Dad La Soul
Creating a job description and person specification.
In a nutshell…
We supported Dan Flannagan at Dad La Soul with their first director hire as they were growing their business and increasing their impact.
Dad La Soul is a community interest company run by Dan Flannagan. Dan started the company to create a community for dads, with the mission to support them and help them avoid isolation.
The company started out in Sussex and is now widely recognised as the leading organisation of its kind in the UK, with a much wider footprint spanning the globe.
Our founder Danielle met Dan through the Good Business Club. It’s a community of businesses committed to being a force for good.
He found Optimo when he put a message into the community Slack. He wanted to bring on another director to support him in the business. They could grow and increase their impact.
It was the company’s first director hire. This meant Dan didn’t know where to start. Originally, he was asking for HR support. But, after a chat with us, we found he was looking in the wrong place.
“It sounded like what he needed was a role description and a person spec for who he was looking for so he could then advertise it.” –Danielle
“Really refreshing for someone to get to the nub of the issue straight away without any jargon, without any long-winded conversations.”- Dan
Our work with Dad La Soul was a one-off project that lasted for 5-6 weeks.
The process started with us having an initial call with Dan. We wanted to understand more about the business and how he envisioned splitting the role between himself and the new director. After this, we went through all the responsibilities of the directors. We tried to split them up based on what he felt best placed to do and what he wanted the new role to do.
Then we put together an initial draft of all the responsibilities. As a bit of benchmarking, we examined similar roles in other community interest companies or social enterprises to determine how the roles could be divided.
After that, we had two or three calls to refine the roles. We did some research into the types of sites that could be worth advertising on and helped him write an advert. Then we helped him to create the recruitment process.
He added us to the system that he uses. This allowed us to make amendments to the system so that the recruitment process would work as efficiently as possible. We created a form that he could use for people to fill in as part of that process.
The recruitment process was successful. Dan has now appointed a new director.
He is also hoping to grow the business now as a result of recruiting the new director.
Dan said that, having worked together and considering what we offer at Optimo, he wants to stay in touch. He wants to see how we can further support them in the future as they grow, now that they have an additional director.
“Took nightmares away.”
Dan was worried due to a lack of HR experience and needed an expert point of view to ensure all boxes were ticked from a due diligence perspective while also understanding the format of the interview. This was where we took the nightmare away by helping them with it all.
“Genuinely refreshing to work with good people that get it.”