User:GayleKaren/WMF Recruiting Strategy Project

STATUS: DRAFT - In progress. Feedback welcome. Please let me know if I can be clearer in some areas and offer reality checks.

Revisions made after December 02, 2011 are in dark olive green, based on feedback from Sue, Erik, and Garfield.

Project Description

The "Wikimedia Foundation Recruiting Strategy Project" has two primary deliverables. Between the dates of November 10-22, 2011, the charge is to create a set of recommendations to support the Wikimedia Foundation in meeting its ambitious hiring targets in the timeframe of the next 6-7 months. Specifically, the recommended outcomes proposed by Sue Gardner, verbatim, were:

• A set of recommendations for the Wikimedia Foundation, aimed at enabling us to hit our aggressive recruitment targets with high-quality staff who are a good culture fit
• A set of base materials for hiring managers, that would help them to run a good process and reach a good outcome. Those base materials might include things like a set of interview questions, a set of reference check questions, a “value proposition” for candidates, and so forth. It's up to you what to include, based on what you learn through the project, and what your own experience suggests would be valuable

This project clearly aligns with the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic goal of stabilizing infrastructure, particularly building internal capacity "to better support the movement and achieve its strategic goals."

Process

The process is unfolding in three iterative, overlapping stages.

• Stage 1: Discovery

This stage consisted of interviewing the following members of the Wikimedia Foundation: Garfield Byrd, Kul Wadhwa, Erik Möller, CT Woo, Alolita Sharma, Tomasz Finc, Barry Newstead, Cyn Skyberg, Jay Walsh, Zack Exley, and Melanie Brown. I also interviewed key external sources in my personal network, chosen for their expertise in hiring in technical fields with similar organizational challenges as well as their immediate accessibility.

• Stage 2: Synthesis and Research

This stage consisted of articulating high-level themes from the data.

• Stage 3: Recommendations and Feedback

This stage consists of pulling the data together into cogent recommendations and then testing these recommendations with people within the Wikimedia Foundation interviewed, to the extent that they have time and availability.

Assumptions

There are a couple of assumptions:

• The scope of the project about the challenges of hiring employees on the engineering and technical side of the Wikimedia Foundation.
• Workforce planning and employee retention are not in scope.

Hiring Challenges

Wikimedia employees seem driven by the mission, by their love of education, by the open source values, and by love of Wikipedia itself. The Wikimedia Foundation does not have the leverage of competitive salary and the promise of stock that for-profit companies can lure with, nor does the Foundation want people who are in it for the money. To quote Jay, the organization is looking for people who can live with their own humanity. The challenge is how to convey what working for the Foundation means for incoming and new employees so that there is consistent narrative that articulates meaning, and that also differentiates between the value of being a member of the Wikimedia Foundation and the value of being a member of the Wikipedia community.

The key hiring challenges surfaced in the interviews with Wikimedia employees fell into three buckets:

• The competitive landscape is rough.

• Getting people in the door for interviews is tough.
• There is uncertainty about clearly messaging the value proposition.
• The Wikimedia Foundation has low visibility within SF Bay Area/Silicon Valley.

Colorful metaphors for the competitive landscape were things like "it's like a shark feeding out there", "hiring developers in the Bay Area right now is like a war", "Facebook and Google are giant talent sucking machines". Identity, specifically as a cornerstone for differentiation, and then the public and visible articulation of that identity is going to be key. Identity issues, partly stemming from rapid organizational growth and partly from ongoing ambiguity in relationship to the Wikipedia community, make it challenging to deliver a consistent narrative about the value of working for the Foundation that can be leveraged for hiring. Another perspective is that the hiring pull that Apple, Facebook, and Google have is beneficial to smaller companies: The people who want to work at 2000+ person company are almost by definition not the people you want at a startup, or small growing company. They're not the rebels, the outliers, the misfits, etc. Smaller companies are likely to come up against Square, Yammer, and Twitter for employees more than Apple, Google, or Facebook. It would be useful to know who the primary competitors are for Wikipedia from a talent perspective, in addition to from a market perspective. Unfortunately, it does not seem widespread knowledge that San Francisco is home to the Wikimedia Foundation.

• The Wikimedia Foundation needs to build internal capability.

• There is variance in skill level of hiring managers and in utilization of consistent, robust process.
• There is a need to hire for a higher caliber of technical skills in the organization.

Developing the cadre of people with the skills to be really excellent at spotting talent, convincing potential talent of the cause, and recruiting them to the Foundation needs to be another cornerstone of organizational strategy going forward. The Foundation needs consistent internal clarity on what they're hiring for, and the effective hunting, screening, and recruiting processes.

• The culture of open space can present a unique environment to adapt to.

Being a part of the engineering team at Wikimedia means recognizing that being an open source organization means fostering and maintaining a community around the code, not just the community around the editorship of the encyclopedia. It also requires a professional openness to produce quality code that people are willing to stand by, in ways that are different than coding in for-profit organizations. (It also means that there likely needs to be a filtering mechanism so that community needs can still be addressed, but not at the expense of moving critical functionality forward - this is a fascinating organizational tension that Wikimedia needs to name, raise, and proactively deal with.)

