Why Hiring Isn't Just The HR's Problem


If you aren’t in HR, I am willing to bet that you don't really care about hiring. And when I say that, I don't mean bringing talented people on board - we all want to work with them, learn from them. I am talking about the process of getting them there. I can tell because until I had to source and hire for a position, I didn't care either. This was about a year back, my entire company was eight strong and I was trying to hire someone for the same profile as mine. I was working with an agency and figured my job was to tell them whom I was looking for and interview the person. I was very, very wrong.

Between scanning endless resumes, having to reschedule interviews and really disgruntling some valuable people, I learnt something.

Hiring might be the HR’s problem. But it also happens to be the problem of every single person in the company.

Understanding the Stakes

Don’t get me wrong, I understand how pressed for time most of us are. If you are running the show, you have a whole bunch of things screaming for your attention - growth, scalability, customers and such. But your organization’s growth depends on bringing the right people on board. And who better to assess the fit of the next team member than the team itself?

After all, your recruiter can keep bringing in the best talent in the country. But if not enough attention is paid to both hiring quality and hiring progress, both your brand and your growth goals take a hit. And when that happens, everyone loses.

So, How Can You Help Your Entire Team Hire Well?

At Belong, we continuously refine our recruitment process. While it isn’t perfect, we are doing everything we can to get there. After long discussions, learning from our own experiences and feedback from the people we interviewed, here are a few things we do to get everyone in the company involved in hiring.

1. Champion the cause 

Any cause needs a champion. As the person leading from the frontline, every leader should become an advocate for hiring well. It should be a core value so it resonates within each and everyone in the company. At Belong, the vision induction meeting has a section where we talk about how bringing people together is one of the values we stand for. Each person here has to take part in our hiring by helping bring at least one person onto our team. This is how the cause becomes a real entity to us, rather than fancy words on a slide.

2. Get people from across teams to meet the candidate

Even during the interview process, involve people from teams that will be working closely with the candidate. When I was interviewed, one round had someone from sales and someone from product meeting with me. This was great because as a member of the marketing team, I’d have to work closely with sales and product teams. So it was essential for both me and the other teams to see if we would share a good rapport. In turn, their feedback helped my hiring manager to make an informed decision.

3. Processes for the win

While this may seem like generic advice, it is very essential if you want to ensure your hiring process doesn’t break at any point for any reason. At Belong, we keep a record of (almost) everything: interview processes, assessment parameters, assignments for each role and more. There are SLA’s set for each round with owners and when it is not met, an escalation message is sent to someone else. This way, the process doesn’t come to a screeching halt because one interviewer can’t make it.

4. Ask your candidates for feedback

We send out surveys to all our candidates after their interview to understand their experience with us. For instance, a few months back, we noticed a sizable number of folks were stating that even after the first call, the nature of the job seemed obscure.

This was not something we could have caught on if we hadn’t asked them. Now, our teams make sure that anybody who is doing the first pitching call clearly understands the role and the larger context behind it, and is able to articulate it well.

5. Make hiring performance a part of your teams’ Key Result Areas

Your teams are worrying about a million things on a daily basis, so hiring can slip through the cracks. To bring in focus and accountability, hiring must feature among the KRA’s of each team. And we are talking about metrics across the hiring funnel -- how many people are shortlisted, how many were engaged, how many interviewed and were finally offered a role.

This type of conversion tracking allows teams to look at the entire hiring process as a whole, and clearly identify areas of bottlenecks that need action. For example, if you are seeing too many drop-offs during the interviews, it’s a possible indicator that the interview processes may need to be refined. Or if you are not seeing enough folks moving to interview, it may either be because your reachout is not effective or that you are simply not reaching out to enough people.

Take a second to consider what a huge investment it is to hire a person - applications screened, calls made, interviews set up, negotiating all the way to deciding this is who you want. Even if it does take an entire village, isn’t it something worth doing right?

Culture Recruiting
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