Our internal team is Lively’s backbone. When people come together with a shared vision, something clicks, and I can feel that we’re all working on something that’s bigger than ourselves. Our values are the driving force behind all of this—so much so that they directly shape our recruitment process. It’s something that makes our approach to hiring a little different. Beyond that, we also have systems in place to develop and support people leaders who care about employee well-being. To put it another way, our hiring process is about more than just finding candidates and onboarding new team members. Employee happiness and satisfaction are just as important.

What does Lively’s hiring process look like?

When candidates apply, their resumes are first reviewed by Lively’s talent acquisition team. They pore over the candidates experience and overall qualifications to see if they meet the needs of the position. If it’s a good fit, they pass qualified applicants onto the hiring manager. A phone call usually follows.

With diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in mind, we’ve found that a traditional phone call is often more effective than a video chat. Our goal with using a phone call is to prevent any unconscious biases from cropping up during that initial conversation. During this call we dive deeper into the candidate’s skills and experience, and gauge their interest in the role and Lively.

If the candidate seems like a good fit for the role, we usually schedule them for an interview with the hiring manager so they can learn about the team they would be working with and discuss the expectations for the role in greater depth. This also gives the candidate the opportunity to really talk with the hiring manager to make sure it feels like a really good match on their end. We also want to know how they could see themselves potentially growing and expanding their career here at Lively.

Next, the process gets even more personalized. Instead of relying on a generic, one-size-fits-all approach to hiring, we tailor the next steps to the specific candidate. Some applicants, for example, may be given a writing assignment. Meanwhile, engineers are usually tasked with a technical coding exercise. Either way, remote final interview panels come next. This is done with a variety of team members across different departments.

On these panels there will always be some people who would be on the candidate’s team if they came on board, but others are drawn from different teams that the candidate might work with cross-collaboratively. Throughout these conversations, Lively’s values play a key role.

How do Lively’s values come into play?

The values interview is part of a candidate’s first panel interview. It’s something special we do here and really important to us. In the interview, candidates are asked a predetermined set of questions surrounding our core values.

Those values are:

• Empathy
• Integrity
• Accountability
• Determination
• Build something people love

The interview panel consists of two people from different teams who are not on the team that the candidate would be working on. They pose two questions for each value, and they’re the same for each candidate.

During this conversation, the values interview team is able to take notes to see if the candidate gave thoughtful answers, if they’re exhibiting Lively’s core values, and if they’d be a value-add to the company. All of Lively’s values are important to us, but we find that candidates who are able to show empathy in a natural way are especially important to us, given our mission and history.

One of our goals as a company is to put out the best product we can to help as many people as possible and empathy is a significant part of that mission. We’ve found there’s a way that candidates show that they genuinely want to be here and care about helping people and making a difference.

What I find most valuable about the values interview is that we can ask five people the same set of questions and get five completely different answers. It’s also interesting to hear a candidate recall an experience where they had to hold themselves accountable or show integrity.

How does Lively develop strong people leaders?

We believe that positive leadership is built around growth and development. A strong people leader is someone who supports individual career paths and the overarching goals of their department. Each guides the other.

We want people to be doing their best work here, but more importantly, we want people to be happy doing their work here. We’ve found that happy people who believe in what they’re doing always perform better. It’s important that people managers understand that while also developing their own skills to become the best leaders they can be.

That’s why Lively holds regular people manager meetings. This includes training that is specifically designed to support positive leadership. The topics vary and have covered things like giving and receiving feedback and maximizing one-on-one meetings. We typically partner with organizational psychologists and other experts to host hands-on training experiences, complete with break-out rooms and role-playing. We want to make sure we fully understand any scenario that might come our way.

We’ve found that these trainings are extremely beneficial for a couple of reasons: One is that they are participating alongside other people managers, which helps everyone understand different leadership styles and challenges. That’s important since we work so collaboratively here. The other benefit is that they help our people leaders sharpen and develop their own skill sets.

There’s a lot I’m proud of at Lively, and our people-first attitude is at the top of that list. If that resonates with you, check out our careers page to view our open roles. We’re hiring and always excited to hold the door open for folks who share our vision and core values.