Less Chasing, More Hiring: How to Build a Process That Keeps Moving

Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for today’s webinar. Less chasing, more hiring, how to build a process that keeps moving.

We know that many of you here today are living and grappling with this topic on a daily basis, so we’re looking forward to diving into a great discussion. And I know that our panel have some actionable takeaways and solid insights that you will be able to use to help you stop chasing. So let’s dive into this great panel that we’re so lucky to have with us today. Joining me today are Gabbie Heintzelman, national recruiter at Historic Tours of America Doctor Taylor Fort, chief human resources officer at IT Solutions, and Josh Tolan, founder and CEO of Spark Hire. Both Gabbie and Taylor are Spark Hire customers, by the way. Thank you all so much for joining us.

And for those of you who aren’t familiar with Spark Hire, welcome. We’re thrilled that you’re here. Spark Hire helps HR and talent acquisition teams close the gap between recruiters and hiring managers with multiple solutions, including an applicant tracking system, one way video interviews, and a predictive behavioral assessment, all of which can be used together or separately. We’ve been around since 2012, helping more than 10,000 customers.

Okay. So let’s dive in, get into this great topic.

For our panel, I’d love to hear a little bit about your organization, your role, and the size and shape of your team. Let’s start with Gabbie. Kick us off.

Hey, everybody.

Very happy to be here. Thank you for having me, Eva and Josh and Taylor. It’s great to meet you as well.

So I am the national recruiter for Historic Tours of America. We are a heritage tourism company that operates out of nine different cities out of The United States. Well, of course, in The United States.

So we we do a lot of different tours, hop on hop off trolley tours. If you’ve ever seen any orange and green trolleys in your cities, that is us. So providing wonderful tours for our guests, telling the story of each city as the nation’s storyteller.

A lot of our cities also have different attractions, museums. We, operate the oldest aquarium in Key West, Florida. So that’s where we were based and founded out of, in Key West. So, as far as myself, like I said, I’m the national recruiter. I head up most of the recruiting throughout the entire country. I hire everything from our trolley drivers, tour guides, mechanics, bartenders, servers, maintenance staff, some of our managers.

And and so it’s a plethora of different types of roles, which has been a very fun challenge to do because there’s definitely a big difference between hiring a mechanic to work on a trolley and hiring a tour guide to talk about our wonderful cities.

Beautiful. A lot of diversity there.

Yeah. Definitely.

Want to just hop on, hop off tours by the way.

Thank you. It’s it’s fun. It’s a really great way to learn about a city you’ve never been to and and, you know, we operate out of some of the just really some of the coolest cities in in the country.

So so Taylor, love to hear from you.

Yeah.

Alright. Great. Well, that… That’s awesome, Gabbie. Thank you for that intro and a little bit more about your company. So I’m the chief HR Officer here at IT Solutions, and IT Solutions is a managed services provider. It’s been around for a little over twenty five years, really based out of Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, for those that know the area. But over the last four years, we have gone on quite a growth journey.

Today, we have over 500 employees. We’re in two countries, both Canada and The US, 33 states. And we even have a team offshore that we juggle between Pakistan and Philippines and India, and that’s constantly growing.

So we’ve been on a really fun journey as we continue to expand our services and really focus on supporting our clients and bringing client excellence to support them in running their businesses and allowing my organization to really focus on the IT. So a little bit about IT solutions. As far as my role goes, I’m responsible for all things HR related. So whether it be talent acquisition to broader strategy, inorganic growth is part of our journey. So I’m pretty heavily focused in M and A as well, down to employee compliance law and overall culture and inclusion. So my team really ranges across the board. And today, I lead a team of about nine individuals that are also spread out across our footprint, both in Canada and here in The US.

It’s been a So fun journey the last couple of years.

Thanks, Taylor. And Eva did a wonderful job introducing Spark Hire, but I’m Josh Tolan, CEO of Spark Hire. Coming to you from a new location today. I’m actually at HR Tech in Vegas, but excited here to be on this panel with Taylor and Gabbie who are certainly the stars of the show.

