for 10 years. And, you know, there's a very, very large number of people in there now. I think it's kind of not, 10 years would be a long time to work in any particular company, I think, today. And WordPress is such an open community in terms of the knowledge base being shared and people exchanging ideas. And it almost feels that it feels that same pattern for people to have careers that do go from place to place so they can build up it. I don't know. Everything's. Yeah, okay, good. They're grabbing microphones. Go. The only kind of contra thing to that is that as people work in a WordPress business, really a part of the overall WordPress community. So I can understand how people get stagnant, like in a small company that has one product and they're building the same thing over and over again. But the community is kind of, is what binds us within and without the company. So I think as long as a business provides what people need to follow that passion, then there is, but. I don't know. So, yes. Yeah, it's a broader context. There's nothing intrinsically bad with a career that. So to mitigate the term poaching a bit, a bit, it's not gonna be very mitigated because it's me. If someone chooses to leave, that's okay. And we should be better at that. So I've worked for startup founders who have this kind of mindset. When someone's leave, when someone leaves they're dead to us. Has anyone seen that? Yeah, we don't talk to him anymore. That's fine. No, he can't come in for beer anymore. That's it, he's dead. And you're like, wow, that's pretty tough. I think if we get past sort of why people leave and we're willing to talk about actually the reason why, it's often not just money is the motivator. There are greater motivators. And you can supply those to make people stay a lot better than just counter offering someone who's going to poach. So I did a hideous blog post that everyone loved because hiring is so outdated on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And the bottom of that stack for any hiring decision is money because you could motivate someone by money, but it's a pretty low order motivator. You can make them do horrible things for money. People work at British American Department, for example, or in recruitment for money. I went with tobacco, that's fine. You steal teachers, come on. So you can motivate them there, but the sweet spot for any hiring decision and pulling someone out of a company, if you are going to entice, that's almost groom, isn't it now, I've gone too far, to entice someone away. Now it's basically a van outside. If you want to try and convince someone to leave their company, what are those drivers? And a lot of people aren't able to say, well, what would convince me to leave? They can't have that separation. So I think it's around, if you can offer someone something interesting and challenging and well rewarded, they're gonna stay with your company. Those three things, that's like the holy triumvate of this thing. But if something can be more interesting, sometimes if they're very technical, there can be a new technology to work on. It can be a new company that's doing something fantastic. And they'll leave for less money sometimes. I see that a lot. It could be the name of the brand. It could be that kind of stuff. It could just be money. The guy could be motivated by money. And that happens a lot too. But I think it's important to think what would motivate you and to try and look objectively at your own company to say why do people come to us? Like why was it you chose to join us and ask your current teams and then use that as how you go to market? Do you think cultural fit, I mean cultural fit is something that we want to come onto because we've touched on it, but do you think cultural fit is one of those things that would entice people from one company to another? It depends because lots of people think you can buy culture from the Argos catalog at the moment. So it's come, we've got beer, we've got a foosball table and that's not your culture. I think we learn about culture in a really redacted way in hiring and when we talk about it for recruitment it's appalling. So we say things like we do beer on Fridays not realizing that that's actually discriminatory. Or we're a young dynamic company discriminatory. All of this stuff and you're like, wow, just publish it. Just one court case and you're gone at that point. You touched on something that Trace Levesque did a brilliant presentation at Pressnomix. It's up online. She works at Yikes, so I'm sure you'd see that. The value of diversity and just how statistically, empirically, a more diverse, not hiring people the same as us is adds value to what a company can do. Oh, I was actually gonna defend poaching from an ethical perspective. I'm listening. Okay. So in technology overall, one of the most frustrating things is that we're really placing a lot of time, a lot of energy and so much money behind recruitment. And we could be doing less of it and doing everything better by focusing on sort of keeping talent in-house properly rewarded, and properly recognized. The big thing is if you want to get paid appropriately in technology, statistically, you should change your job every two years. And that's exhausting. So the fact that if someone's leaving your company for more money and you come back with a counter offer, that kind of exchange should never happen. If you recognize that this person is worth 10, 20, 30% more to your company, give them a raise now. If you recognize, so who here has, does anybody have transparent salary policies on their team? Cool. I have seen so many people leave after realizing what their coworkers make. If there is someone on your team who's making dramatically less, or if lots of teams, it's not always a guy, but we'll say that guy for shorthand. Lots of times that guy who's a little bit obnoxious and a little bit, yes, tends to make quite a bit more than team members because they'll push it. Don't wait for people. It sounds insane to say give people more money or more time off or more benefits without them asking. But if you're rewarding