Organizations work best when people communicate and when information flows easily and effectively between relevant team members. But as companies grow, it can be harder and harder to collaborate on complex and long-lasting projects.
Your recruitment and retention strategy is one of those projects. It requires regular input from recruiters, hiring managers, and HR team members searching for professionals who don’t just have the right skill set for the job but who also fit your company culture.
To achieve those shared goals, building an effective HR and hiring manager partnership based on clear communication and collaboration is crucial. It can help you attract the top talent your organization needs to thrive and create an exceptional work environment that motivates, inspires, and empowers its people.
How to build a collaborative hiring process
HR leaders and hiring managers want the same thing: the very best talent around. By working together, you can pool ideas and lay the foundations for success with your recruitment and retention strategies. Here’s how:
1. Identify your long-term goals
Before you get started on any specific recruitment project, it’s helpful to make sure that everyone involved is truly on the same page.
That means aligning your goals around creating a positive and supportive professional environment where everyone understands the impact of turnover within your teams. By doing so, you’ll build trust, and human resources and hiring managers alike will understand where they’re heading and why.
2. Clarify how roles are shared
To avoid double work and strengthen a shared appreciation for each other’s value, it’s important to establish clearly how responsibilities are split between human resources and hiring managers. Defining job roles across key areas and processes will help you build a healthy, long-lasting partnership built on trust and regular check-ins so that nothing falls between the cracks.
3. Work together on the job description to define your needs
Crafting a detailed, honest, and accurate job description relies on specific information about the role and what the day-to-day is likely to be. It’s critical that HR and hiring managers collaborate and align closely on these to understand exactly what profile of professional is needed. They must also work together to decide how this person filling the role will support and enhance the team.
Identifying your needs and getting the job description right from the outset makes it more likely that you’ll attract the right people and find the perfect match—reducing recruitment and time-to-fill costs.
4. Create motivating employee experiences that make people want to stick with your company
Happy people power retention. Creating a motivating, driven, and fun company culture requires detailed coordination, and can produce remarkable improvements in performance across individuals, teams, and your entire company.
5. Identify team members with underutilized skills
Maintaining regular open communication between hiring managers and HR will make spotting underutilized skills much easier. Doing so allows you to offer promotions rather than having to open a brand-new position and embark on a costly and time-consuming recruitment and onboarding process.
People are 10 times more likely to look for a new job when they feel their skills aren’t being fully taken advantage of—so finding ways for them to progress within your company might just make a big difference to your retention rate too.
6. Build trust between your teams and your people
If you can increase trust within your organization, your retention rates are likely to rise. Through collaboration, managers and HR can help everyone develop their professional skills through targeted L&D and performance programs—especially when these are built around team members’ unique learning styles.
If you can identify future company needs and map learning opportunities to these, you can simultaneously support business continuity and prepare paths for people to progress within your organization.
7. Develop recognition programs
By tuning in more closely with the day-to-day, you can ensure people’s efforts and achievements receive the celebration they deserve. Deloitte found that organizations that properly recognize their people’s work see 14 percent higher levels of engagement, productivity, and performance, contributing almost two percent to the business’s margin growth. Establishing an effective and thorough employee recognition program will keep you tuned in and enhance job satisfaction.
8. Sync on performance and compensation management
Tracking performance and pay across your organization is key to giving people competitive remuneration for their performance. Assessing this in conversation with hiring managers will increase their trust and ownership, reassure you that your strategy is on the right track, and keep your people firmly engaged.
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9. Use HR tech that helps HR teams and managers reach their goals
Modern Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) like Bob make it easy to promote better experiences for team members. They help you empower managers to look after the compensation strategy for their teams with secure and confidential information sharing. They help you plan, take action, and review one-on-one meetings that achieve your goals and support your business’s targets. Modern HR tech also provides insights into attrition and performance that can help shape your retention and recruitment strategies.
Stronger together
When HR and hiring managers work together effectively, up-to-date information can flow much more freely through your organization. This drives a targeted, successful recruitment process and supports a company culture that’s built on learning, development, and retention.
As talented professionals find themselves more in demand than ever, even in the face of a rocky economic outlook, it’s an important step in getting your hiring process on point.
