The Fubra Blog
Our first Fubra Bootcamp!
What’s Fubra Bootcamp?
Fubra Bootcamp is a new way of hiring employees that we came up with and decided to try out to find out if we could achieve our hiring goals such as:
- Hire the best employees
- Hire people who want to stay with the company for the strong career prospects and don’t just want any old job
- Find hard working, smart, creative and individual people who are eager to learn new skills and be part of our growing company
- Increase employee retention through better assessment strategies
- Create a buzz around wanting to work at Fubra
Over the last month or so we have been busy here holding our first Fubra Bootcamp in which 5 potential employees were put through their paces competing for 3 spaces in our growing team as Online Marketing Assistants.
What does bootcamp involve?
Our selection process involved starting off with 60 applicants. We then decided on around 40 people who took our initial pre-interview test which was designed to test research and communication skills. Next was the interview stage, and around 20 applicants were invited to come to our offices in Aldershot, Hampshire for more assessments and a face to face interview allowing us the opportunity to get to know each person and find out what their skills were.
After much discussion we chose the 5 interviewees who had the attitude, skills and experience we were looking for and invited them to attend a one month trial period with us. At the end of the month’s trial they would be told whether they were to be offered a full time position or not and that they were competing for 3 positions that we had available.
The month’s trial involved training sessions in online marketing and advertising, brainstorming days, welcome lunches, halo playing and many other tasks based around determining where each persons skills lay and what they could bring to the company plus what we could offer them.
Why have a bootcamp?
You may wonder why we chose to hire people using this type of process, considering that this is not something that is usually the norm for most businesses.
Well, we did look into other routes as well, and one of them was hiring through the governments Apprenticeships scheme which seemed like a good opportunity to find talent among those who wanted to learn new skills as well as earn money which, in theory, should have been perfect. However, it turned out that this route was not suited to us at all due to the time and costs involved in dealing with the process and because the NVQ courses on offer alongside the job were not really related very well to our work. It seemed that there were going to be a lot of hoops to jump through in order to show that we were “training” the students properly, according to the NVQ syllabus. However, the training that we were required to cover would have actually been far too simple to be beneficial to the job role or in fact, to the student. We do think that Apprenticeships are a great idea in principle and could bring a lot of people back to work, but really they could be run so much better if the emphasis was put on to the employer to come up with a training program and syllabus covering skills related to their industry which was then approved by the governing body.
Another option was just to hire people based on the popular C.V. filtering, plus one or sometimes two interview process that is adopted successfully by many companies. We have tried this before and found that, whilst first impressions undoubtedly count for a lot, it has proven very hard for us to find the best suited people with such a short character assessment which can often turn out to be a false judgement by even the best of assessors due to the environment of the typical interview and the fact that anything will be said in order to impress and secure the job. This can lead to a bad decision being made by both the interviewee and the employer about whether the role is suitable for the candidate.
So we came up with the Bootcamp process to give both us and the potential employees a chance to get on the job experience, get to know everyone, learn new skills and be assessed over a whole month. This allowed room for discovering whether the 5 candidates were really suited to the job and to the company as a whole which we see as just as important to the development of each individual and their career with us.
What was the outcome?
Bootcamp was completed on Wednesday 31st March 2010, after a lot of suspense about who would be offered a full time position with us and overall has been a great success. We are now very happy to welcome to our team Hannah Bird, David Pomonis and Ricky Dawn who are our new Online Marketing Assistants and will be working alongside the whole team to improve the traffic, visibility and buzz around our network of websites.
A big thanks also go out to the candidates who didn’t make it through at the end of the month, it was an extremely hard decision to make and Warren Tilley and Ben Egan also did an excellent job in their time with us.
This whole process has been a successful one for both us and our new team members as we have both had a chance to get to know each other and they have been able to get an understanding of the job that needs to be done to find out if it suits them.
Everybody came up with some great results across their tasks and we are really happy to have such creative, enthusiastic and hard working people in our team and look forward to getting on with their first task of working on increasing the profile and profitability of our Airport Guides network in time for the summer travel season!
Congratulations to Hannah, Ricky and Dave we all look forward to working closely with you all and producing some excellent results in the near future!
When’s the next bootcamp?
We have already started to think about our second Fubra Bootcamp and how we can improve the process, so keep checking back for updates on when Bootcamp 2 is to be held and if you are interested in attending just get in touch and tell us why you think you would like to work for us.
This is potentially something which we could use to employ for other positions in the company as well, and we are excited about looking into this for future recruitment drives!
Tags: fubra bootcamp, jobs, new staff
How does that work if any of the five already have a job? How are they expected to attend a month trial?
Thanks for your question Adam, you have raised an important point and we are very aware that it would be a risk for anyone in a current job to quit and participate in our bootcamp if they were successful in making it to the trial stage. This is exactly the sort of people we want to attract. Someone who would leave a current job to take a trial with us is confident in themselves, extremely attracted to working for us and someone who takes smart risks. These are attributes we actively look for in everyone that works for us.