them appropriately for their value, instead of their ability to negotiate while in a role, you're gonna be able to deal with not getting poached. Well, not having them get poached much more often. Actually, it's funny you mentioned time off there. The last agency was that. There was a period where it's like, okay, they wanted to give the staff a real perk. It's like, great. And there just wasn't quite, because of certain things, wasn't quite the opportunity to do a bonus. So for one year, I think we went into the permanent thing. It's like a real boost on the leave allowance. That went down amazingly well because it's not just the money thing. All of a sudden people, you say that, you can have more time off. You can have another week off a year. They're heads filled with pictures of their families and the time they can have and how much better their life can be. So much more than just, here's a pile of pound notes. It's like, we don't have pound notes anymore. So that was a ridiculous metaphor. But yeah, we're in Scotland, all the Isle of Man and they made a plastic there. Anyway, so yeah, time off. And I'm very lucky. I work for a company with a minimum leave policy. Yeah, you have to take at least that much time off and it's encouraged to take more. What company was that? Human-made, we're hiring. So recently I went through and built out my team and we're all remote, which is a really, really fun challenge, but a challenge. And instituted a flat salary policy for our team. So everybody on my team, including me, makes the same amount of money. So you make what other people in the same role make and you make what your boss makes, which is we'll see how that works. Good luck with that. It'd be interesting. Are you gonna be like blogging how that works out? No, I think I'll be really quiet. Okay. We touched on remote then. We want to touch a bit on the challenges of hiring remotely. Can I do one more piece of poetry? Yeah, sure. Yeah, go on. I know we've been talking a little bit about poetry. I just wanted to sort of cut that off by saying... Can I steal my staff? No. And actually it was sort of like a little humorous. Sometimes you repeat a few things and then it becomes a big thing. I'd say in a WordPress community as often as not we're friends with our competitors and it would be bad for business to go around hiring other people's staff. I see there's actually more opportunity for us to work together to create roadmaps into WordPress careers because there's so much work out there. If we're just trading developers the whole time, we're not making progress as an industry and there is so much work. It's the bigger, better challenge is to onboard new talent. Yeah, rather than just fighting over a given resource size, work together to grow that resource size. That's a very good point. We could touch on the remote thing now. Okay, show of hands time again. Who works in a company which is entirely or partly remote? Okay, this is about what I was expecting. I'd say there's maybe three quarters there. It's part of the WordPress culture. It's the biggest, many of the biggest companies in WordPress, how are they wrong? What sort of particular challenges do we think hiring for the remote workforce raises? We have an in-house team of developers and data science and then we have a web scraping team that is all over the world. So the largest time difference, I think we have Thailand and Peru as a all over the place. They are on holiday while they work, basically, which is not a bad life, if you're thinking of we could hire, no, okay, I won't do that, that's fine. The problem, the challenge with it obviously is how you communicate. And when you're all in the room, it's very easy. There's almost information transfer by osmosis if you're all in the same room. You have, everyone knows what's going on because they can see the same board, they can see the same stuff, they're talking to each other every day. That team in particular has done a couple of different things. We use Slack as noisy as it is and turn off a lot of notifications. There's always on video between people, which I've seen in another employer as well. I used to work for a high frequency trading company in Chicago and between Chicago and London, they had massive monitors that were always on so it looked like the room was extended, where it extended, it extended into Chicago. So it was quite nice. You had this kind of, you'd see them arrive in the morning and that kind of stuff. Really cheap, actually really cheap because it's just leave a Skype call open or something like that or just a hangout which was persistent. And when you wanted to talk to someone, you just walk up to the TV and wave and then they would walk up and say what normally? Let's say we're American. That was my American voice. Very good. You should be on talent in Chicago. So there are great ways of doing this. I'd say read some Joel Spolsky on remote workers because he hired loads of people for Fog Creek and those guys, one of the first things he says is when you get hired, he sends you, he upgrades your internet connection in your house and not him personally, I don't think he's there with pliers but he pays for it and buys you better headphones and a better microphone. So I think it's about thinking of all those things that would cause friction, which is almost like the Chinese water torture of the death march of your career because it's gonna drip, drip those little frustrations. Eventually you just say, I can't, I don't care for this anymore. I'll go to an office. I guess this is covering off a lot of the key things about onboarding when you have found someone. But okay, so let's take for instance, let's say hypothetically, you're looking for developers. As you say, it's a limited pool but you come across someone and they are in a part of the world where you haven't got many contacts, you don't know, maybe they are going to meetups but you don't know anyone at that meetup. I mean, that talent's there. You can work remotely because we know you can onboard. How might you go around engaging with that person and finding out if they're