One of our co-founders, Ashleigh Corker, was featured in The Washington Post, speaking to interviewing and hiring in the fashion space.
At Proto101, we believe that people are more important than ideas because good ideas only become a reality with great people. With this in mind, finding the right people to work with is a job we take very seriously. It is the job of evaluating fit for the employee and the company, a two-way interview.
Over the course of our careers, we have interviewed over 2000 people and we've learned some things along the way:
1. Probe for experience: asking "tell me about a time when..." questions, allow you to hear rea-life examples of how candidates behaved, what they focus on, and previous results. You can get a good sense of how candidates handle stress, conflict, prioritization, and decision making.
2. Know what's hard to teach: integrity, curiosity, and a growth mindset are aspects that we think are important in our co-workers that very hard to teach, so, we probe on them deeply during the interview process.
3. Hire communicators: business is a team sport and communication is essential to coordination.
4. Check the references of their references: a candidate's references should be glowing because they have been hand-selected. To get a less-biased view, ask the initial reference for someone else they can talk to about the candidate.
5. Go beyond your network: it has been proven that the more diverse a group is, the more resilient and better performing teams are. In order to increase diversity of your teams, you need to seek out candidates outside of your personal network.
6. Matching values: we are a value-driven company and it is important to us that our team members are paddling in the same direction as us with respect to those things that we find important: putting people first; inventing and simplifying; committing to quality and sustainability; demonstrating kindness and respect for our planet, team members, and customers; having fun; and testing, learning, and growing.
