Collaborative Hiring to Select the Best Candidates

The recruitment industry has transformed in a way no one anticipated a few years earlier. Attracting quality talent, sourcing candidates, communicating, engaging and even the hiring processes do not work with traditional strategies anymore. With vigorous competition leading to an unmet demand for qualified candidates, recruiters are facing numerous challenges. Acquiring prolific talent is not a one-person job now, and collaborative hiring helps us solve this. How? 

‍Over 62% of recruiters say their job has become tougher than it was a year ago, and 67% of them claim it’s much more difficult than it was 5 years ago. No doubt it’s a candidate-centric recruitment landscape right now –  and organizations need to define their own rules. Amidst the constant pivoting spree, collaborative hiring has proven to be a terrific strategy to tackle hiring requirements faster than ever and at scale. 

The idea behind collaboration in recruitment is quite simple - it’s aimed at making the hiring process smarter. And the proposition is justified. Multiple perspectives, varied experiences and domain expertise can together add up to help organizations select the ideal candidate as per their requirements. 

Contrary to popular opinion, collaborative hiring is not a practice adopted by unsure and fearful leaders. They understand that hiring the best possible talent needs much more than assessing them based on the required hard and soft skills. 

Although all organizations have their own dynamic recruitment practices, the biggest and most successful ones follow collaborative hiring in a majority of their recruitment campaigns.

Let’s now dive in straight for an insightful discussion around collaborative hiring and how it helps in optimizing your recruitment.

Why Hiring Top Talent is Vital for Every Organization?

It might sound like a silly question at the first glance – every business needs great talent to thrive and grow. However, before we move on to discuss collaborative hiring and its dynamics – a short and quick recall of the need for acquiring the best talent, would set the stage right.

Hiring employees is nothing but shortlisting assets for your company. It begins much before the screening and interviews - at the candidate sourcing stage. Now as you would never invest in unpromising assets that do not appeal to you, similar is the case of recruiting candidates. 

Acquiring quality talent is not just important because of the specialized skills and expertise that qualified individuals bring in. It’s critical because of the following reasons:

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• In today’s fast-paced world, organizations want rapid yet effective solutions and the people you hire directly impact your overall performance. They must utilize their resources optimally, meet work deadlines and offer efficiency and reliability.
• The only way to stand out amidst the current competitive landscape is to consistently bring in innovative ideas. And you know that’s possible through1 fresh and high-quality talent. Hence your business’s profitability and long-term sustainability are driven by the workforce that you build.
• Ideal candidates leave no stones unturned in fulfilling the organization’s goals, keeping their own interests aside. They are constantly thriving to add value to your business and grow your brand.

What is Collaborative Hiring?

It’s now time to address the elephant in the room - what collaborative hiring actually is, and why it is significant for organizations. 

As the name suggests, collaborative hiring is nothing but a number of people in an organization coming together to form a team with the aim to make better hiring decisions. In other words, the recruitment team collaborates with teams from different departments to take part in the hiring process. 

If you’re wondering what’s the biggest differentiator as compared to traditional recruitment strategies – consider collaborative hiring to be a team sport rather than an individual’s play. So just like a Football match, everyone has a dedicated role to play and everyone’s contribution impacts the performance. 

 In collaborative hiring, the interview stage is the most proactive phase of recruitment. It’s usually a multi-phased process with relevant department leads, hiring managers and the recruiter interacting and evaluating candidates in numerous rounds of hiring. It’s a win-win as your team gets to assess and analyze the candidate’s abilities, interests and potential. On the other hand, the candidate finds an opportunity to know more about the team, work culture, company values and more.

The best thing about this approach is – it’s not just limited to interviews. Collaborative hiring also covers scoring the candidates, evaluating them, and deciding on whether or not a candidate should be hired. Feedback and recommendations are taken from each member of the hiring team before forming the final hiring decision. 

How Do You Ensure Effective Feedback Sharing for Your Collaborative Hiring Teams?

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As the core productivity of a collaborative hiring team is driven by feedback, it’s essential that you develop a smooth feedback-sharing framework. It should be noted that the final hiring verdict depends on what the team members share in their post-interview feedback discussion. 

