Surge hiring: A programmatic approach to high volume recruiting | Talent Connect 2017
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At LinkedIn, we hire next years new sales people in q4 of the current year. Historically we have achieved this by sheer force of will with mixed results. This past year we applied a programmatic approach, determining TA resourcing, creating internal hiring deadlines, exception processes, reporting, etc. before launch. We used regular comms to keep the business informed and TA engaged. Further we created a scalable and repeatable template for success that can be applied for years to come.
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Surge hiring: A programmatic approach to high volume recruiting | Talent Connect 2017
- 4. Surge Hiring Jeff Weiner Chief Executive Officer Emily Campana Director, Talent Acquisition, LinkedIn Vidya Rao Manager, Talent Acquisition, LinkedIn
- 5. Surge surge /sərj/ noun “A sudden large increase, typically a brief one that happens during an otherwise stable or quiescent period.”
- 6. • 300+ incremental roles • Internal movement creates waterfall effect • Thousands of sourced and interviewed candidates Here's What Happens:
- 8. 5 Pronged Approach Capacity MotivationReporting Communication Process Project Management
- 9. • Identify business needs • Model out required TA headcount to meet business hiring needs • Build new support structures as needed Capacity Planning Stay transparent with the business. Explain to them how business demand affects TA capacity.
- 10. • Identify the right data for the right audience • Build a cadence • Equip TA Leaders to have insightful conversations with the businessReporting Timing is critical! Build the templates and reports prior to launch of work
- 15. • Identify audience groups • Develop communications strategy and timeline • Include various channels: FAQs, Emails, internal websites or newsletters, office hours, etc. Communications Tell them before they ask!
- 16. • Establish one global timeline, process and sub-processes • Address the stressor • Account for exceptions and escalationsProcess Identify a global TA process lead for faster decision making.
- 17. • Get creative in how you communicate to your TA team • Highlight both wins and lessons learned through misses • Motivate your teams through contests, mini-goals, incentives and fun Motivation Create a sense of community by including all regions and businesses involved driving towards one goal.
- 20. Key Takeaways • Partner tightly with your business, finance, HR teams early and throughout the work • Ensure they understand the lead time required to meet their hiring needs • Use a programmatic approach • Define the timelines, roles and responsibilities • Always have a throat to choke! • Tell them before they ask • Focus on communicating early and often • Don't forget the people doing the work – motivate and congratulate! Partnership Rigor Communication
- 21. Thank you
Notas del editor
- Vidya Call Emily: E: Hello? V: Hey Em. Hows the hiring going. Em: Oh Hey Vidya! (It’s Vidya) All great.. We are making steady progress and on track to meeting all the headcount demand this quarter… Vidya: Ah.. That’s what I called to talk about. We need to hire more sales people… like, a LOT more sales people before Jan 1st! Em: WHAT! Has anyone experienced this? – where you are cruising right along, nailing those hiring numbers crushing those customer satisfaction scores, nailing candidate experience and TTF and all of a sudden the number of hires you need to make spikes? Maybe it’s a hiring increase, or unexpected attrition causing more hires than you were expecting to make. I imagine if you are in this room, you probably have. Well, last year we got that call from our partners telling us that the spike we were going to experience was 300 additional incremental sales hires. Naturally our first reaction was measured and thoughtful and just full of leadership prowess:
- E: After we collected ourselves from that mini panic attack we realized a few things. First, this isn’t the first time we have been asked to do this. In general, LinkedIn likes to have its full sales staff in seat when we launch the new year. And since we have been growing this means hiring most of it in q4. In fact, last year’s request was the fourth. But every year, we hear – this was the last time and then somehow that next year roles around. And guess what? (PAUSE) There’s that huge ask AGAIN! V: Secondly, we realized we had work to do and needed to get organized…. FAST.
- E: Good afternoon! I am Emily Campana V: And I am Vidya Rao E: And we're here to tell you how we applied a programmatic approach to our surge hiring at LinkedIn. And leave you with some tips and tricks you can apply to your next spike in hiring.
