How the Product Team Can Boost Your Recruitment Strategy
The “5 Secrets for Success: How Talent Teams Can Learn From Other Departments and Finally Win the War for Talent” Series — Part 2 of 5
The “3 Secrets for Success: How Talent Teams Can Learn From Other Departments and Finally Win the War for Talent” Series — Part 2 of 3
Product teams spend a lot of time understanding what their customers need and, in turn, spend time creating solutions that meet those needs. Internal hiring teams can apply similar approaches by really digging deep to understand the needs of hiring managers and the context in which the hire will operate.
You can create a vision of a role the same way the marketing and product teams do for open positions using the company culture as a lever. It’s time to get super creative and make the job description stand out. I'm a firm believer in ripping up the traditional job spec and creating a landing page that really showcases what is needed. This can help create an irresistible employer brand and spread the word through social media and other digital platforms. Trust me, the right candidates will be knocking on your door in no time. So stop with the boring format for a job spec and get creative with the job spec.
Now, let’s talk about alignment. Product teams align their work with the overall company strategy and you should too. By aligning your recruiting efforts with the company’s overall goals and objectives, you’ll make sure that you’re filling roles that align with the company’s overall strategy and mission. It’s a win-win situation, your recruitment efforts will be more successful and the company will benefit from a more productive workforce.
But what about the “candidate experience”? Product teams prioritize the user experience in their design process by creating products that are easy to use, intuitive and meet the user's needs. You can do the same by creating a user-friendly and efficient recruitment process that prioritizes the candidate experience. This includes creating a simple and easy-to-use application process, providing clear communication throughout the recruitment process and ensuring that candidates receive timely feedback.
But wait, How do you do that? Product teams use user journey mapping to understand how users interact with their products. You can do the same by mapping out the candidate journey and identifying areas for improvement in the recruitment process. By understanding the candidate journey, you’ll be able to identify bottlenecks in the process and make improvements that can lead to a more positive candidate experience. You can create your candidate journey map using a template from Mural. What I love about this is that once you’ve identified the peaks and troughs in the process, you can use things like automation to automate the automatable and save you valuable time.
And last but not least, product teams use feedback from customers to improve their products.
Feedback loops feedback loops feedback loops
You can do the same by gathering feedback from candidates and hiring managers to identify areas for improvement in the recruitment process. This can include surveying candidates after the recruitment process, holding focus groups with hiring managers and even monitoring social media for feedback about the recruitment process.
So many ATSs only give you free text fields or no fields to learn why candidates did or didn't take the job offer or fell out of the process. You could do this with a simple automation or product hack. If you’d like to hear how let me know, and I will share it in another post.
In summary, it’s time for recruitment teams to take a page from the product team’s playbook. By adopting a customer-centric approach, testing different strategies, promoting open positions and the company culture, aligning with the company strategy, prioritizing the candidate experience, implementing agile ways of working, mapping out the candidate journey and gathering feedback, you’ll be able to attract the suitable candidates, create a positive candidate experience and align with the company’s overall goals and objectives.
It’s a win-win situation, yet, you may be sitting there thinking, “I don't have time; I need to source candidates” My response is you're wasting your time; you need to occasionally take a 50,000ft view and go slow to move fast.