Thoughts on hiring

For photography businesses in particular, but with general applicability for any creative service businesses where training on the job can add significantly to the hire’s skill. For background and my context, please read this,

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1. When you get an opportunity to hire, hire for attitude over aptitude. That's what's worked for us: focus on attitude towards people and learning and photography, rather than proficiency in photography techniques themselves. This has helped us build a heart-over-head team that's in love with the idea of love and the idea of photography, and is willing to learn and get better, as opposed to a team of highly proficient gearheads.

You'd think this is tough to assess, but it comes through in the way people tend to express themselves, the way they talk about the things they love. We've always followed an email + in-person interview technique: every piece of written text they send us before the in-person is part of the evaluation. Which leads me to my final selection criterion (you could argue that it's actually the first criterion): articulation. The ability to express yourself clearly, calmly, and precisely. There are surprising benefits to being articulate in the high-touch service we provide to clients: half the job is about being clear in the way we communicate with people around us.

While we look at portfolios submitted, we understand and expect them to be raw and unpolished. What we're looking for is that spark of vision, and that ability to express yourself in words. If you have those two, and you have the love for people and the love for learning and photography we're looking for, we have always been confident that we can teach you the rest.

2. The journey to #1 above, though, to getting to "an opportunity to hire", begins long before the candidate ever writes to us. And this is the work of talent branding: as much as your company should employ product marketing techniques to attract prospective customers to your company, you should also employ talent branding techniques to attract prospective employees to your company. Talent branding is one part magic: it's what prospective hires think of you even before they're hired by you, and one part reality: it's what hires think of you from within the company. This tussle between expectations and reality is where talent branding rests.

Stories has been talking talent branding for a long, long while now, and this has ensured that good to great people constantly wish to work with us. This creates a pool of talent enquiries that we can look through when we do need to hire.

What has worked for us it to ensure that we set tough goals for the following:
a. Our work itself. Has to be top-shelf, straight-from-the-heart imagery.
b. Our public exposition of our work. Sharp, curated, beautiful. This is as much for prospective brides as it is for prospective hires.
c. Our public celebration of our team. No work goes uncredited, no small win goes unnoticed.
d. Our focus on our team's consistent learning. Photographers outside Stories have seen how our team has developed, and that ensures that the next bright-eyed photographer who truly wants to learn will write to us one day.

That's all I have! :)