No one can claim to know it all and when it comes to business, collaboration is crucial. It can help to have the influence and input of others, rather than simply making all the decisions alone. So when it comes to recruiting new staff, collaborative hiring is a popular approach.
What is collaborative hiring and how does it help your business when hiring? Finding the right person for the job isn’t always about the qualifications but ensuring they’ll fit perfectly into the company dynamic too.
In this article, we’ll explain a little more about what collaborative hiring is and how it can benefit recruitment drives for your business in 2022. With this method of hiring, you’ll be able to successfully secure the best talent that’s right for the company.
What is collaborative hiring?
So what is collaborative hiring? Well, collaborative hiring involves more than just the typical individuals who’d hire the person for the job. It’s a hiring method that is team-based and involves colleagues from other parts of the business.
Typically, these individuals might interact or work heavily with the new starter once they’re hired. Will they get on with the candidate personally? Perhaps they’ve got a better insight into what the role requires?
Collaborative hiring usually involves a multi-stage interview process where the candidate will meet multiple employees. Often enough, if they’re working within a team or department, they might end up meeting them all.
It’s a deeper collaboration that can benefit not only the process of recruiting itself but strengthens the relationships between work colleagues.
Reasons to use the collaborative hiring process
It makes sense to use collaborative hiring in your recruitment processes, especially when most companies rely heavily on collaboration. More than 50% of workers in the US say their job is reliant on collaboration. We use many online tools to collaborate with our work colleagues and those we work with externally.
A collaborative hiring process can be a real benefit for those organizations that perhaps have an abnormally high turnover of staff. Struggling to retain staff can be a real problem and the cost of rehiring is expensive.
So what benefits can you find by introducing collaborative hire to your recruitment methods?
1. Diversity in your opinions and viewpoints.
When you get more people involved in the hiring process, it can easily get messy if it’s unorganized in its approach. However, if it’s done correctly, then collaborative hiring can encourage a lot more diversity in your opinions and viewpoints.
There’s a wide range of perspectives that can be delivered to the main person in charge on what the new role should look like. Are there certain duties that need fulfilling? What outstanding issues exist within the role now? What issues could crop up in the future?
With lots more input from those involved, it can help lower the risk of any bad hires and ensure the right person is found for the role. Opinions matter and using this method of hiring is a great way of encouraging that throughout your team.
2. Reduces the chances of bias.
There may be a good reason why collaborative hiring has become more popular with recruiters and that’s because of personal bias. It’s natural for many of us to favor something over the other. As it turns out, LinkedIn data found 42% of recruiters believe interview bias is a problem of traditional interviews.
Whilst the recruiter may feel like they’re making a good decision, personal bias can often cause tunnel vision. This, in some cases, can result in the wrong person being hired for the job.
With collaborative hiring, you can reduce the chances of bias because there are more people that the candidate needs to win over. As you bring more employees into this collaborative mix, you’re going to give candidates a fair experience across the board.
Again, hiring the wrong person can only lead to more headaches in the future, and often enough, bias plays into our decision-making. To give all your future candidates an equal opportunity, this collaborative approach may be useful.
3. Collaboration makes onboarding easier.
The recruitment process, in general, can be a long one. Firstly there’s the task of creating the job description, getting it out there, and gathering in the many candidates who apply. Then you need to sort through the applicants, sift out the potentials and then start the interview process. If you're looking for operations and manufacturing professionals, for example, you can find operations recruiters here who specialize in identifying and attracting top talent in the field of operations and manufacturing. Such experts have the industry knowledge and networks to source candidates with the specific skills and experience required for your organization.
Whilst collaborative hiring may result in the interview/deliberating stages taking longer than normal, it might also identify the right candidate quickly. Not only that but collaboration during the interviews can make onboarding easier.
Onboarding can often become a challenging task, especially when not everyone is on the same page. The new candidate has to learn the systems in place, gather the information left behind by the previous person and continue working with the existing team.
If you’ve already got the team involved in the recruitment, then discussions can take place early on regarding how and what will consist of the onboarding stage. It means things will get picked up quickly and that in itself can improve the productivity and happiness of the existing employees.
4. Better chance of finding the right fit.
The fewer re-hires you have to make over the course of the year, the better. They’re time-consuming they’re a big drain on your resources, particularly from a financial aspect. With collaborative hiring, one of the major reasons why you should do it is the better chance of finding the right fit.
This isn’t just the right fit for the role but the right fit for the rest of the team and company. Every business has its own company dynamic and work culture, so will the potential candidate fit easily into it?
At the end of the day, a role within a company is one that the person is likely going to spend a lot of time in. A full-time job may consist on average of 8.5 hours of work per day. That’s a long time to spend around the same people every working day. If they’re not the right fit for the role, then the honeymoon period isn’t going to last long.
There are plenty of other reasons to try collaborative hiring in the future. Even if it’s just to try it out with your current team. It can mean a lot less stress on the main recruiter, spreading the responsibility a little more evenly.
Just like it can remove bias, it can also help to have more eyes on the process. Why? Well because it can often spot things that others didn’t. Another way of preventing any bad hires and having staff leave sooner than you desired. Talking of staff leaving, keeping your employees happy will help with employee retention.
Tips for improving your business hires in 2022
To be successful at recruitment, it’s essential that as a business, you’re making the right decisions. Improving the hiring process is one that should always be critiqued and improved upon. Aside from the collaborative hiring method, there are also some general tips that can improve your business hires in 2022.
Know exactly what you want and in detail
Job descriptions can often be very vague, so it’s important to know what you want from the role being advertised. Chances are if it’s not detailed enough or it’s easily misunderstood, you’re going to have a lot of candidates applying that are not right for the job.
Again, collaborative hiring can be a useful one here as you could ask any number of people to contribute to the job description copy.
Ask for feedback and give feedback
Candidates appreciate the feedback, but they hardly ever receive it. It can be good to know what they did right and what they can improve upon, even if it’s short and sweet.
However, the same can also be returned for the business. As a hiring process, you can learn what works for candidates and what candidates would suggest needs improving.
Try out collaborative hiring for your next recruitment drive
Collaborative hiring is certainly a great way of switching up your recruitment process. You may learn a lot from this method and as a result, you may want to adapt future hires to this way of recruiting. Collaboration is always a great way of connecting with others and most of the time, it equates to a better result overall.
Candidates that you interview will likely also enjoy the opportunity to meet members of staff that they would be working with. It gives them a chance to mix with the team and to assess whether or not this is a good match for them too.