Digital Graduation
So we asked ourselves a little while ago (beginning of 2015) if there was a better way of both inducting people into the Digital family and also measuring whether they’re cutting the mustard. This led(after a few months of procrastination) to us creating what we now refer to as the “Graduation”. If you apply for a job within Digital at Three, this is what you’ll go through (we reserve the right to iterate on the below to the point that what you experience may look nothing like the below).
In my words, it’s:
”A handshake between Three Digital and the new member of our family”
In the words of Eleonora (our first Graduation guinea pig) it’s:
“The “Graduation Scheme” is like a three-month long first date between you and the digital team, during which you decide whether yes, you want to come by for another drink or oops, sorry, it’s too late and I must go.”
So here’s what it really is. It’s a checklist that walks any hiring manager through the process of evaluating a prospective new member of the Digital team, interviews them, then sets them up for their first 12 weeks. Within this checklist we have guidelines on evaluating them from a technical & cultural perspective and then defines both parties’ responsibility to ensure that new member is both properly welcomed and understands what’s expected of her. We’ve broken the graduation down as follows:
Before offer
- Phone interview
- Technical Test
- Technical Assessment
- Cultural Interview
- Office Tour and Coffee Break
- Team Interview — this is who/where the decision to hire get’s made — not by the hiring manager
After offer
- Reading Club
- Pre Start Lunch/Breakfast
- Intro to Slack
- Team Lunch
Software/hardware to set up
- Slack
- Basecamp
- Trello
- Software relevant to role
- Company login, email, security pass and laptop
After start
- Run through job spec
- Interview feedback
- Customer challenge
- Life with a pay as you go handset for the first month
- Intro to everyone
- Day in store
- Call listening
- Contribution to monthly hackathon
- What has been their impact on business outcomes?
- Company mechanics pub quiz — how does everything work at Three?
- Initiation
- If you were Dave Dyson, what would you do?
- 360 degree review
- Technical assessment
- Pecha Kucha about you
- Attend weekly trade meeting
- Attend Digital induction
- Attend Be Agile course
- Create your own T-Shaped model
- New Starter Diary Study
- Attend your own Graduation
- Make something edible for your Microteam to eat (a Minimum Edible Product)
- Quarterly newbie party
- Teach us something
- Wear your favourite T-shirt
- Work from your phone for a day
- Ask Dave Dyson (Three’s CEO) why he loves llamas
The purpose of some of the above might need a little explanation but perhaps we’ll save that for another time.
Thus far, we’ve had about 3 people take part in the Graduation and we’ve iterated on the tasks and methodology about 10 times as we respond to be the constraints of the business, integration with HR and (most importantly) getting feedback from those taking part in the graduation. As to whether it’s successful or not remains to be seen but initial indications on the quality of our hires and their alignment to our culture look extremely positive.
Watch this space.
This was original posted on the Three-Digital blog which has sadly ceased to be, so I’m re-posting here:
