It doesn’t seem like delivering on a promise should be that hard for recruiters and hiring managers, right? But you’d be surprised—while communicating with candidates on a regular cadence is typically a high-level goal for many talent teams, it proves challenging without the right processes in place. Sprint recruiting sets talent teams up to properly meet candidate expectations and instantly impacts candidate experience in a positive light.
Trent Cotton, Senior Global Director of Talent Acquisition and Retention at Hatchworks and author of Sprint Recruiting, joined Andrea McCartney, Customer Success and Account Manager at Clinch, to discuss how shifting to an agile recruiting approach helps talent teams meet their goals and increases transparency candidates during the hiring process.
Cotton shared that to understand how Sprint Recruiting can enhance your talent acquisition process, it’s important to first revisit the four dysfunctions of recruiting:
- Dysfunction 1: Everything is a priority, which means nothing is a priority
- Dysfunction 2: There’s no drumbeat for the team to follow
- Dysfunction 3: Constant burnout
- Dysfunction 4: Feedback loop broken
The basis of agile recruiting is creating a recruiting processes that is designed to move quickly and continually to improve what isn’t working—as quickly as possible. It fights directly against each of the dysfunctions of recruiting in that it instead:
- Instantly prioritizes
- Creates a metered drumbeat for everyone involved
- Encourages constant process iteration, which helps to avoid burnout
- Turns a previously broken feedback loop into a constant feedback loop dedicated to increasing efficiency and eliminating ineffective steps in the hiring process
So how might a typical Sprint Recruiting agenda look for a talent team on any given day?
1. Feeback loop
Cotton shared that his team first has a 48-hour feedback loop agreement which every person involved in the hiring process is held accountable for. It’s not uncommon for recruiters to solicit feedback from candidates about hiccups or undesirable experiences in the recruiting process. Yet, sharing this feedback with hiring managers who handle interviews further down the talent funnel is often not prioritized—so the feedback gathered by recruiters from candidates does not end up impacting change at all.
But, with a feedback loop agreement, everyone involved is locked into the process and committed to focusing on talent acquisition as a partnership. Getting back to candidates in a timely manner and sharing feedback with internal partners are both high priorities and influence each other.
2. Recruiter Scrum meetings
This agile recruiting feedback loop is fueled by recruiting sprints which Cotton’s team completes in two-week cycles. Out of every open role, which as talent acquisition professionals know, can often be in the hundreds or thousands—ask, “Which ones need filled in the next two weeks?”
The sprint is then dedicated to filling those most important roles identified and then starting over on new roles in the next two-week sprint.
Sprint Recruiting methodology also includes the more familiar Scrum meeting which for Cotton’s team is every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and is very much a checklist format. This meeting style doesn’t include airing grievances.
It is focused on:
- What has been accomplished
- The status of active roles being filled
- Any active barriers to success
- Commitments team members plan on delivering between the current meeting and the next
3. Intentional Prioritization
These meetings help recruiting teams to also calibrate what’s most important right now. Hiring managers will naturally want their roles filled first—so it’s important for recruiting teams to have processes, like timed sprints, in place that allow them to focus on filling the most crucial roles within the organization first. Cotton encourages his team to both have hiring managers budget which roles in their department they believe need filled first and to be strategic about how those roles are filled.
For example, recruiters should limit how many candidates can be classified in each stage of the hiring process at once to make sure time-to-hire stays reasonable, and roles actually get filled rather than simply “opened” and left unattended.
Three lanes and the rule of five is his team’s approach. Only five candidates can be in each stage at one time to ensure that they are moved through the process. Stages include:
- Candidate sourcing and qualification interview
- Recruiter submits candidates to hiring manager
- Hiring manager selects which candidates are interviewed
Selecting a finite number of candidates to exist per role, per stage, at one time, enables these steps to be tracked and completed rather than constantly filling the funnel.
4. Feedback Loop
The only way hiring managers can get five more candidates back into the interview pool is by submitting candidate feedback to recruiters after hiring manager selections and interviews have taken place. And remember—this must happen within 48-hours of those interviews taking place. This process keeps hiring managers accountable for, mindful, and diligent with the candidates they’ve already interviewed. If the fear of missing out on a candidate you haven’t interviewed is great enough, hiring managers will make sure the necessary evaluations are transferred to your recruiting team. After all, that is the only way to receive a slate of new candidates.
How does Sprint Recruiting impact the candidate experience?
The above steps take discipline and internal buy-in to cultivate a talent acquisition process that truly results in partnerships between talent teams and the departments whose roles they fill. But when that’s achieved—every step, every interaction gets faster and smoother. And candidates notice that. Not to mention, the quicker you can hook candidates and get back to them, the more likely you are to submit an offer to them before their other active opportunities. Which we must assume are plenty given the number of open jobs on the market.
Jobseekers can tell when recruiters and hiring managers are in partnership because their timelines and communications are aligned. This gives them an immediate preview of the culture your organization is harnessing. When those impressions include doing what you say you’ll do, supporting your teammates, and delivering on clear and concise timelines, you’re already starting out ahead of many of your competitors.
Want to learn more? Check out the entire webinar to hear and learn directly from Cotton.
