A Culture of Team Engagement Helps Clicktale Recruit Faster and Make Fewer Hiring Mistakes

While recruiting is always a team effort, I have been in recruiting long enough to know that engaged hiring is not common. It should be because hiring managers really need help to make these important hiring decisions, and they benefit when everybody is engaged and able to contribute feedback on candidates.

I also want to say that engaged hiring can be common. I’ve seen the upside in my company Clicktale, which embraced a more engaged model in 2015. Since then, we (a provider of AdTech services and technology) have seen between 25–30% of Clicktale staff, roughly 55 out of 210 employees, actively participate in recruiting using our Comeet recruiting system. Recruiting is now a much more common discussion topic in the lunchroom. Given this level of participation, I can tell you that the benefits of hiring team engagement at Clicktale are tangible.

I want to provide some perspective on what we do and suggestions to help you create a recruiting environment where engaged hiring is more the rule than the exception.

Collaboration isn’t solely built on nagging

Recruiting is by definition collaborative. Unless you’re doing everything, from writing job descriptions and sourcing, to interviewing and checking references, tasks are divided among several or many. This is true whether you are a one-person HR department and recruiting is just part of your responsibilities, or you’re part of a dedicated recruiting team building out an org chart.

Collaboration flourishes when employees don’t need prompts

In my recruiting experience, the most enjoyable and productive moments are when you don’t have to nag people to complete tasks or submit information or candidate reviews. Instead, employees voluntarily jump in. They actively participate and everyone reaps the benefits of engagement. Unfortunately, this is not representative of the typical organization where HR usually has to lead and actively manage collaboration between employees and hiring team members. That’s why I like to do everything I can to create engagement in an organization by focusing at the hiring team level.

Who is responsible for creating engagement?

HR is in charge of employee engagement — both generally and specific to recruitment. In every company I’ve worked at, and companies where I have friends in HR, we are all trying to get our employees to be more involved. It’s really important because employees are at work usually more than at home. People work really hard in tech startups like ours. For some, their mindset is come into the office, work around the clock and go home as fast as they can. This is neither healthy nor sustainable.

We try all different things to push this agenda. We attend management meetings and talk about our engagement plans — including recruitment — and try to convince them of its importance. We also spend a lot of time in the hallways talking to random employees and trying to get them more excited about their workplace.

How I define an engaged hiring team

To me, an engaged hiring team is engaged when it:

• Prioritizes recruiting in its daily agenda.
• Schedules at least one step in the process every day.
• Understands that recruitment comes first when you are overloaded in order to eliminate the overload.
• Sees the bigger pictures. You can work really hard but if you are missing hands, then you can only go as far. So they get the importance of the long-run.

The engaged hiring team as a concept

Describing what an engaged hiring team looks like is easy to do by describing the work day. For me, hiring team engagement is more about your daily routine, working with managers, and helping them set goals and targets. For example, we might agree on a weekly goal, such as contacting three candidates or conducting two interviews. Connected with that, I will also remind them to answer emails and make phone calls to candidates on time.

Goal setting like this is super important because the most difficult thing with recruiting is to find time in your daily routine to actually complete your recruiting tasks. It’s kind of a paradox; super busy managers struggle to find the time to complete recruiting tasks despite needing to hire more people, which will ultimately help free up time for themselves.

Engaged hiring teams in action

I like to kick-off every recruitment by sitting down with the manager and having kind of an opening ceremony during which we define all the details, the steps, a workflow and a calendar. If we need to hire a new person in a month and a half, we’ll try and break it down. I might specify that he needs to call one candidate a day for 30 minutes. I’m very clear that they will need to put everything else on hold, pick up the phone and start calling people.

Once you have created a pipeline and have three relevant people, you can start setting up interviews over a 7–10 day period. When candidates come in for an interview, you try and squeeze in any tests, as well. I will also try and fit in meetings with the director of the function and the HR department.

Engagement extends beyond the hiring team manager

When you have a team that needs to fill multiple positions, you designate specific tasks. For example, we recently had a team that needed to fill five positions. Everyone was super busy so we gave each person one task. One person handled initial phone screening, one person gave the technical test, and one person met candidates for in-person interviews. The senior manager was the ultimate decision maker.

What engagement feels like

The engaged/not engaged border isn’t visible but it is noticeable. You can feel it beyond your office door, in the hallways and the open spaces. When you walk in an open space and see people speaking, you can feel the energy. From a recruiting standpoint, one of the noticeable changes is that people who were never previously involved in talent acquisition will start talking about recruiting in the lunchroom.

Measuring engagement

In general, engagement on autopilot isn’t sustainable even if a company is doing great. Engagement is something that you constantly have to put energy into because it will never remain static. It’s not like finding the right prescription medicine that you expect to work for 20 years. Within the daily routine you’ll get ups and downs.

You can have a manager who is leading a recruitment project but isn’t really invested in it. If he is tired and he is not listening to me, and is not doing his part, then the whole process takes longer, and makes him more frustrated. This is just how it works sometimes. Alternately, you can have a manager who is really invested in finding promising candidates and identifying the best. That situation is fun for both sides; I am super happy and he is, too. Every step on the recruitment way will be so much more enjoyable.

While I don’t think engagement is something that lends itself easily to measurement, I think you can quantify to some degree its effect using two metrics:

1. Apply-to-hire: The number of days from application to hire (for the candidates that were hired). This is indicative of the hiring team’s commitment and response times.
2. Time-to-complete-recruiting-steps: This is the action or response time each member of the recruiting team takes to complete his/her tasks.

