Part 4 of ‘The Recruitment Process’ series delved headfirst into why it’s super important to make a good impression on your candidates and how to go about given the best first impression possible. In this edition, we are going to be exploring collaborative hiring and why you should absolutely be including this in your recruitment process.  

There’s been a seemingly ongoing shift from traditional hiring models toward more collaborative hiring methods of late, but businesses often have more pressing HR and recruitment needs than redesigning their recruitment process. If nothing’s broke, don’t fix it, right? However, your business can immediately benefit from making collaborative recruitment a standard practice. 

What is Collaborative Hiring?

Collaborative hiring, or collaborative recruitment, is a team-based hiring method that structures your recruitment process to get colleagues from other parts of your business more involved. It typically involves a multi-stage interview process, allowing the candidate to meet more employees than the two or three they would usually meet. In fact, they often meet most of the team they’d be working with.

If you think about it logically, the recruitment process doesn’t just hinge on one person or department. It requires buy-in and participation from multiple parts of the business including the recruiter, hiring manager/s, finance, HR and IT. 

It’s really important to understand the different motivations for each person or department and the role that they play in the recruitment process. 

A candidate’s experience will be much more positive if your recruitment process is well-oiled and everyone involved in the journey knows their part and things run smoothly. Ultimately, the success of your own collaborative hiring process will boil down to how well your team communicates and works with each other. 

TOP TIP: A great tool to help with this is implementing a reliable Applicant Tracking System

What Does a Collaborative Interview Look Like?

This style of interview could very well change every time as collaborative interviews can take many forms and team members in attendance (or any other involvement) may be different depending on the nature of the job or applicant.

A collaborative interview will usually include the recruiter, hiring manager, and the candidate as they will be focused mainly on whether or not the candidate is qualified and motivated to take the role. However, during the later stages of the recruitment process, follow up interviews can include an additional team member who will be working directly with the candidate. 

Trial periods are sometimes offered to applicants as an extended part of the recruitment process and are often used as part of collaborative interviews.

Benefits of Hiring Collaboratively 

Every workplace is different, so it goes without saying that collaborative recruiting will look different based on company culture and team dynamics.

As a direct result of more team members being involved in the hiring process, collaborative recruiting can boast ten immediate benefits to those who choose to embrace the method.

Less stress on the recruiter – Traditional hiring models see recruiters responsible for the entire recruitment process. If you’re only looking to fill one position, this might not seem like such a big deal, but when you’re managing more than a few roles, this can easily become overwhelming.

Better chance of hiring cultural fits –  There’s no perfect equation to identify a cultural fit because company culture belongs to the company as a whole. Every team member has their own perception of the company culture. Team-based hiring can help better identify cultural fit in your candidates. 

Improved candidate experience – Being unprepared as a recruiter is a big no. Coming in late for an interview or scrambling to get the details of an application straight can all raise red flags for candidates and poor preparation as a result of a busy workday can leave candidates with a sour taste. With team-based hiring, the responsibility of interviewing, assessing, and evaluating candidates is shared. This will free up time to prepare parts of the interview and share interview preparation tasks. With an easier process, you and your team will have more time to focus on the person in front of you rather than the logistics.

Enable referrals – When managed correctly, employee referrals can be a recruiter’s favourite tool for sourcing great quality talent. This is where collaborative recruitment can really add value as good referrals can be hard to obtain. As your team members become more familiar with the recruitment process, it’s easier for them to refer people they know. 

Increased business buy-in to talent acquisition – Colleagues will experience at least part of what it takes to get great talent in the door. A better appreciation for the work that goes into recruiting the right talent will generate increased business buy-in over time.

Employee retention – Collaborative recruitment is all about getting the most out of your team’s’ involvement and skills when it comes to identifying the right talent. Having your entire team more involved in such a business-critical activity as hiring the right people can make them feel valued and engaged. These feelings in your team are directly tied to higher employee retention levels.

Educate hiring managers on the candidate market – With better oversight into your candidate pipelines, hiring managers will be better informed when making decisions impacting the hiring process. As hiring managers become more involved they will also have higher stakes in the game.

Limit unconscious bias – Ensuring diversity in the workplace is a challenge for many HR functions, and eliminating unconscious bias from your recruitment process can seem near impossible. Alongside bias awareness, team-based hiring is a great solution that limits the impact of unconscious bias. With more people involved, it’s far less likely that a single hiring manager or recruiter can consistently disqualify one group of people from the pipeline without someone noticing.

Cut down your time to hire – With more people involved in the hiring process, the time spent by a single person on recruitment will decrease. Embracing team-based recruitment means that colleagues can take responsibility for certain parts of the process, depending on their availability. As long the processes are coordinated appropriately, you can save a lot of time hiring – and as they say, time is money!

If you’ve found this post interesting, check out part 6 of The Recruitment Process series where we look at fair and objective interviewing