Recommendations

Recommendations are organized tactical versus strategic recommendations. They're based on these key findings:

• Large pieces of the hiring process and supporting documentation already exist in the organization. What needs attention is awareness, utilization, and buy-in of existing processes. Further investigation is necessary to identify the vital few tools to focus on.
• The hiring environment in the organization needs systemic support.
• There is a leadership opportunity to grow the skill and capacity of the Wikimedia Foundation to identify and attract talent.

Tactical Recommendations

These recommendations are focused on the mechanics of the hiring process, the critical nuts-and-bolts plumbing level.

Casting the Net

• Revise Wikimedia Jobs Page

The Jobs Page for an organization should do an effective job of attracting the kind of of people you want in your organization (with a sufficient net for diversity) yet also serve as a filter.

For example, see Mozilla's careers page. Key differences include framing as a "career" or "opportunity" rather than "jobs", personal testaments, the prominence of describing an attractive working environment. Also see Asana's Jobs Page and Quora's Jobs Page for the way they make seeing the upsides of working at those companies immediately evident.

Include things like Brandon Harris' story from the Wikimedia fundraising banner, in a similar way that Mozilla does little testimonials about why people work at Mozilla.

• Evaluate the Recruiting Message

Make sure that the message that goes out to target talent is something that really catches their attention and isn't a form letter. This is incredibly important because people get so many. It's important that it go beyond "you have a great background and I'd like to talk to you about our company." It needs to feel personalized, which speaks to how people want to be related to, and it needs to avoid stereotypical recruiter words like "rockstar" and "stellar background." The letter needs to be brief but focus on the unique offering of the Wikimedia Foundation around impact, and also depict something about the organizational culture. A link to a video can support the letter. (Having an internal recruiter committed to keeping this fresh is a later recommendation.)

I've started collecting recruiting emails from my colleagues and friends who are engineers and developers, just out of curiosity. Thus far, they significantly underscore the need to look at what Wikimedia Foundation recruiters are currently sending out. The fact that my engineering friends are getting these emails from reputable companies (including one from Wikia that prominently mentions Wales) should be embarrassing to someone.

• Search in Less Competitive Markets (i.e. Not the San Francisco Bay Area)

The Los Angeles market, as an example, has salaries that are 25-50% lower than the ones in the Bay Area. One tactic is to post on Craigslist in other markets, because it's free, and find out if people may be willing to relocate.

• Reconsider WMF's Employee Referral Process

In the break room, half hidden behind another flier on the board, is the employee referral form. If, as an artifact of culture, it is indicative of how much employee referral is going on, then the program needs to shift. Even when employees make referrals, the program seems underutilized. Current minimum listed on the form posted in the break room is $100 for non-exempt and $250 for exempt. Anecdotal evidence clearly states a boost in quality employee referrals upon implementation, not just because people refer their friends, but because they may also keep a broader look-out. For comparative numbers, Yahoo used to give $3000 and the industry in Silicon Valley runs from $500 to $10,000. For a for-profit company of comparable size, SmugMug uses $2000 and Yammer uses $5000.

My opinion that I voiced during the feedback meeting was to either make it significant enough to not be token, or to not do it at all. I think that from a values alignment perspective, finding intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation through non-monetary methods would be the way to support employee engagement in referrals, especially as authors like Daniel Pink show that organizations underutilize intrinsic motivational factors.

• Use Snowball Method to Widen Recruitment Pool

Snowball Sampling is a term from statistical research. As applied to hiring, it means finding out who they know, who they look up to, who are great engineers, and aggressively recruiting them. Some companies ask people, when structuring the reference check, who the best people they've ever worked with are for the purpose of recruiting them. The reference check is also a potential source of candidates to poach in that by asking a candidate to ask for the best engineer they know as a reference, it provides an opportunity to speak to someone that may be an excellent coder.

Adjusting the Hiring Process

• Adopt a Streamlined Hiring Cycle

At two companies of similar size to the WIkimedia Foundation, the interviewing process for engineering positions were generally completed, with exceptions, in one day. Having an effective, rapid cycle with skilled interviewers is an ideal situation. In asking Cyn Skyberg and Melanie Brown about the hiring process at Wikimedia, the picture depicted was somewhat cumbersome, burdened by many steps, and with a lot of checks needed - and that's after initial work to streamline it already. The first recommendation is to create a checklist for the hiring process, where for each stage, (i.e. Sourcing, Screening, Interviewing), the lead accountability, the input, and decision-making authority needs to be clearly identified, building on the existing hiring document in the My HR wiki called "How to Hire (Full/Part Time Employees)". The document is pretty easy to ready and seems clear about each step. There are links to resources in HR corner such as a grid tool for a screening and selection process, a guide to phone interviews, best practices on interviewing, homework assignments. Actual practice and implementation seems to be the challenge.

The deliberation in the process exists for a reason, specifically because hiring for cultural fit is an important factor, particularly in retention. It is still a "both/and" than an "either/or" in that the overall cycle needs to be looked at. It may not be as streamlined as other organizations in the end. Wikimedia still needs to figure out the minimum requisite structure and also develop skill at identification and recruitment, and clarity on hiring criteria to support smoother process. It was pointed out that part of the process which is unique to Wikimedia is that Sue as ED meets with every candidate. I actually think this is a competitive strength as it underscores the importance of each hire to the organization and adds to the prospective employee's hiring experience.