The downside of engagement

There are some potential downsides. You might have some managers who get too excited about recruiting, focus too much on it and try to drive the process faster than it needs to go. This can mean overlooking obvious disadvantages just because they want to fill the position. Here’s a personal experience for me:

I had a really long relationship with one manager. He was super enthusiastic. Basically, he was over-the-top. He would run to my office and tell me everything that he had done. One day, he ran to explain that he’d already presented the salary offer to a candidate. My response was very curt and angry; the salary was more than I wanted to offer, and the candidate was just a really poor fit, a fact the manager ignored. I also told him that the candidate wouldn’t stay and we shouldn’t make the offer.

In this case, the manager was far too engaged and too enthusiastic. I told the manager the candidate was a poor fit, didn’t fit the profile and I didn’t think he’d do a good job. Despite my advice and all the red flags, we hired him anyway because the manager was so excited and really wanted to close this recruiting process. The candidate left after six weeks.

It’s a good story that I use (when needed) to illustrate that people should listen to HR. It doesn’t mean that we do not make mistakes, but we do know what we’re doing.

Suitability of companies and work environments for engaged hiring

I think that managers who are customer facing are much easier to work with. Sales reps, in particular, are really good at recruitment. They are experienced working with people and enjoy the process of meeting candidates and learning about their backgrounds. Conversely, I’ve found that people who do not work regularly with people as part of their job are not as comfortable interviewing. It’s probably more due to the fact that they don’t use as many words, or write as much in their daily routines so perhaps they’re not accustomed to it. Developers code; they don’t write. In contrast, sales people write all the time, especially emails to customers and prospects.

When I go into an interview, I bring a notebook to write down everything. Developers often just bring a CV and scribble some numbers on it. Although this helps them remember the person they were talking to, expecting the interviewer to later sit down and summarize an interview can be asking a lot.

Technology can really help here. It helps to have a recruiting system, which includes some kind of interviewing interface, to encourage interviewers to take notes and properly rank the candidate on the right metrics.

How to Create an Engaged Hiring Culture

With these general guidelines, I also wanted to provide specific tips you can use, which have been successful for us at Clicktale:

1. Set realistic goals you can measure.

This is critical. Agree on goals and make sure they fit into everyone’s schedules. Every time I start a recruiting process with a manager, I set them a weekly target for the first few weeks.

2. Create firm milestones and work back to create detailed schedules.

I really like to establish time frames and calendar milestones. In my experience, recruiting is often characterized and compromised by too many vague commitments and missed deadlines. What you need to do is set your mind to a goal like “I want to recruit someone in six weeks” and map back everything that needs to happen. Trust me, this really works.

3. Integrate follow-up and check-ins with team members and candidates.

I will actually follow-up about candidates and find out if they’ve been talked to. It is also really important to have a weekly follow-up until the process is stable and understood.

4. A modern recruiting system makes everything easier.

We have been using Comeet for almost a year at Clicktale. It has been a tremendous help. (This is the selection process we used to competitively evaluate Bamboo HR, Greenhouse, Jobvite, Comeet and Salesforce).

Comeet combines the core features of an applicant tracking system to manage resumes with a lot of collaboration and communication abilities. The reason so many people at Clicktale, roughly 55 out of 210 employees, actively participate in recruiting is because Comeet connects everyone and prevents things from falling through the cracks.

I want every new employee to integrate with the system. I know that if employees integrate with Comeet and start using the system, everything will work much more smoothly, which I like very much. Here are three specific areas where technology has really improved engagement and our recruiting metrics:

5. Create an efficient recruitment workflow that integrates people, places and tasks.

Comeet has a really innovative drag-and-drop workflow builder that helps you create individual hiring steps and assign them to a specific hiring team member. We created one default hiring workflow per department that we customize as needed. It ensures tasks get done and reminds people about outstanding deadlines.

6. Create interview structure by starting with interviewer training.

You want everyone to follow labor laws, represent the company well, and ask the right questions. Unless I have a very engaged manager who wants to do it, I always train interviewers on how to interview and behave. When I’m creating job openings, I always provide additional information such as general hiring rules, details on the position and descriptions of the ideal candidate. We also often create a suggested list of interview questions and scorecards inside Comeet for Clicktale interviewers to use when speaking with candidates.

7. Create an organized and efficient feedback loop for candidate assessments and comments.

It’s imperative that you provide interviewers with some kind of scorecard. If you don’t, it will be tough to gather meaningful feedback in a format that you can easily manage. Quantitative scoring is a way to get feedback from people who don’t want to write or who don’t have the time to write paragraphs. In my experience, quantitative feedback works best if your interviewers have technical positions.

8. Identify what works and invest in those activities.

Whether you use a modern recruiting system like Comeet or spreadsheets, you need to track metrics to identify what is working, from sourcing metrics such as candidate quality to engagement metrics as I pointed out earlier. Fortunately, Comeet automatically calculates Apply-to-hire and Time-to-complete-recruiting-steps for us. It is easy to understand how we have improved over time, and prove it to company management when they request reports.

Creating an environment where engaged hiring teams are the norm is not a one-week or one-month project. However, improving hiring team engagement is well worth the long-term effort and investment in time, resources, and technology. It is also something — like a marriage — that you need to work at regularly. And, like marriage, the payoff can be huge.

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