At Entuitive, we’re always on the lookout for the best and brightest in our industry. Recently, we sat down with our Director of People & Culture, Jennifer Longworth, to discuss what we’re looking for in candidates.

Thanks for sitting down with us today, Jennifer. How does Entuitive approach the hiring process?

Overall, we are a project-driven organization, so we have a pretty responsive resourcing process that brings all the teams together weekly from around the globe to assess our future talent needs. We work directly with our business leaders David Fox, Nick Berci, and Brian Stonehouse as well as the rest of the business to review current job openings and what’s coming down the pipe, so we recognize a need for growth early. We also review our employee’s development interests, their skills, capabilities, and current workload to understand where we need future resources. It’s a very collaborative process where all the teams are engaged.

We also look at our newest and growing offices and service sectors across the globe and within our various markets. We look to meet leaders in these markets like Sanja Buncic in the UK, Chris Johnson in NYC, Mike Lembke in Vancouver, and Brian Shedden in Edmonton to put together a talent acquisition strategy for roles we identify as part of the growth of our business.

Whether it’s the first or the second case, working collaboratively with the business, we source the market for the talent required. We look at things like the team’s current strengths, the role we’re trying to fill, and what capabilities we need to both fill the role and to compliment the team. Diversity is key to building an innovative and advanced group of people to drive our business forward.

Does being a responsive organization impact how we search for candidates?

For sure, being responsive for us means we must adapt to various requests within the business. It also means being open to meeting new people and building roles based on talent that we might find in the marketplace and might not have thought we had a need for, but that would be a great compliment to the team and the business strategy.

As a business, we are always looking for creative, advanced talent that fits with our promise of uncompromising performance, whether we have a posted role or not. We consider if this individual will be an asset to our team. If the answer is ‘yes’, then we’ll work as a team to fit that person into our business plans for growth.

What makes us different is that we challenge ourselves to look for the qualities that we need in an individual. In doing this we recognize that they might not come from familiar places, industries, or backgrounds, and that lack of familiarity in and of itself adds a tremendous value to the business. Often the best ideas and innovations come from the collaboration of brilliant minds representing a diversity of backgrounds and thoughts, so we continue to challenge the status quo in what we are looking for.

Is agility an important quality for the candidates themselves to possess as well?

Yes, for sure, and for a couple of reasons, I think.

Entuitive is a responsive organization that promises to be creative, collaborative, and advanced in all that we do. In order to be responsive and adhere to this, we need our teams to relish trying new things, to challenge what we did before, to learn the latest technologies, and offer up to our clients the best of the best. For our people to do that, they need to be responsive, and so we look for that quality in those we hire.

The world is changing so rapidly and at Entuitive we design for the future, so we need a team that is always interested in learning, growing and challenging each other to think differently, and to be better tomorrow than we are today.

Interesting. Aside from being agile, are there particular qualities we look for in determining whether a candidate is the “right fit”?

Of course our Entuitive mindset, humility, empathy, and courage is important to our culture. It’s important for candidates to demonstrate these qualities.

I also think the “Own It” mentality, or the ability to put up your hand and say, “I want to take this one,” or “I think this is a great idea,” and then get it done is a great quality. We look for people who want to do cool things and who want to continue to make Entuitive great.

Since joining Entuitive in January, I have seen how our people have helped us do great things and built great areas of our business by simply standing up and saying, “Hey, this would be cool.”

And, of course, we are looking for people who want to make a difference – anyone that has a drive to make things “better tomorrow than they were today”. I love that statement because it means so much and it applies to everything we do: in our technical work, in the way we treat people, in the way we live life.

So many people that I have met at Entuitive do such great things both in and outside of work and that really adds value to what we bring to the table. Helping in our communities, working on sustainable initiatives, for example, just makes us a better place.

Are there any strategies to finding out whether someone has the qualities we’re looking for?

We take the time to build a portfolio of questions that align with our culture and being a responsive organization. We work closely with the leaders to ensure we understand exactly what they are looking for in both a person and in the role. And we work hard to find that talent. In this search, it’s important not to settle.

I believe it’s important to have more than one person involved in the process as well. The more people that are involved, the more you learn about the individuals you might want to hire, and the more you get diversity of thought from our business to ensure we are hiring folks that compliment us, ensuring we are not all the same.

Any final thoughts?

Hmmm.

Well, first a huge shout out to all our internal Talent Acquisition leads. It’s a really tough job, and it takes time to build relationships with candidates, sometimes over months or years in order to get the timing right.

A big shout out, too, to the hiring managers that make bringing the best talent into Entuitive a priority. We often forget that in this day in age, talent is interviewing us too, and we love working with engaged hiring managers invested in supporting us to bring in great talent. We have so many hiring managers willing to meet candidates for coffee (virtual or live) and take resumes at speaking engagements. Great talent wants to hear from our leaders and their support really helps lock in great people.

When you have an amazing team, it’s so much more fun and engaging, so making that investment in the time and effort to find the right person and not disrupt that collaborative and innovative energy is critical.

Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us today, Jennifer. We learned a lot!