Understanding the unique needs of Wikimedia also as a non-profit and not a corporate structure is a relevant piece of feedback for the rest of this document as well.

• Assess Current Effectiveness of Phone Interviews

In the internal My HR wiki is a document titled "How to Phone Interview" which has a clear articulation of what to look for and the purpose of a phone interview. The next step is to understand the skill with which phone interviews are currently conducted, and to support the development of skill at phone interviews in the organization.

• Partner Each Hiring Manager with a Member of HR Department

Each hiring manager should have a support person within HR that's their partner throughout the process. This is partly to reinforce that HR is a partner to key leadership in the organization. It is the task of the CTCO's office to make sure that everyone who participates in the hiring process has the skills and the tools they need to effectively do so.

• Define and Set Shared Expectations on Hiring Criteria

Knowing what questions will be asked beforehand goes to having clarity on what the organization is looking for in the first place, and how different variables are weighting. All evaluators should use the same rating worksheet and the same scale, and then the hiring team should meet to discuss their perspectives. (It would be interesting to look at the overall effectiveness of these conversations, and if facilitator support would be useful or not.) There is already a "Hiring Criteria Grid Template" in the internal My HR wiki. The HR partner can partner with the hiring manager to customize and validate for any specific position. Outside that, a C-level executive and a member of HR played an additional role in vetting and courting the prospective hire.

• Refine the Purpose of Reference Checks

The reference check had better be glowing. If it's not glowing, that's a problem. On a fundamental level, the other useful component is straight-up fact-checking, because if someone lied, that's a problem.

Conducting the Interview

• Clarify the Role of Interviewer

The entire hiring experience needs to be managed, and understanding the role of the interviewer is critical. One external interviewee said, "You're selling the experience of working at the company. It doesn't matter if you're tired from not sleeping, if you had a fight with your ex, if you're hungover - you have to be 100% during the interview. It's partly about being a representative of the company and it's partly about being respectful to the person who came to the interview." Erik echoed this by saying that "we need a kick-ass application process". Also, bringing people into the organization should be a team process. Part of the process is also buy-in and investment from those on the team doing the hiring about the new hire.

• Use Paired Interviewing as a Skill-Building Opportunity

Pair experienced interviewers with less experienced interviewers, with time after for a debrief and critique of the process in addition to a debrief about the candidate. Tomasz already does this and stated that it works. Part of this process should be lightly institutionalizing things that already work. Even in pairs, they need to work together within the overall strategy of the interview process - see next point.

• Clarify Interview Strategy and Process with Hiring Panel and Individual Interviewers

It was unclear to me during data gathering how consistently in the organization panels are utilized, and more specifically how they're organized. One of the clear steps in the "How to Hire Full/Part Time Employees" is "confirm hiring panel availability" and "meet with hiring panel prior to verify job and criteria grid." Using a hiring panel seems to be the preferred Wikimedia process. How coherent is the interview strategy? Does each person know what they will focus on beforehand? In other organizations, the interview team is usually a team of four (seemed to be the common consensus number of multiple organizations), each asking different questions or focused on a different area. Some of the panel should be by engineers focusing on content specific topics.

The hiring panel and its utilization is not universally used. I think a mixed method with individual interviews AND a panel may be ideal because it covers potential differences in personal interaction styles that may impact how someone interviews. That said, the issue of having a deliberate strategy where people who are collaborating on the hire each knows what they are doing or eliciting in a skilled way is more important, panel or not. Structure supports the process, but is not a substitute for skill at process.

Strategic Recommendations

These recommendations are not about tactics but revising the underlying context by which recruiting happens. One key necessity is creating the right hiring environment.

People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they're really proud of, that they'll fight for, sacrifice for, that they trust. - Howard Shultz, Starbucks

This is actually a core culture issue, meaning one that leaders at every level of the organization need to embody and articulate.

This blog post by Yishan Wong, who went on to become Facebook's first Director of Engineering and who scaled most of their engineering team, articulates the philosophy that "Hiring is #1", which means to him, "make hiring your number one priority, always", which means "that it needs to be your organization's first priority, it needs to be each manager's first priority, and it needs to be each engineer's first priority." Treating hiring as a number one priority over everything instigates clarity on behaviors and values, which can be indices of quality of people and workplace environment. As many people need to be involved in the hiring process as possible because it creates engagement and investment in successfully on boarding newcomers. (If people had a hand in hiring someone, they're more likely to be welcoming and invested in seeing that person succeed.) "The quality of coworkers is the single greatest determinant of workplace happiness, and fully engaged participation by everyone is the primary way by which everyone exercises direct power over making their job experience better."

At Yammer, they place a strong emphasis on maintaining excitement throughout the process. Said their Director of Infrastructure Engineering, "I never want to lose someone to another company because they didn't realize we were interested in them." In every interview, they stop ten minutes early to let the candidate ask questions, and see it as an opportunity to maintain excitement. "Everyone asks about culture, what we love about working at Yammer. It gives us a chance to talk about what's amazing. We sell how awesome Yammer is even if we don't think we're going to hire the person. People talk. If someone really wanted to work for us but didn't get hired, it's usually good press for us: great place, high standards."

To create the right hiring environment, the focus should be on building internal capacity, impacting the hiring context, and developing the organization.

This is more languaged from a corporate, for-profit perspective. I still think that there is something about building capacity and developing the organization. However, in terms of building a hiring engine in the same way that other for-profit companies have, that may just not be Wikimedia. The question still arises, how do you have employees keeping a look-out for quality talent to join the cause and join Wikimedia so that it's considered a part of what they do?

Build Internal Capacity

• Hire a Dedicated Internal Recruiter

Hire a dedicated internal recruiter that is unconventional in screening methods. Using primarily an internal recruiter, coupled with agency support for specific positions, is a solid strategy for a small, growing company.

From the perspective of some engineers, it is much more interesting and compelling to be called by a recruiter for a company rather by an agency. The ability of an internal recruiter to create the experience and value proposition of an organization exceeds that of an agency. They will have a fundamentally different conversation with potential employees. When recruiters work for agencies, it tends to be more about volume than customization. Organizations do not get the same kind of dedication with an agency, and the story is actually different. One internal recruiter I spoke to who started off with an agency said, "Now I really get it! It's not just me reading off a piece of paper about the things I'll give you. It's me being able to sell this company in a very genuine way. I'm not selling because I'm paid to, I'm doing it because I'm seeing every day our new releases, our new features, and I'm more passionate about the product and able to talk about it in a different way than I used to. I understand and love the product and the people, and that comes through."

How candidates experience representatives of a company is how they experience the culture of the company. I talked to SmugMug's "Huntress", their internal recruiter who has a background with agency recruiting. Smugmug is of comparable size to Wikimedia and on a comparable growth trajectory. They have just hit their 100th employee, and they have an amazing engineering and dev team. Their internal recruiter was so enthusiastic while talking about her hiring practices that by the end of the call with her, I wanted to work for SmugMug. That should be the experience someone has of a recruiter for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Currently, anecdotal reports from Wikimedia employees suggest that there is an almost zero hit rate from agency recruiters as compared to personal recommendations, which also reinforces the recommendation of increasing the referral bonus and also creating a hiring culture where employees are actively scouting talent.

That said, developing and deepening the relationship with agency recruiters is important. As Wikimedia continues to use agency recruiters, it needs to make sure that those recruiters have an A-level relationship with us. Many agencies have A clients, B clients, and C clients. Wikimedia needs to be considered an A client by their agencies if they aren't already. For that purpose, it is worth bringing them onsite to experience the organization and to increase their ability to represent Wikimedia.

• Employee Skill-building in Hiring Practices

What needs to be designed is process for supporting employee skill development in hiring practices. This is deeply tied to the notion that setting expectations at a cultural level to create a hiring environment that attracts talent is necessary, and that there needs to be a partnership between the office of the CTCO and hiring managers to co-create more consistent and effective process. Over time, the Wikimedia Foundation needs to increase its adeptness at identifying and recruiting top talent. Some relevant information exists below in Appendix B.

• Leadership Engagement on Hiring Narrative

Specifically, leaders in the organization need to be engaged around perpetuating consistent hiring narrative, putting hiring on the radar of their employees, and also managing the internal organizational issues of rapid growth particularly in the context of onboarding new employees. There are pieces of the value proposition in place - that someone joining the Wikimedia Foundation has an opportunity for global impact with a meaningful mission, gets to work for a stable company, can freely share code they've developed. There are others pieces that are less clear, around existing and future benefits, growth opportunity in the company, and how the company takes care of its own people to the degree they pay attention to employee burnout.

There may be a need to use a cross-functional team to make sure we're using the employee value proposition as articulated.

Impact the Context

• Increase brand-awareness within the SF area targeted at specific sub-cultures.

Many people I interviewed in the tech industry were unaware that San Francisco was home to the Wikimedia Foundation. Tomasz has already been hosting open source meet-ups to begin with and there is an increased need for awareness that the home of the Wikimedia Foundation resides in San Francisco. Ways that Wikimedia can increase its presence in the local tech community would include:

Local Advertising

As an example, Mozilla has a prominent, relevant billboard up. I took this picture 11/14/2011 on my cell phone while driving up 101, in the highly trafficked corridor between SFO and San Francisco. The timeliness given the current Occupy movement is interesting. They have also papered the 4th and King Caltrain station with recruiting billboards.

The kind of scatter approach that billboards use is not a good fit for Wikimedia. It would be better for a "recruiting engine" company. However, it may still be that growing awareness of the presence of the Foundation among specific Bay Area subcultures is necessary. The analogy of raising the signal to noise ratio came up, and that's a very relevant metaphor for everything that "impacting the context" should specifically aim at.

Hackathons

Examples of local tech communities would include: Hacker Dojo, BlackBox, Founders Den, NextSpace, I/O Ventures, Noisebridge

Local Hackathons: SuperHappyDevHouse, Hack The Future for younger hackers, Hack for a Cause

Erik's comment "You list these as though they inherently mean something, which they don't" was both beautifully frank and made me evaluate why I did include these. Because they're in my personal network, I still wonder if it's useful to reach out to them, and what I'm clear on is that identifying the key communities in the Bay Area that aren't already friends and allies to look at as potential recruiting pools would be helpful to Wikimedia.

