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:

Shauna Geraghty, Head of Talent at Talkdesk, sat down with Daniil Karp, Director of Marketing at Teamable, to share how her team develops their KPI and metrics strategy. The full conversation can be found here: Planning for Success: Setting Your 2018 Recruiting Metrics and KPI Strategy.

We don’t have to convince you of the reasons why you should focus on building an employee referral program, right? Just to refresh you on why employee referral programs are so effective, in a nutshell, they lead to faster hires who perform better and stick around longer. If you’d like more specific facts and figures, you can check out some of the most compelling stats here.

Let’s say that you’ve seen the numbers and you’re already bought into the idea of launching an employee referral program. What comes next? How should you treat referred candidates—and the employees who referred them—during the interview process? Remember that your referral program rests on one important factor: employee participation. Let’s explore a few best practices to help you keep employees and the people they refer happy (even if they don’t end up getting the job).

So you’ve just landed a role leading a talent team—congratulations! Depending on the size and structure of your organization, your title might be Vice President, Director, or Head of Talent, but for most of these roles the expectations are the same: You’re responsible for the systems of hiring, rewarding, managing, and developing the people within your company.

How should you approach your first 90 days on the job? CTPartners recommend that, “the first 90 days on the job is a critical time period for gathering information, making first impressions, and setting a tone that will best facilitate a strong human resources leadership tenure.”

Let’s investigate what that might look like in practice.

This is a guest blog post by Shauna Geraghty, Head of Talent at Talkdesk. Join Shauna this week as she hosts Teamable's January webinar: Planning for Success: Setting Your 2018 Recruiting Metrics and KPIs Strategy.

The start of a new year is the perfect time to assess your Talent Acquisition team’s performance from the previous year and refine your KPI strategy for the upcoming year. At Talkdesk, we are doing just that. We had an incredible 2017, expanding into new markets, opening a new office and growing at breakneck pace. As such, it is important for us to step back and take a comprehensive approach to analyzing our Talent Acquisition team’s performance so that we can accurately plan for the new fiscal year and maintain this incredible momentum.

Let’s say that you’ve been inspired by a story like the one from Aubrey Blanche at Atlassian (Aubrey boosted the number of female technical hires by 80%—you can learn how she did that here). You’ve decided that building a diverse team is a priority at your organization. You’ve revamped your pipeline and recruiting strategies to bring in candidates from a broader range of backgrounds. So what comes next?

Pop quiz: Does your company value financial performance, innovation, and tapping into new markets? Here’s a hint: The answer should be yes for at least one of these points,if not all of them! And if that’s the case, you’ll want to think about how you can actively promote diversity and inclusion, since more diverse companies have been shown to outperform less diverse peers on all those dimensions (and more—check out some of the most impressive statistics on diversity and inclusion here).