Thanks, Eli! This seems great to me and I’m glad to have things like this out there.
I wanted to provide another perspective on a couple of points.
(For context, I’ve recruited for a junior ops role once, and for a senior ops role once. Unsure how much the below applies to other hiring managers.)
On writing skills and quality of work tests:
I agree that people probably underrate how important writing skills are for success in an ops role. However, that said, when recruiting I only pay attention to writing quality in some contexts, mainly because there are times when I’m more interested in candidates being able to spend their time/effort on other parts of the application, or on minimising time.
In application form answers, I usually don’t pay attention to the writing quality ~at all, since I expect candidates will vary a lot in how much time they had available to do the form, and at the first stage I much prefer a sketchy application to no application at all. (I’ll usually include a note in the form to say that.)
In work tests, I’ve usually tried to indicate cases where writing or polished-ness is something I’m looking at or not.
E.g. in a recent senior ops hiring test, I had a strategy task which was to sketch out a plan for a major organisational decision. I was most interested in testing good judgement – like seeing how candidates generate and prioritise relevant considerations for a complex decision like this – and didn’t want them to spend time making the writing pretty rather than producing more/better content. So I said something about how I’m interested in the content and clarity-to-me over style and polish.
Whereas for test components that, e.g. to write an email, message or policy; then I definitely will be looking at the writing quality and polishedness.
(That said, I do agree that spending 10-20% of time checking seems widely good.)
On quality of application materials, I agree that a CV/LinkedIn etc. that clearly aims at the role requirements is likely to be strongest; however I’d also add that a non-personalised CV is a lot better than no application at all! At stage 1 ensuring that as many good people apply as possible is one of my top goals.
On unclearly relevant experience, one tangential point. Here is an extract from the generalised feedback I sent to applicants rejected at stage 1 of my junior ops hiring round in 2022.[1]
Among very early-career candidates, e.g. those just out of university, the strongest candidates were those who could show some signal of their operations ability. For example, organisational work for student projects/societies or local charities, or personal-life things like setting up a task management system, organising a group trip or helping a friend with a visa application.
Relatedly, among people with work experience that is not closely related to this role, at times I felt it would be beneficial for them to put less emphasis on their most impressive but less related experience, and more emphasis on their most relevant experience, even if it seems less impressive. There was a group of candidates with substantial experience in roles such as communications, consulting or people management, whose application concentrated on how that experience transfers to this role.[2] If these candidates had more directly relevant, but less impressive experience, such as those I mentioned for recent graduates in the previous point, I think they would have benefited from mentioning it, even if it was a long time ago.
(This role was more about fairly “nitty gritty” logistics, finance, HR, things like that; rather than e.g. a lot of project management or comms where I’d probably weight broader kinds of experience higher.)
I.e. a document outlining the most common reasons I did/didn’t advance people to the second stage; I didn’t give personalised feedback at this stage. (I planned to give personalised feedback for later stages, but unfortunately didn’t get around to it. If you’re one of the applicants from this 2022 hiring round who asked for feedback but I didn’t get back to, my apologies for that.)
Thanks, Eli! This seems great to me and I’m glad to have things like this out there.
I wanted to provide another perspective on a couple of points.
(For context, I’ve recruited for a junior ops role once, and for a senior ops role once. Unsure how much the below applies to other hiring managers.)
On writing skills and quality of work tests:
I agree that people probably underrate how important writing skills are for success in an ops role. However, that said, when recruiting I only pay attention to writing quality in some contexts, mainly because there are times when I’m more interested in candidates being able to spend their time/effort on other parts of the application, or on minimising time.
In application form answers, I usually don’t pay attention to the writing quality ~at all, since I expect candidates will vary a lot in how much time they had available to do the form, and at the first stage I much prefer a sketchy application to no application at all. (I’ll usually include a note in the form to say that.)
In work tests, I’ve usually tried to indicate cases where writing or polished-ness is something I’m looking at or not.
E.g. in a recent senior ops hiring test, I had a strategy task which was to sketch out a plan for a major organisational decision. I was most interested in testing good judgement – like seeing how candidates generate and prioritise relevant considerations for a complex decision like this – and didn’t want them to spend time making the writing pretty rather than producing more/better content. So I said something about how I’m interested in the content and clarity-to-me over style and polish.
Whereas for test components that, e.g. to write an email, message or policy; then I definitely will be looking at the writing quality and polishedness.
(That said, I do agree that spending 10-20% of time checking seems widely good.)
On quality of application materials, I agree that a CV/LinkedIn etc. that clearly aims at the role requirements is likely to be strongest; however I’d also add that a non-personalised CV is a lot better than no application at all! At stage 1 ensuring that as many good people apply as possible is one of my top goals.
On unclearly relevant experience, one tangential point. Here is an extract from the generalised feedback I sent to applicants rejected at stage 1 of my junior ops hiring round in 2022.[1]
(This role was more about fairly “nitty gritty” logistics, finance, HR, things like that; rather than e.g. a lot of project management or comms where I’d probably weight broader kinds of experience higher.)
I.e. a document outlining the most common reasons I did/didn’t advance people to the second stage; I didn’t give personalised feedback at this stage. (I planned to give personalised feedback for later stages, but unfortunately didn’t get around to it. If you’re one of the applicants from this 2022 hiring round who asked for feedback but I didn’t get back to, my apologies for that.)
To be clear I do think broader experience adds something! But it only speaks to certain parts of what I’m looking for.
This is awesome. If every recruiter gave feedback like that, it would help so much. Thanks for setting such a great example!