How to gain internal buy-In and lead it to success
One of the biggest challenges in ensuring an awesome talent acquisition process is making everyone in your organization a recruiter! When and if you succeed at this, you will often find great success and buy-in to the process for finding, retaining, and on-boarding talent as well as building an awesome talent pipeline. Recruitment has always been a core piece of my life in all aspects and I truly feel it is an HR professional’s secret weapon in making an impact on the business.Awesome people are what can make or break your team, your company, and your culture - how powerful is it to be the charge and subject matter expert in this space? You can build awesome relationships with cross functional and impactful teams; you learn core and key functions is all aspects of the business and you get to match people to their dream jobs! Who wouldn’t want this opportunity? With this mindset, I want to share the top 3 ways of achieving buy-in for the talent acquisition process and ensuring its success. Ready, set, here we go:
#1 – Define a process. Big or small, put it down to paper. It is important to ensure your vision for what you need from hiring teams is defined (tell them what you want and need!) and what the process is for recruitment overall (a life-cycle diagram works well for this). Many times, without a process, recruitment can turn into organized Chaos and if people aren’t aligned on the steps you are leading it can impact the candidate experience as well as your employer brand as well as the ability to fill seats effectively with the right people. State what you own in the process from an HR perspective (defining requirements for the role, pre-screening, talking salary, testing, etc.) and let hiring managers know all they need to worry about is making awesome selection choices being fully engaged in meeting new people – who wouldn’t love that!
#2 – Gather feedback on the process and the talent acquisition experience – always. Just because you’ve defined a process, doesn’t make it a hard fast rule. Your biggest stakeholders also have the greatest opportunity to challenge and keep recruitment interesting. Survey and ask them what would make the process better and do it often. For example after you’ve filled an open seat, ask them: how would they like to get more or less involved? Why? What did they feel worked? What didn’t work?
Make it fun, make it innovative; think outside the box with them and help make awesome things happen. For example, host a group interview; develop a networking night; set up an activity for them with their top candidate. Make people matching awesome and change your game if you need to. No one likes hard fast rules or routine ways of doing things, so keep an open mind and make changes with the power of feedback from your biggest clients. It will keep them engaged and continue your opportunity to make an awesome impact across all things People.
#3 – Stay involved after the hire is made! Who wins an Oscar and never talks about after? No one! Promote it to the internal nation when you’ve made an awesome hire with your team! This will not only increase the impact of the experience, but encourage hiring managers to full engage the next time they have an open seat, because they want another Oscar (who wouldn’t). Share the success story with other managers to gain buy-in and involve awesome hiring managers in any recruitment training you conduct. Let them show their peers how it’s done and celebrate the impact of their commitment and partnership with you.
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