Here’s why every department should become great at hiring

5 mins, 18 secs read time

For businesses looking to reach success in 2024, growth is often top of mind – taking the form of increasing market share to expanding a product offering. But the core of any company’s successful growth always starts with hiring and retaining the right people who will bring that plan to life.

For many companies, especially in times of high growth, the responsibility for hiring top talent can often fall solely on the People team. This makes sense to some extent – who better than Recruiters and Talent leaders to pave the path forward to sourcing, interviewing and engaging the right candidates to fit open roles?

The real challenge arises when departments outside of TA don’t see hiring as a core component of the goals they need to achieve. The truth is that whether you’re leading the finance, engineering, product, sales, legal or accounting team, every department is needed in order to invest in hiring.

Competitive advantage has moved away from physical capital to human capital, changing the relationship between employees and companies.
Daniel Chait, CEO & Co-founder at Greenhouse

Consider the ROI of a great candidate experience

The most innovative and successful companies today know there’s a difference between good and great hiring. These companies are often the most competitive in their hiring strategies (they know top talent is up to eight times more productive than the average). And they also recognize how great hiring affects the output of employee lifetime value (ELTV), including the four significant inflection points within the employee lifecycle: their start date, the point when they’re fully contributing to the company, the moment when they make the decision to leave and their last day.

Consider the pain you feel when a high-priority role isn’t filled quickly or isn't offered to the right person: work piles up, deadlines are pushed and goals are affected. And the benefits of top talent not just saying yes to the offer, but having such a great experience during the hiring process that they want to stay, can mean the difference between hitting future business goals or falling short.

It can be frustrating to lose a top candidate to a competitor in the final stages of an offer due to a poor candidate experience. Some businesses might have given up hope that they can even compete for talent with such high stakes. According to McKinsey, 82% of companies don’t believe they recruit highly talented people and for companies that do believe so, only 7% think they can keep them. If the company’s view is that only one department should be focused on providing the type of candidate experience that top talent expects, it’s easy to see where the lines are drawn.

“The hiring process itself is a major factor in how people form their impressions of most companies,” said Daniel. “If a candidate has a good experience during your hiring process, you'll improve your hiring brand, making it easier to get great candidates who are excited about working for you.”

But creating a positive candidate experience doesn’t just happen – it’s a strategic function of great hiring from every department and role, from referring a candidate to sitting in on an interview, to ensuring a great onboarding experience after an offer is accepted. In a world where 75% of job seekers consider an employer's brand before they even submit their application, every department can contribute. And with today’s AI-driven, automated and structured hiring tools like Greenhouse, it doesn’t require anyone to add more to their already lengthy to-do lists.

Data-driven recruiting

The candidate experience has profound effects on your company’s employer brand, offer acceptance rates, referrals and more. Tracking and using the data that results from great hiring is a powerful way to influence the health and growth of your business. And it’s a safe bet that every department in your company is highly invested in that outcome.

How is the candidate experience measured within an organization? By collecting consistent data and actual quotes from candidates via surveys, it's possible to point to real evidence of how resistance to participation in the hiring process holds an organization back from greatness. For example, comparing data department to department, office to office or your company to the average. You can monitor trends to see if you’re improving and make candidate satisfaction a company KPI. This type of data can also be used to identify opportunities to strengthen your hiring processes across the board – look to your people team for guidance on metrics that most contribute to overall business health.

We’ve seen the power of this data first-hand by helping hundreds of organizations conduct their own candidate experience surveys, leading to overall improvement in their hiring programs. For example, when Greenhouse customer IonQ shifted from a research-oriented company to a manufacturing company, they had to rethink the hiring process to make it more structured, efficient and streamlined. It became clear that IonQ needed a more automated, streamlined and candidate-first system to keep up with the demand for top talent. By prioritizing hiring efficiencies with Greenhouse, IonQ was able to reduce interview scheduling time by 50%, decrease the time to hire by 12% and see a 40% increase in employee retention rates.

Hiring is a whole-company initiative

Using data and insights to improve the candidate experience is only one aspect of a mature hiring program, but it’s a highly important one that every department can influence. By consistently hiring the right candidates for the right roles (at an efficient pace), your company will be more agile, more innovative and more competitive than ever before.

It’s an equation every team can get behind: the business output of an investment in your people equals driving revenue up, driving costs down and managing overall risk. It’s time to be confident with each and every hire, so you can focus on what’s next for your business. That’s why every department – not just the People team – should invest in great hiring.

We help businesses be great at hiring through our powerful hiring approach, complete suite of software and services and large partner ecosystem – so businesses can hire for what’s next.

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