As a recruiter, it can often feel like the weight of recruiting is firmly and all-encompassingly upon your shoulders. While this is fair to a degree, there are plenty of times where it's better for you not to be a hero. The team you're building is just that--your team--and if you can loop them in to your recruiting world, you'll not only alleviate the stress of hiring for multiple roles, but find better candidates too. Recently, the Head of Global Talent and Operations for Booking.com Jen Boulanger (oops, I dropped something. I think it was a name.) told me "Recruiting takes a village". We feel the same way over at Entelo, and here are a few ways we've gone about involving the whole team in talent acquisition.
Active Referral Checks
So you've instituted a referral program and educated the team on the specifics. This is a great start, as referrals are a huge source of hires and are more likely to stick around. The trouble is, having just the referral program still requires your colleagues to do some work before they can surface a candidate.
People don't know who they know. Get the most of your team's network by sitting down with them one at a time and actively combing through their networks.
One way to go about this is to craft LinkedIn searches on your own with the "1st Degree Connections" filter enabled. Share this with your teammates and have them run it in their own LinkedIn Account. Obviously, you should start with searches for candidates of the same skillset as your teammate, as a Salesperson is more likely to know other Salespeople, but don't hesitate to look for other roles too. Make ample use of the "OR" operator to make things easier for yourself. Here's an example of a super simple Account Exective search you can have your reps run to learn more about the Salespeople they have in their network. For extra credit, add "EAE OR SAE OR AE" to the string.
Ain't No Party Like a Sourcing Party
We've had awesome luck at Entelo doing team-specific sourcing parties. For these, have your team stay late, order them dinner, crack a few bottles of wine, and start sourcing. Institute a reward for who's able to get the most responses. You may be surprised at how enthusiastic your team could be during one of these --after all, they're now directly involved in the hunt for the person who could end up sitting next to them all day and working on their team. The stakes have never been hire.
Manage Hiring with Your Hiring Manager
We harp on this frequently here at the greatest recruiting blog of all time, but it's important so it bears repeating: the earlier you can get the hiring manager involved in your recruiting process, the better. Ideally, you should be crafting job descriptions together, getting their feedback on lists of candidates you create, and managing their expectations by mapping the talent market. If you have a hiring manager who's fully invested in recruiting, as they all should be, you might even try having them reach out to the true all-star candidates, as (no offense) people are more likely to respond to a peer than a recruiter.
How do you go about crowd sourcing your sourcing? Hit us up in the comments?