I’ve been running Spark Hire for about fifteen years.

The company’s about a 100 people give or take and yeah, just excited to be here today and have a great conversation about engaging hiring managers.

Beautiful, thank you.

All right, let’s jump in. So Taylor, I’d love to start with you. From where you sit at IT Solutions, what does that hiring team look like that you’re typically supporting?

Yeah, I mean, so at any given base, so I have a team of three recruiters. And at any given time, we average about 15 to 20 reps.

Like just in our ongoing growth journey, like I said, we’re constantly adding new roles as we expand our client base. We’re expanding our talent pool as well. And so with that, we pretty much have about 15 unique hiring managers. I mean, we have probably over 45 managers within the organization that at any point could be hiring.

And kind of along the comment that Gabbie made earlier, our team that we’re supporting ranges quite drastically. Right? So we’re supporting hiring managers from sales who are, in some cases, stepping into new markets, and we’re building out a sales engine there to more technical talent and even specialized teams. So it’s it’s quite a wide first, hiring team that we support here.

Yeah. Definitely. Sounds like that. Gabbie, I’d love to hear how many people are involved in hiring day to day in your role, and how many of them have hiring as their main job?

Absolutely. So as far as hiring as their main job, there’s a team of about four of us that really just strictly focus on the recruiting aspect of things.

Myself, we… And we have two… One recruiter that handles all of our retail side of things, and then two recruiters who split some of the other cities as well, and then myself who will jump in and assist as well. So that’s those are the ones that will mainly do hiring on a day to day basis and the recruiting side of things. Then it’ll fall to our…

We have about, we have an at least one HR manager in every city who will do second half of their recruitment process and the hiring process of the paperwork and everything that needs to go out that way. But then similar to Taylor, we’ll have anywhere between 45 to 50 hiring managers around the country doing that middle section of the in person interviews, the evaluations, making sure all of the information gets reported correctly and appropriately to whatever the platform that we need it to. So it’s really a team effort that ranges from three to four of us to about 45 to 50 back down to about 15 to 25 somewhere in there depending on who it touches with the HR managers and the HR admin.

Yeah. Sounds like a lot of variety in those scenarios. Definitely.

For sure. For sure. And just some context on us. Our hiring process is very much hiring manager led. Just being a company of about 100 people, we have an HR function, but the function of doing everything, all things HR. So recruiting is just one of those pieces. So HR is certainly involved in the hiring process, but we definitely, just being a lean team, heavily rely on hiring managers to be active, to really own their part of the process.

And that’s what we’re talking about today. So I’m really excited to dive in.

Yeah, let’s do just that. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about ownership throughout the hiring process.

When a role opens on your team, what does that look like? Who owns keeping it moving forward? And is that written down anywhere or is it just more of an understood responsibility? Let’s start with you, Taylor.

Yeah, it’s a great question. So technically, my recruiters own the process. However, at IT Solutions, our managers are actually kicking off the rec process. They’re going in and saying, Hey, this is a need that I have.

And actually, it goes to first is my HR business partners. So I have a team of about three or four HR business partners, and they’re the ones working closely with the business leaders on a day to day basis. So there’s an immediate jump in from that regard to make sure, hey, is this the role when a manager submits it? Is this the role that we were aware of? Does this match someone who has left or a new headcount that has been discussed? And we find that kind of initial ownership is really led by the HR business partner because we find that sometimes that’s where ambiguity starts in the process, is being unclear of really what the need is and what the intent of the fill is.

Our HR business partners are the first ones that are engaged, they’re reviewing it first to say, hey, is this the direction that there’s a consensus? And if not, they’re stepping in and really addressing that in the beginning. And then once they’re also making sure that the job description is right, that they have the right compensation, things like that. So they’re kind of the orchestrators, I would say, of the rec, while the recruiter is making sure it’s moving through the process. So if it’s getting stuck in any one location, the recruiter is throwing the flag and really engaging the right stakeholder in that. But I find that that really has driven our process, is really getting to the beginning and getting that strategy layer in because, like I said, we see that that’s where it’s really easy to just submit a rec and say, hey, I need a body. But if there’s not alignment in the beginning of what that need actually is, that’s where you can really get off track down the road.