gonna be a good fit? There's a, yeah, he's passed the tough one to me. It's a difficult one really. I'm gonna step back here and talk about recruitment. Your recruitment process in the first place, right? So if you have a recruitment process, show of hands actually, who has a recruitment process in their company at the moment? Not many people. Okay, that's a good thing. You want to establish this like loose process, right? You want to have a way of making it efficient for you to evaluate who is good for your company. I'm not gonna delve into that because that's gonna take forever as well. But a way to evaluate who is good for your company without it taking five months. For the record, you don't want it to take a long time because you will lose out to offers, you'll lose out to counter offers. A lot of recruitment is always thinking what is gonna stop this person from getting hired by me? That's what you want to be thinking the whole time. It's like panic mode. That's a good way to operate. With remote, it's difficult because you're, you talked about culture here. I mean, I think it's quite different if you have a remote culture. You need to establish is this person an incredible communicator? Because at the end of the day, unless you've got them doing some kind of work where they don't ever need to touch in, they're just, you know, they're on JIRA. I don't know, they're just going through tickets, they're going through tickets, things like that. Just things that need to be done. They're gonna be, they're gonna need to be good at communicating. So you need to figure out a way of establishing that I'd advise, you know, you want to obviously speak to this person face to face, hang out. Is that at a minimum? Some people are gonna have code tests. I mean, Matt will talk about code tests more than I will, but... Those are horrible. Yeah. Just use collab edit. And it's free. No, I think for the way I've seen it done in the past, you just de-risk it as much as you can. Ultimately, it's best to in, I guess, get someone interested in the company, in the headquarter variety of the company. So you do want to let them see it at some point. I think if you're just on your own at home responding to JIRA tickets, it's a bit like a skinner behaviorist psychological exercise of a rat poking to get food every now and again. It just seems like, what? I mean, I'm at home and it's great, but here's some code. It would just be so depressing. So how do you actually get them to have some experience? Because humans are social animals at the same time. In the interview process, yes, de-risk it with don't fly them over straight away. That's very costly. Other companies I've worked for have done that. He was terrible after 35 minutes and 3,000 pounds airfare. Seem that done. No names. And yeah, so de-risk it. Use hangouts. Half a standardized test upfront is the right way. I made that very open-ended because it's not about a quiz. The worst tests are in this set of circumstances is an answer A, B or C. Rubbish doesn't tell you anything, but sort of give them an open-ended test so we use a very, I thought we'd say a Mars-Rosa test. For example, you can write it in any language you want. It was a basic test for object-oriented coding. Like would you make a plateau or an object? Would you make a road for an object? Is there a controller object? This kind of stuff. Any language you want. And then it was also struggling to find something to mark it. It's like, who knows Lisp? You know what I mean. It seems, thank you. But yeah, I'd say make the process lightweight but also make it robust enough so you do have the same thing with each person because then you build up that benchmark. It's useless to have the process which changes in light of every new person coming in. Do you see value in trials? The ideal work that I think the best interview process would be to pay someone to be a contractor for a week, a month, however much you can and then take it because then you can see exactly what they do. So if people have a skill of interviewing, with something to do, something to interview very well and then the next week you're like, God, that's awful. You get like, oh man, how did he slip through? And it's just because they're great at interviews. So you can de-risk that, get them on. But obviously in a tight talent pool, they're not available because they have a job already. But hiring a contractor perm is a good way of doing that. I mean, there's the other model of trial which is sort of quite well known, the sort of automatic approach of like, okay, here's a job, here's a job of work to do. But the amount of time and effort you need to put into it is something that you could do in your free time. And I think then you also have kind of a weird switch for the person. So they're already being paid normally a higher rate to be a contractor to you. So they might be getting a little bit more. It's like, what are you offering in terms of that? I can guarantee you work, but what else am I getting? So yeah, this is, sorry. This is coming away from remote a little bit and touching more on tests and interviews because I love, love, love paid contract work as a way to determine talent, fitness. So I think, who here has had to do a free chunk of work as part of an interview? Did you really wanna work for that company because you thought they were awesome? Really? I'm gonna come and give you like an angry pep talk about not working for free. Like, yeah, there's so much resentment and I know so many people will just walk out of interview processes where it's like, hey, tell us what you would do with this problem and be like, I would get paid for it. Yeah. So who here is in a position where you've got a lot of inbound applicants? Awesome, I don't work for them and they don't pay me but I love them. Gap jumpers does, so they work with you to create tests around the role and then they do blind filtering of inbound applicants. So you'll say, we built this test together, we think this is what a good front end developer looks like for this role and they're just gonna give you the top five or the top 10 performing