As the objective is to make better hiring decisions and make them quickly – there’s a need to optimize the feedback-sharing process. Take a look at how you can create a system for managing interview feedback and insights from the collaborative team: 

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1. Leverage interview scorecards - This is a great way to document the feedback and share it with the team. Give candidates the score for each aspect. This helps in standardizing the interview assessment and understanding different perspectives about the candidate.
2. Keep all feedback comments in one place: This is a simple yet often ignored step of feedback sharing among collaborative teams. In place of emails, and Slack messages - a centralized sheet should be used for feedback that enables candidates to provide their inputs as soon as an interview is done.
3. Standardize skill interviews with a rating system: The most optimal way to document the results of skill-based interviews is to use a rating system. So grading candidates for their skills based on various parameters on a scale of 1-5 will standardize the feedback-sharing process.  
4. Automate the process: Collaborative hiring can be overwhelming when done at scale and hence cannot be executed manually. Utilizing an automation tool will help your hiring teams make informed decisions while interviewing candidates. Moreover, the tool also ensures effective collaboration where everyone is informed and updated about the recruitment status and interview status of candidates.

Collaborative Hiring vs. Traditional Recruitment

The main difference between collaborative hiring and traditional hiring is that traditional hiring is exceptionally stressful for recruiters and the dependency is huge. Also, the chances of bias are incredibly high in the case of individual recruiters. 

Collaborative hiring, on the other hand, is a more holistic approach with distributed teamwork. This approach doesn’t involve any dependency on an individual and hence the chances of bias are cut off too.

Here are some of the drawbacks of traditional hiring that have been addressed by the collaborative hiring approach:

• No consistent communication happened between departments and the hiring team
• Recruiters overworked to get as many qualified candidates as possible and hence compromised on the candidate's experience
• Nothing such as ‘team suggestion’ or collective feedback existed 
• Candidates got very limited information and the chance to interact with only one person from the company

All of these issues are thoroughly solved by a collaborative hiring approach. Are you still sceptical about why should you pivot your primary hiring strategy? Let’s take a deep dive into why you should shift to collaborative mode very soon.

Why Should You Opt for Collaborative Hiring? 

We saw how collaborative hiring works – representatives from various teams join the hiring team to contribute to the hiring process. If you haven’t ever tried the collaborative approach, the first thing that might worry you is the involvement of multiple leads and team members in hiring. As their productivity is primarily measured in terms of domain-specific outcomes, it is fair to think so. 

Now the question that arises is – why should you opt for collaborative hiring? Is it really worth the valuable efforts and time invested by your expert teams? Here are the top benefits of collaborative hiring apart from optimal hiring decisions:

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• Minimize unconscious bias: The prior benefit of collaborative decision-making is the elimination of the unconscious bias involved. Additionally, enhancing diversity and maintaining it is something most recruiters suffer with – a collaborative approach helps tackle that effectively. 

• Deep evaluation of candidates: Undoubtedly the biggest reason for opting for collaborative hiring is the in-depth understanding of the candidate and their potential contribution to the organization. A comprehensive overview coming from different perceptions, thought processes and judgements helps you study the candidate effectively.

• Greater probability of hiring cultural fits: When people from multiple teams evaluate a candidate together - they are more likely to identify if an individual would fit into the company culture or not. As a variety of perspectives and opinions meet, the target candidate gets judged based on numerous parameters. 

• Reduce the time to hire: The entire process of collaborative hiring is based on the distribution of critical hiring work among the team members. This directly pushes down the time taken to hire as an entire team is involved with varied skills and expertise. You end up saving a lot of time and hiring top talent quickly.

• Enhances Candidate Experience: We all know how critical candidate experience and engagement are in the recruitment space these days. Nothing can be better for a candidate than interacting with executives, leads and members of various teams. Collaborative hiring also enables candidates to know deep information about the company, the kind of work expected for the role, the kind of interactions happening and how will they feel while working with them.

How to Create a Winning Collaborative Hiring Strategy?

Before beginning collaborative hiring, it’s vital that we develop a hiring strategy covering the ins and outs of collaboration and the action plan. Here’s a step-by-step approach for creating a powerful collaborative hiring strategy:

Step 1: Create a Framework for Collaborative Hiring

You cannot create a separate hiring plan for each of your job openings. Especially when doing collaborative hiring, where a lot of factors need to be considered – it’s an ideal practice to create a template after identifying all the stakeholders, role requirements and assessment plans for each job category. The framework should include but is not limited to: 

• Hiring workflow for each job opening
• Suggestions on forming a hiring team and related activities
• Tools and solutions required to make collaboration more effective

The template should be your go-to framework as a hiring manager whenever a new job opening arrives.

