Linking Talent Acquisition to Talent Management
Including guest post from Cheryl Roubian, Director of Talent at Greenhouse.
At Greenhouse, Cheryl leads a team focused on finding, elevating and extending the lifecycle of top talent for Greenhouse. Find Cheryl on Twitter and LinkedIn.
This post originally appeared on the Greenhouse blog on August 9, 2017, under the "Company Culture" category.
Top 3 Ways to Improve the Intersection between Talent Acquisition and Talent Management
Sometimes things just work better together: milk and cookies, Sonny and Cher, Bert and Ernie, sharks and dinosaurs (ok, maybe they don’t but they should). To this illustrious list, I will add Talent Acquisition and Talent Management.
In January of 2017, we brought Talent Acquisition and Talent Management under one roof. While the two teams have always worked well together, it’s been really cool to see the ways that bringing them together has created deeper and more effective collaborations.
The best part is... you don’t actually have to combine the teams to reap the benefits we’ve experienced. Here are three ways you can leverage the expertise of each team to build a stronger organization:
1. Include your business partners (BPs) in the kick-off process for new roles
Context: At Greenhouse, our recruiters do a lot of discovery when they kick off a new role. That discovery turns into our interview plans, which are an incredibly rich resource and answer questions like:
What’s the business need for this hire at this time?
What are the high-level objectives and 90-day goals for this person?
What are the qualities, technical capabilities, and interpersonal skills we’ll need this person to have?
While our recruiters have always built interview kits and our Human Resources Business Partners (BPs) have always had access to them, it didn’t occur to us to intertwine their workflows until we combined the two teams and I started reviewing the interview plans.
What we used to do: Our approval process for opening a role included putting a second set of eyes on the interview plan before we officially open the role - for us it was historically someone at the director-level or above.
What we do now: That second set of eyes now belongs to the business partner (BP) who supports the team opening the role.
The benefit: This creates an opportunity for the business partner and recruiter to share important context on the role and overall profile of the team. Sharing knowledge in this way is a good check-and-balance that we’re building strong teams with balanced skill-sets. That makes for more effective teams and a more effective Greenhouse.
TACTICAL TIP: If you’re using Greenhouse as your recruiting tool, you can create a notification that alerts the BPs of internal applications. This gives the business partner a heads up on potential internal moves – information that might otherwise take a couple days or weeks to filter over to your Talent Management team.
2. Notify BP’s about new hires as soon as an offer is accepted
Context: When a new hire joins Greenhouse, they get access to Greenhouse Onboarding (our product) and go through our company-level Onboarding Program. Behind the scenes, the new hire’s manager is also working with her business partner to run through her own onboarding checklist and make sure the new hire gets onboarded to both the team and manager but also Greenhouse overall.
What we used to do: BPs heard about new hires as part of onboarding setup, typically about halfway between offer acceptance and start date.
What we do now: BPs are automatically notified as soon as an offer is accepted.
The benefit: This gives the BP a leg up on supporting managers as they prepare to onboard their new person. Data shows that good onboarding leads to better outcomes. When our managers are prepared to onboard new hires, it means new hires ramp faster, are more effective sooner, and stay longer. Everybody wins.
TACTICAL TIP: If you’re using Greenhouse Recruiting and Greenhouse Onboarding, there are actually two ways you can do this:
In Greenhouse Recruiting, you can notify your business partners when you mark a candidate as “hired”, or
In Greenhouse Onboarding, you can set up your tasks to notify the business partner when a new hire has been added to the system (i.e., when a new hire is pushed over from an accepted offer in Greenhouse Recruiting).
3. Capacity-planning and Org changes
Context: BPs are usually the first people to know about organizational changes - from promotions to departures and everything in between. While it might not always be appropriate to share this information with your entire recruiting team, it’s vital information for effective planning on your talent acquisition team.
What we used to do: At Greenhouse, this communication loop has always been pretty close, but we use to shared this kind of information in a more ad-hoc manner, which meant there was occasionally a lag in sharing key moves.
What we do now: Our BPs and the head of Talent Acquisition now have regular touch-points throughout the week to share information around promotions, transfers, departures and other organizational changes.
The benefit: If your organization is growing, business needs change FAST. Knowing when and how org changes are happening allows us to better plan and adjust our recruiting capacity to business demand. This means we can open roles more quickly, which means hiring managers get help faster, and Greenhouse can meet its business objectives sooner.
TACTICAL TIP: Depending on the rate of change in your org and/or how fast you’re growing, consider having these touch-points at least once a week.
Summing it up
In this post, I’ve shared some of the ways we’ve found our talent teams work more effectively when they’re intertwined. Six months in, we’re still uncovering really interesting ways that Talent Acquisition and Talent Management work better when they work together. I hope you’ve found this post helpful and would love to hear how Talent Acquisition and Talent Management work together in your org!