Seeing Google Wave in that article threw me for a loop for a second! Aw, 2009.

I worked for an environmental center that was part of a university for about a decade. I actually took classes with them as a student, became an intern, then part-time, then full-time, and watched the place grow massively during that time. They were in a unique position for an environmental center because student tuition funded everything there - and it was bountiful for many years. I don’t have anything in particular to add except that they practiced a lot of the same processes you describe, at least for full-time hires: inviting them for 2-3 days, paying their travel and lodging, creating a schedule of team interviews, meet n’ greets with the larger staff (often with lunch provided as an incentive for more folks to join), one-on-one walk n’ talks, and occasionally presentations related to their work area. I got to be on several hiring committees, which were usually two people who would be working closely with the person and a third person, more of an outsider who is still part of the community and culture but wouldn’t necessarily be working closely with them. This third person was often able to give a lot of perspective on how they perceived that working unit and was really valuable. I attended countless lunches and presentations over the years, too, and our feedback was usually requested via email if you felt inclined to do so. Yeah, there were a few stinkers. Definitely some I didn’t agree with. And some that totally surprised me. But more often than not, many people were in agreement that the right candidate had been chosen. There was often controversy over whether we were hiring too many folks who had come up through our system as students, perhaps they interned with us, and went off to work somewhere else for a good while - whether that was too much “inbreeding” and not enough “new ideas.” Ultimately, though, there was usually a clear choice when those folks went head to head (and it certainly wasn’t always the former intern). More of a problem was the place underwent a huge architectural redesign and went from a bunch of tiny scrappy trailers serving as offices to a pseudo-open floor design where work groups were segregated instead of mingling together and everything talked quietly because the walls (cough, slightly-higher-than-cubicle, unmoveable, just-high-enough-that-you-don’t-know-if-anyone-is-there-but-they-can-definitely-hear-everything) basically ruined office culture in an instant. But that’s a story for another day. [sorry for the wall of text, how do you start new paragraphs in this editor?!]

Niagara, Niagara.