Mike Joyner’s Post

It's headcount planning season! I love it! --said no recruiting leader ever I've been talking to a lot of teams that are digging into projections for next year and trying to figure out how to model out their recruiting team's capacity. If you're looking for tips on how to navigate this process and need help building a capacity model, we're kicking off our next workshop focused on this next Tues. We've got a dense two hours of sharing different approaches, hearing from others in the community, sharing GBD and industry benchmarking, and you'll also receive access to our capacity planning product, Recruitingplan.io, to give you a jump start to quickly build your model. Register here: https://lnkd.in/gegvK4PQ

How are recruiting teams navigating the surge in job applications? This question has been coming up a LOT with teams we work with. Recruiters want to maintaining a great candidate experience and realize that there are some great people available that are applying, but simply don't have the time and resources to review applications in the same way they have in the past. Holly (Brown) Dyche on our advisory team did an amazing job diving in to research this topic to learn how teams are solving for these challenges, and about tools in the market that are helping teams create more efficiency. She's summarized her findings in this month's newsletter, and it's packed with insights. You'll also find the latest leaderships moves in the market, our suggested reading list, and more!

I’ve learned over time that the idea of ‘creative destruction’ is not intuitive, but can be a net positive both for your career and learning. As I have experienced it in recruiting operations, the idea is that no process or system is precious and untouchable. By deconstructing and continuing to challenge entrenched practices, new creative solutions and sometimes breakthrough innovations can surface. Does that mean that you should constantly change things for the sake of it? Absolutely not. So what does this look like for those of us in recruiting ops: Co-design - bring in others to enhance, refine, and iterate on your idea and, in turn, create supporters that will need to be a part of making change happen. Often you may discover that you're going after a slightly different problem or there's a nuance that needs to be accounted for that you haven't thought of. Don’t get married to the project you just launched. Just because you tried something and it didn’t work, doesn’t mean in the future it isn’t the right thing to do (people, organizations, technologies all evolve). Avoid the big reveal when possible - it’s nearly impossible to nail every little detail the first time. Ship > get feedback > iterate to learn and improve things as quickly as possible. This also makes it possible to fail fast without wasting a ton of time and resources. I’m a recovering perfectionist and see this as an ongoing development area for myself. You can get started by building a proof of concept, piloting a process change with one group before the entire company, experimenting with new tools for specific use cases, etc. Communicate with partners - you don’t necessarily need to ‘walk a mile’ in every partner’s shoes, but you do need to understand how their work impacts yours and vice versa. Introducing changes in recruiting ops often requires input, feedback, and coordinated timing in the context of all of the other changes people might be experiencing at the same time. You don’t want to launch a new ATS when you’re also changing other big pieces of the people tech stack. Create opportunities for you and your team to stay plugged into the priorities of cross-functional partners and the business - invite guests to team meetings, you attend theirs, set-up a regular cadence to share roadmaps and rationale. This means that you’re opening lines of communication. If you’re in recruiting operations, it’s your job to translate information across teams and flag dependencies that require tighter coordination.

Dashboards are great, but often they can fall apart when the underlying data is a mess and no one can trust the 'insights'. Data is only useful when it's in a structure that you can analyze, and insights are only powerful if they can be trusted and communicated in a way that others can understand. Join Kira Bartholomew and Amy Wood (she/her) for our upcoming Influencing with Data course to learn the fundamentals.

Our team recently wrapped up an Ashby ATS implementation project with Bennet Reiners, Amanda Johnson, and the talented DeepL team. Big congrats! Doing this over the summer in Europe is no small feat. Each member of their team really stepped up to learn the new system and own different areas of the implementation. Truly one of the most collaborative and thoughtful implementations we’ve been a part of. It was also amazing to partner up with the wonderful Morgan O'Marro. Over the past several months, we've also had the pleasure of collaborating with Nathalie Alex at Linear and Sarah (Hallahan) Logia, CPC, ELI-MP at Arc Institute. This work has focused on optimizing existing tools, implementing their core ATS, and/or building dashboards to track key insights. We've also provided guidance on various aspects of their recruiting processes, offered hands-on assistance with system configuration, and helped build operational dashboards. As teams look for opportunities for automation and efficiencies in their tech stack, it’s important to consider the following: ✅ Timing - recruiting teams should always be conscious of timing for contract renewals, hiring ramps, and bandwidth of the team (recruiting and hiring teams) to absorb a big system change. Change requires training on new processes and settling into a new UI and process updates. Make sure operational disruptions are accounted for in the decision. ✅ Familiarity - many teams we work with optimize for the familiar tools that they’ve used in the past, but that doesn’t mean it’s always the best option for the team based on their scale and problems they’re trying to solve. For example, the terminology and configuration is different with Ashby than with Greenhouse. This requires education and understanding of how things fit together in order to design the process that works best for your company. ✅ Historical Data Fidelity - For Ashby, consider if you will have access to a data integration that will enable a more real-time data sync or if it will be a more traditional data export/import process. These involve very different data migration and cutover strategies, and varying degrees of impact to historical reporting. If you need help evaluating or selecting an ATS, we published a playbook with templates to help you - https://lnkd.in/g4TdPNgb. We can also share our experience in weighing trade-offs between various solutions. If you could use help navigating an implementation or optimizing your existing ATS, don’t hesitate to reach out.

It was fun partnering up with Armina Behrouzi, CEP, CECP to share our observations on equity compensation and tips for talent leaders.