Improving the Hiring Process by Engaging Your Team

Problem

I wanted to get more candidates into the funnel and improve the hiring process by increasing the team's involvement.

Actions taken

The first action was to revisit our messaging and make the approach more personalized through writing custom-tailored messages for the senior candidates we thought were a great fit. Instead of generic messages, the hiring engineer emailed the candidates to personally invite and inform them about the job opening. Second, we created more touchpoints and follow-ups to close the loop. We implemented a weekly "sourcing power hour" where engineers get together with the recruiter to look at candidate resumes and then write customized invites and send these to the ones they think would be a good fit for the role. The third step was to scale up the process and get more engineers involved in recruiting. We created task forces and assigned owners to ensure we had a consistent process from creating the messages to the various interview segments. We launched pair programming where we trained engineers to do interviews and this helped improve engagement because they felt more involved. It also helped avoid hiring delays when an interviewer is unavailable since there is a pool of trained engineers who can be substitute interviewers in such situation.

Lessons learned

Improving the candidate experience on the application process is an effective way to increase hiring success rate. We received better responses when we told potential candidates why they would be a good fit for the role through custom-tailored messages. Furthermore, ensuring an interviewer will be available to conduct interviews in case of sudden unavailability made our hiring process more efficient.