Boomtime: Putting People at the Center of Our Hiring Process

By Bill Bice, CEO

Hiring the right people is key to success, but it’s also one of the biggest challenges faced by any company. With millennial employment turnover rates of 37% in the first year of employment, it can be hard to find and retain the best people. Studies show that the main reason a person leaves their job within the first year is because they don’t feel like they fit into the company culture. While a traditional job interview can be a good way for a company to assess an applicant, in our experience it did very little to give applicants an idea of what the company culture, employee dynamics, and workplace energy are like. Cultural fit is key to employee satisfaction and happiness, so it makes sense to give applicants an idea of what the company culture is like BEFORE they accept an offer.

Picasso said, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” As a Word of Mouth marketing company, boomtime does just that. We make great marketing available to small businesses by evaluating the best marketing, breaking it down, making it our own, and then incorporating scale in our marketing automation platform, fuse. We work across 25 different vertical markets, from B2C like boutique hotels and homebuilders, to optimizing the performance of B2B sales organizations.

We solve a huge problem in the market: it’s almost impossible to attract, train, and manage great marketing talent. Few companies do their IT internally anymore, they use a managed IT company. Marketing is following the same path in increasing sophistication, which is why we created the first managed marketing company. We’re experts at finding innovative marketing solutions for our clients and then scaling them.

We needed a more effective recruiting strategy for finding employees who can take the best of what is out there and make it our own. We take a revolutionary approach to marketing, it only makes sense that we’d do the same with our recruiting strategy. We also wanted a better way to quickly sell great recruits on why they should come to work for us, but that was a challenge when we used a traditional interview process.

Imagine you could meet potential employees at a cocktail party instead of the contrived constraints of an interview – that’s the applicant party.

The applicant party allows us to streamline our hiring process. Applicants are welcomed into a happy hour-style casual party, where they have a chance to meet and talk one-on-one with the people they would be working with in the future. They’re asked to participate in a variety of games and activities that allow them to experience and better understand the pace, logic, and stress management skills that they will need in their day to day life as part of the team at boomtime.

When we’re not eating and drinking and getting to know each other, applicants are asked to play different games, with the help and support of our team. When they first arrive, we stick a card with a topic on it to their back. They’re tasked with asking our team yes or no questions to determine what their card says. This helps us evaluate their problem solving skills and creates social interaction. Can they continue to come up with good questions? Do they lose patience, or do they stick with it? Then we ask them to play some Pictionary. We’re looking for how well they listen and whether their strategy is to stick with it and keep trying on a picture we’re just not guessing – or to take a pass and move on to the next card. Next up, we have them play a game of Mastermind, to test out their logical problem solving skills. Finally, we task them with giving a quick speech teaching us how to do something - to see how well they handle the pressure, but also to see if they can effectively communicate. All of these games tie back in some way to skills and talents that our team uses daily in our work. Throughout the evening, we’re having fun, but we’re also taking note of whether or not the applicants are having a good time – and how they handle the pressure and the challenges.

Our applicant parties allow us to meet multiple applicants over the course of just a couple hours, and they also get to meet a wide swath of our current employees. The evening provides potential recruits with exposure to our team, our culture, and our energy, and is a way for everyone to participate in the recruiting process. It gives our team an opportunity to meet and evaluate applicants – but it also gives applicants an opportunity to meet and evaluate our company.

boomtime has a series of company values that drive everything we do – we call them the boomtime Laws:

·      Work hard, have fun doing it
·      Be curious, learn and share
·      Question everything
·      We choose the company we keep
·      Do the right thing
·      Insanely helpful
·      Success is contagious

The applicant party allows us to quickly communicate our company culture and showcase how our team embraces these values. From the moment applicants walk in the door and begin to meet our team and play some games, the fun and energy are apparent. It’s easy to see that we’re quick-paced, curious, fun, helpful, and team-oriented. Applicants not only get to meet their future teammates, but also spend time with them and get to know them better. They get to experience the quick-paced, think on your feet, collaborative environment that is what working at boomtime is all about. They see how we support and interact with each other, and then get to experience that support and collaboration themselves as they participate in a series of games and exercises designed to test their logic and problem solving skills, giving them a better sense of what their work environment would be like, and allowing us to see how they handle these challenges. As an applicant, either you like this fast pace and rolling with what comes – or you don’t. Either we embrace each other – or we don’t. Over the course of a couple hours, we all have a good idea of whether or not we’re a good fit.

People are at the center of everything we do, so why wouldn’t we put them front and center during the recruitment process as well? After all, we’re hiring our own coworkers, and our applicant parties provide a way for everyone to become participants in the hiring process. At the same time, it provides our applicants with an opportunity to experience our interpersonal office dynamics in person. When we do hire someone, we know that they’ll easily integrate into the team. They have already met and gotten to know some of their teammates, and they have a good idea of what the culture and their day to day life in the office will be like. This translates to happier, more productive employees, and a lower turnover rate. And isn’t that what good recruiting is all about?