Building Structured TA teams : How to speed up the hiring process and bring diversity:

Pandemic times, brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible business environment. Whether and how companies will emerge from this downturn will also depend on their preparedness and on the ability of teams and leaders to understand their potential choices, and to make decisions.

When this scenario comes into the hiring process to bring these talents, we — talent hackers, recruiters- are not only looking for these skills mentioned above, but also someone who will bring the company to the next level, and be a real cultural and diverse addition.

I mean, finding these talents takes a lot of effort. Not only does it require hard work, but also strategy, analysis, different tactics and experiments.

In the last months, I’ve had the privilege and opportunity of directly hiring diverse talents to different companies, even during a difficult pandemic.

In addition, we were able to decrease the time to fill executive positions from 8 to 2 months in a scenario where people are not willing to make bold career moves due to this period of uncertainties.

So, here is a summary of what I’d like to share in order to achieve these results:

What comes?first?

First of all, it’s important to say that these experiments are only possible to be built, tested and implemented if you have a Talent Acquisition (TA) organisation that allows you to think strategically:

• Global teams setup organised by business needs and complexity;
• Sourcing teams, recruiters, and candidate experience coordinators organised by technical domain;
• An amazing employer branding team supporting all the squads above;
• Focus on TA data to drive results;
• Constant improvement of your process and applicant tracking system;

So, how does it work?

1. Finding and attracting our top talents

• Sourcing and Talent expertise; know what you want, where the talents are and how to approach them. It’s important to have a clear context about the internal and external changes and how they affect your processes.
• Looking further?: Diversity and Inclusion (D&I). Have a specialized sourcing process constantly developing ways to find candidates from diverse groups. For example, you can rely on searching for and finding new boolean searches on sourcing tools, on exploring through data mining in your own network and on software to improve your searches.
• Sharing important information — and what matters — know what they want to know. The job description — even if well written — is not enough to attract top talents. They’re used to regular and constant approaches from other well-known companies and?,of course, they will only think of a career move if they’re fully engaged.
• Being genuine in our pitch to the candidate: nothing’s better than telling your story: each company has a unique one and has its own “wow factors”, work practices and routines, values, social vibe and people.

In summary, you have to put yourself in the candidates shoes: to rely on the important facts that matter to each candidate and adapt all the elements you have in your company’s storytelling. Then make sure that there is credibility in what you are telling them;

2. Using data, methodologies, and experiments to drive our results

• Analytics: what paths and decisions can you take? Share and discuss TA strategies with other team members and stakeholders?. And, of course, if the strategy is not working, the team needs to commit to changing directions based on data and hypotheses;
• Employer branding (EB) data: Have an EB team constantly testing templates and approaches: AB testing, creating better ways of communicatiing with each group of candidates, tracking your campaigns and launching new ways of telling your unique story to the external community;
• Methodologies for stakeholder management and decision making: have all interviewers involved from the kickoff of a new position, it is possible to avoid biases and wrong assessments by creating a standard process to assess important skills for leaders, peers and team.

3. Partnering with the organisation;

• As I mentioned previously?, one of the most important things is the alignment with the hiring team-: not only during the kick off but also throughout the whole process. One example is the candidate debriefing meeting where you can use a structured session to discuss your scorecards and make a decision.
• Referrals program: It is proven: a very attractive Bring / Referral a Friend program is one of the best sources you can have to hire new talents — and at a fast pace too!

Finally, this post is just focused on sharing experiences and lessons learned, and it is a compilation of what has worked during the last year. Independently of each stage, these practices are in constant experimentation, change and improvement.

In the next article, we will share our experiments on building structured and Agile HR teams, using the same tools and methodologies as our tech squads.

If you'd like to exchange more information about these TA practices, let me know:

Maiara Nakamura - Head of Talent Acquisition - ília digital | LinkedIn