From the recruiter's sewing box: what really counts at wibas!

Do you know the feeling? You read job advertisements and ask yourself whether the requirements described are too high for you, what's really behind the glamorous descriptions - or whether an unsolicited application makes sense if all the advertisements are a bit but none of them really suit you. As a long-standing HR specialist and recruiter at wibas, I'll give you a few insider tips to help you not only get through the recruitment process, but also to assess what really matters at wibas in order to be valued, successful and happy as a wibas consultant.  

To draw the big picture: the right professional orientation and experience are important - the right personality is just as essential. The two aspects are like yin and yang. 

The wibas personality

So what should make you tick as a wibasian? For ease of reading, here is a clear list of the most important personality aspects: 

• Passion or enthusiasm for a topic: we love to see your eyes light up! Ideally, of course, for something from our Theme cloudbut also for a hobby, a book, music.... who is "on fire" for something becomes good at it and infects others.  
• Personal maturity and reflection: Know yourself and your strengths, weaknesses and learning areas, your motivators and goals - and be honest and open with yourself and feedback from others. This is the basis for finding peace of mind and personal stability. Resilience, i.e. the ability to "get back on your feet" in the event of stress of any kind, also plays a role. We are aware that maturity takes time to develop - of course, we expect more maturity from consultants who have been in the profession for years than from those just starting out - but the attitude towards it is already evident there too. Maturity can also be seen in being able to listen well Really listening and understanding what a customer needs is part of our consultant's alpha and omega. 
• Quick change of perspective: not only is it important to be able to adopt different perspectives and think in a complex way, but it is also important to be able to switch quickly between, for example, the consultant's view and the customer's view, the company's view and the personal view. In a workshop preparation, you look at the system to be changed in terms of content, but at the same time it is important to find solutions, to "direct" with your workshop moderation in order to influence it.  
• Focus and balance - the well-done consultant job is demanding. You are confronted with a variety of tasks and have to have a lot "on the screen". Being able to balance these tasks well - so that nothing important falls by the wayside, but still avoiding multitasking and the associated "nothing half and nothing whole", but being able to focus on changing tasks is a supreme discipline! 
• solution-oriented creative drive: wibas is an energetic and pragmatic organization! We appreciate it when people take the initiative, take on issues and drive them forward and implement them. Don't just make plans, do it! At the same time, we are solution-oriented: With us, you should be pragmatic enough to find good solutions that are as uncomplicated as possible and drive them to "finished", but the following still applies: be committed to Inspect&Adapt and see whether the 80% solution is enough of what was originally thought of. Or whether more is needed...  
• Structured: you have the ability to cut a problem, a topic into small pieces and shape it and "work through" it bit by bit (or let it flow into a backlog in which others also get involved? We like! 
• Humility: Yes, humility! It sounds old-fashioned, but it's important to know your limits and shortcomings. And not to act like a guru when you learn something new, but to take an objective learning curve. Read about the Dunning-Kruger effect... And as nice as it is when you can apply what you've learned: not every customer problem is a nail that you should work on with your newly acquired hammer. Knowing that you have other tools in your kit that can help the customer find a solution will take you further. 
• Honesty and openness: no one is perfect, everyone makes mistakes, no one knows everything. You are bound to have gaps too. Be gracious about it and own up to it. Be honest with yourself and with others - no one is immediately considered incompetent if they admit to a mistake or shortcoming - on the contrary. 
• Appearance: not everyone has to be a show-off, but being able to stand up in front of others - being able to present your own opinion appropriately is important. Those who have a pronounced penchant for performing can focus more on training or giving presentations at conferences. 
• Communication: your communication should be approachable, clear, vivid, as long and complex as necessary - no more or less. Send first-person messages, stick to feedback rules, be direct and don't play rhetorical games. It should be an expression of your maturity! 
• Be authentic: last but not least - be yourself and unaffected, don't act like a guy or a girl. You can and should have a profile, rough edges! wibasians really aren't perfect in the points just mentioned, but they can do some of them and make an effort for others. 

What are sought-after professional aspects at wibas?

