We’ve recently been doing some candidate interviewing and hiring for our client services team. And along the way, we’ve met some interesting, talented and quite experienced marketing agency pros. Some we liked and some we really liked. Some liked us back, some didn’t and some others we had a mutual dislike. Standard hiring stuff, really.
In our ongoing search for the best agency talent, there were lots of conversations and many that were very interesting. One conversation that I personally had stuck with me, as the candidate referred to joining Clever Samurai as building a community.
He knew about our advertising agency, knew about some of our work, knew the credentials of our creative team and had a real affinity for our brand. And given that we are in the business of brands, he openly acknowledged that he loved ours. He might have been sucking up a little, but his enthusiasm was palpable. He simply wanted the opportunity to help us build our community. And he seemed to have the credentials to contribute.
After he left the interview, I looked up the word community. Here’s what I found.
“a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals”
I was impressed with the conversation but I became even more impressed as I thought about what he meant by community. In our case, we’re in the market share business. So, the goal of our community is to drive business performance for our clients in some very diverse verticals. And the goal of our clients, who also form part of our community, is to do exactly the same thing.
In reflecting upon the various interviews over the past quarter, the folks we’ve hired all reflect the values of our community. They couldn’t wait to join our advertising agency, they cared about the work first and the pay cheque later, they wanted to learn and they wanted to make a difference for our clients.
And in some of the folks we didn’t hire, we saw an over abundance of self-interest, an over valuation of potential contribution and a material difference in values. They simply didn’t fit our community. Standard hiring stuff, really.
So to those new employees (and new clients) to Clever Samurai, welcome to our community. We can’t wait to build great things together in 2016.
Incidentally, the candidate who used the word community is not part of Clever Samurai yet. We’re both now evaluating which part of the neighbourhood he might belong.