- V: What is Surge? Here is a dictionary definition of surge.. it is a sudden spike that lasts for a brief period and leaves you rather shaken up! E: It’s a jolt. It’s often unexpected and for LinkedIn, we have been experiencing this every year for the past 5 years… Things are going smooth and fine. But right around the end of summer (Q3/Q4) we have huge surge.. And our last surge in hiring amounted to around 300 sales roles within a quarter!
- E: When we experience this surge, a lot happens! We open 300+ incremental roles and reqs. The roles range from junior Individual Contributors to Director+ levels and spans across all the geographies we operate in. E: At LinkedIn we take the concept of “Open Talent Market” very seriously. So all of our surge hiring roles are pushed to our current employees. This helps us source the brightest talent from within our company. V: But, Emily, don’t forget.. This also means it creates a waterfall effect.. Every internal we move creates a backfill that also needs to be filled by Jan 1. E: Yes! And that is exactly what happens.. Our 300+ reqs can quickly become 400 and so on… Leaving our TA team and Hiring Managers with a huge body of work to achieve in a very short period of time.
- E: Like I said – this last year wasn’t our first rodeo. In the past, we have survived this surge and delivered hires to the business by sheer will and brut force. V: But brut force and will means we were not efficient or scalable and we left business and TA burnt out… Challenges such as lack of awareness of success, inconsistent processes around internal movement, constant one-off request from the business – it left TA spinning and constantly reactive. E: To be fully transparent. It was painful. Like pushing a boulder up a hill… in mud. Recognizing this, we knew we had to do it better. We need a plan and a way to reduce the pain that comes with such a important time for our business.
- E: This time we took a step back and said how can we address the side effects of the surge before it happens. Enter Vidya with her brilliant Program Management mind to essentially save us by bringing order to the chaos. V: Ah, Emily, you flatter me. We essentially decided to look at this hiring time as not just a large volume of individual jobs to fill, but as a large project with a start date and an end date. We knew we needed various gates along the way to ensure we operated with a plan and were deliberate Then we identified 5 areas that we felt were most important to create successful outcomes – a 5-pronged approach. The five prongs were: 1. Capacity: How do we staff our TA organization to deliver these hires? 2: Reporting: How do we report out progress to the Business? 3: Communication: Who should know what, when and why? 4. Process: How do we execute and ensure we know timelines, processes, exceptions, etc.? 5. Motivation: This work is hard and exhausting and a bit frenetic -- How do we ensure our team thrives through the surge? Mind you, we did not do this alone. It took a village to make this programmatic approach work. Identifying and engaging these folks at the right time for the right purpose was crucial to the success. Let us now see how we all worked together to apply the 5 pronged approach
- E: Get early information from whoever manages your headcount. They need to tell you as early as possible what the demand will look like. Why? Because you just might need to hire some recruiters to get all this work done and how can you know how many to hire if you don’t know how much hiring is coming? Our finance and sales ops partners were crucial in setting this project up for success. They were able to give us the estimated headcount demand in July and then we could use that number to determine if we had enough recruiters. Here’s how we looked at it. We assume each recruiter could hire and average of 5 ppl a month. We have around 3 months to do this work. That’s 15 hires per recruiter. 300 incremental hires + backfills (let’s just estimate 100). So, 400/15 hires per recruiter = around 26 recruiters needed to do the work. It’s important that your partners are aware of the impact of hiring changes on TA’s ability to deliver. Let them know what your current capacity is, how long it will take to hire and ramp recruiters and how much lead time you need. But, also be flexible – it doesn’t have to be exact, just an estimate.
- Ah… reporting. Anybody in this room feel like they have all the reporting their customers request on lock? (Respond appropriately) We knew we were going to be able to tell our business partners just how successful ( or not ) we were against these big hiring goals. So, we focused on making sure we had the right reports. We determined, but chatting with our partners, exactly what data and information they needed to see. And, how frequently they needed to see it – every 2 weeks. Then we created dashboards, alongside our Talent Analytics team, to arm us with that data so our TA leaders could deliver it, along with insights, to our leaders and partners. Hiring attainment to goal Forecast expected hires to start – so business knew the staggering = people input the forecast Broke it up by line of business and region Create reports early right people informed, every TA leader (template, armed – prepared to provide input and use the tools).