candidates. You're never gonna see what school they went to, you're never gonna see their name until you choose who you wanna interview and that's a really, really great way of sort of, I hate the word meritocracy so I'm gonna just, but go for sort of really testable skills that reflect the job. Yeah, it'd be like blind auditions for an orchestra. I think that's their whole, I don't know. I'm gonna 180 on that entirely right now and say that I really don't like that. Nothing personal, the reason being, right, so you've given out this test to said developer and you've been given the top 10, I don't know, who's performing on this test, right, and you've got these guys who are really good at doing tests and there's this developer out there who might be a top contributor to WordPress, but just test really badly because why they're not good at tests or they don't know about what you're asking them and you've missed out on this candidate because you've screened them before you even had the chance to talk to them. So that's my two cents on tests. I think they're good for some things but that's my position. I think the answer, one thing, because then you're gonna come back, then you're gonna come back. The gap jumpers thing is great for removing unconscious bias at the front end. So that's like, I'll give you a great example, but not the company, don't name the company. No, no, there's not even a word it rhymes with. So we had an example of lots of applicants failing at second interview stage and then we looked at the data closer, lots of female applicants just ending their process with us at second stage. In particular, one guy would say no to every female applicant that he had and then we proved it with the data and then what we did is just work around him because it was in a country where we couldn't get rid of him. It was in a country that rhymes with Moranths and you can't, and he was Moranths. I'll fire people in Moranths. Yeah. Really hard. Oh, that's so bad because everyone knows that now. Fine, but that unconscious bias removal tool, there's actually a tool, a plugin for Chrome which removes the names and the pictures of people so you can't be biased now because you don't know, right? I think that's closing a symptom, not the problem. So if we did that, well, the recruiters wouldn't be biased, that would be fine, but they'd still meet this guy. I nearly said his name. They'd still meet this guy and he'd still say no. I think you have to, if you're out to remove bias and increase diversity, you have to really take a close look and say, look, that's you. You are that person. Actually, there's another stage that you can remove bias at and that's in writing your job ads as well. Oh, my God, yes. Yeah, I mean, there's so much weighted loaded language we use. I'll go back to Tracy's presentation, but she basically had, here's a list of words you really don't want to lose. And here's a list of words you really could use if you want to increase diversity. There's a tool online that will, in fact, do this for you for free, which we can tweet out later, I guess. So you don't, yeah, Textio. There you go. Little plug sponsored by Textio. Textio's the paid for one, but there's a free one called the gender decoder. And if you write gender decoder and job ads, and what she'll do is it runs through and it will say, these words are more masculine, these words are more feminine. And if you get rid, what I found is that actually we have more females apply when the job ad is more feminine. Now as a white guy on a manual, predominantly male panel, that's lousy for me to be talking about, it's good, isn't it? I learned a word, it's good. I loved it though. I refuse to appear on pure manals. Yeah, I do too, I do too. But I am Cornish, so that's diverse. There's not many of us allowed out. I'm a cyborg. Awesome. There you go. And of the neckerchief persuasion, so. That's cos of the, I'll explain it. So yeah, there are brilliant tools out there that you can use to do this, even if you are the most undiverse person in the world. Never hire ninjas, bad word. Gurus also, rock stars, kill them all. If I, so if I can tell everyone to stop doing anything, it's I hate bullet points so much. So when you're writing your job descriptions and you guys can jump in and interrupt me and tell me I'm wrong. But when, so has anybody seen the HP internal applications data? Oh, that sounds horrid. Yeah, yeah. So HP was tracking their internal applicants for promotion and they found that male applicants applied when they met like 50, 60% of the stated criteria. And they found that female applicants were waiting until they met more than 100% because it's a checklist. Of course that's what they're looking for. They want someone who can do all of these things. Those are recommendations. Who was looking for a job? And can I see? Yeah, yeah. I think the microphone picked it up anyway, so we're good. You can say it again if you like. So I was recently talking to a really wonderful young lady who was looking for an internship and she was really upset where she was like, yeah, you know what, it's an internship for first years but they want all of these different skills. How am I supposed to get these before applying? And I was like, no, no, all of the bullet points on job descriptions are bullshit. No one is, look, if you're writing your job descriptions like that, stop it, I hate it more than anything and it will make me hate you. You don't want that. What I really love is I've seen a couple times people who write job descriptions where they say like short paragraphs. So say, within the first month in this role we expect you to be doing these things. Within the first three months we expect you to be doing these things. And within a year we'd really love to see these things happening. So everybody says they're hiring for the potential to learn and we do a really bad job at it. But what you're saying is we need you to be able to do these things. We're looking for this type of person, not this checklist. David, you had a really nice sort of three word list of things earlier. I'm really tired. Their