How Quality of Hire and Retention Rate Improves When Recruiters, Hiring Managers and the Department Heads Work Together to Hire an Employee

Is One Person Actually Enough to Make a Hiring Decision?

Sometimes, although one refines their job descriptions, betters their branding, explores more creative sourcing strategies and also keeps up with new recruitment technologies, it proves to be insufficient. Despite all their efforts, they can still end up hiring the wrong candidate.

Such issues can reflect talent shortages and their incapability to match the market conditions. What one can notice here is that there is a particular factor in play here. Sometimes one can overlook the fact that there has been a lack of cross-team collaboration in the process of hiring.

In this blog, we will see what happens if the recruiters or department leaders or even the hiring managers make their decisions during the recruitment process in isolation. More importantly, we will explore what threat it poses and what kind of metrics are in place that can help one evaluate how their decisions impact long-term success.

Exploring the Repercussions of Making Hiring Decisions in Isolation

Every company manages their projects by performing cross department co-ordination, and as roles are interconnected, deciding which applicant to hire using a single perspective seems inadequate. Without understanding the needs of the team, the department, the company, how sure can one really be that they are making an informed decision?

A recruiter is knowledgeable about talent markets, candidate engagement and sourcing strategies, but, if one needs insights on long-term business priorities or who would make an ideal teammate, who can immediately fit and contribute to their current collaboration style or workforce dynamic, they need to speak with the department heads and the team leaders.

After all, every person involved in making a hiring decision has something unique to offer. When you look at all their perspectives put together, you will be able to figure out which candidate will not only be able to perform the required role but also, will be able to thrive with the team and further the company’s goals.

The Price Paid

We cannot really fully discuss the benefits of such a collaboration without first understanding the consequences of operating without it.

All for One, One for All

Let’s consider a recruiter, a hiring manager, a department head, as a unit and let’s look at what they offer individually towards the recruitment process.

• A recruiter focuses on the candidates who meet the technical requirements and salary expectations.
• A hiring manager focuses on whether the candidate possesses a specific skill that can help take care of immediate challenges.
• A department head will be more concerned with the candidate’s ability to contribute to long term growth and their ability to help achieve strategic objectives.

Until and unless the three musketeers work together, the operation is doomed for failure. Probably because they will end up hiring a candidate who can only take care of one part of the need while failing to take care of the rest.

Look at it this way: if a candidate possesses all the necessary skills but isn’t good with collaborations, the team will fail to deliver on time or uphold quality. Meanwhile, if a candidate is very good at communicating and is able to work as a unit but lacks the competencies to further departmental goals, that candidate will just prove to be a weak link eventually, and you will be looking for a replacement pretty soon or an addition to keep up with the progress. Either way, that could cost you a lot of your time and money.

A Risk of Losing Them Quicker

There are several factors responsible for high employee turnover, but in too many cases the cause has come to play at the very beginning of the hiring process.

When all the stakeholders haven’t come together to make the decision, the candidates can get a different image of what their responsibilities are or what they can expect from the job or what sort of growth opportunities the company has to offer. Because of this, when the candidates actually join the company, they can be hit by a very different reality. A reality that might make the candidates feel a bit misled, and they might choose to leave.

So what can you do next? Either you can go through the entire process of hiring, onboarding, training, while the team faces pressure because of the loss of productivity, or you can change the entire tune and perform with the whole band.

The Circle of Conflicting Information

Imagine looking for a remote job and finally getting an interview where you are told it is a remote job. Later on you are told by the hiring manager that you actually have to come in three times a week; Ok, maybe you can make it work, but then you find out during the final interview from another stakeholder that the company may transition to a full-time on site job in the near future. Days spent and for what? Wouldn’t you be frustrated too?

Even though the candidates are interested in the role, their decision is held back because now they are doubting the company’s ability to communicate and if they can actually work in such a misaligned workplace?

Then the competitors swoop in offering a much more clear and much more consistent hiring experience. Well, what other choice does the candidate have than to choose the competitor. This can especially be more harmful if the candidate is a specialist or the employees are at the peak of their stress handling the current project because of the shortages in manpower. Wouldn’t they eventually leave too?

How Does Cross Team Collaboration Save the Day?

You Can Always Confirm it With the Use of Metrics.

Treating it as a joint operation can help all the stakeholders to gain clarity about expectations, responsibilities and the complete evaluation of the criteria, which will reduce future misunderstanding of the role, between the stakeholders and also with the candidate.

If you are ever curious whether collaboration has actually helped you, you can find it out by measuring its impact. After all, there are many metrics that can provide you with valuable insight in that matter.

The metrics you can use to understand how much collaboration is helping the company, are:

• By using factors like employee’s performance, manager evaluations, retention rates and how well they have contributed to the overall business, you can assess the quality of hire. When there are multiple stakeholders who have influenced the hiring decision, the decision itself is quite comprehensive; as a result, the company will see considerable improvement in the quality of hire over time.
• If your employees have been working for a longer period in comparison to past records, then it is likely that their role expectations are being met and also that their capabilities and the company’s needs are aligned. If you see higher retention rates then it means that the candidates received realistic information about the role, which again is a fruit of cross-team collaboration in the hiring process.
• When you collaborate effectively, the expectation is clearly defined, team dynamics are discussed, and the candidates know how the projects are actually managed. Also, the team leaders are now prepped to support the new hires to fit into their roles much quicker, reducing the time to reach productivity.

So there you go, you can not only find out how cross team collaboration works by observing the shorter ramp up periods, how fast the employees are contributing and how well overall performance is growing, but also how well it is working for you.

Take a Step Towards a More Collaborative Approach for Hiring

Cross team collaboration’s value extends far beyond practices and improved communication among the stakeholders, more over, it increases the quality and ensures successful hiring decisions.

If one wants to avoid misaligned decisions, increased turnover, poor candidate and employee experience, especially in today’s competitive talent market, one cannot risk operating in isolation.

With proper communication and observing quality of hire, retention rate, time to productivity, one can be sure to make more well-informed and successful decisions.

Let us know what kind of challenges you have faced because of such communication gaps in the comments below, and please stick around to gain more beneficial insights about collaborations in this modern world.