If you are a multinational company, the process of hiring people is pretty smooth. You post the job description online and, in few days, tons of CVs arrive in your mailbox.

Easy peasy.

But is it really that easy to find the right candidates navigating a sea of similar profiles?

Here at Friendz we like doing things differently from the ordinary: we go off the grid every time we can. We don’t know whether the motivation for this revolutionary push can be traced back to our young age or to our strong determination, but it had always delivered results. One example? We hired the first employees in a party where, before and after a beer, we tested their skills (we even closed them in an escape room with 60 minutes to find the way out!).

But this time we went even bigger.

We were extremely needing a new resource to enter the Marketing&Sales team, to take care of introducing Friendz to as many clients as possible. In front of us two possibilities: hiring a Junior or a Senior. We were sure that a Junior figure would have adapted to the Friendz mood more easily (but what about the client portfolio?), while a Senior would have done the job better (but what about his classic attitude, so different from ours?). Pros and cons on both sides.

Taking a decision seemed impossible. We could have chosen the least bad or…. do things our own way! “Why don’t we hire an entire team? Three juniors who support and encourage each other, who share moments of joy and pain, satisfaction and disillusion, who learn from their own mistakes…” “Amazing, let’s do it!”

Internship 3x1

We posted the job advertisement “Friendz is hiring: internship 3x1, apply with your team!” on Facebook and LinkedIn. It followed a brief explanation of why we decided to recruit this way and how single applicants were eligible too (we would have helped them creating the team later). A detail not to be forgotten: the salary was x3 too!

We created a Facebook group where all the 30 fortunate candidates chosen (the applicants were over 400!) were invited and we used the platform for internal communications and organization. What we were going for was investing in motivated people who would have been able to collaborate with us in the long term, not just answering to the moment urgent needs.

We invited them in our office for a company presentation: we talked about what we were doing and, especially, how we were doing it. We have also gone through our milestones: from idea generation in one of the co-founder grandmother’s flat to the victory at the Web Marketing Festival in 2015 and the Wind Business Factor in 2016, from the process of creating the users community to all the adventures we lived together that made Friendz that special. At this point it was clear to everyone in the room that what we were offering was not an ordinary job!

…not an ordinary job!

First Challenge

In “The Wolf of Wall Street” Leonardo di Caprio asks a room full of salesmen at a seminar to sell him a pen.

Good one, but we needed something fancier.

We gave each team four days to buy a bike and resell it for the double of the price. They were also asked to film all the steps of their adventure, to prove and explain everything they were doing. The qualities under examination were the creativity of the candidates’ strategy, their determination and, to a lesser extent, the profit. Even if it was possible to read on their faces a mix of fun and concern, it was clear that everybody was completely high as a kite too.

The results were just amazing! From who organized a lottery spin in front of universities, who customized a bike for special florist deliveries, who collected money for the parish. If you think to have heard it all, imagine our surprise when we watched the videos they made: one more incredible than the other, a tangible proof that they were on the same page with Friendz mood and ready to embrace it!

The voting jury

Second Challenge

If I ask you what is the most important quality for a salesman, what would you answer? Reaching the clients, probably.

And how better to test this skill if not asking the candidates to find the contact of a famous Italian Youtuber and asking him to register an audio note while repeating some unlikely words (of common use but out of context)?

Not to be mentioned, the teams also approached this task with an extraordinary degree of creativity: some of the candidates called his mom pretending to be a friend, others reached his girlfriend in front of school, some others directly knocked at his door! While watching the teams structuring their approaches, we were able to identify the people who were the most creative and determined.

Disclosing the secret strategy

Third Challenge

Thinking outside the box and reaching the client are important skills for a salesman but, at the end of the day, he should be able to convince the clients to buy his product. How? In every possible way!

We contacted Grom (the famous ice-cream multinational company) Marketing department, and explained them our plan: we wanted to send our candidates in a mission at four Grom shops, in different locations around Milan. The mission? Convincing Grom’s staff (that was not informed of our arrival) to give the team an ice-cream for free: anything goes, except running away without paying! And here comes a fake bachelor party, sumo-fighter costumes, fictional food bloggers and an improvised boyband! And, most incredible, nobody was left in the cold!

Free ice-creams!

Fourth Challenge

Last but not least, a skilled salesman should understand the client he is speaking with, being as empathic as he can in order to make an unknown service/good a desired one. A good challenge to verify these skills is to explain something difficult to someone who has never heard about it.

At this point of the competition, just three team were left. We brought to the office three of our grandparents and we assigned to every team one of them. The teams had to explain to our guests what Friendz is and how the app works, in a way that they were able to autonomously refer it to us. It was not easy at all, but we are sure we got some extra downloads from unexpected locations such as bowls clubs or construction sites.

Grandparents at work

The choice was super hard to be taken: the three finalist teams were all deserving a job at Friendz!

We decided to give the possibility to join our team to Elisa, Marco and Arnaldo, three young graduates from the best universities in Milan, already involved in some job experiences abroad. Very interesting facts that we should have known before with a quick screening of their CVs but that we discovered just after we hired them.

We are super satisfied with the results achieved with our unconventional recruiting process. We married this approach from day one and, never more than now, we realized the added value that it brought to our team. We saw how the candidates’ attitude changed over the two weeks: from the first contact, when they thought they were relating to a “normal company”, to the moment they experience the vibrant atmosphere of our office. Everybody was able to express himself, without tension or constraints, working in team and showing his real personality.

Probably, in the HR world, asking for out of ordinary things should become more ordinary.