2024 Weeknote 40 : Gone fishin’

September 30 – October 6

My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work. Learn more about the weeknotes concept here.

I am currently on vacation, exploring Tucson, Scottsdale, Flagstaff, and Sedona, Arizona just for fun. This week’s post will be a bit abbreviated since I’m not officially working.

One Thought: Hiring under duress

We recently completed hiring for a new Application Developer role (which internally we call a GX Developer), and I wanted to celebrate a little. Aside from adding a great new team member (starting late this month), our process was record-setting in terms of speed, without sacrificing the depth of our review.

Our hiring processes are pretty good on the whole. But there’s one terrible, awful, no-good, very-bad exception that is beyond our control. Due to the narrow way an Ohio law has been interpreted, we are only permitted to hire (or even promote) people if it’s voted on by our “Automatic Data Processing Board,” which was… *checks notes* …established in 1967. Waiting on a Board vote wouldn’t be so bad if they met frequently, but at most they meet monthly, and sometimes—like in November—they skip the meeting. So this fall we can hire on October 7 or December 2 or… end of list. Hit those dates or you won’t see any new hires until 2025.

So we had to hit October 7 for hiring. But we didn’t post the job until August 30 (the Friday of Labor Day weekend). We had just 4 weeks to find candidates, review resumes, conduct intro calls, hold first-round interviews, hold second-round interviews, and make an offer. We’ve never hired that fast.

Yet, remarkably, we made it. Not only did we get the job done (with a great new hire we’ll share on LinkedIn later), but we did it with one of the largest candidate pools we’ve ever screened for a single role. Here are the dates, numbers, and actions:

Timeframe	Hiring Activity
Fri, 8/30	Publicly posted the job on Indeed (free listing), LinkedIn (paid job slot), and NeoGov (or core applicant tracking system), despite it being Labor Day weekend; total staff time spent prepping materials, arranging schedules, and making postings: about 16 hours
Mon, 9/2	Through all channels, we picked up about 60 candidates over the weekend (the downturn in tech hiring may have made it a little easier to find people); yes we worked intermittently through the holiday weekend to assemble our applicant pool NOTE: We do not use any AI or other automated tools to review or rank applicants. In fact, we don’t even have HR screen applicants first — all resumes go directly to the hiring manager for personal review.
Thu, 9/5	Between Tue and Thu of this week, we completed 17 introductory calls with candidates, each lasting about 30 minutes with 1-2 people on each call; that’s about 12 hours of staff time
Mon, 9/9 – Thu, 9/19	We scheduled 7 first-round interviews and completed 6 of them (1 candidate dropped out); we used a panel of about 4 people for an average of 1.25 hours per candidate, adding up to 30 hours of staff time
Fri, 9/20 – Tue, 9/24	We scheduled 4 second-round interviews and completed 3 of them (1 candidate dropped out); we used a panel of about 5 people for an average of 2 hours per candidate, adding up to 40 hours of staff time
Tue, 9/24	We made a formal job offer to our primary candidate
Thu, 9/26	Our primary candidate accepted the job offer
Fri, 9/27 – Fri, 10/4	We complete background checks and wait for the Board meeting
Mon, 10/7	Our Board vote will be held, completing the entire cycle
Mon, 10/28	Day 1: Onboarding

• Total time from posting to accepted offer: 27 days
• Total staff time spent: about 100 hours
• That averages to about 5 staff hours per work day during this period — a remarkable commitment

Extra Special Thanks: Eric Nutt

None of this would have been possible if I’d been running this show. But hiring manager Eric Nutt got the job done and is primarily responsible for setting this record. He powered through resumes during the Labor Day holiday weekend. He completed most of the intro calls solo, and did it in just 3 days (17 calls in 3 days? Kill me!). And he agonized with the team over all our choices (we had a ton of really good candidates).

So a big Thank You to Eric! And a big “I’m sorry” to anyone in our organization that tries to beat this record. 😎

Five Notes

1. UK digital services professional Matt Jukes had an interesting post about how things can/should change, now that the Government Digital Services (GDS) is resurgent in the wake of their elections. He has specific ideas for how local government can be supported, which I appreciated. And while he’s talking about local government in the UK, the principles apply across the pond as well.
2. HBR’s IdeaCast took a look at “How Tribalism Can Actually Strengthen Workplace Culture” and it directly aligns with my experience, thinking, and past leadership. Indeed, I’ve had some friction with current peers because I’ve followed the advice and insights shared in this podcast episode (and I wish they would listen to these ideas, but I know they won’t). I first learned some of these ideas from Seth Godin in his 2008 book Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. There’s tremendous power in setting up a unifying culture. Take a listen.
3. Another example from across the pond (in the UK) that I appreciated this week was from Emily Webber and is a collection of posts she found valuable. Once I saw this series, I subscribed. This week’s post: Posts from Awesome Folks #124
4. This week USDR released a new post of value: A new model for building user research capacity across cities. In this piece they share some bare-bones basics of what UX research is, and then talks about how they’ve done work with multiple cities to build out research useful to all those cities. It’s inspirational. I just wish we had more resources to go after this work faster.
5. And since I’m on vacation, you only get 4 items this week, rather than 5. 😉

One Video

I’m on vacation this week, so I’m not going deep into anything complex or nerdy. So here’s a puppy cuddling with a golden retriever. Your 90 seconds of zen. Enjoy!

Five Laughs

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One Photo