Step 2: Draft Guidelines for Choosing the Hiring Team and Their Respective Roles

Set up clear and concise guidelines for selecting the team each time you decide to collaborate for hiring. State who you want to be in the team for respective job requirements along with executives or hiring managers who are always needed in the hiring team. Apart from the team members, you also need to document the expected roles and responsibilities of each of them. 

Don’t forget to add mandatory commitments expected from the team members too. Note that it’s easy to convey casually to senior leads about their roles, but creating a definitive guideline will boost the effectiveness and seriousness of your hiring team.

Step 3: Focus on Delivering Engaging Interview Experience to Candidates 

Now that you have finalized the hiring team and individual roles, it’s time for planning out the flow of interviews along with their respective objectives, stakeholders involved and the way interviews will be conducted. Ensure with each aspect of your plan, you’re keeping candidate experience as the priority. A few best practices that you should follow for optimizing the interview experience for candidates:

• Try to mix up the panel with leads and associates for offering various perspectives of company culture to the candidate
• Predefine the type of questions and the scoring methodology to be followed during different rounds of evaluation
• Allow candidates to choose their preferred time slot for interviews
• Take care of automated reminders through messages and emails to candidates 
• Develop an interview experience that is easily repeatable and scalable.

Step 4: Provide Training to the Interviewers

Train your hiring teams to drop bias, interact with candidates efficiently and analyze role requirements before every interview. You can also get a better idea of the hiring environment through mock recruiting sessions. Try to conduct a couple of mock interviews by making one of the team members the candidate.

A set of popular and effective questions along with candidate scorecards can be handy in training the interviewers. Ensure that the training material you create can be effectively repeated for all new interviewers. A repeatable training course enables the much-needed awareness for interviewers and sets the right expectations for them.

Step 5: Scale Your Hiring Process and Analyze Your Performance

While collaborative hiring, you will find out that your decisions improve with time as a hiring manager. It’s important to understand that hiring is a never-ending practise and as long as your business exists - you will need to hire.  

• Reporting dashboards and hiring analytics help you scale optimally by constantly analyzing performance and acting on it.

• Review your outcomes and management skills continuously.

• Connect your recruitment tech dashboard to make things even more convenient for yourself.

Step 6: Collaborative Hiring Tools

The tools that you integrate with your collaborative hiring impact the overall efficiency of the hiring campaigns. Hence it is vital to choose a powerful tool - Nurturebox helps you automate the talent sourcing, pipeline and candidate management. It’s the collaborative hiring solution you need right now because it enables your hiring team to collaborate seamlessly. 

How can Nurturebox Help You Optimize Your Collaborative Hiring Process?

Unlike the traditional hiring approach, collaborative hiring has dynamic and multi-dimensional requirements. Managing the entire recruitment process - sourcing candidates, pipeline management, interview and continuously maintaining the hiring database can be immensely overwhelming for your hiring team.

It doesn’t matter if you’re working alone as a  recruiter or collaborating with your team – Nurturebox streamlines your entire hiring journey starting from the automated sourcing of candidates, the platform enables you to up your hiring game and boost your growth. 

Here’s how Nurturebox helps collaborative hiring campaigns:

• Find prospects and add them to your campaigns

Looking to source candidates from LinkedIn? Just download Nurturebox’s Chrome extension and get started with automated sourcing in a jiffy. All it takes is a couple of clicks for you to find candidates’ contact details and add them to your campaign. The platform also allows you to integrate your existing ATS with the sourcing campaigns via the extension. 

• Automate candidate outreach and engagement 

Gone are the days when emailing twice was enough for your target candidates. Now scale your sourcing and recruiting with multi-channel outreach and engagement made easy with Nurturebox. Channels like LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Emails and SMS can be used to interact with your target candidates.

• Collaborate in a hassle-free way

The most important feature with context to collaborative hiring: Nurturebox makes it completely easy for your hiring teams to work together on hiring campaigns. The platform automatically performs sync of candidate profile and activity to your ATS - so that you never get confused regarding the status of hiring, latest feedback and repeated outreach to the same candidate (which might well be possible if done manually).

• Monitor and Analyze Your Performance

The way to improve your collaborative hiring and overall recruitment outcomes are to continuously track performance, gather insights and double down on what’s working as per the analytics. Nurturebox provides you with real-time analytics on every touchpoint of the sourcing and hiring journey.