Totally. We talk a lot about that internally around that initial alignment and that… The importance of that intake kickoff. So, yeah, you’re not alone in that. What does that look like for you, Gabbie?

It it starts similarly. We’ll have a…

One of the hiring managers of…

You know, say we need somebody in, say, one of our sales reps. The sales manager will reach out either to myself or their local HR manager to say, hey. We we need two or three people. So then at that point, it’ll get communicated to our national recruiting team, so either myself or somebody, whoever is in charge of that city, and they’ll work together to create the ad, make sure they have all the pertinent information, that you were talking about as well, Taylor, the proper salary range, the, you know, is this what we’re looking for as far as, is this job description and job ad correct?

Making sure we’re, clarifying all of those pieces. And then from there, the recruiters are the ones who have ownership of getting that posted and getting it put up on our company website, making sure that everything is correct and following the traction that the ad has within the…

Whether it’s on a job job board or a company website. So it is a lot of communication back and forth and making sure that the hiring managers give us the correct information so that as we’re beginning the screening process, we can have…

We can be looking out for the right things and continuing the communication to create that ownership as well so that the hiring managers don’t say, here you go recruiting team.

Do it for me. It’s a collaborative process the whole time.

Yes. Right. That’s a beautiful segue to my next question, which is on expectations and ownership. So how do you make those expectations clear to your hiring managers at the start? And what does that ownership look like?

I’ll jump in quickly too and like combine this question with a little bit of the last one as well. I think for us, when the role kicks off, if it’s a backfill, there’s often a rush from the hiring manager of like, all right, let’s just get the same role reposted. Let’s fill the seat with the same exact person, same job description because that position has opened up. Whereas like for a net new role, there typically ends up being a little bit more thought that gets put in at the front end of that process because they have to position it, they have to get it approved in the budget, they have to present the case for why that role is necessary. But for a backfill, it’s often like the position opens up, manager wants to fill it right away.

I think for us, a lot of expectation setting is also just taking a step back and looking at the business holistically.

And if there is a backfill or a position that opens up, it’s thinking about, okay, do we really need to backfill or is actually, is there a net new role that now over time things have changed and what we actually need might be different? Or is this something that we can fill some of the gaps internally? We have to have those discussions because I think it’s very easy to just rush into the process of backfill, great. Job description, great, we already have it.

Let’s start with the hiring process. But then you can very quickly get in the middle of that hiring process and you start to wave around like, oh, well maybe we can actually do this internally with this person instead or what we really need is X. So I think for us the biggest thing is really just beginning of the process before we even level set an expectations for the actual process. It’s really thinking through like, well what does the business actually need at this moment in time and moving forward versus just using like historicals to dictate what gonna for.

Yeah, totally. Just taking that time to be really intentional about what it is that the business needs.

Okay, I would love to jump to a poll. Tony, if you could drop that in, I’d love to hear from the audience on responsibility around hiring. Where does that most often break down for you within your organization?

Are you chasing the hiring managers? Are the hiring managers unsure of what’s expected?

Is there an… Some ambiguity or just kinda depends based on the role?

Let us know what that looks like for you and your organization, and we’ll see what that looks like for the audience.

I’m gonna take a guess here, and I’m gonna get that the first thing is going to be the most popular answer because when we go to SHERM conferences, we often will put up a poster board at our booth and we will ask people what is their biggest hiring challenge.

And I would say at virtually every SHERN conference when we have that board, the number one thing is chasing hiring managers.

So I’m gonna throw that out there as a guess, but we’ll see if I’m right.

Yeah. Let’s see those results, Tony.

Let’s see what all of you are experiencing in your organizations. Oh, Josh nailed it. There we go. The recruiter ends up chasing hiring managers for input.

