June 15, 2021 - Comfort Works Blog & Sofa Resources

Recruitment process is different from one company to another. Sometimes, it can get overwhelming. Our recruitment team aims to bring a seamless experience to our candidates. From entry level to leadership, everyone should have access to the same information about how we hire.

Comfort Works is known for our culture and we believe that our recruitment process is an important element that shapes our culture. We care about building an inclusive and enjoyable workplace, and that starts with hiring.

We want to share essential information (bonus with some tips!) to anyone who’s interested to join us.

Job searching and application

This is the time where you learn about who we are, what we do, and what it’s like to work with us.

We try to ensure that you know us a bit better and you feel sure enough that you’ve got enough information to apply for the right job. Check out our career page. View our YouTube channel or Instagram page. Read our blog to get to know our team better.

Once you feel that the job you’re eyeing intersects “who you are” and “what Comfort Works is”, click that apply button.

Unless you apply through internal referral, you don’t have to write a cold email or even a cover letter to us – we treat all candidates from all platforms equally. Just be sure to include your complete CV and/or portfolio in your application, and you’ll be in our funnel right away!

We carefully consider everyone who applies to us, and we try to make every bit of our interaction as personal and positive as possible. We believe that people deserve to have a good experience when applying to us regardless of the hiring outcome.

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Your CV, portfolio, and anything in between

Your CV is the first source of information for us to learn about you. We view your resume as an ideal place to highlight your achievements and background.

Depending on the role, you’ll also be required to showcase your portfolio/past work samples. Whether it’s a project you took part in during your internship, a side hustle with a couple of friends, or the most recent campaign you worked on in your last role – feel free to present any of your proudest work in the past and tell us more details about it!

Don’t worry, we don’t really look at how pretty the presentation is. We just want to get a sense of your best work. So, do make sure that there’s no misalignment in your design on Behance or an error/typo in your strings of code at GitHub. Well-thought-out work shows a lot about your conscientiousness, and is enough to land an interview with us.

Cover letters aren’t required, so it’s your call on whether to include one. If you choose to include it, keep it simple and concise. Tailor it to the job you’re applying for and tell us how you’ve made an impact, using data to back it up.

Having a huge following on your LinkedIn profile doesn’t guarantee a job here. But, it’ll be nice to see a dusted-off LinkedIn profile with synchronised information to your CV.

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Down the recruitment funnel we go!

If a recruitment team member believes you might be a match for a job you’ve applied for, you’ll be looped into our hiring process.

While the process may differ slightly for different roles, the same basics apply, whether it’s a Customer Experience Officer job or a Tech job, an entry level or a leadership position.

Not all of these may apply for your role, but here are some of the ways we assess candidates in our hiring process:

Online assessment(s): You may be asked to do a brief online assessment in an email interview format. For some roles, there may be additional online assessment in addition to the email interview. The online assessment will be very role-specific and assess your strategic thinking and hard skills required for the role.
Short chat: Before diving into more in-depth interviews, you’ll typically have a short conversation over the phone. This will usually be with a recruiter to assess or clarify additional information about you.
Project work: Especially for senior or leadership roles, we sometimes ask candidates to complete a small project.

For instance, prepping a product roadmap for our website interface. It’s mostly to help us understand how you think and your approach towards problems. We’ll let you know about any additional materials needed early on.
In-depth interview(s): Behind an invitation email to your interview, there’s a whole recruitment team dancing to “I Gotta Feeling” by Black Eyed Peas. We’re excited to interview our candidates and take it seriously because, at the risk of sounding cliché, Comfort Works is what our people make it.

The process can be rigorous (typically 1-2 interviews, and we keep it virtual during the pandemic), but it’s also meant to be friendly, warm, and welcomes you to know us better too. In the end, we want above all to assess your skills and see if you and this role are a match.

Finally, reference check: We include this at the last bit of our hiring process. We’ll speak to your previous employer or supervisor, people you’ve worked with, or even your lecturer back in school if you’re a fresh graduate. We just want to learn more about you through the lens of other trusted sources.

Do we assess culture fit?

We don’t only look for people who fit into our culture, we are also serious about hiring people who add to our culture. As we celebrate diversity, people who can bring fresh perspectives and positive experiences to our team will have their spot saved with us.

So, take the time to check out our career page and evaluate how you can embody our culture in your daily life. It’s far better if they are authentic and reflect who you are as a person. Give us examples of how our values resonate with your personal values.

Comfort Works holds a strong emphasis on our customers. Whether or not you’re in a customer-facing role, understanding how our product works and which market we serve is useful in the interview process.

We strive to bring great user experience and our UI/UX & tech team love to promote that concept. Empathy and customer-centricity is a great asset that we welcome in our team.

Decision and offer

After we complete the whole hiring process, the recruitment team together with the hiring manager will put everything together and review your application.

We take into account a number of factors to come to a decision. If we decide that you’re the best candidate for the role, our recruiter will reach out to you with an offer – and we promise you that our call will make your day!

Once you’ve accepted the offer, we’ll bring you through the onboarding process to officially welcome you as our “Rookie”! Roll up your sleeves and get comfortable with what’s next — we are thrilled to have you.

A few more tips

Now that we’ve laid out the formal information about our hiring process, here are some bonus tips:

Be kind to your recruiter and all the people that help you along the way.
This is not only applicable for Comfort Works, but also anywhere you interview. We are more interconnected than you think, and you never know when your kindness will come back to help you.
Be realistic in your expectations and feedback.
We receive hundreds of applications for each role. We try our very best to provide feedback for people who ask for it. If you want to learn more about how you can improve or what makes you fall short, write to us and we’ll be happy to answer you.
Be kind to yourself. We all (myself included) get our hopes up, and if things don’t work out, we may feel crushed. It’s a global pandemic, an incredibly competitive job market, yet you had the courage to apply for a new role. Acknowledge that as your strength and put that energy to find your dream job. It may be with Comfort Works, it may not. Whichever your path leads you to, remember that you won’t be there without your hard work.

