If you’re active in the talent acquisition space, you’ll be well aware of the ongoing shift from traditional hiring models toward collaborative hiring methods. In fact, 2 out of 3 HR and recruitment professionals are using collaborative hiring, according to our TGTHR survey!
Touted by Steve Jobs as the ultimate way to hire the best talent, collaborative hiring has quickly transformed from buzzword to a tangible team-based hiring practice.
However, armed with little more than a poorly defined concept, some teams have struggled to push the collaborative hiring process into practice. Businesses often have more pressing HR and recruitment needs and redesigning a hiring model can seem like a risky venture.
In this post, we’ll equip you with ten ways your business can immediately benefit from making collaborative recruitment a standard practice. Bring these to your next meeting with hiring stakeholders to get them on board with the investment into team-based hiring.
What is collaborative hiring?
Collaborative hiring, or collaborative recruitment, is a team-based hiring method that structures your recruitment process to get colleagues from other parts of your business more involved.
It “typically involves a multi-stage interview process, allowing the candidate to meet more employees than the two or three they would usually meet. In fact, they often meet most of the team they’d be working with.”
The collaborative hiring process is most prominent in the interview process, though a deeper collaboration will include colleagues in the screening, evaluation, and, ultimately, selection stages.
What does a collaborative interview look like?
A collaborative interview can take many forms and cast of team members may change every time. Usually, in early rounds, a collaborative interview might include the recruiter, and hiring manager, and the candidate. They will be primarily focused on whether or not the candidate is qualified and motivated to take the role.
At later stages, a collaborative interview may include an additional team member who will be working directly with the candidate. In either format and regardless of how many team members are involved, interview scorecards should be used to properly evaluate the candidate.
Job trials or work trials may also be considered extended collaborative interviews.
9 reasons to adopt collaborative hiring
Collaborative recruiting looks different in every workplace simply because of the team dynamic.
As a direct result of more team members being involved in the hiring process, collaborative recruiting can boast nine immediate benefits to those who choose to embrace the method.
1. Less stress on the recruiter
In traditional hiring models, recruiters are responsible for all of the tasks within the recruitment process. When you’re managing more than just a few roles, this can easily become overwhelming.
Burnout among recruiters is becoming increasingly common: “Increased business competition, and a focus on speed and responsiveness, coupled with distractions presented by mobile devices and social media, are all worsening mental health among recruitment professionals.”
With more team members in the hiring process, recruiters are alleviated from sole responsibility for the recruitment process. Collaborative recruiting places the recruiter in more of a coordinator role. And while they may still conduct most of the interviews and sourcing, team members will pitch in with evaluations, CV screening, and crafting pre-screening questions.
Of course, collaborative recruitment will vary from company to company. There are no set tasks that must be shared among a team. But it does mean that recruitment becomes a team responsibility rather than just that of the recruiter, which results can encourage decreased levels of stress among recruiters.
2. Better chance of hiring cultural fits
There’s no perfect equation to identify a cultural fit because company culture belongs to the company as a whole. Every team member has their own perception of the company culture. Cultural fit determinations can be hit or miss if they’re left to just one person.
Team-based hiring can help better identify cultural fit in your candidates. With more team members involved in assessing candidates, you’re more likely to get a more complete picture of a candidate’s cultural fit. Each team member will assess the candidate from their own perception of what it means to be part of your company.
3. Improved candidate experience
Most recruiters know the feeling of rushing into a candidate interview having done little to no preparation at one time or another. It’s inevitable if you’re responsible for every moving part of the recruitment process.
No one likes the feeling of being unprepared, but especially candidates. Coming in late for an interview or scrambling to get the details of their application straight can all raise red flags for candidates.
Poor preparation as a result of a busy workday can leave candidates with a sour taste.With team-based hiring, the responsibility of interviewing, assessing, and evaluating candidates is shared. Most likely you’ll have more than one person involved in a single interview. This will free up time to prepare parts of the interview and share interview preparation tasks. With an easier process, you and your team will have more time to focus on the person in front of you rather than the logistics.