When we try to assess the training and experience of applicants, we look at three pillars, but not all of them have to be present (and certainly not to the same extent): Consulting, Change Management, Agile topics - what training and experience does someone bring to the table? For senior roles, (agile) leadership experience is also important. We don't make it easy for ourselves here, but try to understand more precisely what our counterpart has learned and done, in which environments and which roles the person has worked in. We know that a certificate does not necessarily mean that the person has understood and assimilated what they have learned. And we also know that a certificate is not necessarily required to have penetrated a topic. Job titles and job descriptions can be deceptive because they don't always clearly paint the scope and content and, more importantly, the environment in which the person worked. So where do I dig a little deeper: 

• Consulting: we are interested in whether you have already worked explicitly or implicitly in consulting roles, because the consultant's perspective on an organization is different from that of a person/role in the organization, in the system. You don't have to have been employed in a consulting firm to have internalized the perspective. Some also fulfill consulting roles in internal change teams, for example. 
• Change management: This is about the "toolbox" that a person brings with them to initiate, support and consolidate changes in the company. How intensively have you tried out workshop formats? Learned and applied coaching techniques - how and in what environment? Have you had experience with training? What approaches have you learned? We are not interested in the names of the schools, but what you find meaningful and useful about them! 
• Agile topics and frameworks: it is obvious that knowledge of and experience with Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, LeSS, Objectives & Key Results (OKR), Okaloa etc. are important for us. Not everyone knows everything - that's not necessary. As we are committed to an agile mindset and not framework dogmas (if they even exist...), we appreciate it when people can build bridges between frameworks, see what connects them and not what separates them. But also have actual experience with it in roles that have allowed them to reflect on the system and the framework. It is not enough to have attended a Scrum training course to be a good Scrum Master; it is eye-opening to have been in the role in an organization yourself! 
• (Agile) leadership: wibas itself has a lean organization (we implement what we advise and represent outside the company) and has no traditional leadership roles. But of course leadership is also important for us, not just as a consulting topic for clients. If you come to wibas as a senior consultant, knowledge and a mindset of lateral leadership, mentoring and topic leadership are also important for us. The more junior consultants learn this with us, the more senior consultants should bring alternatives to traditional leadership models with them. 

If you are well positioned in, let's say, two of these topics and are interested in the other aspects, we might have a match! 

wibas as an organization - what can and should you expect?

To describe wibas as a whole here would certainly go too far for this article. However, there are a few things about us that you should be aware of when applying. Some people are looking for exactly that, others find it difficult. 

• wibas is changing: we apply Inspect&Adapt to ourselves and constantly question ourselves. This means that we adapt our structures or processes - sometimes a new circle is formed to close an organizational gap. Or we adapt our strategy process, which is then more OKR-oriented than Scrum-oriented. This often results in new opportunities to get involved or perhaps initiate this change. Of course, we get our people involved if they were not involved in shaping the change themselves. But perhaps you also find it stressful that everything is constantly changing and yesterday's structural knowledge no longer counts tomorrow? 
• At wibas, you are visible: we are not a corporation, not a large company. Here, everyone is visible with what he or she does. Yeah, you are noticed and appreciated - or do you find it difficult? 
• wibas is transparent: we make every effort to make facts, figures and our knowledge accessible to everyone in order to feed the entrepreneurial spirit in everyone. You can, but must also take entrepreneurial aspects into account in what you do. You will also sometimes see aspects of our work that may burden you (e.g. training types with too little turnover and economic success). We want all employees to pull together and contribute to the change instead of struggling with it. 
• wibas attaches great importance to balancing customer and internal work: at wibas you can effectively help shape the organization and drive topics that increase our visibility (giving presentations, publications, organizing network meetings...). Nevertheless, we are an economically driven company - we have to earn money, if only to pay our salaries. We must also not get bogged down with internal issues - customer work has a very high priority. This sometimes results in conflicting goals. 

If you think that all this suits you and what you want to achieve professionally, we are always happy to receive your unsolicited application or your application, although you may not fulfill one of the points mentioned in the job advertisement - talk to us!