How DCA is Recruiting Diverse Creatives with Virtual Portfolios

DCA is a design-led firm that specializes in difficult, unique, and unusual projects. The creative nature of their work meant that paper portfolios were still strongly preferred right up until the pandemic. Paper allowed for additional creativity that applicants and hiring managers enjoyed. Remote work has changed all that—and now, Amy says, “we’re never going back to paper.”

Before using Talent Gleam, DCA manually managed a wide variety of application components in print and via email. With so much on paper, it was difficult to keep track of candidates they liked but hadn’t hired. 

“It was a nightmare,” Amy told us. “How do you keep in touch with people? Plus, their application is probably in a locked filing cabinet somewhere in the office, and we were all working from home during lockdown, it was just not practical.”

On top of the practicalities, today’s market moves so fast that the window of time between application and job offer is days, not weeks. “If we hesitate at all, candidates are gone,” Amy says. Talent Gleam keeps the process moving quickly by storing applicant info, communication, scorecards, and everything else they need in a single platform.

There are still some sticky points that make architecture a different beast than most applicant tracking systems are prepared to handle—like the fact that initial screens are based on design portfolios, not CVs. In order to make blind screening work, DCA must ask applicants to leave their names and photos off their design PDF, and it doesn’t always happen.

But the pros far outweigh the imperfections, Amy says. There’s no filing email or fussing with over-large attachments.

Not to mention that it’s much easier to provide and collect feedback this way, too. Some of the team still miss handwritten notes and paper portfolios, but Talent Gleam is so much easier that they’re willing to let it go. “They have to mourn that and move on, because we’re not going back to paper. It’s just too much work.”

With Talent Gleam, the team screens applicants quickly, reviewing comments and star ratings without messing around with the manual back-and-forth.

One of DCA’s favorite things about Talent Gleam is the virtual trail of breadcrumbs they leave without even trying. “It’s easy to see who said what to which candidate, and that makes for a great candidate experience,” says Amy. It also helps with GDPR compliance because they don’t have to go back and search out files for deletion.

When we asked Amy why DCA chose Talent Gleam, she didn’t hesitate. “It was the scorecards,” she said. “The scorecards really work for us, and they’re visually engaging. We’re a team of designers, so engaging visuals  matters to us.”

Scorecards are helping DCA increase their diversity by focusing on the right factors. “It’s about understanding what success genuinely looks like, not what we think it should look like,” says Amy. 

Advanced education is a requirement in the architecture field, so alma maters tend to matter. Hiring managers are much more excited to hire people attached to their old university than those who studied elsewhere. 

Since then, Amy and her team have found a lot to love about Talent Gleam:

• Equality monitoring: Equality monitoring has helped with DCA’s diversity goals: “We’re re-thinking how we’re sourcing and choosing candidates. We’ve been able to question our process and redesign it from the ground up.”
• Referral portal: DCA can see where recent architecture grads are coming from and who’s referring the best-quality candidates.
• Customization: When working with initiatives like the Be More Inclusive program, DCA can dedicate folders and workflows just to those hires so the process is crystal-clear. They can customize different stages for different hires and label them any way they choose.
• Tags: Tags have helped DCA sort, prioritize, and assign candidates, enabling them to quickly sort through a pool of hundreds to find who belongs in an interview and who should remain in the pipeline.