Perhaps not a surprise from this audience. Yeah. We hear a lot of that from our customers and I’m sure all of you… Well, clearly, of you are living it. So let’s talk about that.

Gabbie, what do you ask hiring managers to commit to before a role opens? Like turnaround time or who’s in the interview loop, and how do you get them to stick to it?

Yeah.

It… This might feel like a little bit of a cop out answer, but just talk to me.

Let’s just be open to having that conversation. I really want…

I really emphasize to…

If something…

While you’re having conversations with candidates within the space, within your interview, and you don’t know how to move forward, give me a call. Let’s talk about it. Let’s communicate. And even if that means, that’s why I try to put so much emphasis on the beginning and how…

Like, when we’re creating those requisitions and creating those ads, emphasizing the importance importance of communication during that. So I hold them to just sending me…

At least send me a quick note like, hey. They showed up, which is…

Which sounds like a very, very small task, but I’m sure many of you have experienced that. You know you have an interview scheduled for the day, and at the end of the day, if you’re not in the same office or you’re doing other things, you don’t know if they if they showed up or not.

Just…

It’s not…

The notes aren’t put in or anything like that. So I I try to hold them to just just give me a heads up. That’s that’s from the basic basicness of it. And then I try to…

For those who have been working with me for quite some time, after that, I try…

I then go, take your notes. Send me your notes or input them into our Spark Hire ATS. We’re…

We really like to use the evaluations there, and I think we’re get to that a little bit later on in our conversation. But learn…

I I emphasize the importance of knowing how the process works so that they can keep communicating with me and making sure that their notes get put in within a reasonable amount of time. You know? Same day, I understand that’s that’s not always reasonable within twenty four to forty eight hours, keeping me in the loop of what’s happening. That’s usually the biggest thing that I try to emphasize with all of our hiring managers.

What about you, Taylor?

Yeah. I mean, I think for us, it really kind of starts in that intake conversation. We we really take a very transparent approach with our hiring managers. Right?

We ask them, you know, what’s on their plate right now? What are the roadblocks and things that they kind of anticipate? Are you taking vacation? Is your team taking vacation that you think is maybe absorbed more of the time than maybe you would like it to, things like that.

And one of the things that we ask for commitment right off the bat is we make sure that we’re having a touchpoint scheduled at least once a week.

And we’re coming to that meeting, we say, Hey, we’re going to provide an agenda, going into that meeting of, Here’s what we’re seeing, here’s what we need from you. And we find that creating that cadence starts to just drive some of that just natural accountability, I would say.

And kind of similar to Gabbie, we’ve also implemented other, what I would call more process things, where we’re looking for them to provide us what we call go no go decisions a little bit quicker. And then for us, it’s also finding least in our business, I don’t think every stakeholder in our business has the same background. And what I mean by that is I have sales leaders who are traveling 50 of their time, and it’s easy for them to send an email while they’re getting on and off a plane. I have other managers who are literally on the phone all day and helping their teams juggle inbound calls, things like that. And so it’s not exactly a one size fits all for the organization. We try to meet the hiring managers where they are and what is the best avenue to be collecting that feedback so we can be as agile as we possibly can be. But part of that weekly touchpoint, the other thing that we do is we go through our recs and discuss where they are in our priority list.

And we talk about, right, that, like, any slowdown in their feedback could impact where our recruiters are spending their time. And so we drive some mutual accountability there too through our transparency.

So I like that a lot.

And I think we try to drive accountability too even as we think about the candidate experience as well. So you can drive that accountability internally with recruiter and hiring manager. But I think when you set those expectations upfront, what we found is when we communicate to candidates that we’re gonna get back to you in X amount of days at each different step of the process, we tend to have much higher engagement and participation from candidates in the hiring process because they know what to expect. And so it feels like there’s this continuous forward momentum in the progress that it’s like, okay, I did this thing.

