Why you should be obsessed with Community Hiring

Hiring is more competitive than ever. How do you stand out? Community Hiring

It’s almost impossible to find in Google, and ChatGPT doesn’t know what it is but it’s helped us build a world-class, global team at Attio.

This article covers the main challenge for all recruiters and defines two key benefits of community hiring with a data driven example.

In recruiting, timing is everything

The most important factor when matching a candidate to a role is timing. And the timing is rarely right for the majority of people who are the best match for the role.

Traditionally, the retained executive search model [30% of the role salary paid in 3 instalments for a longlist, shortlist and completed hire] suits high level, high-salaried jobs. These search firms employ recruiters who have built communities and can expand their network in order to produce a long list of well suited candidates. Payment up front gives them time to advise, engage and identify the best people, as well as discover who is considering a new role. They effectively stay connected to people until the timing is right by focusing on building community. It works really well, take a look at how Maddy Cross uses data and research to do this at Erevena .

Contingent recruiters rely on successfully placing a candidate and therefore have a shorter time period to source, engage and place a candidate. Using channels to identify who is available immediately to fit the role doesn’t suit long term relationship building with candidates. Working multiple roles disables their ability to stay connected to top talent until the timing is right. It works well for some roles and industries during talent shortages or hyper growth periods. However, being paid on success doesn’t allow them to build community. They need quick results and will otherwise move on. A company that bucks this trend is Wiser , I recently spoke to James Hughes , Sheldon Campbell Msc , Kate Hill and Jack Catherall about how they build communities and I can see that is massively rewards their brand and business.

Finally, the embedded RPO [Recruitment Process Outsourcing] model helps companies scale quickly without adding permanent headcount to their recruitment team. You can hire a company to place any number of recruiters into your business who help you recruit until the hiring is completed. It’s paid up front and/or on success but they are contractors, which makes it hard to attach everyone involved to the client company and build community. It works well for hyper-growth investment backed businesses at some stages. You can read more about this via Talent Point , I previously learned from Simon Mortimer about their investment in a data team to help keep track of all their efforts and build their own community to match across their portfolio of clients.

Timing is the most important factor in making great hires but the hours, investment and tools required to build communities has restricted the majority of recruiters. Until now…

What is Community Hiring?

Community Hiring is the process of discovering, accessing, engaging and building a network of talented people, regardless of their availability to join your company at the point of contact.

It’s particularly important now because relationships hold a high value and many of the tasks completed by recruiters are administrative, repetitive and automated. Great recruiters have done this for a long-time but the communities they carefully built through events, meetings and private introductions have moved online - accelerated by no-code tools as well as remote working.

Online talent communities are ripe, scaling and accessible.

Community Hiring looks like this...

1. Contact community leaders and volunteers. Communities are hard to set-up, run and maintain, how can you support their members and their growth? It could be financially, time based, content, data, feedback.
2. Connect people and communities. Include links to communities who can support candidates and applicants you are not hiring.
3. Share resources and careers advice. Provide people with an opportunity to up skill or develop to increase the chances of working together in the future as you both grow.
4. Make talent feel welcome in your world. Invite people to lunch, go for coffee and build a community of your own to share content, resources and provide support.
5. Keep in touch with people. Set reminders or create a newsletter to maintain engagement and keep active, it’s really hard to remember you or your company unless you are present.
6. Invest - Use tools and people to build community. New communities appear every day, they are supported by products you can work with and you might need to build out your team to manage this and the people you know.

Two benefits of community hiring

Community Hiring should be at the heart of the entire hiring process and in fact, the whole business. To get started, here are two of the biggest benefits.

Find great people - Look for communities of people who are well suited to your company and roles

Discovering and engaging the right community at the start of a search for talent provides access to relevant candidates who are more responsive and, in my view, demonstrate attributes that are valuable - such as curiosity and career development.

Due to the democratization of community hiring, it’s big business now. You can use tools like Pallet or TechTree and tap into community leaders like Lenny or Gergely .

You can also find communities online by looking closely at online profiles where the content and activity connects to places like LinkedIn groups, Slack channels, newsletters and events. You can ask people you know or don’t know about their communities. It’s worth searching more broadly in places like Twitter and Reddit as well. There are quite large communities now using social sites [like read.cv for designers]. You can still go to events of course and I’d still recommended tapping into your fellow recruiters for introductions as well. If starting from scratch, signing up for a bunch of newsletters helps to hone in on the content that the communities are producing.

