At Timezynk, no applicant is selected based on our gut instinct. Instead, we avoid bias in our recruitment by anonymizing CVs and cover letters – and to make it all more fun, we invite our candidates to participate anonymously in a Battle Royale. We believe that in this way, we can find the best candidates today and tomorrow.
When a candidate’s CV and cover letter enter our recruitment tool, they are automatically anonymized. This means that we are unable to see anything that can identify who the candidate is, such as the candidate's name, age, gender, ethnicity, or address for that matter.
In this blog post, we’ll explain how our recruitment process works and how it helps us find the best candidates who are a natural fit for our organization!
After anonymizing the CV and cover letters, we go over each one and rate candidates between 1-5 based only on their previous experience and knowledge. The purpose of this is to avoid bias and assess all candidates equally.
We think that it is the candidates previous experiences and knowledge that will determine if they will succeed in their role. The candidates who are rated 3 and above are considered and contacted, and finally, the best candidates move on to the next stage.
Besides previous experience and knowledge, we want to learn about the candidate’s motivation, problem-solving skills and personality, to know if they are a good fit for the specific role as well as our organization. Normally, this is done by letting the candidates answer questions, take tests and do interviews. But we decided to give it a twist and came up with an even better and more fun way to do this – inviting our candidates to a game of Battle Royale!
In Battle Royale, candidates who have applied to work for our support function swing against each other in the hardest of battles, over the grand price of a virtual meeting. The battle consists of tasks to get to know the system and questions that need to be answered. The candidates will therefore get to see our system in-action and learn about how Timezynk works.
The five candidates with the highest rating will be invited to a video meeting/interview. In this stage, we de-anonymise the candidates in the system so we know what to ask them and talk about during the interview.
After this, we add the rating of the interview with the previous ratings and further discuss which candidates are most interesting for the role. The top three candidates with the highest total rating are invited to one more interview (physical if possible, otherwise another call)
After this, we ask for references and contact them, and if everything checks out we offer the candidate the job.
Most candidates apply for several positions at a time, and parallel recruitment processes tend to be quite demanding for the candidates. Since we started implementing our new recruitment process, we’ve seen that:
In addition, we have received many comments from candidates about how fun the process has been. For us, the usually quite heavy recruitment process is now something our recruiting managers look forward to.
For example, we received a reply from one of our applicants that really made us happy:
“I must say: Whoever wrote the previous email and explained your recruitment process gets the biggest gold star I can give! I never thought in my life that I would have such a wide smile from a job application as when I read through this. I love it when recruiters take the time to have some fun!”
In conclusion, we only see benefits with avoiding bias and adding some fun into the mix when it comes to our recruitment process. After all, the process of applying for jobs as well as searching for candidates is demanding – so why not make it a little more relaxed and entertaining for all parties? At least that’s how we see it.
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