Self-Selection at Scale

The most immediate question we faced at Trade Me was how we could facilitate a self-selection event at scale. Should we follow the Lancaster bombers’ lead to get everyone into a giant hall and simply tell them to get on with it? Or was there a more structured way that would make the people involved more comfortable?

We tried researching the concept, but it appeared that either no one had carried out a self-selection event at this scale before or, if they had, they hadn’t published the process or results. This meant we had to design and develop our own self-selection process from scratch.

We spent months planning our first squadification and put an incredible amount of thought into the details.

Sandy describes what was involved in those early stages:

After we had made the decision to run a self-selection event, we spent months planning it. We had to come up with ideas for how to facilitate it, so we ran a trial in one of our satellite businesses. In the end we spent a full day just preparing the office materials we would need––cutting out photos of more than 150 people, making templates, and creating visual signals for ready/non-ready squads.

We spent a lot of time setting up and creating the environment. Even though we didn’t control what was happening during the day, we put a lot of time and effort into creating an environment that would be as conducive as possible to a successful event.

Now that you understand that you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves to start planning your event, we’ll explain the steps in detail to ensure that you’re ready to conduct your own self-selection event. The following graphic shows the first six steps of the process:

We start with how you can identify whether you’re ready to run an event and what you’ll need to have in place up front.