Recruiters as Business Partners with Hot Topic, Rubicon, Factual and The Wonderful Company

July 10, 2017 at 7:00 AM by Johnny Sanchez

Recruiting@Scale-LA (1).pngOn a beautiful June evening in LA, over 30 recruiting and talent acquisition leaders came together for a night of networking and candid conversations about the challenges hiring the local talent market.

I moderated a discussion led by Brian Breth, Director of Talent Acquisition at the Rubicon Project, Nancy Martinez, a recruiter at Factual, and Shelley Radford, Talent Acquisition Manager at The Wonderful Company, who each contributed their smarts, experience and sense of humor to a conversation about the many obstacles and pushback facing today’s recruiters.

Here are some of our key takeaways.

1) Provide strategic business value.

Recruiting is far more than just fulfilling the orders from other departments. It’s a strategic endeavor critical to the survival of many organizations. The more talent acquisition leaders provide critical insights and expertise, the more valuable they are to their organization. Effective recruiting is a key driver of your organization’s success.

2) Quantify your recruiting.

Recruiting often gets treated like a cost center, but in reality recruiting drives revenue by increasing your org’s bandwidth. After all, more salespeople usually means more sales. Use data to show how recruiting is a resource. Track metrics like cost of hire to show them that you care about optimization and improving your process. By showing your value and using data to prove it, you generate buy-in from the people who matter most; your execs and hiring managers.

3) Speak the language of your partners.

Other departments like finance should be your best friend. The easier you make it for them to understand the value you provide, the more valuable you become to them. Proactively provide the finance team with data they can use, such as attrition projection, time-to-fill estimates or time-to-start estimates. The more you support them, the more they’ll support you when it comes to things like headcount, raises and other issues critical to your team.

4) Training and preparation matter.

Hiring well requires effective training and preparation. Your hiring managers won’t just know how to fairly and effectively interview people. They won’t know what questions to ask or how to ask them if they are not trained and prepared for each interview. By training and preparing your hiring managers and interviewers, you create a better candidate experience and a better hiring experience, which ultimately creates a more effective process for everyone involved.

5) Diversity starts at the ground level.

Diversity can’t be top down. As much as the support of senior management matters, creating a culture throughout organizations that support and value diversity is essential. Diversity is not just about numbers; it’s about creating an environment where people are all treated fairly and equitably regardless of their background. Taking actionable steps like trainings for hiring manager and interviewers, while using structured interview questions, nurture a culture of true diversity and inclusion throughout an organization.

Thank you to our speakers Brian Breth (Rubicon Project), Nancy Martinez (Factual), and Shelley Radford (The Wonderful Company) and all of the attendees.

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