Radically reducing time to hire at SumUp
How our Brazilian Talent Acquisition team used recruiter specialization to speed up our hiring process
In times of lockdown and social distancing, our team has been trying to find the time to share with our community what we have learned so far. This time we would like to share with you how our Talent Acquisition team in Brazil kept up with the hiring needs of a company that was doubling its size year over year for 7 years in a row.
In the past 2 years, our Talent Acquisition team tried different approaches to decreasing time to hire while, of course, sustaining the quality of the people we bring onboard. We knew it wasn’t only a matter of hiring more recruiters but also about creating an environment where recruiters and hiring managers could move quickly and assertively. That’s what we at SumUp Brazil call having “brain over muscles”.
As we discussed how we might change the way we operate, one question we were eager to answer was:
Does having recruiters specialized in certain roles cause time to hire to drop over time?
We knew some big companies out there practiced some level of recruiter specialization in functions or roles — Spotify and Facebook, to name a couple. But why? And would it work at SumUp too?
So we decided to test specialization in roles. Here’s what we did:
- A group of recruiters, mostly in our tech recruiting team, became specialized in certain roles: backend engineer, frontend engineer, product manager, QA engineer, engineering manager, salesforce developers and even tech recruiters. They were our “specialized recruiters”.
- A second group of recruiters, our control group, were continually assigned one-off positions, meaning roles that didn’t repeat themselves in the short term. We called them “generalist recruiters”.
In total, both groups closed almost 50 positions. When we compared the average time to hire of both groups of recruiters, the results were astonishing:
- The average time to hire the first position was about the same in both groups;
- Specialized recruiters, though, would see an average time reduction of 74% in the subsequent hires they made.
Why?
Because recruiter specialization exposed the recruiter to the same experience over and over again, speeding up their learning curve. They could reuse all the relevant insight from the first time they hired for a particular role — the technical side of it, the state of the talent market, the interviewers, the different ways to evaluate a candidate — and use this as groundwork for subsequent positions.
Doesn’t it get boring for the recruiters?
It depends — after all, people aspire to different experiences. But in this instance, the sense of delivering great results made the entire team feel stronger and more relevant. Most specialized recruiters also felt satisfied with the experience of being an expert in a role — they became capable of having eye-to-eye conversations with hiring managers and acting as advisors about the state of different job and talent markets.
Here are a few additional learnings we found along the way:
- A recruiter’s background didn’t have a strong correlation with the drop in time to hire. For example: a recruiter who supported positions in Operations started to recruit Salesforce Developers for the first time during the experiment; his average drop in time to hire after the first position was similar to recruiters who were already recruiting for tech but on a one-off role basis.
- It seems like the more the recruiter closes positions in the same role, the greater their average drop in time to hire. One of our recruiters closed 9 positions of the same role. At some point, when the positions opened, she already had a very good idea of where to look for people, causing some positions to close in only a couple of days.
One crucial thing to stress is that this way of working could become psychologically stressful for recruiters if their performance evaluation, as individuals or as a team, is directly linked to how fast they can close positions.
At SumUp, recruitment performance is not about the time to hire. Rather, it’s about supporting the company in its mission of empowering small merchants by learning how to outsmart common practices in our field (and sometimes how NOT to). When the team has a clear mission and finds room to experiment and learn, we get to be more creative and deliver even better results together.