This raised the useful conversation about the specific grounds one finds quality candidates in, considering tech AND non-technical positions (ex. on the strategy, community, or global development, finance and administration, or talent and culture portions of the organization). Based on this, I've added a strategic recommendation around finding other organizations against different criteria of comparability to share best practices with, who are truly doing innovative work. Factors in considering comparability means being sensitive to the fact that many non-profits aren't a good match, in part because small non-profits experience scarcity and are driven by that in ways that the Foundation isn't. I would guess that with shifting models, for-profits with a social mission that are attempting to hybridize non-profit do-gooding intent with an abundance mindset (rather than scarcity) may be a useful place to look.

Using Multimedia as Inspiration

Millenials in particular are more used to short, bite-sized, "sticky" ways of taking in information.

The 2009 "Inside Wikimedia" Video needs to be updated (as WMF is no longer 20 paid staffers) and then actively used to court people. There's also an opportunity to tie an updated video to a clear articulation of the Wikimedia strategy. Also, TED talks have a great deal of cache. I'd send out the TED talk with Jimmy Wales to people. (Incidentally, very pleased to see Wales and Wikimedia featured in a CNN Money article as a small company that is actively hiring. It would be great to find out if that article generated any prospects.)

The other video to leverage is the WMF Strategic Plan video, though it needs to be tightened. Another recommendation is to develop a video that drives home the actual strategy and importance of implementation for the mission of Wikipedia and Wikimedia to be successful.

Other Examples:

• A Look Inside SmugMug - useful for both marketing and recruiting
• Why Smugmug? Video (notice the "Interested in our jobs?" link immediately below it)

• Build on Innovative Attractors

Erik and Tomasz have already started experimenting with this with challenge posted via banner on Wikipedia. More data is incoming about why there was a low completion rate which could have to do with any number of variables, but this is a promising start.

Erik noted that the challenge seemed to work in terms of building an international pool, but there were few responses at the local level, so a more targeted methodology is required. Erik also mentioned starting to use short-term, low-dollar contracts for discreet pieces of code. Where HR could perhaps support that process is in partnering to develop a strategy, supporting the experience of the contractor relationship with Wikimedia, performance evaluation, and helping smooth the way for those contractors identified as high performers in this context for potential employment with Wikimedia.

• Evaluate How the Wikimedia Tech Blog Represents the Engineering Sub-culture Aligned to Mission

How do the Wikimedia Foundation blogs offer insight into their company culture in a way that is visible to outsiders, and particularly prospective hires? In this case, I refer specifically to the Wikimedia Technology Blog.

As another potentially comparable example, Etsy is interesting because they use the Code as Craft Etsy Blog to communicate how the core values for engineering are in alignment with their organizational mission. There's a story to be told in here about the engineers at the Wikimedia Foundation, in part because being non-profit and completely open source would require quality code to emerge that people are willing to stand by. Unlike organizations that can hide messy things on the backend and clean it up later after a release, Wikimedia can't do that - but its engineers can and do take pride in what they create and seem willing to stand up to that public scrutiny and to do the necessary work of engaging the community around its code. Wikimedia, like Etsy, is going to be selling the image of working at Wikimedia.

I found the Wikimedia Tech blog after I wrote the original recommendations. That said, I do think it needs to be re-evaluated through the dual lens of conveying tech information and for how the engineering sub-culture is portrayed.

Develop the Organization

• Articulate a Career Path for Technical Positions

There currently does not seem to be much clarity around possible upward mobility. It's also the job of leadership to partner with their employees to draw line-of-sight to a long-term future of the organization. The Wikimedia Foundation strategic plan goes until 2015. What're the implications for those in the organization and their roles in that timeframe, if not beyond? Predicting the future is difficult but creating a sense of possibility is imperative.

• Implement Leadership Development Practices

See "Leadership Development Challenges" below for more context.

As part of this work, the Wikimedia Foundation needs to institute leadership development practices. It's part of what needs to be articulated in the value proposition of being an employee.

After my conversation with Geoff (General Counsel), I wanted to underscore this further. There needs to be a significant training initiative in an organic, just-in-time style that systemically supports leadership development as a statement about investing in people.

• Develop a Robust HR Organization

The HR organization needs to be capable of scaling apace with the growth of the organization. See "The Positioning of the Office of the CTCO and HR" below. The consequence of not having a strong HR organization in strategic partnership with internal leaders is not having support in driving hiring, critical conversations about key people and retention, not having a focus on skill development, and the under-utilization of existing resources in the organization to support the hiring process.

• Align Rewards and Recognition Systems

Part of building the organizational culture and creating a hiring environment is aligning the rewards and recognition system. In particularly, peer-to-peer recognition systems are important. What's the equivalent of Wikilove in the Wikimedia Foundation?

• Ongoing Quest for Innovative Practices

This speaks directly to an org culture piece, but specifically for the Talent and Culture Office in the organization, there is a need to stay attuned both internally and externally to innovative practices and trends.

