The Art of Hiring

I was just thinking that I had already made every observation and recorded every thought about our life and  farming, and there was really nothing more to report. I was contemplating ending this blog and wondering how columnists manage to have new thoughts and opinions day after day, year after year,  And then I glanced through the New York Times opinion section and there was a topic that interested me and that I have some experience with. It was written by a man who advises students on writing their resumes. 

Well, I do have opinions on that. In the last 6 years I have inherited the role of gatekeeper for hiring on both farms.  Meaning, I get the inquiries and I decide whether to move forward to the next step with the applicant.  We almost always hire someone who gets over the first hurdle. It is simple to turn people away at the start, but I find it much harder to reject someone after I have started to have a conversation. Almost everyone has potential and we hire people who appear to have more complicated issues than potential value as a farm worker, sometimes, because we have multiple missions going on at once.

Off the farm I have served on a number of search committees, hiring cantors and rabbis and educators. It is really hard to decide who would be best, even after you meet the person.  People can look fantastic on paper, and they can do a great interview, make a deep and meaningful presentation to a large group of congregants and they can still surprise you in ways that you had never anticipated. Part of it is that people are always on their very best behavior when they are trying to get a job, and references will rarely tell you about the true weaknesses of an applicant. In fact, I scarcely believe in references except as a way of implying to the applicant that you will be checking their story. But once they get the job, other characteristics can surface, and you just hope that their good qualities far outweigh the bad ones.  

The first step in applying for a farm job is the basic test: can they follow directions of the simplest kind?  Our application process is clearly outlined on our website, and if someone doesn't read the directions and follow them, I turn them away at that point. And next: show me what kind of person you are. You don't have to know everything, you have to be able to learn everything.

Because we hire so many young people, it is hard for me to pay much attention to what they say on their resume.  It just doesn't really matter what retail jobs they have had, or what an excellent communicator they say they are.  Actually what matters more is how they decide to tell that story.  If they use every verb in the thesaurus, that is not a plus. If they try to fluff up a pretty minor experience, definitely not a plus. If the resume uses up more than one page, that's a minus. 

But this year we had already hired just about everyone we needed, and one more inquiry came in.  This person was studying environmental sustainability and I try to let anyone who is studying something relevant like that to come to work, if we have space. We can always squeeze in another part time worker.  What set him apart immediately (other than his gender) was what he wrote in a section called Awards/Activities. He said: "Proud stay at home parent for 10 years." This immediately set him apart from all other applicants -- I have never seen that before. I wanted to hire him on the spot.  And when he came for an interview, we all agreed that he had the right stuff.

I used to be incredibly picky about spelling and grammar.  Well, I still am, but there are times when it makes sense to look beyond that.  A few years ago I got an inquiry from someone who just could not spell. But then I noticed that her spelling errors really reminded me of Benjamin, my own kid. And I know that he has many fine qualities even if he can't spell consistently.  She also called herself an artist, and she had not quite graduated from college.  I pretty much think that anyone who is prepared to be an artist for a life calling has enough grit and determination to do almost anything.  And I was right. This young woman was a great worker. And she went on to continue her work as a professional artist.

Other passions and experiences that lend themselves to being a good candidate for working on this farm:  bakery work, restaurant work, theater, teacher or even substitute teacher (those are brave people), catering, team sports. Anything that requires a lot of fast-paced productivity, repetitious acitivity or a mindset for managing simultaneous priorities.  I don't pay a lot of attention when people say they have farm experience since it isn't always that helpful to inherit what was learned on other farms. Also, they often exaggerate their level of competence.  Like, always. 

I have a friend who immediately rejects any resume that includes sorority membership. I get that.  It's part of telling your story, and if that part of your story is that important to you that it goes on a job application, you might not be a great fit. But if someone has a particularly interesting turn of phrase or way of writing, that is a good flag. I do love good writing.

Our application can be daunting, I bet. It's four pages long and you really cannot google any of the answers.  They are mostly short answer questions that ask about a person's adaptibility, relationship to sustainable agriculture right now, what they want to be when they grow up.  We get a lot more applications from women than men here and my nephews think the application may be skewed toward women, just in the types of questions we ask.  I disagree, but I can see that sitting down to answer all those questions thoughtfully might exclude a certain population.  Which is partly the point, but mostly it is a way for us to let other people know what we care about and who we are. If someone fills it out and sends it back within one hour of receiving it, that is generally a sign of a lack of seriousness. Usually those answers are brief and useless. To me, the most illuminating question comes at the very end and it is what really makes the most difference in getting to the next step:  "Tell us three interesting things about yourself."  On so many levels, this is an important question.  We have actually had someone say, "I can't think of anything."  You can imagine how fast that application went into the trash.

A few years ago, before we took the question about age off the form (when we finally realized that it was illegal to ask that, for some reason), we got an application from an 80 year old man. This got my attention.  He was a marathon runner with a very long list of interesting life work and he wanted to learn about farming.  How could we resist that?  This man worked here for four seasons before he decided it was time to hit the road with his wife and start traveling.  He was an extraordinary addition to our team and much beloved. He became the person who was responsible for most of the annual infrastructure work -- building trellises, constructing fencing, working with irrigation. He also loved to pick cherry tomatoes (a job that is done standing up, not all crunched up on the ground) and sell at the stand. He was a civil engineer in an earlier career. He thought a lot about how to make things better around the farm.

One time I did an interview while driving between the Vienna farm and the Loudoun farm. The young man was applying to work in Loudoun but he was coming from Alexandria, and I needed to go out there for some reason anyway, so we rode together.  We had 45 minutes together, then we got a flat tire while on the farm, then we had to resolve that issue, then we had another 45 minutes. By the end of that shared experience, I knew that this guy was going to be a good fit.  We talked about so many interesting things on that car ride, although we didn't talk about farming much at all. He had worked at a friend's farm that was in its first year of existence the year before. I knew he hadn't acquired many skills there but that he was loyal and willing and full of life. On the first leg of the trip, we found ourselves talking about our relationships to Judaism, and even about God.  He did turn out to be a great worker.

Applying to work on a farm, usually without any farming experience, means that you have to be able to demonstrate that you have the capacity to learn to do this work and to bring somethiing good to the group. We work together for hours, in all kinds of weather, sometimes doing very hard and tedious stuff. If  you are a whiner, that's no good. If you have nothing interesting to say, that's no good. And if we always have to wait for you because you are late, that is really no good. And most importantly, if you don't like to keep working steadily, that is just bad.

I can't take all the credit for the successes of the last many years of hiring, but we keep assembling groups of interesting, hard working, smart, well-intentioned people.  This year we have an unusually high proportion of new folks, and it gives us another chance to teach them to do things the way we like them to be done.  We learn more every year about creating systems and communicating our standards and methods.  Farm work looks easy enough -- you can see perfectly well what needs to be done (get the weeds out) but in fact it takes a long time to learn to do anything effectively. Especially if you have spent most of your time at school, honing your brain skills.  Working with your hands and your body while you are using your brain -- that's harder than it looks.

I said earlier that we have several simultaneous missions when we hire people, but that is a whole different post, for another time. If anyone out there has any ideas for topics, send them along. I am beginning to feel like a broken record.