Teamable Blog

Great news, you sweet wonderful talent acquisition pros, you! The Phone Screen is back for round 2, and it's chock full of tips, tricks, and the real work stories of a recruiter who gets stuff done. In this installment, we caught up with Greenhouse’s Senior Recruiter Ariana Moon to learn about her path to recruiting, the tools and metrics she uses most, and how she’d like to see this profession change.

Talent pros know full well the importance of an inclusive company culture in attracting top talent and keeping them around. But it's not enough to articulate the culture on your website and Glassdoor profile. How do you measure and improve your culture in the interest of optimizing your hiring and retention functions? 

Welcome to The Phone Screen! Every week, we're featuring the talent folks who get stuff done. Just like the first part of your hiring process, we're going to get to know people a little beyond their resume by asking about their background, wins, favorite tools, and thoughts on most meaningful recruiting metrics. For our inaugural installment, we caught up with Honeybook's Employer Brand Manager and Talent Partner, Jess Park.

So your recruiting team is hitting their goals, adding new sourcers, managers, and analysts, and has instituted a successful employee referral program. What next? Bersin by Deloitte set out to discover the most common denominators amongst mature talent acquisition teams, and released their findings in a comprehensive report available to their members. To save you a click, we broke down the key findings right here on the Teamable blog. Here's what they learned:

“And now, I’m gonna hand it over to Tim from HR, for a quick update on talent.” Tim, your talent team’s HR business partner, dutifully saunters to the front of the room and takes his position at the podium. He reiterates headcount goals, goes over the open roles he’s desperate to fill, and then--stop me if you’ve heard this one before--implores the company to send over their referrals.

“Referrals are an excellent source of hire, they’re more likely to take the job and more likely to stick around, so please, think about who you know and send them our way.” Tim goes on to explain that for a limited time only, there’s a special $10,000 bonus for any referred senior software engineer who gets hired. Cue some chipper murmuring from the crowd.

So, how does this story end? With an influx of referrals and a slew of great hires? Spoiler alert: Bruce Willis was dead the whole time and so was Tim's referral pipeline.

When I was your age, we had to walk 5 miles to a public library computer to access a /careers/ page. And all you got was a list with a search bar!

If you’ve been around the recruiting block a few times, you remember the days before company culture videos and organizational values made up the sheen of a modern careers page. And if you’re one of the eager young recruiting minds of tomorrow, it may surprise you to learn there was a time before there was so much as an “Apply Now” button. In this hopefully recurring segment, your Teamable pals are digging deep in the archives of the Internet Wayback Machine to dredge up the careers pages of yesteryear.

 Recruiters are increasingly being held accountable for the truest definition of their job: delivering quality up levels in talent. While “quality of hire” often is measured based on actions taken by an employee far after they leave the recruiter’s purview, enterprising talent folks will take the opportunity to revisit their interview process with insights about hires who turned out to be A-players. Easier typed than done, of course. Measuring quality of hire is slippery, as what truly constitutes a dimension of quality is open for debate. In an attempt to see what makes for a high quality hire, I tasked myself with quantifying one of the most successful hires I have made throughout my career. I identified the following:

The recruiting team at Stripe was facing a dilemma: their once-robust employee referral program was losing steam. Fast-paced growth and expansion to multiple offices meant the tried and true methods of plying employees with cookies and manually combing through their networks no longer cut it. They need to figure out how to scale an employee referral program, and fast.

Katie Bishop and Lizz Hounshell from Stripe’s recruiting team enacted several strategies to get their referral pipelines back to fighting weight, and to hear the full story, we got them set up on a webinar to explain the nitty gritty. Here's the skinny.

There's been much hemming and hawing in the recruitment blogosphere about how exactly to structure referral bonuses. I'm sure you're all familar with the reasons it's so complicated-- how do you decide the amount? Do you offer the same prize for all roles, or pay a premium on hard to fill or in-demand positions? How long do you wait after the referral starts working to pay out? Do you pay the taxes on this bonus, or do employees get to find out that their $5k bonus looks a little more like $2800?

It turns out this line of questioning might be putting the cart before the hires, since a monetary bonus is often not the most appealing incentive for employees. So rather than tumble down the rabbit hole of paying out employee referral bonuses, let’s take a step back and examine the circumstances under which employees are actually motivated to make referrals, and how you can pull those levers to build a referral culture at your company.

50 recruiters walk into an office. I forget the punchline, but the result is an afternoon of rich conversation surrounding recruiting metrics, setting up referral programs (anyone know a good tool for that?), and creating a reliably strong candidate experience. First on the docket was some hiring pipeline data collected from real talent teams, hot off the presses from Lever: