The Drive to Dublin – Building a diverse, world-class team at speed

Recently, we hosted our team yearly get together for our EMEA insights team. To kick off, we asked anyone who had been on our team 3 months or less to stand up and introduce themselves. One third of the room stood up, including two people who had literally just joined us that day. Through a massive hiring push, we had increased our EMEA team from 25 to 38 in just 3 months.

We had recently welcomed a constant stream of new hires after a trojan sourcing effort but, at this moment, the scale of what we had achieved was really evident.

Building a team from scratch, I have been hiring Insights Analysts in Dublin and Dubai since 2014 and it is known to be one of the toughest roles to fill. Insights Analysts need to have technical skills as well as, commercial experience and the right culture fit for LinkedIn. Finding the right blend of these skills and experiences along creativity, resilience, stakeholder management and problem solving is a tough brief.

In 2017, we had more roles to fill than ever before with tenured members of the team moving onto their next plays. Although a challenging situation, this positive attrition is a great sign that we are developing talent in the team and supporting career transformations to new opportunities and often, relocation to new countries and even continents!

How did we achieve this surge in hiring top quality talent?

Needless to say, we have been busy! Below are the 3 keys areas I feel have driven the most significant shift in traction:

1.      Develop an informed sourcing strategy and adjust as you learn

Using our data Insights from LinkedIn, we could deep dive into our talent pools and see that, to achieve our current goal, we should broaden our search area to outside of Ireland.

Expanding our search has resulted in ~75% of our new hires being relocated from across the world from Egypt to Seattle to Portugal. Paired with some hires from Dublin and internally who have joined the team, hiring internationally has brought us the gift of diverse experiences and backgrounds. Of course, visa applications and relocation challenges do slow the process down and add incremental costs, but balanced with the upside, everyone we hired was more than worth the wait!

2.  Ensure that joining your team feels like a great decision for every candidate

In a competitive market, having a strong talent brand is vital. We are lucky to have very attractive opportunities for candidates in the analytics space but it is equally important to get that message out in the market at scale.

We recently developed a talent brand strategy which we have started to execute on to help bring the role to life for candidates. This includes asking our newest hires to share their experiences of their first 120 days in the role on LinkedIn, designed consistent banners across the teams LinkedIn profiles and revamped and simplified our job specs so it was clear to all candidates what their role would be.

As we say in LinkedIn, great talent knows great talent. The more diverse the team, the more diverse range of candidates we can attract to our roles. The diverse backgrounds of the team ensure candidates feel like they could belong and be included in our team.

3.  Make sure you have the right team on board to invest energy in the search

As anyone who has sourced will know, finding the top-quality talent is incredibly time consuming. In order to achieve our goals, everyone involved needed to commit this drive as their number one priority and invested the time and energy needed.

All Insights Managers committed to coming together as One Team in our search for our next wave of Insights Analysts. This meant we could find the best team for each candidate based on their experiences and career aspirations. Also, more tactically, we centralised all meetings with Talent Acquisition to one weekly meeting to ensure every hour possible was spent on sourcing over internal meetings. Thank you to my Insights partners on this journey Annmarie McCormack, David Horgan, Darren Connolly, Deidre Wafer & Mel Furze.

Most importantly, without our partners in Talent Acquisition, we could not have been successful. A massive thank you to Giles Cognard and Maire O'Connor for their tireless creativity, resourcefulness and patience.

I am incredibly proud of the progress the team has made and as always, there is lots more to do. In an industry which is rapidly changing, hiring for skills of the future is essential to ensure you are ahead of competition.

...and of course, we are still hiring :)