I know I’m gonna hear back by X. And so communicating that to the hiring managers and the importance of, okay, we’re aligning on this SLA, this commitment between us in terms of when you’re gonna give your feedback. And that allows us to uphold our commitment to candidates and when we’re gonna hear back from them, which keeps them bought into the process and prevents them from withdrawing or seeing something through with another employer because they haven’t heard back from us and they don’t know when to hear back from us. So I think you can create that accountability too by just saying, hey, we’re gonna communicate this to candidates.

And if we don’t meet that commitment, that’s gonna obviously negatively impact our process. But I think Taylor, like you said, you gotta meet higher managers where they’re at as well. Things come up, that’s just life, that’s just work. Hiring is not their full time job. But if they do come up, to Gabbie’s point, they gotta talk to you. We gotta communicate. If something’s gonna get pushed into next week and now we’re not gonna be able to get back to the candidate by Friday when we said, it’s like if they can communicate that to you, candidates will be understanding if you can communicate that to the candidate and then give them the updated timeframe.

So I think that’s what it just comes down to is you have to create that accountability through communication and with all stakeholders in the process. So it’s not just recruiters and hiring managers, it’s also with the candidates as well.

Yeah, I’m hearing a lot about communication and feedback and obviously that’s really the foundation for keeping these hiring processes moving. I’d love to hear a little bit about the how around that communication. So, maybe we’ll continue with you, Taylor. What has worked for you with getting those hiring managers to engage without potentially turning them into power users of a platform that they might only be using a few times a year? What does that look like for you?

Yeah. I really think…

I mean, we’ve tried…

I mean, and and we’re constantly looking at ways to evolve our process to just make it more efficient, right? I mean, what we always tell our hiring managers is we’re on the same team and we all want the same thing. And so we’re constantly just evaluating how we can be better meeting them where they are. But for us, that weekly connect for us at a minimum, depending on hiring volume or how quickly their rock is moving, sometimes we need more than that.

But at least having that one meeting helps drive alignment so much between the recruiter and the hiring manager. Because what we find in, Gabbie, I’m sure you can speak to this. Sometimes as a hiring manager is going through the process, their wish list is slightly evolving, but they don’t even realize it.

So part of the feedback for us is us being able to engage with that feedback.

Sometimes just getting it in writing isn’t enough for us to double click in and ask questions. So if a hiring manager gives one feedback and allows my recruiter to say, Hey, tell me more about that. Or, Hey, that ties into one of my screening questions. Should I be adjusting that to better get you better insight into setting you up for success in your first interview? So really carving out that time and us having a dialogue with our hiring managers has allowed us to double click so much more into our process and making sure that we’re staying truly aligned with what the hiring manager is really, I think, envisioning, in this hire.

So Okay.

So it sounds like that weekly, almost face to face piece is a really important part of your process.

Agreed. Well, also us putting things in writing. I think so many times it’s so easy for hiring managers to not see all of the work that’s happening on the back end. And I think I always tell my recruiters that their value and what they’re doing every day matters so much.

But if hiring managers don’t see that, they don’t know that. So you guys could be having several screens a day, but if only one gets it through and you’re only communicating that one, the hiring manager isn’t seeing all those other activities. And so we do with part of that write up that we send as part of our agendas is we’re giving those statistics so they can see too, and it allows us to dive in and brainstorm with them where we might need some of their, like, insight and assistance. Because in theory, you know, our hiring managers are closest to the talent and really what they should be looking for.

So if we’re missing the mark and, you know, maybe our outreach approach, that’s something that we can dive in deeper with in that call.

Right. That’s great. Yeah. So you’ve got the face to face piece, but then that written element and the data to support that being really important. Gabbie, you mentioned evaluation, so written feedback. Again, talk talk to us about what that looks like for you with getting that hiring manager engagement.

Yeah. Definitely. So we actually also do, not quite full, like, all, like, all hands meeting. Usually, we will, as we’re putting together a requisition, we’ll start having weekly meetings with each city, to have similar… That that feedback as well that Taylor was mentioning because she’s absolutely absolutely right.

