Co-AD Janet on why we have decided to pause a recruitment process part way through.

Last week we held interviews for the role of Nest Community Connector. We met five really interesting, amazing and unique humans, all of whom would have brought something really interesting to the role and to Talking Birds.

In the course of the interviews, the candidates asked us usefully searching questions, about the company and about the post, that prompted us to reflect more deeply on the role and where it sits within Talking Birds.

We realised, in our reflections at the end of a joyful and challenging day of conversations, that we were, in fact, asking ourselves more questions about the role than about who should fill it.

It felt unfair to ask anyone to walk into that uncertainty – and although it took some uncomfortable discussions to get to this point, we have decided not to appoint at this time. We will pay the applicants for the time spent on their applications and interviews, and we will ask one of our freelance family to hold a temporary ‘caretaker’ role supporting Nest Residents. We hope this will make space for our staff and board to interrogate and reimagine the shape of the team that will best support the company’s development and evolution into our 4th decade.

Roles in small companies are flexible things, they shape themselves around individuals and circumstances (neither of which are static) and, of course, evolve over time. The shape of the company and the skills and specialisms it needs gradually change. We should have remembered this. We knew it years ago, when we were a company of three artists and used one person moving on as an opportunity to create a role for someone with a very different skillset.

Even as a small and generally flexible company it’s easy enough, when you are as busy as we all are, to make the mistake of just forgetting to take a moment to question yourself sometimes: to just treat something like recruitment as a thing grown-up businesses do, a linear process rather than an opportunity (or obligation) to throw everything up in the air a bit. That’s just what happens. That’s how systems persist. It’s probably largely responsible for companies getting bigger and more difficult to turn around, and also perhaps how silos develop – when roles become defined by job titles rather than what needs doing.

It feels like this decision – to reconsider rather than appoint – may be a good example of the regenerative way of working that we aspire to. It is not sustaining the status quo, or growing for the sake of growth, but looking beyond: to regenerate, reinvent, find a better way of doing and being.

This has been a useful lesson for us: even when we are busy, we need to make space to explore whether the obvious path is actually the right one – remembering that just because this is the way something is always done, that doesn’t necessarily make it the right way of doing it.

We should, of course, have done that before holding interviews, but if we had, we would not have made new connections with those 5 wonderful people – and although we don’t yet know what shape of role Talking Birds really needs right now, we also don’t yet know what might grow out of the connections we made on that day of questions and conversations.