We wish you all the best in your job search and, truly, thank you for your interest in Comfort Works. We look forward to seeing you in our recruitment funnel and getting to know you better.

CHECK OUT OUR CAREERS PAGE

Ever been in someone’s living room and thought, “Wow, how did they come up with this setup?” because everything looks like they were made for each other? While picking out the right wall paint and setting up the right decor are important, we believe that the heart of every living room is the sofa. As the sofa experts, we know a thing or two about how to get started on creating and growing a sofa of your very own.

It starts with one

Whether it’s your parents’ old couch or your very own brand new sofa, your first piece is where it all begins. So, picture your first sofa and contemplate these details:

How many kids or pets do you see running around the house?
What kind of parties do you see yourself having and how many people do you see passed out on the couch?
Or maybe you only see yourself and your S.O. chilling in your one-piece snuggies, watching The Notebook while snacking on caramel popcorn?

What does the couch look like in all of those scenarios? A small loveseat? A 3-seater sofa? An L-shaped sofa with chaise? Does it have comfy round arms you can rest your head on without using a pillow, or low square arms you could leave your TV remote on? Maybe it’s part of a whole set but you decided to start off with just one piece and get the others later.

My personal rule of thumb is to look for something that is (a) comfy and (b) easily adaptable to my living space. This is how my S.O. and I chose our first sofa, the IKEA Friheten corner sofa with chaise.

Own-Friheten-Corner-Sofa-Bed — *My Friheten sofa*

It was perfect for us at the time. We had just moved into our cosy little one-bedroom apartment, and we needed something that could double as a bed in case we had friends crashing. The chaise that opens up into a storage compartment was also a total space-saving plus for us.

As far as comfort goes, I can safely say that it is definitely perfect for someone with lower back issues who needs something not too soft but not too stiff to lie back on Saturday afternoons… with her book. All jokes aside, it is definitely well-balanced between its firm structure and cushy upholstery.

For us, all the other details will come in handy later on when we move to a bigger house and decide to upgrade the sofa.

And then there were two (or more!)

So it has been a few years and you’re now moving to a bigger place. Maybe you’re married or maybe you’ve created a whole family of your own. Maybe you simply want a home upgrade. No matter the reason, the sofa you have is no longer practical for your new living space.

This would be the time to:

1) Plan and re-organise your new living space. How much more space do you have? This will tell you how many pieces you can fit in your living room and what components they should be.

2) Check your couch. Is it in one piece? Could it use a few repairs here and there or do you think you’ll need to buy a whole new one? This will help you decide if your original sofa should be in your new living room plan.

3) Think of your sofa as part of a set that you’re building. To simplify the plan, here is a breakdown of what all sofas essentially are as separate components:

Chair/single-seater section/armless chairs
2-seater or loveseat sofa/2-seater components
3-seater sofa/3-seater section
Chaise lounge/chaise sections
Ottomans/pouffe/footstools! (Yes, even them.)

Just like with your first sofa, the idea is to piece together the components you think will work best for your typical lounging activities. Once you’ve got a rough idea of what you want, you can get into the nitty-gritty details of what your sofa is actually going to become.

Making it work

Your sofa components should go hand in hand with one another, which means it is now up to you to make it look and feel like a complete set. The key to a perfect set is making it a perfect match in every way possible. Some pointers include:

1) Choosing from a modular series

These are sofa models that come separate components that can be put together to create as large or as small a sofa set as you wish. For example, take the IKEA Soderhamn set that allows a 3-seater sofa to be joined with a corner piece and a chaise to create one massive living room couch. Choosing from a modular series is ideal, as it shaves off all the extra work you’ll need to do in order to get your sofa components to work together.

Find everything you need to know about modular sectional sofas here!

2) Mixing and matching different sofa pieces that all go together

Worst-case scenario: you have no idea what model sofa you have or where it’s from or you just can’t find others that look like it. Now you’ve got three kids, two golden retrievers and no idea how to make your now-tiny sofa work. What now?

First thing’s first; calm down. Breathe. It’s not the end of the world! In fact, it’s totally fine to not have all matching pieces. You can always find other sofa components that complement each other in style and comfort.

For example, let’s just say you started off with a round-arm sofa as your main piece. You could get a whole other round-arm sofa, chaise or even sofa-bed to put it with. You could even pair that second piece with an ottoman. Ottomans (or footstools) are generally neutral and pretty much go with any kind of sofa. They can also be used alone as an extra seat.

If that still doesn’t feel right, all you will need is to get them all in coordinating colours and textures. What better way to do this than to get them all slipcovers? Once you’ve found out if your sofa components are slipcoverable, you will never have to worry about mismatched pieces ever again. Besides, being able to remove the covers and toss them into the washing machine is a plus for practicality!

Soderhamn-Slipcover-Process — *Installing slipcovers on all the Soderhamn sofa components*

If all else fails, don’t worry – your sofa set is yours to decide and design. Don’t let interior design ‘rules’ influence what you want or like – you can just choose different pieces for your living room that go together. Remember Monica’s apartment in F.R.I.E.N.D.S.?

MONICA'S APARTMENT — Image credit: NBC / Getty Images

At the end of the day, it all depends on how you feel about it. If it makes you and your family happy, then why not? :)

If your living room is in need of a cohesive new look, matching sofa slipcovers could be the answer you’re looking for. Take our fabric samples for a spin to find the best solution for your home.