Back when dinosaurs were alive, HRs used to manage all the hiring. Today, in 2024, collaborative hiring seems to be gaining pace.
If you’re anyone responsible for hiring people, or even if you just work in a company, this article is about to make your life easy!
Yes, this is regardless of how big your company is, how many employees you’ve got or what your priorities are. If you “hire” people, spend a few minutes here.
Table of Contents
What is Collaborative Hiring?
In the simplest of words, “Collaboration” is when more than one person does something as a group. Hence, collaborative hiring is when more than one person is responsible for hiring talent.
Benefits Of Collaborative Hiring
There are certain benefits you avail when you opt for collaborative hiring. Overall, you save time, energy, and manpower. However, these benefits compound into many other benefits such as:
- Diverse perspective and expertise: Instead of one person, multiple people, from different teams/departments can vet each applicant. This lets them input their requirements, questions, and skillsets to pick the best matches.
- Promotes inclusivity and better decisions: When you give your employees the chance to directly be a part of the hiring process, it makes them feel included. The fact that they’ll be choosing their own teammates also forces them to pay more attention and be more diligent towards their choices.
- Collaborative responsibilities (and blames): In the traditional way, wrong hires get credited directly to the HR. This creates multiple issues within the company. When you’re collaborating, credit for both right and wrong decisions is shared equally.
- Less bias and more retention: With a single, central decision-maker, your applicants may be victims of biases and prejudices. No ones at fault, however, people often like/dislike others without “logical” reasons. Collaborative hiring ensures a single person’s biases can’t impact your hiring process. It also increases employee retention as the applicant’s are chosen based on audits from a larger pool of your employees hence post-hiring disagreements are likely to be low. `
- Better understanding for the applicant: The applicant has multiple points-of-contact with your company instead of a single HR. Hence, their understanding of the company, team, goals, work environment and everything else is clearer as well. The candidates can also showcase specific skills to specific individuals who’d understand said set of skills. Basically, gives them a broader canvas to paint on.
Now, to facilitate collaborative hiring, you’d need something called the ATS. Let’s discuss what an ATS is and how it can make your life better then!
What is ATS and how to choose a good ATS?
ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System. Imagine this to be the central hub where all your applicants, and people involved in the hiring process meet, discuss, collaborate, share files and much more.
Yes, it’s much more than just a form-filling page. In fact, here’s what I look for when choosing the best Applicant Tracking Systems.
For starters, I look for atleast a few AI features. One of my favourites is the AI being able to audit resumes for me and give me a list of the best fits.
Another feature I love is the AI being able to detect “who’s fit for what”. Meaning, some ATS tools let me scan all my applications and automatically tell me which candidates can be interviewed for which vacancies.
Collaborative features are probably my biggest “yes” points. I usually choose an ATS that lets me share files, chat with my team members, assign tasks and roles etc.
Another feature that I use ATS for are the pipelines. These are basically a set of rules that govern what happens when something else happens. E.g. you can set specific emails to be sent to specific people when an applicant is forwarded to the next stage, or rejected. You can also use pipelines to automatically choose recruiters, request documents and basically do anything else. The best of these tools allow for unlimited creativity.
“Third-party integrations” are something else I pay attention to, E.g. being able to automatically forward onboarding documentation or specific courses as soon as an applicant is hired helps save time and energy, doesn’t it? Some also allow generating contracts, signing, forwarding and requesting a signature all on automation using automated contract builders!
A specific ATS I used once even let me post on multiple social media profiles (e.g Linkedin) in a single click. Helped me save time and energy instead of having to post it manually.
And then there’s reporting. A good ATS software not only helps you monitor all your hires, speed, bottlenecks but also helps your applicants. They can be kept in the loop regarding their application status, any pending documents/questions or anything else.
While this isn’t everything I look for, any ATS that offers the features I’ve discussed so far will most definitely not disappoint you.
What not to do when using ATS for Collaborative Hiring?
You’ll find dozens of lists telling you what “to do”. But, the real damage is done when you do things you shouldn’t be doing!
For starters, do not rely 100% on the ATS while ignoring your human colleagues. ATS are great solutions, but in the end, it works only as good as you configure it. There are multiple ways you can mess your ATS making it unreliable and not as efficient. Hence, always include human reviews for your final decision.
Talking of configuring it wrong, do not make keywords your #1 priority. Of course they’re important but choosing candidates solely based on the keywords in their profiles isn’t the smartest way to use an ATS.
Third, because it’s a “collaborative” process, be sure no one’s confused about their role or what’s expected from them. Also, not everyone should be doing everything. Set clear roles for each involved member and they’d pay attention only to that aspect.
Also, reduce “absolute” powers to the least possible amount. Absolute powers are approvals/signatures required from specific individuals without whose presence the process doesn’t move forward.
Do learn to declutter. Just because a feature/option is available on an ATS, doesn’t mean you must use it. Advanced ATS platforms are very feature-rich, however, you should learn to pick-and-choose what you need and don’t need.
Finally, once an applicant has moved forward a few steps through your pipeline, take the time to teach them your ATS. This is often ignored, leaving the applicant confused and clueless about their current status. This also leads to them missing important notifications/appointments.
Final words- Starter’s guide to Collaborative hiring
That’s about it. By now, you should have a pretty decent idea of what collaborative hiring and ATS is. If you read the section above, you should also be able to use your ATS to its full potential.
Of course, this is just a beginner’s guide. There are dozens of other tips you can use or avoid to make your collaborative hiring easier and better.
Go on then, play around with some ATS tools and see if they can boost your company.