I've added to this because there's something that needs to be in here about being a learning organization that has permeable boundaries, supporting an open exchange of information with other organizations and systems that have traits in common with Wikimedia where there may be relevant practices to learn from and adapt. As mentioned above, finding those organizations with comparability and in which specific areas will be challenging, but also fun and interesting. Factors that would impact comparability would be values, scale, technology adoption, global reach, funding structures, etc.

Organizational Backdrop for Implementation

"Do or do not. There is no try." - Yoda

Recommendations are useless without the ability and capacity to implement. The key question that needs to be answered before implementation is that if indeed the overall hiring is a key priority for the organization, is the budget there to fund what infrastructure it would take? And is the entire leadership team ready to make the case for the time up front that it would take to develop internal capability?

There are beautiful things about the Wikimedia Foundation for potential hires to discover. There's a tenacity and a listening that the organization does, with a timbre that Erik characterized as "not accepting defeat or proclaiming victory". The people who work for Wikimedia are passionately committed to what they do, and to building an organization that is evolving into something beautiful.

The Wikimedia Foundation is already on track for doing a few things well, like innovating via hiring challenge through a banner on the site, and being on track to host a hackathon in January. That said, key issues emerge around hiring challenges, particularly within the context of managing organizational growth, leadership, and the role of HR and the CTCO position.

Managing Organizational Growth

The organization is experiencing the identity and fracturing issues that come of rapid growth without adequate integration, which creates challenges in leadership and hiring.

Hiring occurs against the context of the needs of the organization. Working with decentralized, rapidly growing organizations that are enmeshed with networked structures is critical for addressing global issues because they have a lot of leverage. However, that leverage needs to be used lightly with a high degree of engagement, and the more conscious a network is of its own capacity and the relationships between different parts, the better it functions. In the interviews, a picture that has emerged are the stress fractures of an organization that has grown very rapidly in the last two years, while also trying to maintain an informal organizational culture without burdensome hierarchy. Symptomatic of this are reports of "I don't know people anymore" and increased suspicion due to less visibility of organizational functioning that comes with the rapid shift in environment when the scale of the organization changes that rapidly.

There is an alignment issue between Wikipedia's presence as a top five website and Wikimedia's organizational maturity and infrastructure.

It seems like people who are familiar with Wikipedia but unfamiliar with Wikimedia expect more infrastructure than actually exists, both in terms of headcount and maturity. There seems to be large variance in range of employee experiences with organizational systems, and subsequently employee maturity (as differentiated from the concept of personal maturity, though in some cases, that may overlap).

The impact of growth on the ability of the organization to "see itself", to have a strong sense of identity, is reflected in the following statements:

• "Influx of people who don't understand organizational values" - whether or not that's true (not sufficient data), that that story is out there is an issue.
• "This is supposed to be a transparent organization, but it's become less so, especially in the last year when people have come on board."
• "We don't have an identity."
• "It's been a really painful growing year, especially for the people who have been here the longest."
• "Maintaining culture at all has been impossible with new faces coming in."
• "Sixteen months ago, there was thirty-five people and no management. We're hiring people to do things and not really managing them."
• "People are craving culture. They want to be open and transparent. We're stuck between being a tech company, and a growing, international, evolving organization that is becoming this amazing being."

There's a paradox in that there is clearly an extant organizational culture with multiple sub-cultures, and yet in the transition and growth stages, there's also accompanying anxiety about what's happening to that sense of identity.

In this case, added levels of hierarchy and process likely feel countercultural, especially for people who have been with the organization for awhile. In many cases, increasing levels of hierarchy are only useful for specific situations anyway and given the distributed authority and autonomy values that Wikimedia holds, traditional models are not particularly useful.

There needs to be a shift in the organization from the perception that growth is a necessary evil to fulfill the strategic plan to internalizing a way of embracing growth and the subsequent inevitable changes to the organization.

Right now, even if people want to grow and are supporting growth, the fact that there are statements like the ones above from a broad range of interviewees says that there are mixed feelings, and likely not good methods for integrating new people into the organization and integrated into the culture and flow of work.

Leadership Development Challenges

"Sixteen months ago, there were thirty-five people and no management. We're hiring people to do things and not really managing them." - Wikimedia Interviewee

Directly stemming from the challenges of rapid organizational growth, there are attendant leadership and structure issues.

As an example, Barry has grown his team from three to twenty people in the last year. Most leaders in that position try to match people to specific tasks, hope they have enough direction to swim rather than sink, expect them to rely on their peers to acquire culture by osmosis, and particularly in the startup world. Questions leaders could be asking with this type of growth include, "How is the way I distribute work different? How has my communication with my whole team shifted? Are people within my team aware of what they are accountable for and how those accountabilities are tied to their role, and to the overall strategy of the organization? How do new roles interact with existing roles, particularly across departments? How do I have to lead differently now that my team is exponentially larger than it was a year ago? What do I do directly less of and what do I have to do more of? How has my role changed?" These questions need to be asked any time there's that much growth, for the C-level team and below them organizationally.

