Get an insight into DANSIC

How we hire and engage with our team members

If you are familiar with our organisation, you know that here at DANSIC, we care about social innovation and sustainability, and while we are striving to make a positive impact in those areas, DANSIC is so much more than that. Our community is made up of a diverse group of individuals, members coming from all over the world, including China, Argentina and Greece. We speak different languages, come from various educational backgrounds and have different skill-sets, but what is common no matter who you ask, is that we are proud to be members of the DANSIC family.

We are open to all

We take pride in DANSIC’s values, such as peer-learning, creativity and diversity. These are also reflected in our hiring process, since we are looking for candidates that would thrive in an environment with such principles. However, we do not want to complicate things and make the hiring process a super overwhelming experience for candidates – it is pretty straightforward actually.

When we post a vacant position, we ask candidates to send their CV’s together with a short message about their motivation on why they want to join DANSIC. We don’t expect full length cover letters, because most of the time, already from the short email and the CV, we can tell if the candidate has potential, which we can then explore in an interview. If you want to read some of our volunteers’ personal motivation on why they joined DANSIC, check out our previous blogpost. So after screening the applications, we invite candidates for an interview, which resembles an informal conversation between one of our HR Specialists and one of our Crew Directors, and we always try to create a relaxed atmosphere. The interview gives us a chance to get to know the candidate and share what we are doing at DANSIC. We try to explore whether he or she is a good fit for the position and for DANSIC as an organization. Moreover, we also want to find out whether DANSIC is the right place for the candidate to get involved in. Once we are through the interviews, we make a decision on whom to hire and welcome the new member to the DANSIC family.

We see professional experience and skills to be relevant for finding out how the candidate fits for the particular position, but they are not the only thing we take into consideration. A candidate might have a great deal of experience in a given field, but it could be that his or her personality or motivation is misaligning with DANSIC’s culture. Another person might have less proficiency in the field, but would be a better fit for our team based on his or her other qualifications. We are not looking for one “holy grail” skill in candidates, because we realise that everyone can contribute with different things and bring different strengths to the table. We focus on creating a team with a diversity of perspectives and experiences. However, we always appreciate an open mindset to teamwork, as collaboration plays a key role in fulfilling our day to day tasks. Most importantly, during the hiring process, we try to recognise what the candidate could bring to DANSIC, whether it is his or her professional skills or enthusiasm about social entrepreneurship or volunteer organizations.

We share and care

We appreciate each and every member’s input in achieving the social innovation goals of DANSIC and that’s why we try to give back to our volunteers. We want to make sure that our members have a positive experience in DANSIC, so we, in HR, regularly check-in with them to see how they are doing – encouraging them to share their ups and downs, so that we can provide them advice or show our support by simply listening. After all, DANSIC is grounded in its volunteers, and without their well-being, we wouldn’t be able to do what we are here to do – to support the development of social innovation.

We laugh

While we work hard to reach the yearly goals of DANSIC, to make sure we don’t always focus only on our tasks, we strive to create a social atmosphere where there is room for all sorts of fun activities. The COVID-19 restrictions practically made us a virtual family, since we have held almost all our meetings online. As we started our journey together not long after the lockdown here in Denmark, we had little time to get to know each other face-to-face, “in real life”. Though that has been definitely challenging at times, it didn’t stop us from fun interactions. Our HR team is making efforts to hold our volunteers together through different online social events. We have had a lovely Sunday brunch, where we spent time together chatting about anything and everything but work over delicious food. At the moment, we are planning an online Pictionary night, where everyone gets the chance to show their artistic or not-so-artistic skills. With such activities, we can unwind and recharge together, so that we are ready for future challenges.

We hope that with this blog post, you got a sneak peek into how we engage with our members here at DANSIC, and if you feel like you resonate with some of the core ideas of our organization, keep an eye on future posts for available positions! Meanwhile, you are always welcome to contact us.