From sourcing to marketing to operations, from organizing events to planning and forecasting to ensuring compliance, more and more defined workstreams are emerging in talent acquisition teams. And that’s a good thing for the teams’ maturity and ability, but it also presents a challenge.
Recruiter collaboration has become crucial
Where talent acquisition leaders were able to neatly divide the same type of work across a team of full service recruiters, they now have to design processes where multiple people are involved at different stages of the same funnel.
Team members might specialize in organizing events, or recruiting on campuses, on hiring diverse candidates, or managing candidate pipelines, but their work areas will still cross and overlap. Responsibilities and accountability are not as clearly defined.
Heidi Gardner, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, and author of “Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos,” explains here how increased specialization in a specific expertise mens that corporate teams need better collaboration than ever:
Recruiter collaboration relies on communication
Teams that collaborate well make more profits, and that goes back to everything from sticking longer to tasks, to feeling more engaged and less tired from work. The trick, however, is to figure out how to become one of those highly collaborative teams.
Recruiting teams who are growing and scaling up their operations are especially vulnerable to that challenge. Good collaboration relies on good communication. With every additional person, the team has an increased number of possible communication lines, and just as many opportunities for people to fail at collaborating on the same projects.
Better recruiter collaboration takes better processes
Process for the sake of process is the quintessential organizational nightmare. Process to save people from doing double work, to better share candidate information, or to help make hiring decisions faster… It’s harder to complain about that.
What does a good recruiter collaboration process look like in talent teams? Recruiting operations deal a lot with answering that specific question. They find inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and failing links in the way their team works and try to fix them.
Good processes also take good tools, and that is true across functions and industries. At this software development company, for example, the combination of process improvement and collaboration tools improved productivity by 20 to 30 percent.
Productivity and efficiency are also strongly driven by technology. We’re at a place in the global economy cycle where “the next wave of productivity gains” in businesses will come from improved collaboration. In other words, companies who want to improve their productivity need to invest in the processes and the technology necessary for better team collaboration.
This applies to talent teams as well, and is also part of recruitment operation's ambit. The recruitment operations specialist’s task would be to understand and map out how the team works, and find the best tools to help it run smoothly.
Some examples of the questions they would ask are:
Who first adds a candidate to the team’s system? Who sets up nurture tracks and pushes candidates into them Who decides to pursue a specific lead and why? How they hand the candidate off after pre-screening them? Who adds them to a talent community? Who decides to remove them or to invite them for an interview?
The operations specialist would then identify where information is lost or delayed, or where two or more people redo the same work, depending on their findings.
They can then look into what technology will best serve their team’s process. Allowing actions like syncing email conversations or adding notes to candidate profiles ensures that all information is centralized and available for the whole team. Small things like mentions, tags or push notifications can make it easier to hand off tasks from one team member to another.
Business leaders everywhere are always looking for ways to help their teams collaborate better, because there is so much to gain from it in terms of productivity and profit. As talent teams grow and become more specialized, they need to invest in improving their collaboration practices as well.
It’s certainly an investment, both because better recruiter collaboration means well-designed processes and better tools, but it’s also a sign that the talent team is growing and gaining in maturity, and that’s pretty much always a good sign.
Agile Recruiting: Optimizing your TA Operating Model
We've invited Mitzi Shafar, an experienced talent acquisition leader and currently lead partner at Talent Collective, to tell us about how companies can start implementing an agile recruiting methodology, a driver of talent transformation.
