What we’ve learned from recruiting with some of Australia’s leading tech companies.
Crew is a talent consultancy for technology companies. We started in 2018 as a 1 man band and there are now 12 of us working hard each day to deliver outcomes for our clients.
Whether it’s a recruiting team deployed on-site, employer marketing production, talent intelligence or a more traditional recruitment service, we support any talent challenges that our clients face.
Over the last 4.5 years, we’ve worked on-site with over 25 technology companies of all sizes. From lean startups and global scale-ups all the way to established businesses. Every business has its own unique challenges. But we’ve been fortunate to witness first-hand, how the best ones win.
In a meeting, we spoke about this recently and we agreed that there are some common threads that the best companies all share when it comes to hiring well.
Here’s our breakdown of the big-ticket items.
Hiring maturity
All recruiting is part science, part art and sometimes part luck. When it comes down to it, most organisations can hire well occasionally.
However, hiring well consistently is challenging when the organisation doesn’t take the science of hiring seriously. Talent teams that are underfunded and under-resourced always seem to be operating at odds with the business.
Hiring maturity starts at the top of the business, and it starts with more than just words and soundbites about the “value” of its people. Talent leaders who have a voice that is heard and that make recommendations that are listened to, are the ones we see leading teams that achieve consistent hiring success. Hiring maturity.
Hiring Manager ownership
Hiring ability is a leadership skill. When hiring leaders for clients, we ask about the teams they’ve hired and retained.
The best leaders talk about how they properly invest time in their hiring processes.
This includes all the pre-interview activities, the seemingly mundane things like ensuring Position descriptions are accurate, that interviewing teams are aligned and that time has been allocated to the recruiting process.
They recognise and accept that quality hiring requires an investment in time as well as effort.
Compelling proposition
In-demand talent can see beyond superficial word salad about culture and values. The best companies talk not only about what it’s like to work there but also about how the work is done.
How does software get deployed, how do code reviews happen and who spins up AWS accounts?
When we blend clarity about the actual work with the details of all the benefits and fun things like Friday drinks and Ping Pong tables, we build a compelling employment proposition that speaks to the right candidates.
Talent Ops Led
The reason most business struggle with consistent hiring is that recruiting is made up of multiple moving parts.
Executing all these parts consistently well is inherently challenging. Once you start to add scale to this, the challenges can become overwhelming.
The best talent teams have a Talent Ops lens that looks at the whole talent function & experience. Talent Operations is where efficiencies are found, improvements happen, and innovation exists.
We have a saying that good hiring comes from good planning, so ultimately, it’s what fuels hiring success. Without effective Talent Ops, recruitment strategies rarely succeed.
Adaptability
Understanding the market forces and adjusting expectations is a key trait we’ve witnessed first-hand with our most successful clients.
Being adaptable and more importantly, open, to thinking outside the box in order to identify, attract, engage and assess potential talent has been a common theme for them.
Organisations that stick to one way of doing things that may have been implemented in a different market often struggle when the market changes. This ties into the first trait in this list, hiring maturity.
Hiring is an evolutionary process that morphs to suit the conditions and that’s what the best hiring teams understand.
High-quality communication
Not many people like the thought of joining a business that seems chaotic or disorganised.
The way that businesses hire often provides direct insight into how the rest of the business operates. There’s no doubt that the best clients we’ve worked with all seem to be really good communicators both internally and externally.
They dont leave people guessing about what’s going on nor any room for misinterpretation. This makes them seem well-organised, smart and good operators. The sort of place where other smart operators would want to work.
There are of course other things that some of the businesses we’ve worked with do particularly well. However this a list of the collective traits of the most successful, consistent hiring teams.
What would you add to the list?