How to break the rules of hiring – and attract the best talent

Ripping up the rulebook comes naturally to challenger brands – it’s in our DNA and, I think, the only way we can truly win. While rule-breaking is often associated with external aspects like marketing, communications, and product development, it doesn’t have to stop there.

Small, agile teams have the unique ability to take risks and break rules, and you can do this within your culture and team too. We don’t need to adhere to classic organisational chart structures, and at Bold Bean Co, we do this by hiring for roles that don’t even exist.

The goal has been innovation, and diverse thinking, but what surprised me was how it also attracts the best talent – arguably the most important thing to get right in our current phase of growth.

Take our ‘beanologist’. A brand new role that, yes, we completely made up. We were blown away with the standard of applicants. Tthe interest was so overwhelming that we had to close applications after just a week-and-a-half.

Our slogan at Bold Bean Co is ‘bean obsessed’, and the beanologist role is a natural extension of this. We’re looking for someone who’s not just passionate but truly obsessive about our bean varieties, their sourcing, and how harvests influence cost and quality each year.

This person will leverage data, trend analysis, and consumer research to deepen our understanding of the bean category and drive its growth. They’re going to be our in-house bean expert and I want them to further establish us as the bean brand.

The role attracted people from agricultural and research backgrounds, as well as category management, which is the classic research-slash-commercial role that sits in brands like ours. We didn’t stipulate what sort of background we wanted, which attracted a lot of candidates who might not have seen themselves fitting into a conventional fmcg role, but who had the right skills. The one unifying attribute of the candidates was the passion they had for what we’re doing.

Going against the grain with our hiring practices is something we’ve done before, and it’s really paid off. We created the unusual role of chief bean champ for Charlie Hanks, who is a real-life bean obsessive and loves getting other people energised about them.

She attends events where we need to spark a love for beans, whether it’s consumer-facing shows, sales events, pitching to independent retailers, or even energising our supply chain partners. Her charismatic, full-of-beans energy helps us deliver on our mission to make people obsessed with our products across the business — everyone from our partners to our team.

We also did things differently when we made our first senior hire in marketing. We wanted to find someone who can push us to think more like a creator than a classic fmcg brand. Louisa, our new head of digital, was exactly that, bringing her experience from Bosh, a recipe-sharing media brand with its own range of fmcg products.

We’re investing in engaging digital content to build a community, rather than spending on expensive out-of-home campaigns and big ads that small brands like ours can’t afford. Even prior to Louisa formally joining, we had built a base of over 50,000 users visiting our website each month, with 45,000 of them using our recipe blog. Louisa’s role was designed to fit with what works for us, rather than what works for everyone else.

We’ve learned that following the crowd isn’t always the best strategy. Early on, we felt pressured to create highly produced content, so we hired an expensive videographer and invested heavily in ideas. While the videos performed well, they didn’t revolutionise our business.

We eventually realised that our original approach – shooting content on our phones – was just as effective. Instead of chasing super-slick posts like other brands, we focused on simple, authentic recipe content that truly resonates with our followers. We’re now sitting at 100k followers, and that’s with less than £500 paid spend behind our social media.

One of our biggest brand successes was something I was told by expert fmcg advisors not to do: our cookbook Bold Beans. It wasn’t a commercial project – in fact it was very resource-heavy, and the advisors were right in saying a cookbook is not necessarily going to sell the beans themselves.

But what it did give us is an excellent soft sell. We showed up in beautiful bookshops, we inspired people with delicious, tempting recipes and I was invited on BBC Radio 2, ITV’s This Morning and Times Radio to talk about it. It was these opportunities that not only enabled us to get our brand out there, but also to share our mission and bring people into our brand world.

I’m fully aware that this hire is one of our most off-the-wall ideas yet, and a bit of a risky move. But rules were made to be broken, and I’m convinced a beanologist is the perfect role for a challenger brand like ours – unconventional, collaborative, and deeply immersed in our product.