Scaling up a Recruitment team: why focusing on culture will lead you to high-performance teams

Last year I faced the biggest challenge of my career so far: scaling up and tribalizing a tech TA team. By that time, we had only 2 tech recruiters and 12 tribes unhappy because we were understaffed. The company was tribalizing more and more teams and everyone thought: why not tribalize TA?

What does TA tribalization mean?

When a company says “We have tribes”, that means they have a team structure based on value streams or “small companies inside a company”. Imagine that a company wants to build and launch 7 products at the same time. Pretty common, right? But if you have only one central marketing team, one central Engineering team, and so on, how would it be possible? It would be a huge stretch, right? Now imagine that for every 2/3 products, with the same value stream (growing the business, lending, merchant care, etc.), you have your own teams. This multifunctional group is what defines a tribe.

So if you have different tribes focusing on different businesses, how can you assure that the TA team can focus on all of them at once?

That’s why some companies tribalize them.

Now, back to the story.

How did I problem-solve the request of tribalizing TA? Did I even know where to start?

When they asked me if I wanted that challenge, of course, I said yes. Then, I started thinking about everything that could lead to success or failure:

• How can we scale in a smart and pragmatic way, considering data to bring the right structure?;
• How could we assure that recruiters would not, at some point, compete over candidates inside the company, once we would have loads of the same role open at the same time?;
• Which structure could allow the recruiters to continue having a leader that would inspire and understand their career path?.

A lot of things to consider because, of course, even though it would be an experiment, we were talking about people, not numbers.

With my mind boiling with ideas and questions, I’ve decided to start from where normally people don’t: asking the business what exactly was their pain.

In a world where everything moves fast, starting with the simple question — “what problem do you want to solve here?” — can lead you to the right plan, that one you’d not have to reverse totally later.

What have I learned by asking the business what problem they wanted to solve?

After doing my research, I found out something interesting: tribe leads wanted dedicated recruiters, but not just because they would cover all their roles, but because they would understand better their needs. That, my friends, is exactly the primary problem a recruiter should solve — being a true advisor to the stakeholder.

With that in mind, it was time for me to draw my first scratch. The first thing to consider: calculating the previous quarters' headcount and the growth provision to the next 3 ones (with or without Corona, because we know this can change the scenario). The estimation considering each tribes’ growth and the average bandwidth of a recruiter, could tell me the size each team should have and the seniorities/roles as well. After calculating it all, it led me to an estimation of a 20 people team (including TA Leads, Recruiters, and Candidate Experience Coordinators) — what? you ask me — but yes, we had to reach the average of at least 100 positions hired per quarter.

Why did I consider a recruiter bandwidth of 7 simultaneous roles?

Quick pause here to explain why I considered this. A recruiter can, for sure, work in 15/20 roles at the same time — we saw that happening many times in the market. What sometimes we don’t consider is: what is the impact of working in so many roles when it comes to quality of hire?

Let’s say that a great recruiter should split the working time into a few parts (considering a team with Candidate Experience coordinators, so the scheduling part would not impact here):

• Sourcing: 5h at least per role;
• Reaching out to candidates: most of the time you need to do 2 or 3 per candidate. Considering a Developer hiring funnel, we should approach at least 70 candidates per role(3 min each);
• Interviewing: 1h per candidate, considering in the same funnel above around 15 candidates;
• Final debrief: 45 min each, around 2 per role;
• Offer negotiation.

You do the math. It’s very hard to work only considering the time, add that to having to learn from scratch each profile and area.

What is considered to be a healthy number of roles for me is up to 7 for recruiters and 3 for Leaders.

Back to the story.

Now, with a team of this size, how do we guarantee synchronization and a non-siloed team?

After drawing the structure, with 7 TA teams, one thing was on my mind: how can we grow that much, tribalize, and guarantee everyone would not be siloed but a true chapter? The answer is: building a strong hiring culture, of course!

Everyone talks about culture all the time, but what does it really mean in practice? Culture is what defines a team, a company, what will tell you how the future will be, according to what the team believes and the direction you’re pointing to. By that time, one thing I knew: I wanted not only to scale the team, but I wanted the team to be the best I’ve ever worked with.

I wanted TA to be recognized as true advisors by the business and that the term “order-taker” would never be mentioned.

There are important things that should be considered when tribalizing TA, and building a strong team culture can help you with it. Some of them are how we ensure the processes will be aligned, the candidates will not be contacted by different recruiters and how can we assure that the pressure from the business would not impact the quality of the hiring. So here’s what I decided to do:

1. Build the team mission, vision, and best practices, that would be sent for each one of the final candidates for our team: we would guarantee we were all aligned on the expectations and believes;
2. Build job descriptions for each role, considering the following competencies: advisory approach, stakeholder management, candid feedback, strong sourcing and interviewing ability, and last, but not least, a team over individuals mindset. I wanted problem-solvers with a team mindset;
3. Get the buy-in from the business regarding the tribalization plan — the most difficult part, I would say, because I’ve decided to go through the following path: I was not going to tribalize right away — or hire teams already inside the tribes, reporting to them — I would hire the team in the next 4 months, engage and grow the culture in the next 6 and then they would change reports;
4. Interview personally one by one, focusing not only on evaluating competencies but also inspiring since then — Are they really true believers of what we want to build here?

What is the result of the tribalization for you?

Steps 1 to 3 were done in 2 months. I was so much looking forward to starting the process and see our team grow smart. The business accepted the plan because even though I was telling them that full tribalization would happen in 1 year, I was actually solving their real problem in 4 months — do you remember the importance of asking about their pain?

What happened after that, was the best part! We started hiring our people. Every single candidate I’ve interviewed, made me learn something new. I met amazing professionals along the way and I could see, little by little, our team being hired with the same mindset: being true advisors to the business, thinking about recruitment as strategic, and always sharing knowledge and candidates. This process not only made me meet amazing candidates but also showed me my true partners for this journey inside the company: the sourcing lead (Inna), my lead by that time (Steven), and one of my first leads hired (Sam T.). They all helped our team to become what it is nowadays: amazing!

Then, month by month, I received messages from our stakeholders satisfied about the changes, but what about the numbers? — After 8 months, our time to hire decreased by 50%, the quality of hire increased by 30% and we were hiring an average of 100 positions per quarter. Our Chapter — how we were called as a TA function for the tribes — was working by the same hiring processes, using the ATS in the same structured way, we had rituals for knowledge sharing and group sourcing sessions.

The year is now 2021 and we have 27 people: recruiters, TA Leads, and candidate experience coordinators. All of them working in harmony and helping each other to be better every day — to yourself, to the team, and to the company. When you have the whole team looking in the same direction and with a non-competitive mindset, you can really be proud. Not of you, but of them. This is the only thing that a leader wants at the end of the day.