Without systemic integration practices at the same time as expansion, these are the common and solvable issues. Systemic integration doesn't mean more hierarchy, but it does mean more conscious attention to organizational practices. I believe in the bare requisite structure needed, no more, but definitely no less.

Now that you have an effective executive team in place, it's time to look at where and how to implement consistent management practices in the organization and develop that team's (and the level below) leadership and management capability in a way that the individual style differences are preserved, but practices and especially messaging is more consistent.

With the executive team in place, there is also now an imperative to build capacity at the middle layer of leadership that translates work from strategy to tactics, and has sufficient skill to make things make sense for the frontline folks doing the work, while offering pertinent, valuable feedback to the executive level to effectively make decisions at a broader level and do requisite steering. Likewise, the executive team needs to have vehicles from which it receives as well as gives input from their people. Beneath the different managing styles, the different professional experiences, the teams in the organization beneath the C-suite need to have some experiences of commonality for a cohesive organizational culture to exist. This doesn't mean that things need to be the same. As an example, the principle that "anything can be questioned at any time", which is a healthy one for an organization (between extremes), can look differently in community development than in engineering, but that employees have experience of it and access to some effective process is the common, binding key.

One of the key movements in maturation is the shift from a constantly reactive to a more creative stance.

A creative outlook means also greater agility in being reactive, or right action to borrow from the Buddhist framework.) This means sometimes going slow to go fast, architecting a development path and room to develop for leaders in a way that supports them in the growth trajectory of their choice and that their evolving role requires.

There seem to be conflicting narratives in the organization exist around "who we are" and "what's the relationship between the community and the foundation".

While there won't be a single narrative ever due to the nature of the organization, there is a specific need to identify the narrative to the extent possible in relation to hiring and that's an executive-level responsibility. The organization is in the midst of organizational transformation. Organizations undergoing transformation need a different level of attention than maintenance. One could argue that most organizations are in transformation, which I think has to do with the general pace of change in the environment, and which, in turn, speaks to the requisite level of agility of organizational leaders to keep apace because one can no longer really expect true stability.

The Positioning of the Office of CTCO and HR

"No one knows what HR does." - Wikimedia Interviewee

It's an astonishingly common statement in lot of organizations I've worked with, with all the variations like "No one knows what business development does" or "No one knows what the marketing team does". The fact that it's common doesn't make it less of a problem, and this ties back to organizational growth, of people having the sense, whether it's "true" or not, that they don't know everyone anymore.

That people don't know what HR does impacts the relationship that people in the HR function are able to have with the key people they need to partner with and support in driving hiring.

The role of the CTCO needs to function strongly in both the transactional and partnering/strategic role with leaders at every level of the organization. Beyond the transactional, there's the talent management side - having the strategic conversations about key people and retention, the development of people, and also manage the integration points of the varying sub-cultures in the organization. They'll never be exactly the same but there can be underlying same elements and they certainly need to be pointed in the same direction.

If the relationship and positioning of the office of the CTCO and HR in relationship to the organization is marginal, it impacts utilization of the existing resources in the organization.

Specifically, I'm thinking of the knowledge of what's in the My HR portion of the office wiki. It sounds like Cyn and others did quite a lot of work in putting up resources on the internal HR wiki and cleaning things up that were there. Without seeing it personally, it looks like My HR includes guides to hiring, interview best practices, and the selection of a hiring panel. The issue is one of utilization, and without hiring managers being in partnership with their HR support team, it's not realistic to expect them to know what's there and actually use it. With both Cyn and Daniel exiting, it will be absolutely critical for the incoming CTCO and Director of HR to build those relationships and support utilization as an ongoing priority. There also needs to be consistency in the relationship, which is a cornerstone of trust. For instance, there used to be monthly meetings of hiring managers, and there isn't one anymore. That's symptomatic of a fragmented relationship.

As the organization scales, HR as a key support structure needs to scale commensurately, not just in degree, but in kind.

That means, the organization needs to scale its HR functioning not just in terms of services and benefits, which need to grow as the organization does, but in the relationship itself between HR and the organization. As the organization grows, this means also supporting tighter feedback systems, including that of performance management aligned to the values and strategic objectives of the organization. (Incidentally, I think performance management is one aspect of employee engagement, but not the only one, and should not be confounded with development.)

Appendix A: An Employee Value Proposition

The feedback I got from Tomasz is that he would like to see more quotes from staff. This needs to be validated and revision with staff from different parts of the organization, which could be used as an engagement mechanism. It also needs to be customized. For instance, Tomasz is looking for web developers and the add in there could be around pushing HTML5 to its limits. This may need to be written as a narrative also. I was looking for a way to visually tag and separate items so because words PLUS images has a higher retention in people's brains and is more fun to engage with.

Appendix B: Partial List of Hiring Manager Skill Development Materials

This Appendix exists to suggest areas of supporting materials necessary in building managerial skill in identifying talent and recruiting. Basic materials for much of this stuff already exists on Wikimedia's internal HR wiki, and is seems to be underutilized which requires the design of an engagement strategy more than an actual redesign of the materials. An evaluation of the materials as part of due diligence will be critical. The engagement piece may be integrating validation with a weekly hiring manager's meeting.