Additionally, the collaborative hiring process will allow more team members to meet your candidate. This is a great opportunity for them to share their experience working at your company with the candidate. With a more complete picture of the day-to-day of your company, candidates can better manage their own expectations. This overall leads to a better candidate experience.
4. Enable referrals
When managed correctly, employee referrals can be a recruiter’s favorite tool for sourcing great quality talent. Employee referrals:
- Reduce your time to hire,
- Increase your employee retention rates,
- Improve your cultural fit,
- Provide pre-qualified talent,
- Higher your applicant conversion rates.
But even with all those great benefits, referrals can be tough to track down. This is where collaborative recruitment can really add value. As your team members become more familiar with the recruitment process, it’s easier for them to refer people they know. Colleagues will be less likely to feel as if they’re passing off a friend to a disconnected department but rather to their team.
5. Increased business buy-in to talent acquisition
People love to hate HR, a feeling which tends to extend to recruiters. For recruiters, the roots of this problem rest in the traditional recruitment models where recruiters play the role of an order taker. This, in turn, can generate a lack of respect for all of the work recruiters are responsible for.
Bringing your team into the hiring process can start to break down these negative barriers with talent acquisition. Colleagues will experience at least part of what it takes to get great talent in the door. A better appreciation for the work that goes into recruiting the right talent will generate increase business buy-in over time.
Additionally, team-based hiring creates a more transparent hiring environment. With the right talent acquisition platform or ATS, anyone involved in the process will have oversight into your talent pipelines. This can help your business understand any challenges in your recruitment process and encourage them to pitch in when it comes to troubleshooting!
6. Employee retention
Collaborative recruitment is all about getting the most out of your team’s’ involvement and skills when it comes to identifying the right talent. Having your entire team more involved in such a business-critical activity as hiring the right people can make them feel valued and engaged. These feelings in your team are directly tied to higher employee retention levels.
Also, having your team help in the selection of candidates can help ensure their future colleagues are already pre-approved by them. In the long term, this can help form teams that your current employees like working with- from the very beginning!
7. Educate hiring managers on the candidate market
Many recruiters will have nightmares about their worst hiring manager. You know, the one who simply doesn’t understand your process. They don’t understand how you can’t just rustle up more candidates after all the applicants have already been rejected. The good news is that this scenario is far less likely when you have them more involved in the recruitment process.
With better oversight into your candidate pipelines and the process, hiring managers will be better informed when making decisions impacting the hiring process. As hiring managers become more involved they will also have higher stakes in the game.
The collaborative hiring process can help break the traditional hiring manager vs recruiter relationship.
8. Limit unconscious bias
Ensuring diversity in the workplace is a challenge for many HR functions. And eliminating unconscious bias from your recruitment process can seem near impossible. Alongside bias awareness, team-based hiring is a great solution that limits the impact of unconscious bias.
Each colleague has their own biases, however, the transparency that the collaborative hiring process brings severely limits these biases. With more people involved, it’s far less likely that a single hiring manager or recruiter can consistently disqualify one group of people from the pipeline without someone noticing.
9. Cut down your time to hire
Inevitably, with more people involved in the hiring process and calendar availability shared, your time to hire will decrease.
Embracing team-based recruitment means that colleagues can take responsibility for certain parts of the process, depending on their availability. As long the processes is coordinated appropriately, you can save a lot of time hiring!
Coordinating collaborative hiring
Working in a team to get the best talent in and hired clearly has some great benefits for the business. And while responsibility is shared, it’s more important than ever for recruiters to coordinate tasks and activities in the recruitment process. Recruiters should be seen as the central point of contact for any recruitment process. They’ll delegate tasks and get involved where necessary.
To make coordination as easy as possible make sure that you have recruitment software that values this principle at its core. That will mean features that enable
- easy sharing of documents, profiles, and contact logs,
- unlimited users on your plan,
- customizable roles to ensure appropriate participation,
- and real-time updates on your team activity.
Start your collaborative hiring journey today. Bring these nine key benefits to your next team meeting to sway stakeholders. And make sure you have the right software in place to enable collaborative hiring in your company.
Further reading: How to use your ATS for collaborative hiring
