Dear Tech Companies: Hiring without mentorship? Think again.
You can ensure your talent strategy has an edge: even before talent enters the door.
Each story in our Dear Tech Companies series focuses on issues in the tech space and provides strategies and solutions to companies looking to invest in meaningful solutions that will drive impactful industry change and make the industry more accessible to Black, Latina, and Native American women.
Picture this: You’re actively recruiting for a front-end developer. Now put yourself in the shoes of your ideal candidate. What do you think matters more to them: this job or their career journey?
Even if they’re excited about the role you’re hiring for, you should assume they’re also thinking about their career holistically. And if you’re looking to nurture and keep this talent for the long haul, you know that mentoring matters. But what if we told you mentoring support during interviews could supercharge your retention strategy?
You’re probably wondering how a practice that goes into effect before an employee’s first day supports retention. Research in our new report, System Upgrade, shows that an improved candidate experience leads to impactful hiring, which in turn leads to job retention and satisfaction. When you assign mentors to support candidates in the interview process, you enhance the recruitment experience of prospective hires and ensure a more thorough assessment of your candidate slate. By creating touchpoints to clarify the interview process, answer questions, and support candidates, you can ensure you’re not just filling a role, but intentionally bringing talent on board who are excited to stay and excel at your workplace.
We know what you’re thinking — this is hard work. It requires time and money, creating a job or changing the scope of a job for mentors, and buy-in at all levels of your organization. In short, it’s not just a policy or a checklist, but a practice. Where should you start? Closer to home than you think.
1. Leverage the wisdom of those closest to the process: current employees.
If you want to understand how to make your hiring practice more efficient, why not start with those who’ve gone through it? Leveraging your team’s insights through employee surveys or conversations can unearth what’s going well in your hiring process, what’s not, and where mentoring might be most effective for prospective candidates. Disaggregating data received from these sources could also help you understand barriers and pain points in recruitment that may not always be apparent — and which technical employees they disproportionately impact.
2. Embrace Employee Resource Groups as partners.
ERGs can be at the forefront of transforming and sustaining corporate culture — if you let them. Tapping into ERGs’ expertise and experience ensures you’re not creating a one-size-fits-all approach for mentorship during job interviews. When you find synergies between what ERGs already do and the value they could bring to mentorship in the recruitment process, you can ensure you’re building belonging and achieving your business goals at the same time. A key ingredient to making this successful is compensating ERG leaders for this work — through pay, access to leadership opportunities, sponsorships, or trainings.
3. Don’t reinvent the wheel, realign it.
You don’t need to rebuild your entire hiring flow. Instead, make what already exists work for you and your candidates. This involves identifying touchpoints in the hiring journey where mentorship can add the most value, and then asking yourself how what you already have can be built upon. For instance, do you have existing pre-boarding or onboarding resources for employees? How about a buddy system for new hires? By realigning what exists rather than overhauling your entire process, you can optimize your recruitment process without overwhelming your organization.
After years of flux, companies can no longer afford to lose talent. The key isn’t to work harder, but smarter. By getting intentional about your hiring, you can build a practice that ensures that recruitment isn’t transactional, but transformative — for your candidates, your workplace, and your business. Remember, your company’s success rests not just on who you hire, but how you hire them.
P.S.: If you’re looking for more ideas on how to integrate mentorship into your recruitment process, check out our free resource for six questions to ask yourself when designing effective and efficient corporate policies. Read our full report today for more resources like this.