aptitude and the, what was it? Aptitude, attitude and fit with the values. Yes, okay. That was a good list. Fit with the values. Actually, we're really into our last little bit. Did anyone, oh, okay. Really fast. I feel like I'm swearing into a mic more than I should. One of my favorite things in interviews that you guys can probably tell me is wrong, if it's wrong. I love making, especially middleweight and above people, pair program on technology they're not familiar with. And I love making them do this with someone who's ideally an intern, somebody very young and very adorable or a junior developer because you would be shocked the number of times that people will be straight up assholes. It's a really great way to test whether or not people have problem solving skills, what their communication patterns are like, whether or not they're able to learn during a task. But you would be real, maybe not shocked, maybe just gently resigned and horrified. By the number of times they will straight up yell or be abusive with the, you've got to tell the person they're pairing with that they can't get fired from this. So just say, hey, you're going to do this, you might get yelled at, we'll buy you some cake later. But it's an incredible way to see whether or not somebody's going to be absolutely horrible to work with day in, day out. Okay, I think we touched on the culture thing because you've talked about fit with company values, I think there's culture, we touched on diversity. So how about for the last bit, if it's cool with you guys, we've got five minutes, anyone got burning questions out there right now? Okay, oh, we have got burning questions. So I was going to do the culture thing, I bet he covers it anyway. I'll jump down, show our hands and we'll get a couple of questions in before we finish in five minutes. Is that cool with you guys? All right, okay. Yes, sir. What is your million dollar tip to make sure that your employees do not run away? Handcuffs. Golden handcuffs. Interesting, well-rewarded work. I mean, just get them something that they want to do and reward them for it and recognise them when they do good stuff. I'll recognition, yeah. I'd say as well, if you're an employer and have people currently and be looking at who's doing what and make sure you're not just rewarding the people that are loudest, but the folks that are actually facilitating getting stuff done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay, so obviously it can be quite difficult as a recruiter to find people who are looking but where would you recommend people who are themselves looking for a job to actually try and find employees who might not necessarily be advertising on job boards and that type of thing? So that's an interesting one. There's loads of cool stuff you can do that people don't think about. And so there's a cool blog that I read a while back where, I can't remember the name of this chat, I'm sure you've read it as well. He used Facebook Adverts to target employees. During the reunion. Yeah, that he wanted to work for. So this is pretty simple. We're looking them up on LinkedIn. They've probably got a work email or you can actually target Facebook ads by the company. And there's stuff like that. I mean, to get noticed, make sure you have a website. Like, I'm sure most of you do anyway. I hope you do. Make sure you've updated your LinkedIn because recruits do like that tool even though I've hated it a little bit here. Just a multitude of other stuff. Yeah, so the other thing I think to watch is that we will research someone who applies that we like. So if you are the admin of a horrible Facebook group or something like that, I will find it. It's weird because now I think more than ever the job seeking market and candidates who apply are very leaky vessels for information. So you always end up giving away more. So if you've only given me your email address, I'll still find your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Penguin, Live Chat, whatever it is, all of that sort of stuff. I'll still find it. I'm going to go with one more word. You should make a landing page with all the criteria that you think they're going to want. Just not just your website. I know. A landing page with maybe a video of you on or something on there as well and say, and you can get that in front of a CEO for nothing on LinkedIn or on Facebook. You can advertise with like five people at the same time. You can get some of your friends to be part of that group so you can only advertise to two people and make sure your friends don't click on the ads. That way you can actually build an audience of just that person. Also go ahead and be putting yourself out there for the thing you want to do. So if you're great at this specific thing, write a blog post about it, give talks. Everyone will offer you insane jobs if you give a talk. Highly recommended. But yeah, just be putting it out there that this is my name. Here is actual useful information about this thing. Going to do one more question from the floor here. Hi, for someone who wants to get a junior developer job, what is the minimum you expect for someone? Because I don't know when I should start to apply to send my CVs. Now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's very, very gendered. I do see women wait longer and longer, especially for junior roles. I see a lot of people get into junior roles who don't have any skills at all really. So if they can, somebody dumber than you is always getting paid more than you. Do it now. The recruiters hate that, so they'll give real answers. I would say do it as soon as you're sure that, as soon as you feel confident this is something that you want to do. Like if you just wake up one morning and go, oh, I think a web developer will be pretty cool. That's probably a little early, like actually try it. But not long after. Otherwise ASAP, yeah. Yeah, okay, and on that salient knowledge, that deep wisdom from our panel, we will close this panel. Thank you very much to our panel. Thank you very much to our audience. Thank you to the fabulous volunteers who've helped us out.