Sometimes you could be having 10 calls a day for one position, and two interviews will come out of that, and the hiring manager just sees the two interviews. They’ll come they’ll come back to the recruiter and say, hey. What…

What’s happening here? You’ve only sent me two or three people. When in reality, you…

We’re trying to make their jobs a little bit easier by sending the people we think are qualified. So that that is a huge piece that I I didn’t mention earlier that Taylor really fleshed out with her process. Thank you very much for doing that. But with with our side of things, because we hire a lot, you know, we do hire a lot of frontline positions with tour guides and sales reps for our tickets and a lot of people just for a little bit of higher volume.

Every time we have a new hiring manager come on or somebody new that will be conducting interviews, I’ll actually do a crash course training on the Spark Hire platform for them. That way they have an understanding of the the process as a whole. I’ll give them an overview of here’s what your recruiter is doing for you. Here is how the entire process works, and then I’ll go into a lot of detail on their piece with the evaluations section and the actual interview.

So that way they do have the complete overview, and they’ve at least seen it once so that it makes sense to them of why each piece is working the way it is. And then we’ve set up within the Spark Hire platform. We use their evaluations section pretty pretty religiously. It’s it’s where we like to have all that feedback and all that information.

That way, an…

Anyone who’s assigned to that position can go back and look and see feedback if there does need to be a secondary interview or if this is a person who has applied in the past and has interviewed in the past, why didn’t we move forward? And we have all of that information there. So not necessarily power users of the whole platform, but they do get very…

They get pretty educated on that section of the of the Spark Hire platform, just to keep everything consistent, and to make sure that we have the information that we need to back anything up, basically. So it’s it’s something that I do training wise, and it’s been a pretty, well received process. It puts everything in the same place. I’ll ask for them to put it in the evaluation, but again, to Taylor’s point, sometimes, you know, we have some people that are really, really great with their with their computers and with the evaluation section, and they love using the platform. Some people, that’s just not the case, and they really, don’t know how to continue even with some of the training. So as long as they email me that information and we can get that feedback put into the platform, that’s the biggest that’s the biggest part of it. It’s just getting the feedback put in somewhere.

Yeah. We hear that a lot from customers around the importance of that single record, having everything in a central source of truth. You’ve lined me really up. Really… You’ve lined me up really well for the next poll, Gabbie. Tony, I’d love to drop that in. Let’s hear from the audience. How do hiring managers at your organization usually share candidate feedback?

Where are you capturing that? Is it directly in your ATS or a hiring platform? Is it over email? Is it in the hallway? Or all of the above? Let us know what that’s looking like in your organization.

People are really gonna start thinking that we planned my my segue there. Yeah. I know.

You’re setting me up beautifully. I love it.

Tony, let’s see what the audience had to say. Where is that feedback being captured?

Let’s get those results up and see what you all… Oh, interesting.

We have a tie.

We have a tie between email and a mix of all of the above, and it’s not consistent. So, with 44% each, we’ve got a tie here at the top. So I think it’s safe to say there’s a there’s a real spread of how this feedback is being captured across our audience today. Okay.

I would love to move on to…

We can we can go ahead and pull those results off, Tony. I’d love to move on to talking about bottlenecks within your process. How you find those? How you diagnose those?

And let’s start with you, Taylor. Where do candidates go quiet or drop out of your process? What are you seeing there?

I mean, I feel like we probably see the most towards the end of the process, right? More than in the beginning, I feel like my recruiting team does a really good job at keeping our candidates engaged. They’re proactive. They’re reaching out, building excitement and things like that. I think if we ever do see any sort of fallout, it’s when a candidate might be actively pursuing multiple opportunities, right? And they’re getting to that final stage and maybe we’re just not moving quick enough or something else comes through, things like that. So I would say out of all the stages, it’s usually in that second to kind of final interview stage where we typically see some falloff.

That makes sense. What about you, Gabbie?

