Recruiting is a Team Sport

I was recently listening to one of my favorite podcasts, HR Happy Hour, with Steve Boese and Trish McFarland, with their guest Daniel Chait, the CEO of Greenhouse. Greenhouse is the one the hottest ATS platforms on the market and Steve attended their user conference. (I didn’t go because I wasn’t invited, even though I sang their graces over a year ago on the world renown T3 – Greenhouse!)

Daniel made a comment on the podcast that was really good:

“Recruiting is a team sport.”

He’s absolutely right! One thing I tell Talent Acquisition leaders is that you need to establish this up front when you start a new position. During the interview, find out who “owns” recruiting in the organization you’re thinking about going to. If they say, “you!” or “recruiting does”, or anything in those terms, run!!!

Recruiting in not a function of one department.  The answer I love to hear is, “the hiring managers own recruiting”. I can work with that!

Great recruiting only happens when it’s a priority by all parties involved. I tell TA pros that recruiting will happen with or without you. If an organization fired everyone in Recruiting today, they’ll still find ways to hire people tomorrow!  So, find ways to add value to the talent attraction that needs to happen with each hiring manager.

Recruiting is a team sport, but you can’t have a bunch of ball hogs on the team!  This isn’t hero ball!  I want my organization to recruit like Golden State shares the ball! Everyone’s involved. Everyone’s excited and bought in. Everyone understands the importance of each other’s contributions.

Greenhouse built their software with this philosophy. An ATS that easily gets everyone involved in the right way. This isn’t a one department function, Recruiting is an organizational function.

Check out Daniel on the HR Happy Hour Podcast and on Twitter, he’s one of the few HR/Talent Tech CEOs that will actually engage people on Twitter. He even occasionally will tweet at me and tell me he disagrees with my posts, which I love!  (which is probably why he didn’t invite me to his user conference…but, really, I’m over it…I still like their tech regardless…maybe it’s because he’s a UofM grad…)

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