A More Collaborative Recruitment Strategy
Gain more value from your current and future employees
This concept might seem counterintuitive. The reason you’re looking to grow your team is to get ahead of the capacity issue and now I’m suggesting that you use those valuable resources to take part in what traditionally isn’t their responsibility.
Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of taking part in the recruitment process and I would like to share my experience with you.
The Environment Is Changing
The world is on the verge of major change. People are changing their perception of life. Those who are privileged enough choose change and others are forced into new directions.
As the pool of potential candidates grow it will become increasingly difficult to find the right matches. Desperation will cause some to shoot for positions that they would’ve never considered.
This makes for a volatile recruitment environment and quite challenging to grow a team. However, the benefit of having a bigger pool of candidates makes it more likely to find quality as long as your filtering process is good enough.
The recruitment process consists of drafting the job specification, reviewing the applications, pre-interview evaluation, follow-up interviews, and perhaps even some practical assessments. This requires a lot of time and effort and will introduce an interesting challenge to any team’s workload.
Why should you be investing your team’s time and effort — when they could be focussing on adding value to the business — into playing a critical role in shaping their team? I spent some time phrasing it as ironically as I could. Shirley, you can’t be serious! This is my attempt to convince you.
Improved Team Dynamic
This is arguably the most important aspect for any team to be successful. The company’s culture relies on having teams that can operate well together. Having the right combination of personalities is critical and can so easily be disrupted. The impact of damaging the team dynamic cannot be underestimated and is often only realised when it is too late.
We’ve recently revised our process by introducing a few random questions that have no real answers, just to challenge the applicant’s creativity and sense of humour. This unique approach was only identified because we were part of the process.
Choosing your colleagues is just as important as choosing your friends, as you’ll be spending a big part of your time with them. Productivity depends on happiness, and happiness depends on relationships.
Good relationships keep us happier and healthier — Lessons from the longest study on happiness by Robert Waldinger
Better Source Control
The team members know exactly what they need. Better than the managers, the directors, or the recruiters. I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t play a role, but they shouldn’t lead the effort.
The quality of job specs you’ll get from someone who does the work will be more accurate than you’ll get from someone who manages the team. This is partly because they understand the requirements better, but mostly because they know what they need; they also know what the ideal candidates will be looking for.
Improved Efficiency
The team knows, better than anyone, how valuable their time is. When they are asked to review applications, evaluations, and even driving the interview process you can expect a lot of refinement. Unnecessary and redundant parts will be removed and new parts will be introduced to streamline the process. The faster you can assess someone the quicker you can get back into solving the problems you enjoy and get paid for.
Apply the Agile methodology to your recruitment process by continuously reviewing and improving it. The outcome will eventually pay off.
Accelerated Improvement
Having a stake in the recruitment process will ensure that the team rapidly improve their technical and social skills. You need to be confident in your role to evaluate your potential colleagues.
There’s nothing as daunting as interviewing someone who knows more than you do. It sometimes happens that the interviewee takes control of the interview, which is often misinterpreted as a sign of overconfidence. However, if they’re not being challenged by conflicting opinions they pretty much have a free ride which is not fair to either party. Expect your team to be more prepared than the candidates.
It will also improve the EQ of your team members. The interview process is, at its core, a social exercise and the best way to improve is by practicing. Gaining this experience will not only be beneficial to the team but also the individuals.