I have to agree. It’s very much… If people are actively looking for roles and there’s… They’re juggling multiple… Either multiple offers or multiple interviews, Sometimes it just happens to be whoever got to them a couple hours before. And a lot of times, it’s a no hard feelings. I was just able to accept this first, but it it really proves the point of staying on top of that hiring process because you can have someone up and ready to give an offer, and then someone might have called them an hour prior. So I I really don’t have too much to add. Taylor really hit it on the head there.

Yeah. I think to your point, Gabbie, that’s that really just goes back to, like, how you can communicate to hiring managers the importance of their timely feedback and doing the things they need to do when you guys agreed on when that need to be done.

Because it can feel like a very small deal to a hiring manager to bump something to the following week. And I think a lot of hiring managers might even have the perception of like, oh, well if the person really wants the job, they’ll wait till Monday to hear back from us. And it’s like, they might really want the job, but they might also really want the three other jobs they’re interviewing for. And if one of those other employers gets back to them first and they’re still waiting to hear from you or you can’t get back to them when you said you were going to, that can cause their confidence to decrease or them to accept another offer or just drop out of the process altogether. And that’s really why I love, it seems so simple, but Taylor’s weekly meeting with the hiring manager, just making sure that it’s always on the calendar because to me that’s just like a fallback you always have in place to ensure the process can keep moving forward.

Somebody I spoke to a while ago, another TA leader told me that in her process, they do something called turndown Tuesdays and follow-up Fridays. And they put those things in their calendar and it’s all related to candidate communication. So turndown Tuesdays are when they have to get back to candidates to let them know that they’re not gonna move forward. Follow-up Fridays is I either have an update or I don’t have an update.

So it’s no update update, but at least it’s in the calendar to make sure at a minimum I can communicate with the candidate to keep them warm, tell them about what to expect when we’ll get back to them next week. And so if you have those types of candidate communication touch points in place in your process, having that weekly cadence with the hiring manager allows you to execute on those things. And it again creates that mutual accountability of like, hey, well this is the day when I get back to candidates who I need to let know we’re not moving forward with this. Or this is the day that I gotta provide all candidates with updates on where they’re at in the process.

You can’t do those things without the feedback from the hiring manager. So having that stop gap in place with that weekly meeting is another thing you can put in place outside of the fact that, hey, we expect your interview evaluations to be at the ATS when they’re done. But you put these things in place to make sure you have like checks along the way. So if something doesn’t get done, you still catch it and can move the process forward.

Yeah.

And like defining what those bottlenecks look like, I’d love to hear from each of you on the longest candidate might be waiting between steps in your process and where that, both of you said towards the end. But do you do you have any numbers that you can share with our audience on what that might look like? Obviously very different roles, very different industries, but to share with our group here kind of a benchmark of of what that looks like. We’ll start with you this time, Gabbie.

Yeah. So we try to…

The longest really people will go through, maybe not getting at…

Have the automatic…

Somebody applies on the on the website. We have the automatic, hey. Thank you so much for applying. So they at least get that touch point, which is, yes, an automatic notion, but we’ve all applied for jobs clear…

Clearly, we’re all here. Hello. You know, we’ve all applied, and it’s just really nice to have the, okay. It did go through.

We did at least…

We completed step one as a candidate.

So that’s always there. Then we try, you know, twenty twenty four to seventy two hours depending on when in the week and and the candidate quantity. There are some positions where we’ll we’ll throw out, and sometimes we’ll get 50 applicants, which is wonderful, but it’s not realistic to go through all 50 in one day. So we do try to push through as many as we can, and try to keep no more than seventy two hours of at least having one of our recruiters looking at it, whether that’s then contacting, hey.

Thank you so much for applying. We would love to set up your preliminary call, and then get that on the books, ideally scheduling again within one to three days. Sometimes that’s not always possible depending on candidate schedule or sending…

Scheduling out the thank you so much for your application at this point. You know, we’re looking for other candidates. So we try to keep it pretty pretty tight.

That doesn’t always happen, you know, some scheduling vacation, all that… All the fun stuff that makes us human. But we try to keep it fairly tight within each within each step.

