The challenge: With exciting new leadership and facing a full online relaunch, the New York Observer needed to hire a hard-nosed and creative newsroom leader who could partner with the EIC to develop coverage areas, expand the newsroom, edit copy, and mentor a young team
After researching the client's business and goals, we developed a job description and scorecard that emphasized the client's start-up nature and exciting journalistic vision, and which would help us identify excellent candidates who were excited to achieve the organization's goals
What a person needs to accomplish in this role. Where job descriptions focus on what the person will be doing, outcomes focus on what the person must get done. Most of the jobs we hire for have three to eight outcomes. Below is a sample list of appropriate outcomes for this role.
Work with the EIC to articulate the business beat's mission and prioritize appropriate stories. Assign staff and freelance to prioritized stories. Edit and position to reflect the publication's mission and voice.
Source, interview, and hire reporters (experienced and young/hungry) who are excited to relaunch a publication, don't want to spend their days aggregating other pub's stories, and can write the second day story first
Mentor the cub reporters in the newsroom, leading them to select and write stories that align with the publication's mission and grab the right kinds of attention
Through a combination of personal network sourcing and online research, we identified 75 candidates that had the requisite skill set. After evaluating those candidates, we chose 12 to join us in a 45-minute screening interview.
After screening the candidates, we referred five candidates from a variety of publications, and who had a diverse (but on-target) set of reporting and editing skills.
After several rounds of interviews, we helped our client make an offer to the candidate that possessed both the requisite skills and the engaging personality to succeed in a dynamic, growing organization.
Based on our 15 years of experience building teams and hiring for clients, we've developed a powerful methodology for consistently sourcing the best candidates:
The first thing we do is get to know your business, your products, your customers, and your personnel. These are simple but powerful conversations that help us build a complete picture of where you've been, where you're going, and who you need to help you get there.
We help you position the role within the org and the marketplace. Then we help you refine, or we create from scratch, a job description that matches that strategy and is designed to capture the attention of the target candidates.
We create a scorecard that describes exactly what you want a person to accomplish in the role. The scorecard lists outcomes and competencies you're looking for, giving you a clear picture of what the person you seek needs to be able to accomplish.
We don't just post job descriptions on hiring sites. Using the hiring strategy as our guide, we ask our network for referrals and target appropriate sectors to find qualified people who may not be actively looking for a new role.
We work with your hiring manager to develop an interview process that makes sense for your org. We assign roles and specific questions to interviewers, then help you rank candidates according to the scorecard. Finally, we help you make the offer. If desired, we can operate as both a facilitator and a negotiator on your behalf.
So does Tita. That's Tita. You won't be able to see Tita if you're on mobile. But she's there. Woofing. As she does.
