How does your company bring new talent on board? Does someone from the business call or email your recruitment or talent team signalling the need for a new team member? Is the process smooth and efficient?
Traditional recruitment models often see the recruitment or talent team sitting remotely from the rest of the teams with the company. This can lead to an “us and them” mentality and quite frankly, a lot of mistrust between two working groups who should be working very closely together.
So it bears thinking that there may be collaborative ways of recruitment teams and hiring managers to work together to hire new talent.
True recruitment partnering
Considering a more embedded recruitment model could improve the level of cooperation and communication within your teams and result in more successful new hire outcomes.
Enhanced collaboration will lead to a higher quality interview process, an improved talent pool to choose from and an elevated candidate experience. What’s not to love about this idea?
Collaborative hiring
The idea that key recruitment specialists physically work side by side with hiring managers to truly partner at each stage of the hiring process, offers many benefits.
Here are just a few of them:
- Working together builds mutual trust and respect between teams working within the company and the recruitment function
- Physically working closely together allows business and recruitment teams to make real time decisions together about candidate attraction strategies, advertisement copy, job descriptions and so much more
- You’re likely to generate more referrals from team members in the business if you are sitting near others when you are talking about the role and its requirements
- You’ll get feedback on interviews that business stakeholders conduct immediately, in person and you’ll be able to talk through next steps straight away
- Your business benefits. Your hiring manager have access to genuine recruitment and talent experts sitting in amongst your business teams, offering real time counsel, tips, ideas and feedback as the hiring process unfolds
- Just by being around, interviewers can ask recruitment specialists last minute questions before they head into candidate interviews. You can reaffirm key messages to be delivered in interviews and remind those interviewing how to avoid interviewer bias
Advice and expertise right where you need it
True collaboration grows the recruitment capability of your hiring managers. When your HR, recruitment and talent team members are dispersed in your business, you’re able to convey important people centered concepts. Key discussion points might include how to create an exceptional candidate experience and how to “sell” the role and your company to top talent.
Observing what goes into the recruitment process will also give hiring managers and teams a better appreciation for the complexities of sourcing quality talent. It also shows them that it’s no easy task to sift through applications to find high quality candidates for consideration.
Identification of training needs and professional development opportunities
Working amongst the teams in your business has other benefits too. In partnering more collaboratively with business units, team member training needs are more likely to be identified, especially in relation to interview training.
Star performers will also be easy to spot when you are working hand in hand with business stakeholders. This will potentially signal some useful conversations with hiring managers and leadership teams about professional development opportunities for employee further growth and development. These are the sorts of actions that improve employee retention and contribution.
Start small
It is difficult to replace the workings on traditional recruitment departments overnight. But trialling the use of single, united teams focused on delivering the best possible talent placements for your company can be achieved with this collaborative and innovative recruitment concept.
This model has the potential to work with companies of various sizes and across a broad range of sectors. Where you require multiple hires, consider deploying more than one recruitment specialist to business units at a time, to appropriately handle recruitment activity demands.
If you are struggling to get stakeholders on board with this innovative concept, give it a go for one open role and see how the recruitment process progresses. Seek feedback from all stakeholders involved and share that feedback with relevant leadership teams on the successful completion of the trialled recruitment assignment.
Embedded recruitment success
The success of any embedded recruitment model relies on a range of underpinning factors. These include:
Leadership/management buy in
Any change in a working model requires leadership endorsement. Without it, the concept is likely to get quashed at the first hurdle.
Patience and an open mindset to work through any issues of the first few trials
Changing work patterns that have been in place for a long time is difficult. People involved in any initial trials should be open minded and solution focused when resolving inevitable issues that arise.
Metrics to measure success
Measurement is pivotal. Record benchmarks such as current time to fill and resume to interview ratios before trialling a change. Compare results after say 3-5 trials of your collaborative recruitment approach. Take into account qualitative feedback from hiring managers as well.
Recruitment team member competence
For any new initiative to be successful those stakeholders involved must be “up to the challenge”. Any member of your recruitment team deployed to work within the business must be able to competently communicate with a range of business stakeholders.
The ability to actively listen to business stakeholders, influence direction and communicate professionally are essential attributes for any recruitment specialist trialling a collaborative model of working.
I would love to hear if you have tried something like this in your workplace. Did it work? What were the key challenges you overcame to make it work? Feel free to share your comments in the section below.