Hiring and recruiting, the Slack way

Two starters, two stories

What good looks like

As these two stories show, recruiting is a complex process that can easily go wrong. But if you get it right, you can enjoy a host of benefits:

• Get the right person
  Making the wrong hire can be a costly mistake that takes years to fix. Top-notch recruitment helps you to get it right the first time.
• Attract top talent
  Candidates have a choice and they need a reason to choose you.
• Get there first
  Digital has accelerated everything, and good candidates won’t wait. Young workers expect an always-on, tech-driven experience. You need the agility to make that game-changing hire before your competitors.
• Build your employer brand
  Candidates will assume that the recruiting experience reflects your employee experience. A strong hiring process reassures them that they’ve made the right choice and motivates them to hit the ground running.
• Save time and money
  Recruiting takes about 38 days per hire. The better your recruiting process, the more precious resources you save.
• Get strategic (at last)
  Smarter recruiting processes mean less busywork and more high-impact partnerships, so you can focus on building skills, planning and delivering ever-greater value.

In other words, recruiting is far more than sourcing human resources from the labour market: it’s a collaborative, human process that’s really about learning, understanding and building relationships.

What candidates want

Catherine Rush, former head of talent for technology at DMG Media, argues that recruiters need to:

• Make the recruiting process as fast as possible
• See the process through candidates’ eyes and understand whether it works for them
• Give candidates the opportunity to express themselves, explain their background and demonstrate their abilities
• Give candidates feedback on how they performed.

Good recruiting brings together three vital elements:

Why old-school recruiting isn’t up to the challenge

Both businesses and job candidates are demanding much more from the recruiting process. The problem is that old-school approaches, based on tools such as email, phone and spreadsheets, simply can’t deliver.

Old-school recruiting is:

• Slow
  It takes far too long to find the right people and bring them on board, and burns through too much time and cash in the process.
• One-sided
  It’s oriented towards the internal needs of the firm doing the recruiting, without paying enough attention to what candidates need and want.
• Unresponsive
  It leaves candidates waiting for weeks on end to find out what’s happening with their application.
• Cumbersome
  It relies on aging technology that simply can’t deliver instant communication, seamless information sharing or cross-boundary collaboration

Introducing the channel-based messaging platform: a new approach to managing recruiting (and all of HR)

Human resources leaders across many industries have discovered a powerful new way to streamline and accelerate the recruiting process. It’s called a channel-based messaging platform, and it differs from first-generation intranets and collaboration tools in several important ways:

• User-driven: it’s managed by and for users
• Fluid and organic: it supports the way that each team wants to work on each project
• Open: sharing is the default setting (with airtight privacy and security)
• Channel-based: it’s organised logically into project, team or topic channels
• Searchable: so company knowledge becomes available and discoverable
• Integrated: it unites all your HR and productivity apps in one place
• Easy to adopt: so users take to it spontaneously and effortlessly

Five benefits of sharper recruiting

Let’s look at five areas in which using a channel-based messaging platform can make a decisive difference to your recruiting.

1. Faster recruitment process

Channels will allow you to speed up many aspects of the recruitment process.

As you develop the requirements for a role, you use channels to request, gather and document input from hiring managers and other staff. The quicker you agree on requirements, the sooner the job can be posted and the quicker you can get qualified candidates through the door.

Later on, the platform can help you to set up interviews, gather feedback, collect stakeholder opinions and prepare job offers far more quickly than traditional tools.

Taken together, these improvements add up to faster recruiting overall, bringing you the talent that you need at the time that you need it.

2. Faster feedback and alignment on candidates

Before candidates’ applications start rolling in, you can create a dedicated channel to view and share them or seek feedback.

Stakeholders can share their comments and suggestions, discuss candidates with one another and quickly reach decisions on shortlisting, interviewing and, ultimately, job offers.

Use threads and emoji to get a quick sense of what everyone thinks about different candidates.

3. Reach better applicants

Employee referrals are a vital source of quality candidates. Referral candidates have the highest candidate-to-hire conversion rate, start sooner and report higher job satisfaction . To encourage internal applications, create a channel to promote jobs internally, solicit internal referrals and publicise any incentives.

If you choose to use outside contractors or an agency, as many large firms do, you can invite them to contribute quickly and easily in the same channels as in-house recruiters and sourcing staff.

4. Give and receive better feedback

Channels are the ideal way to gather feedback from multiple sources – from recruiting managers on candidates and from candidates on the recruitment process itself. It also makes it easy for you to let candidates know how they’ve performed in tests and interviews.

Candidates are stakeholders too, and their impressions of the interview process matter. Ninety-nine percent of job seekers believe that they should get feedback on their interview experience, but 74% say that they never receive any. Forty per cent say that they’ve been faced with irrelevant questions during their interview, suggesting inadequate preparation and poor information sharing within the hiring organisation.

To prevent problems like this, use your hub to establish the process that you’ll follow before you embark on interviews. This can make a real difference: firms with non-standardised interview processes are more than five times as likely to hire the wrong person.

5. Reduce review meetings

Once you start using channels, you’ll need far fewer internal review meetings during the recruitment process. That saves time internally and makes the process faster overall. As you prepare for interviews, a dedicated channel is the ideal way to share interview structures, hiring scorecards and interview guidelines – and achieve the alignment that you need among the stakeholders involved in interviewing and evaluation. 

Separately, create a channel where interviewers can coordinate logistics and topics to cover (to prevent duplicate questions) and manage feedback after the event. This establishes a clear audit trail and lets you refer back to candidates that you want to revisit later on.

Once your job opening has been filled, archive the related channels to keep your workspace tidy. If you need to go back to an earlier stage, all your channels and resources are still available. You can also track data on competitive offers to help with future decision-making. For tips on how to use a channel-based messaging platform to manage your process for onboarding new starters, take a look at our guide.

The ideal collaboration hub for recruiting teams

Smarter collaboration processes and tech connect your hiring teams to the people, knowledge and software that will help them to win the best talent. At Slack, we believe that our platform represents the ideal collaboration hub for recruiters and their stakeholders, at every stage of the hiring process.