Fundamentally, it's about the relationship between Talent and Culture Office and the people doing the hiring, with the outcome being for a true partnership to exist.

Below is a list of some of the current documentation that exists in the My_HR office wiki, courtesy of Melanie Brown. In reviewing the text of a couple of these documents, they seem to be cogent, aimed at being user-friendly, and pretty comprehensive.

After looking at one with Sue (specifically the Sample Interview Questions for Cultural Fit), these will need thorough scrubbing, validating, and rewriting to be readily useable and helpful. It seems like Cyn did work on a few, but there are many that are older from the time the staff was smaller. Therefore it's not just a matter of underutilization but also an overhaul of what's in there. I would expect this to be a priority for the incoming CTCO and Director of HR, simultaneously leveraged also as an opportunity to build relationships in the organization.

Some documents below are accompanied by a suggested engagement strategy to both do process improvement on the document and increase utilization. (Variance on the capitalization of documents reflects the actual title of the documents in the system. Also, keep in mind that I've only seen a small sample of these documents.) The key point is that it's not sufficient for the documents to exist, they need to be supported.

• Interviewing Best Practices

Test them to see if they work.

• How to Interview

Put people through experiences of well conducted interviews and poorly conducted interviews, have them name differences and recommend improvements, and run mock interviews themselves.

• Screening Techniques for Best Results

Test screening techniques on other current employees. Potentially could be used as a teambuilding. (Joking...)

• How to Panel Interview

Discover if this is being utilized and utilized well. If not, discovery why.

• Sample questions for general use

Test the questions against good criteria for use. For example, does it address behaviors, beyond theoretical knowledge?

• Sample Interview Questions for cultural fit

Test on current employees. Test on friends, family, and available strangers and see what they say.

• Cultural Characteristics

Validate with employees in different parts of the organization. Collaboratively adjust them.

• What not to Say

See below.

• From Your Fellow Wikimedians: Tips and Tricks for Interviewing at WMF
• From Your Fellow Wikimedians: Tasks for Potential Hires
• Interview Criteria grid Template (pdf)
• Interview Criteria grid Template (editable)

Why It's Illegal to Ask If You Spoke Klingon Growing Up

One way to consider this topic is, "What's none of my business?" What IS my business is, "Will they be a great employee?" and "Can I trust them to do the work?" Race, religion, sexual orientation, and marital/family fall into the category of "None of My Business". These are protected categories. The handout would be an expanded version of the table below, or just builds on the existnig What Not to Say document in the HR corner. The conversation would be to put up different categories and see if people know what's in the "cannot ask" column and what's in the "can ask" column, if anything.

Cannot Legally Ask	Can Legally Ask
If your name has been legally changed, what was your former name?	Have you ever worked for this company under a different name?
Are your parents or spouse citizens of the U.S. ?	Once offered employment, can you provide proof of eligibility for employment in the U.S. ?
Any inquiry as to the number of days missed due to illness. This subject has become even more sensitive with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act	How would you rate your overall attendance record?
Have you ever been arrested?	Have you ever been convicted of a felony?
Do you wish to be addressed as Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms.? What are your plans regarding having children in the future?	There is no way to ask questions related to gender, marital status, or children legally. There is also no way to ask any question related to race or religion legally.
What is your nationality/lineage/ancestry/ descent/parentage? How did you acquire the ability to speak, read, or write a foreign language? What language is spoken in your home? What is your native language?	What languages do you speak, read, or write fluently? (Lawful only if job-related)

Additional Components

Here are two other prospective topic areas:

Labor Laws

This is the "If you have people who work for you, here's what you need to know from a legal perspective" module. This module, to be developed in partnership with Legal, would follow-up on module of what interviewers cannot legally ask from a hiring perspective. Line-of-sight would be drawn to hiring specifically in that when employees have a conversation about benefits, items in this category play a key role.

Bad Hires

I see this one as a place to bring in some humor, but to also start the conversation about lessons learned. This topic could be external people talking. Hearing colleagues talk about hires they brought in where they "should have known better" and there were subtle warning signs during the interviews would be a great conversation.

Appendix C

Resources

http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/the-rare-find-reinventing-recruiting-10132011.html

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Sue Gardner, Garfield Byrd, Kul Wadhwa, Erik Möller, CT Woo, Alolita Sharma, Tomasz Finc, Barry Newstead, Cyn Skyberg, Jay Walsh, Zack Exley, Melanie Brown, Leslie Harms, and Dana Isokawa of the Wikimedia Foundation for your time in answering my questions and painting a frank, cogent picture of the Wikimedia Foundation and coordinating the process. I also appreciate the time friends and acquaintances took to talk to me about hiring challenges, especially Elizabeth and Sam Nichols and Jill Valenzuela at SmugMug, Matt Knopp of Yammer, James Hogan formerly of PayPal, KimElisha Proctor of Ebay, the Thiel Fellowship Network, David Weekly of Hacker Dojo and PB Works, Rebecca Lipon of Synopsis, Glenn Tobe formerly of Avenade and now Elliott Avenue Consulting, Neil Laughlin of Microsoft, Teresa Torres formerly of Affinity Circles, Alexis Baker of Voxer, and Regina Lawless of Virgin America.