How we find professionals that will take you from good to great

3 April 2023

Berg| Our process

In the beginning

All our collaborations start with a session to learn about the mission, we do this while reading company documents and building our intranet page to deepen our understanding of your company.

We want to feel your passion firsthand hand so we can share that passion with the candidates who come through the process.

We'll learn about your industry, who you compete against, who are the leaders in the space and who are the upstarts. This helps us to understand whether or not there are companies that have the people who hold the values that you need.

Everything starts with the right person on the bus. If you treat hiring in a transactional fashion, you will receive transactional employees and they won’t take you from good to great.

We are your advocates and in order to hire the best people, it’s necessary to understand how you think. There are no shortcuts.

Intake meeting

We take an outcome-based approach to understand the hire. This means speaking to two different people to understand the differing expectations of the role.

First, we discuss the mission statement of the role and the high-level expectations of this new hire.

Next, we talk about what success looks like. Not what the person is expected to do but what is the expected outcome of the things they do.

From here, we will talk about the key character traits that you want to see in the candidate.

We typically record and transcribe intake meeting, using our own knowledge and generative AI to complete the picture and create the collateral including a job description

You can read more about our intake approach here

We research and source

With a full understanding of the hire, we then move to the research and reach out phase of our work.

We create a picture of your industry and adjacent industries where your next hire could be. This will include relevant currents and formers of all your competition and numerous adjacent industries with reasoning as to why you may find your next start there.

Although we have a deep pool of candidates, we don't really rely on them as we believe that you are paying us to find the right person wherever they be and not just the most convenient person for us.

After all, there are 500,000 C-Levels in the USA alone, and the people that we know best may not be the right fit for your business. For example, we may know an incredible Chief Sales Officer but if she wants to work in coal-fired plants and you deal in solar panels, your values might not match.

We conduct a rigorous CV assessment. This means we look for resumes which

Have the expertise necessary to do a great job
Show an upward career trajectory
Stick around (less than 3 jobs in 3 years)
Show markers of key values (ie extracurricular study, hobbies or sports teams)

Interacting with candidates

The majority of our placements come from us reaching out to the right people rather than applicants to job sites. We believe in research combined with targeted outreach as opposed to spam.

Below, you can see that 23% of the candidates that we reach out to end up in a process, vs the industry average 6%

When we find a candidate who looks good on paper, we will be persistent but not transactional. Moving a professional from one company to another isn’t just for us to make a profit, it's a life-changing event.

The interview

The goal of our interview is to discover excellence, ethics and values:

Does the candidate's career make sense?
Has the candidate excelled in their past roles?
Do they have the right values (internal locus of control, humble, hungry, smart + your specific values)
Do they have the technical proficiency to do a great job (we conduct technical interviews for all roles, using external professionals for software development)
[optional] Are they good managers?

Once we complete an interview, we provide a written report as well as a full replay of the interview which can be interrogated through AI:

Learn more about our interview process here

Reference checking

References are almost as important as the interview itself. Yet almost everyone does it wrong, if at all!

They hold off conducting references until the end of a process, using them to confirm that the person worked where they said they worked for the amount of time they said they did. If a bad reference springs up after you’ve made the offer, powerful psychological bias will try and normalise bad references or mark them as a ‘one-off’.

Our approach to a reference is a call to a line manager where we ask questions not to get more comfortable in recommending the candidate but to understand how the candidate impacted their former manager.

Learn more about our refere ncing process here

Getting to a hire

You'll be kept up to date throughout our process and eventually, you'll begin to interview the candidates yourself.

We're happy to help in whatever way we can to ensure you get the person who'll take you to great, whether it's providing interview training or managing the scheduling process to keep everything streamlined.

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