5 Ways to Involve Your Team Members in Recruitment and L&D

The recruitment process can often be daunting – the prospects of promoting an open position, finding the ideal candidate and going through the interview process are both stressful and time consuming for employers. Many organizations overlook a huge recruitment asset:  their current team.

Involving team members in the hiring process can lead to gaining high-quality new hires. Additionally, team members feel more engaged and loyal because they’re making more of a difference in the future of your company. Here are five ways to involve your team in the hiring process to keep them engaged.

1. Ask for Recommendations

While it seems pretty straightforward, many companies turn to external resources like LinkedIn or Monster before asking their internal teams for referrals. In doing so, they miss the chance to tap into a huge network that’s already established by their team members. Additionally, referrals are one of the most cost efficient candidate sourcing techniques because they don’t require the use of job boards.

Team members are great resources for hiring recommendations because they know the company culture – and often the needs of the position – much more intimately than an online service or recruitment firm. Plus, when involved in the recruitment process, employees are more likely to feel a connection and loyalty to the company and to you.

2. Ask Team Members to Create Content

Another great way to leverage your team in helping to recruit is to ask them to generate content. Employees can be great bloggers, and often, they have unique stories about why they love working for a company or fulfilling a role.

For example, maybe one of your team member’s could be a former customer. Such a story would be a compelling way to illustrate an inviting company culture.

Ask your team to write a blog post and share it on their social media channels to generate buzz and desire to work for your company. You can also go the extra mile and incentivize them with a new hire referral program. Referral programs will reward them for finding your next great employee.

3. Suggest Sorting Through Resumes

While this may seem like a monotonous task to some people, many employees want to help influence who will be their next team member and will jump at any opportunity to do so.

Start the resume sorting process by asking for volunteers to select the top five to 10 resumes that stand out among the others, and avoid candidates that make these common resume mistakes. More often than not, this exercise can lead to acquiring some great talent. It also helps focus time on other tasks and spreads out the recruitment responsibilities. Ultimately, this activity frees up individual bandwidth.

4. Invite New Interviewers

Don’t pigeonhole yourself into only asking typical top-performers to sit in on every interview. This practice may not be diverse enough for the needs of your company. Likewise, it may result in encouraging the hiring of similar types of people rather than diversifying your team’s brainpower.

Instead of asking the same three to four people to meet every candidate, put out a call for interviewers. It may surprise you how many people are always interested in helping to interview our candidates.

5. Host a Group Meet and Greet

Before making any major hiring decision, give all members of the team an opportunity to meet the potential new hire and weigh in on whether he or she would be a good fit for our team. This portion of the interview process simply involves a larger, more casual group meet and greet, and often involves less planning and effort than a more formal interview.

Choose environments that align with your cultural values. For some companies, it could be a happy hour. For others, it could be an interactive game. Pick the activity that’s closest to your true culture to see how your potential new hires would fit in down the road.

This type of interview is also a good chance to see your interviewee in a more casual environment. You can more accurately assess how he or she would fit into the current team dynamics, especially without the more formal setting of a traditional interview.

To make this process more structured and to get the most out of your team members’ involvement, provide a framework beforehand. Tell your team members you’re looking for a set of attribute or characteristics that align with your culture and values.

For example, you might be looking for an entrepreneurial spirit, a healthy sense of competition and the ability to work inter-departmentally. Providing this framework before the meet-and-greet will help your team members know exactly what they should be looking for, and it will also help facilitate post-meet and greet conversations.

Collaborative Recruitment = Stronger Culture

If you do choose to involve your team in the recruitment process, you can expect great cultural gains. Companies that take a collaborative recruitment approach are likely to see better hiring results, improved productivity and increased employee retention.

If your team is ready for it, take a collaborative approach to finding your next team member to see if you could benefit as well.

Creating an Effective Employee Value Proposition

Developing a strong EVP is not just critical to your organization’s culture, it can also make or break your talent recruitment process. Learn how to strategize one here.