Yahoo Talent Engineer Discusses Advanced Recruiting Lessons

April 20, 2015 at 12:49 PM by Rob Stevenson

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Erin Wilson is a special breed of Recruiter. 

As the former Head of Talent Engineering at BrightRoll, until they were recently acquired by Yahoo, Erin's pioneered some truly interesting recruiting tactics.
When he thinks about improving hiring processes, he isn't looking at writing better emails or job descriptions. He's looking at building iterative, replicable processes that deliver the same exemplary candidate experience every single time.  He's striving to identify misalignments between the business needs and hiring managers' ideal candidates. He's poring over data to see the trends in their hiring funnels and looking for rates that don't hold true across different roles.

Part of what distinguishes him from others is his laser focus on building an entire organization as opposed to merely closing talent requisitions. This became abundantly clear when he joined us on our podcast, Hiring On All Cylinders, to discuss at length how he went about building a recruiting team, creating an interative vs. facilitative hiring process, and measuring the effectiveness of his team's interviews.

One of the things that stuck out was his deep understanding about every role in the company as well as the direction of each department. When I asked what people get wrong about Recruiters, he suggested that Recruiters don't take enough credit for the impact they truly have. He pointed out that the Recruiter is the only person in the company expected to have a functional understanding of every role, and if they didn't, then they can't expect to have meaningful conversations with the talent they're trying to attract. In addition, learning as much about the candidate as possible in terms of their goals, ideal job, and what they want in a new workplace was imperative to knowing for certain if the role was right for them.

In addition to the above, we discussed:

  • How BrightRoll achieved a 95% offer acceptance rate
  • Results of BrightRoll's "Write Your Own Job Description" strategy
  • Matching investment of interviewer and interviewee

If you want to learn in full detail the lessons Erin has learned and how he went about enacting the above strategies, tune in to the latest episode of Hiring On All Cylinders, streamable via iTunes, Stitcher, Podbay, or, directly below!

  Group Demo

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