50 ways to be a Talent Maker: Insights for talent partners

5 mins, 18 secs read time

Have you seen our latest eBook, 50 ways to be a Talent Maker? We’ve gathered strategies and tips from experts who deeply understand what it means to be a Talent Maker and bring these concepts to life.

This is the third post in our Talent Maker mini-series. Did you miss the others? Find the first post on talent leaders here and the second post on talent magnets here.

In this final post, we’ll explore a few insights for talent partners. A quick refresher: A talent partner ensures everyone has the best support and tools to succeed. They’re likely to be hiring managers or other leaders who can foster cross-departmental collaboration. Feel free to share this post with any potential talent partners in your company.

Tip #38: Get friendly

Would you rather work with someone who expects you to do all the work (but takes all the credit for your success) or someone who’s committed to pulling their own weight and celebrating your wins together? The answer is obvious (we hope) – it’s much more enjoyable to work with others when you feel like you’re part of a true partnership.

Show your commitment to talent programs by nurturing strong relationships with your heads of HR/People and Talent Acquisition/Recruiting. Forging these connections can help with marketing, outreach, metrics and your overall hiring success.

For hiring managers, these relationships are especially critical. Paweł Rzymkiewicz, Head of Engineering at Codility, believes promoting synergy with the recruiting team can help you:

• Connect with talented candidates and improve your recruiting process
• Save time and money in both the short and long term
• Hire the right people in the best way possible, ensuring your company’s survival and success

Paweł writes, “Meet your recruiter halfway, because they’re looking for ways to connect and work with you better too, so make it easy for them to do so.”

Tip #42: Share your metrics

One of the biggest challenges for recruiters is a lack of clarity on the ideal candidate profile. Recruiters rely on hiring managers to share details of what success looks like. The problem, says Joeri Leemans, Technical Recruiter at Sonder, is that, “Often a hiring manager won’t know exactly what they’re looking for and the company will end up hiring someone for a role who may be a little different from what you were looking for initially.”

But chances are you do have a good idea of what success looks like on your team. What are the KPIs or metrics you use to guide and measure performance? You can share these reports and metrics with the recruiting team to show them what “great,” “good” and “needs improvement” look like. Then they can add these to interview scorecards for the role and screen for those metrics in their preliminary interviews. Be as detailed as you can to help your recruiter understand how you define success on your team.

Tip #43: Embed your recruiters in your team

Another way to foster better relationships with recruiters is to include your recruiting partners as members of your team, especially to learn about challenging roles.

You can decide the level of involvement that makes sense depending on your team and the role in question, but some hiring managers find it helpful to have recruiters attend daily stand-up meetings or team all-hands. For technical roles, you might consider inviting your recruiter to observe pair coding or other working sessions.

When recruiters regularly work closely with members of your team, they develop a deep sense of your team culture and expectations. This better prepares them to answer candidates’ questions and sell the role.

One Talent Maker CEO shares this advice: “Our recruiting partner comes to our all-hands and other meetings, talks to the interviewers afterward and checks metrics. We have our recruiting partner sit with the team they are hiring for, and they often have a role at team meetings.”

Tip #45: Be open to new perspectives

We’ve covered how you can help your recruiting partners by having a clear idea of the qualities you’re looking for. But what happens when you’ve tried that approach and you’re still struggling to find promising candidates?

In this situation, consider cross-functional skills that would be attractive in the role. Rather than getting hung up on bringing in someone who has done the exact job before, you may benefit from an outside perspective. Opening this up also gives the recruiter room to consider a broader candidate pool and tap surprising sources of talent.

Remember, being a talent partner means trusting your recruiters and helping them succeed – even if this is a departure from how you’ve done things in the past.

You can look everywhere for new perspectives – even to your existing candidates. We love this tip from an engineering manager: “Every time we hire a new recruiter for tech hiring, engineering is involved in the interview process for the role. Some of our questions relate to actual hiring challenges we’re having. We ask them how they’d respond and innovate with them as a teammate.”

Tip #47: (Re)evaluate candidates

After you open up a role and begin actively recruiting, it’s important to make sure you’re on the same page as your recruiter throughout the process and are able to make tweaks where needed. Review pipeline data with your recruiters to understand why candidates are falling out of your interview process. Discuss opportunities for better evaluating and engaging candidates based on these trends.

For example, Paweł Rzymkiewicz, Head of Engineering at Codility, recommends taking a look at the percentage of candidates that pass pre-screening tests vs. the percentage of candidates that pass the first round of interviews and adjusting the process accordingly.

You might also look at your interview panel. Joeri Leemans, Technical Recruiter at Sonder finds the Greenhouse Interviewer calibration report especially helpful. Based on what you learn from this report, Joeri says, “you can put together stronger interview panels and provide training to those who are not as aligned.”

You can also get useful insights from candidate surveys. After Greenhouse customer Delphic Digital learned that candidates thought their interview process could have been more challenging, they created a more thorough screening process for all candidates.

Download the eBook to learn all the other ways to be a Talent Maker.

Download now