However you do it, communities are full of people and they have online profiles you can use to decide if you would like them to be a part of the community you are building for your company. As an added bonus, their community gives you a lot of material to personalise your outreach.

Hire great people - Build a community for the future

Maintaining contact with great talent improves access to great talent in the future. By focusing on building a relationship with a talented person, you will work out the right time to work together.

Make sure that your time and effort discovering great people is rewarded by putting in place a process that builds your community. This means capturing details, storing data, engaging with them and providing your time and relevant content. When you first connect, the timing is probably not right now, but it might be one day. If you have a process for remembering and engaging great people, you’ll be there at the right time in the future.

At Attio, we don’t focus on “time to hire” as a recruitment metric. The reason is simple: the right person is a lot more valuable than the wrong person hired quickly. The good news is that simple community tracking & engagement makes it possible to hire people quickly - they already know your business and have continued to learn about it so you can start a conversation warmly, or better still, they tell you when the timing is right.

Depending on the size and breadth of the community you are building, consider a specific hire for this in your recruiting team. Ideally someone with a marketing / community focused background with a passion for people realising their potential and high density teams.

How we use community hiring at Attio.

At Attio , we are consistently growing our team but it’s very important that we continue to raise the bar with every hire in order to build a smart, highly effective team that really works for us.

In 2022, Attio doubled in size within the first nine months through a traditional recruitment process. We saw in our reports dashboard that we hired 0.01% of people we had looked at when sourcing.

This means we had to review 1,000 online profiles to find 200 we loved and contact all of them to bring 35 people into our process and make 1 hire.

• 1,000 reviews = 200 targets contacted = 35 people engaged in the hiring process = 1 hire

This shows us that the time spent on 800 profiles [~80% of sourcing] didn’t directly help us hire and we lost 165 people [~80% of targets] because the timing or content of our messaging wasn’t right.

We successfully made the hires we needed, but we also encountered numerous talented individuals at the wrong time. This felt like a huge opportunity to invest in our future talent requirements through community hiring.

A little over six months ago, the majority of upcoming hiring [Sep 2022 - Mar 2023] was focused on engineering roles. We discovered a bunch of communities, started making connections, used tools like Pallet and had much better results. It enabled us to spend more time reviewing great profiles, talking to great people, building relationships for Attio and we established our own community.

The results have been outstanding.

We built a list of 400 people from 8 different communities that resulted in us putting 120 people into our hiring process and adding 6 brilliant engineers [Twillio, Zendesk, GoCardless alumni].

• 400 reviews = 240 targets contacted = 120 in process = 6 hires.

This shows us that ~50% of the time spent on reviewing profiles helped us make a hire. A massive efficiency gain. We had a significantly higher response rate from community members and successfully met our hiring goals. Additionally, we built lots of relationships for the future.

Outcomes for Attio

• 30% of our time spent Community hiring produced an outcome (person in process) versus 3.5% of time spent sourcing outside of communities. 10X in a startup is how we’ll succeed!
• 120 people came into our hiring process from the community approach, 30+ are now ‘Friends of Attio’ because timing wasn’t right but we would like to work with them in the future.
• We didn’t save time and we didn’t hire quicker but we spent a lot more time with the right people. We’ll hire directly from our own community in the future.
• Community hiring worked and it will reward us exponentially compared to the linear rewards you see from repeating traditional recruitment processes.
• Saving the time we previously spent looking at the wrong profiles provided us with more time looking at, speaking to and interviewing great candidates. This raises the bar and provides context we can feed back into our hiring process and our Friends of Attio community.
• We helped the communities we benefited from to grow. Instead of just rejecting candidates, we could feed them back into a network of communities that would support their growth.

What's next

Community Hiring is not new, it's what great recruiters have been doing for decades but I've struggled to find the content, process and community that supports it. Now is the time to create that!

I plan to write again so please follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter if you are interested in:

• Discovering communities & tools
• Engaging talented people
• Managing communities
• Why community members make great hires

Let me know if you would like to join a community of people who are focused on community hiring ??

My next goal is to improve the process for maintaining the relationship we are starting and engaging our community of talent. Luckily, I can use Attio for that!