An interview to remember

I have recently had the pleasure of being involved in recruiting the latest fantastic addition to team ANDY. During the process, I was reminded of a conversation I once had with senior manager in an organisation I used to work for after identifiying recruitment as an area in which we could potentially make huge savings.

No day-long, multi-room recruitment with lunch thrown in, said I. ‘Well, good luck recruiting me then’, said the colleague. The theory is that for some positions the company has to sell themselves to the candidate as much as the candidate sells themselves to the company. A slick, professional recruitment at a posh hotel indicates that we mean business and that this is a comfortable working environment.

In the case of the organisation we worked for it was also borderline fraud. The people and work were both wonderful, but your next taste of the organisation after interview was a long wait for a lift which (most of the time) creaked and jolted its way to an open plan office which was either far too cold or far too hot. You only return to the plush hotel when you in turn try to recruit someone else to join you in the office block which architect and building firm had conspired to make totally future-resistant; trapping those within it forever in the decade of its construction.

Our compound's security is unconventional

I wonder how this individual would have reacted to the pressures placed on our recent interview candidates. The path to our Kibera office is adjacent to an abandoned, vandalized garage which has become the fly-tipping capital of an area which has no waste collection arrangements and no public bins. Visitors are just getting used to the smell when they are required to negotiate the collection of ducks, dogs and a group of horned goats which scavenge through the litter and trot in an intimidating fashion around the driveway. Thankfully none of the group around on the day were with newborn calves or we may have seen some action.

The interviewees arrived to find ANDY already falling behind its rather ambitious schedule, so wait with other gathering candidates in our cyber café, mingling with paying surfers and their potential colleagues- exiled from the main office by the interviews - excitedly playing traditional Luo music, bought during a recent work visit to Kisumu.

Some kids scavenge for valuable refuse

When the candidates did take the hot seat to be grilled by Fred and me, they were interrupted by various noises from our visiting beneficiaries and the activities of our neighbours, including a man showing off his bike, a group of women arguing, colleagues who had not read the sign on the door walking in and chatting away, and just to add an extra test the men who compete with the animals for the pick of the litter occasionally set fire to areas to clear it, prompting the lovely smell of burning plastic to waft through broken windows and fill our interview room.

Be grateful that computers can't process smells

Not discounting the fact that the fumes could have caused us to be high as kites for the whole thing, the interviews went very well and none of the candidates were horrified or walked out. More to the point, they got a realistic view of what life could be like in the office: a bit hectic, baffling and unpredictable, but always worth being there and never far away from the lives and experiences of the people we work with and for.

My old colleague back in the UK may never have reached the interview, but judging this book by its cover would be a huge mistake.