- Here is a sample dashboards we created to update the business.. Complex.. Let me break it up for you..
- At the top, we put in the main info -- Insights and highlights. Data is great, but what does the data tell us? Is this good or bad? Then we included the most important data to the business – attainment to hiring goal.
- We also included a forecast of the when the remaining hires would be filled and the hires would start. This was important to our sales ops team as they built out territories and our finance partners as the forecasted when salary costs would land.
- And for us, it was important to split it up regionally and used Green, Yellow and Red to quickly identify the status of each region’s success.
- V: Key to any successful project or work in general is effective communications! V: In our program we were deliberate in developing a communications strategy early on. We identified every little detail.. Who are the audience groups, what frequency do we want to communicate to them in and why. We even drew up the timelines of when we wanted to send the comms out and who was going to be the sender. Our audience groups ranged from Sr. Exec leadership to every sales Employee. The messages we sent to Sr. Exec Leadership team was a different flavor than what we sent to an Employee. E.g., An Employee needed to know how to apply to a job, a Recruiter needed to know what exceptions were available during internal movement, a sr. leader needed to know highlights of the progress. A large part of our success in communications was also the variety of channels we used to communicate in. We didn’t just stick to emails. We had internal webpages, centralized emailbox for Employees to ask questions through before they talked to a Recruiter. We even hosted virtual office hours to help Employees navigate through the process. One lesson learnt, I will tell you, is that those distro lists can sneak away from you.. So pay close attention to that. And… Em: Tell the stakeholders everything they need to know before they ask!
- V: Ah.. Processes.. My personal favorite! The first and foremost important thing we did here was established a single global timeline.. Emily do you want to give us a brief on what that means? E: Yes.. Remember I told you that an open talent market creates waterfall effects? Imagine the magnitude of that if we had all the 4 lines of businesses not being on the same timeline! It only gets worse. So, early on we worked with the business to establish one global timeline. We worked on deploying something called the internal hiring pause.. What is that you ask? We worked with the business to set a deadline by when we want all decisions on the senior level roles to be done (it was oct mid last year). Then we also had a similar deadline for junior roles. This enabled us as a TA org to know the demand by mid Nov to a better extent without the backfills due to internal movement. All this while we still kept focusing on external sourcing and hiring too. But, were there no exceptions to this? Yes there were.. V: Afterall what is a process or a policy without an exception right? In a perfect world everyone follows the processes and policies.. We don’t live in that world yet. #1 stressor for us was the the internal movement that comes during this time and creates more/different openings. We knew we had to solve for this by ensure guidelines for movement, processes to verify eligibility, and a streamlined selection process for internal candidates. So we defined those processes, exceptions to those and escalation paths. E: One tip for success here is to identify one TA SME that can set up these consistent processes for all teams and who is responsible to ensure execution against these processes. Essentially – one throat to choke. This last year it was me – I have since handed that little ditty off to someone else on the team.
- Em: Phew… I told you this wasn’t easy.. But we did it. Our results were: 1. Hired 300+ sales professionals in just 3 months! 2. But more importantly we Strengthened the brand with our business Strengthened the partnerships with all stakeholders V: And built scalable and repeatable processes that we can use over again. In fact, our sales recruiting team is going thru a surge hiring period right now and using this framework.
- And we get to be the super heros – (get into super hero stance)
- Em: So, Recruiting super heros.. Here are some key takeaways as you apply this type of a programmatic approach to hiring: Partnership: Always partner early on and tightly with your business.. Understand the business case for urgency on both your end and theirs.. This gets you one step closer to the business partnering. V: Rigor: Use a programmatic approach. Have deadlines, be deliberate. Have a throat to choke.. Aka Emily! Em: Finally, Tell them before they ask.. Communicate early and often.. Stop and congratulate your super stars! Help them thrive the surge and not just survive! Hope you got a thing or two from our presentation today on crushing your next high volume hiring. We are here for any questions you may have! Thank you for being a wonderful audience!