I am a hunter by nature. This time of year I seek to hire a team of brilliant staff with rare potential to be fantastic educators and role models. It is a labour fit for Hercules – an arduous job because I am so gosh darn picky.
Staff currently employed at Boundless and a mountain of rejected applicants will attest that getting hired here is like getting accepted into a Navy Seal program on steroids. In any typical year, I will sort through 400 applications and conduct 200 interviews to engage a few handfuls of ridiculously talented new people.
I have been accused of targeting the Greco-Roman ideal of only wanting educational philosophers that bear six-packed abs. We want staff in possession of such lofty character that any parent would yearn for just one of them be their next son or daughter-in-law. I overturn many stones to find a 21st century Aristotle. We need bona fide leaders. Find me a Pericles please or a Florence Nightingale with a smooth paddle stroke.
Eastern virtues matter too. Our staff must be in the moment and adapt on a dime, not trying to control everything. Working well with teens means ceding authority carefully while nurturing respect. Anything forced, or any hint of needing to try too hard will result in teenagers looking through you like a ghost.
While we have hired 95% of our team, it’s always the last 5% that leaves me in an annual recruiting conundrum. Do I hire merely the “good” and call it a day? Or do I wade through another 50 resumes for the last two gems?
I have conducted over 5000 interviews during my tenure at Boundless. Apparently I have a reputation for using some mysterious ideology or protocol for sifting through the morass to find the precious few. Really, there is no secret or sorcery.
I look for that almost impossibly rare combination of courage, charisma, character and cool. I look for people that teenagers want to hang out with, and who they will accept as their leaders.
And it is this rarity that makes me feel, on good days, like I am on a noble search for the human resource equivalent of the Holy Grail. On bad days, my resolve is tested severely. But the horror of thinking that I would be embarrassed by having a staff member representing Boundless be anything less that superb keeps me honest and true.
Thanks for reading.
Steven Gottlieb
Executive Director
