Identifying people who could be right for the job is a small portion of what it takes to successfully build an ideal workplace. Keeping them around for the long-run is the part everyone’s working to fine-tune. In other words, what’s the key to finding the balance between growing a happy, satisfied team and a thriving company?
If you're no stranger to the Entelo Blog, you know we share a great deal on how recruiters and hiring managers can be better at finding talent. Similarly, we're constantly working on finding our own sweet spot for hiring people.
At Entelo, we’re creating a culture excited to build a product that helps others improve the way they work. What’s our secret formula?
Our CEO, Jon Bischke, continually stresses the importance of recruiting to the entire team, especially with the leadership team. Every weekly team meeting includes an overview of candidates and hiring initiatives for the week. Additionally, there’s an expectation that every team lead spends a significant portion of their weeks recruiting for their most pressing roles. This includes the full spectrum of recruiting from sourcing to interviewing to closing candidates. On average, I’ve seen hiring managers spend anywhere from 25-50% of their time each week on recruiting-related activities.
And this isn’t limited to just hiring managers. Jon also spends a ton of his time each week when it comes to recruiting. One piece of feedback I frequently receive from candidates is how impressed they were with the fact that Jon personally sends sourcing emails to candidates and will hop on initial calls with them. That level of emphasis on recruiting trickles down to the entire team and has helped us create a culture where everyone is a part of the recruiting process.
Most companies will only require employees to be a part of the interview process, and leave most other responsibilities to their talent acquisition teams. We don’t think that way. Whether it’s the engineering team building tools allowing them to sort through their networks better or the marketing team researching recruiting topics to produce better content around talent acquisition, each team understands that staying involved and up-to-date on the recruiting process and latest industry news allows them to do their day jobs better.
Naturally, since we build recruiting software it’s especially important for everyone on the team to understand recruiting so we can set a great example for customers, prospects and candidates. However, there’s more to staying involved with our recruiting practices; one of the things I stress to teammates is the importance of recruiting for their own professional development. Leadership demands that you can grow a team and develop them, and I’m convinced that the emphasis we place on talent will go a long ways to helping all my teammates become better leaders in the future.
Many companies talk about vetting for culture in their interview process, but what does that really mean? For us, building a culture starts with how our interview process is structured in the first place, and there are some commonalities to our process regardless of the role we’re looking to hire for:
Jon always mentions to us that we should never stop recruiting. Specifically, in order to retain your top talent, you should still be “recruiting” them. We attempt to do this in a number of ways, but most notably:
While this is by no means an exhaustive look at how we think about recruiting, these principles are the ones that lead how we think about growing our own team with the types of people who want to help us improve the way organizations recruit as a whole.
If what we’re doing at Entelo sounds like something you want to be a part of, we want to hear from you. We’re hiring!