Recruiting Process at ProVeg
At ProVeg, we believe in equal employment opportunities for all. It’s of utmost importance to us to create professional, international, and diverse teams where you can bring your full self to the workplace. With a mission like ours, we all pulled together with body and mind, heart and soul, to work towards a world in which everyone chooses delicious and healthy food that is good for all people, animals, and the planet.
Firstly, thank you for your interest in supporting us and contributing to our goal of reducing global animal consumption by 50% by the year 2040. As you may know, ProVeg’s operations are spread across eight countries, namely Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, the US, UK, South Africa, and India. Our recruitment team, located in Berlin, manages recruitments globally and follows the same recruitment steps for all the different branches, nationally and internationally.
In this blog, we would like to introduce you to our recruitment process in more detail.
When you apply for a position at ProVeg, we first ask you a set of pre-screening questions. This is part of your application form, which helps us understand your motivation for contributing to our mission. In addition, we require an accurate and up-to-date CV and a cover letter that shows us you are fit for the position. After you submit the application, you will receive an invitation to do an online assessment, focusing on logical analysis, numerical reasoning, attention to detail, spatial reasoning, and a personality test. This helps us understand your ability to solve problems, digest and apply information, learn new skills, tolerate stress and assertive behaviour, and think critically.
The goal of the online assessment is to get a general impression of each applicant. All applicants, no matter what position they apply for or where they are from, take the same test. Although the initial questions and the general test are part of our decision-making process, they are just the first steps we take when evaluating applicants.
Now, what’s next?
Application review:
Once you have submitted your application and participated in the online-assessment, our recruiting specialists and hiring managers will review your application and assess your motivation, as well as your job-specific and organisational fit for the position and the team. We always aim to provide feedback for applicants afterwards. Our recruiters and hiring manager are looking for applicants who are motivated and closely fulfil the required job-specific skills.
Phone interview:
We will then invite the selected applicants for an interview via phone or an online audio call. During this interview, we will help you to gain a better overview of the position and explain the responsibilities and tasks of that particular position. The phone interview also helps uncover more of your motivations, experiences, expectations, and strengths. We also try to understand how you would fit into the ProVeg team. This is also the stage where we discuss salaries, so the expectations of both parties remain on the same page.
After the phone interview, recruiters share the protocol with the hiring managers and usually get back to you with an update within the next few days.
Trial tasks:
If your phone interview is successful, you will be invited to do a job-specific trial task with a time allocation of 90 to 120 minutes. You will usually have one week to complete the task, and we always recommend choosing a timeframe when you won’t be disturbed because your ability to concentrate is essential in order to achieve good test results. Tasks will, of course, differ from one position to the other, but we try to make them all interesting, and as close to your future position as possible.
The trial task helps you get a sense of what your daily tasks would be, and it also provides us with an opportunity to understand your ways of thinking and your approaches to problem-solving. Once you have completed the tasks, we will evaluate all the trial tasks from the applicants, together with the hiring manager. If you are successful, we will invite you to a Face-to-Face interview.
Face-to-Face interview:
You can either come to our Berlin office or meet us virtually through Google Hangouts. The interviewing panel usually consists of your future line manager, an executive (in the case of senior positions), one team member, and the recruiter. During this step of the process, we try to get to know you as a person and an employee and will ask in-depth, job-specific questions in order to understand how well you fit the specific team and the role. So, come prepared for the interview, and be ready to explain why you want to be part of ProVeg.
Trial day (optional):
Although together we have already put a lot of effort into the previous steps, sometimes it is still not possible to decide based on the information gathered thus far. In this case, we will invite you to a trial day. This step helps us get to know you and your way of working better. It also gives you the chance to get a full picture of the job, to meet the whole team, and to learn more about the actual tasks that await you at ProVeg.
Final decision:
This is an internal step, where the recruiter presents the selected applicant profile to the Executive Team. Once the executives approve the hire, we will send you an offer letter, and upon accepting the offer letter, our administrative team will take you through the onboarding steps.
As a non-profit organisation with limited resources, we have much less room for manoeuvre than the business community or larger NGOs with other funding models. That’s why application documents, the job-specific test assignments, and the interviews are given so much weight. This helps ensure that we finding the right people to work with us towards achieving our mission. We want to be as focused and efficient as possible, and bring people with the most appropriate skills and experience into our organisation. Our team is our most valuable resource, and we only want the best people on board. We owe it to the animals, the environment, the planet, and its people.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our HR team at [email protected]
