Since our founding as a company in 2004, the cultural fit of a prospective employee has always been one of the key criteria on which we base hiring decisions. Now, we want to look beyond “fitting into our culture” and “good enough.” Now, we’re raising the bar.
However, hiring talented and experienced people is easier said than done. That’s why we’ve taken the Bar Raiser approach to how we hire staff in January 2023.
Following the highest standards
“At Hostinger, we don’t just fill positions with warm bodies. We seek to hire the best for Hostinger’s success. We can be proud of our high standards and push them even higher when it comes to hiring the right people,” explains Benita Narkevičiūtė, Head of Talent Acquisition at Hostinger.
We have enshrined our constant drive for high standards in our 10 Principles. These principles help guide everything we do. When it comes to hiring, we’re looking for people who can advance our business and our teams by approaching our goals from a fresh perspective or bringing new expertise.
When considering a potential Hostinger employee, we ask:
- Trying to find the best solutions?
- Are you leading by example?
- Do you put the customer first?
- Do you take responsibility for your tasks?
The Bar Raiser process is designed to answer such questions within an interview loop.
Our goal is to raise the bar, meaning we want to hire people who are 50% better than the current team. We try to hire cultural leaders from different angles:
- They strive to create world-class solutions and take care of our customers.
- They are models of our principles and lead by example.
- They bring skills and industry knowledge to Hostinger and help us move forward and achieve future success.
This can be a time-consuming process, but if each person we recruit raises the bar, then the team grows stronger and produces stronger and stronger results. We know from our own research that high performers thrive in high performance teams. They can also become discouraged if their team is not performing up to its potential.
“Some say it’s expensive to have multiple interview steps. I think it’s much, much more expensive to hire the wrong person who leaves the business within six months,” says Benita Narkevičiūtė.
“When I learned that I have to hire the best possible people, I got scared and thought what am I going to do if the person is going to be much better than me. It took me a few years to really embrace this thing. When you have someone much better than you in some dimension, and you see how they change things, the entire organizational hierarchy, and then it hits you that there’s no other way to do this,” shares Hostinger’s Chief Product Officer, Giedrius. Zakaitis.
As Giedrius explains, at Hostinger, our goal is to raise the bar even higher, not overall, but mainly in some dimensions. We usually ask if we would hire this person and in what dimension would this person be a superstar.
Bar Raising: The Beginnings on Amazon
In 1999, during a period of explosive business growth, Amazon executives were hiring without a structured interview process or consistent standards to ground their approach and hiring decisions.
As Bryce Hanson, Co-Founder / Senior Consultant at Culture Compass and an experienced global business leader who spent nearly 20 years at Amazon leading and delivering results with business and HR teams, explains, hiring managers and interview teams were easily driven by personal bias. groupthink, subjective interview feedback and urgency to fill positions.
“Tech teams noticed that Amazon’s bar for talent was actually falling. So the technical and recruiting leadership teams put together a repeatable, scalable, and easily teachable proposition that would lead to a consistent interview and hiring process. Using a common scoring system against defined and assigned competencies, the program required each recruit to be better than at least 50% of the existing pool in some specific way. An objective third party, known as a Bar Raiser, would facilitate the end-to-end process and help build consensus on hiring decisions to raise the talent and performance bar for the company.”
The name Bar Raiser applies both to the process and to the group of people – Bar Raisers – who carry it out. The process works with a trained Bar Raiser being involved in the process but not directly with the recruitment team or recruitment team. As a result, a Bar Raiser is free from the sense of urgency or unconscious bias that can lead to poor hiring decisions.
According to Bryce, the new interview and hiring process added an objective intensity to hiring, which, combined with a company-wide philosophy, promoted and reinforced high hiring standards. As a testament to the success of this approach, over 20 years later, the Bar Raiser remains a key aspect of recruiting at Amazon.
Bar Raiser app on Hostinger
Bar Raiser is a trained interviewer in the hiring process who ensures that the hiring decision has the most significant long-term potential. That’s why at Hostinger, we have a few criteria for this person:
- Must be a true ambassador of Hostinger’s principles and demonstrate the ability to evaluate talent against our principles.
- Must be nominated by their team leaders/colleagues.
- Must be a skilled interviewer and have completed Bar Raiser training.
- Must have strong analytical skills, objective mindset and be passionate about the hiring process.
“As an ambitious, global company, we are always open to receiving inspiration and guidance from the world around us, especially from the best companies in the world. We take these tools, test them as they were implemented in other companies and then make our own adjustments to get the best result,” explains Giedrius Zakaitis.
An example is the application of the Bar Raiser principle.
Initially, we started with the same model as Amazon. Then, in mid-2023, we worked with Bryce Hanson to review and revamp our own process, leading to Bar Raiser 2.0.
Accordingly, we expanded the role of the Bar Raiser. Now, it includes facilitating the debriefing of the interview, which was previously handled by either the hiring manager or the recruiter. The issue was that hiring managers or recruiters were not always objective because of the pressure to hire quickly or meet sourcing and hiring performance goals.
“Another major change was the focus on behavioral interview questions specifically tied to Hostinger’s principles. This enables interview teams to assess candidates for actions, behaviors and past achievements linked to Hostinger’s principles. A critical aspect of the process is the concept of keeping the ‘vote’ secret before tallying, as it creates the potential risk of groupthink. This can lead to poor hiring decisions based on individual bias and the very human desire for consensus and harmony. Now, instead of vetoing the final interview, Bar Raisers guides, advises, provides feedback and supports both the recruiter and the recruiter at every stage of the interview process,” says Bryce Hanson.
Benita explains the roles:
- The hiring manager is the owner of hiring and ultimately the decision maker.
- Recruiter brings day-to-day expertise to coordinate the end-to-end hiring process.
- The Bar Raiser provides objective insights as it does not feel the urgency to fill a role.
Giedrius has experienced this first hand: “As a hiring manager, it helps me cover my blind spots and raise the bar by challenging me to why. If I had to name one of the best things I’m most happy about that we implemented recently, it would be Bar Raisers.”
We know that every candidate values Hostinger as much as we value them. We hope that having a Bar Raiser improves the candidate’s interview experience and shows them how seriously we take each role and how invested we are in hiring and developing the best people.
Misconceptions about the Bar Raiser process
Having participated in over 1,000 interviews at Amazon and working with Bar Raiser for the past 20+ years, Bryce identifies the two main misconceptions about the process:
Bar managers abuse their power by vetoing hiring decisions regularly
At Hostinger, hiring managers are the final decision makers supported by the Bar Raiser and Recruiter. While Bar Raisers can veto a hiring manager’s decision if they believe it is not in the company’s best interest, this rarely happens. Simply put, veto power is the exception, not the rule.
The Bar Raiser interview is the hardest part for the candidate
A candidate does not need to prepare extra for the Bar Raiser interview – it is a simple discussion about your values, principles and beliefs. Additionally, Bar Raisers are excellent interviewers who have a deep understanding of the culture and are trained for such calls.
Measuring the height of the rod
At the time of writing, we have hired 136 people since implementing the Bar Raiser process at Hostinger.
So far, only 9% of them worked less than 6 months. We will continue to monitor this rate and aim for 0%. We have currently introduced Peak Performance Indicators and Peak Culture initiatives to measure the performance of Bar Raiser hires. They shine a light on those who deliver results and demonstrate outstanding behaviors across one or more of our 10 principles.
“There is still a lot of work to be done,” insists Benita. “We are working with purchasing managers and hiring managers as we see many opportunities to enhance our interviewing skills, improve our overall understanding of recruiting and ensure an enriched candidate experience. We are in a good place, but we can be in a much better place. Fortunately, we know what we need to do to get there.”
We want every person who joins Hostinger to feel proud and motivated to raise the bar even higher.
Part of Hostinger’s Communications Team, Kotryna is responsible for building and maintaining media relations and ensuring that the organization’s achievements and initiatives receive public recognition. In her free time, Kotryna likes to explore new places and take pictures.