Yeah. That definitely with the beginning. With the interview process, you know, I could prescreen someone today and then interview availability doesn’t line up until maybe next Friday, but we do still try to keep all that communication happening between that time.

Okay. So it sounds like one to three days is kind of the the framework you’re aiming for. What does that look like on your end, Taylor?

Yeah. I would say in general, that’s our expectation too. I’m kind of… With Gabbie, I think where we see longer then is usually when more of the candidate schedule, right, has conflicts that drag it out less on our side because the recruiters are pretty good at really managing our hiring managers and saying, Hey, either can you give us access to your calendar or can you give us time slots on certain days that work for you so we can be quick about getting interviews scheduled.

I think the one thing that maybe where I see a little bit longer of a gap, and my recruiters just naturally, they care so much about the client, like the candidate experience, that they’re naturally just touching base. When we have a candidate that we’re really interested in, they’re naturally just reaching out and saying, hey, here’s where we’re at, things like that. Then maybe the one stage that sometimes takes longer where they have less of an update in that proactive reach out is after the second round interview. In our practice, we typically have a hiring manager, then they have someone else in their interview process also interviewing.

And I find that that slow down is because really there’s not clarity on who’s owning that feedback. And what I mean by that is whether it’s a panel or just another individual, they can be providing feedback. Normally, the idea is that it goes to the recruiter. The recruiter is collecting information, but really, feedback needs to getting to the hiring manager.

So then the hiring manager can process and then make a decision on what they want to do with that feedback. They ultimately are accountable to making that next decision. And what I find is this, that slows us down. Because a lot of times the recruiter is trying to push it along, so the feedback goes to the recruiter, and then the recruiter is passing it back over to the hiring manager and trying to get them to talk and align on what they wanna do.

And that naturally takes more days than I think we would like.

Yeah. So coming back to that beginning kickoff, that intake meeting, establishing that accountability around those roles.

And for us, I would say, I think where we see the most delays are actually at the end of the process when we have candidates doing these final interviews with managers.

Because often what we find is even if a manager really likes a candidate, you wanna wait till the interview with the next candidate because they want to compare and they wanna make sure they get to see, interview everybody before they make a final decision, which I can empathize with. Of course you want to be able to compare candidates and you wanna make sure you explore your options.

But I think there’s also a balance where it’s like, okay, but we have to debrief about this candidate. If we look at this candidate in isolation, do they actually meet everything that you’re looking for? Like, are you a yes on this person? And if so, we might need to make a quicker decision and that might make us uncomfortable because we have to pass on some future interviews.

But we also might not wanna run the risk of waiting and having this person just wait for us to interview other people if we know they’re a good fit. So sometimes it’s like having those hard conversations with hiring managers to come to a decision.

And in some cases it might mean, hey, we do wanna wait to interview this other candidate or these two other candidates and it’s next week. In those cases, that’s where it goes back to communicating with the candidates. Not that you’re gonna go back to them and say, hey, we’re interviewing these other candidates, but it’s, hey, let’s get a call on the calendar for next Thursday, right? So you get the candidate committed to a time to talk about the next steps and at that time you’ve done those other interviews but at least there’s something in the calendar where there’s like a bookend and the candidate knows that something’s gonna happen around this timeframe.

And you can couple that with communicating with the candidate of like, hey, if anything changes or if you need to hop on before then, if anything comes up, just communicate with me as a recruiter so we can hop on a call earlier. And that way as a recruiter you can notify the hiring manager if the candidate reaches out and they got another offer or something like that. So there’s a balance but that’s what we find the most challenge with is like when we’re down to a few really good candidates, the hiring manager waffles a little bit and it’s really about pulling them back into what criteria do we set, what we’ll be looking for, is this person a yes, can we make a decision? If not, where do we go from here with the candidate?

And just making sure you have those conversations to drive that forward.

Right, Right.

This is all great stuff. I appreciate this from all of you. I’d like to move on to our next poll, Tony. Let’s talk about where the hiring process slows down the most for all of you here today.

Is it getting the feedback from hiring managers? We’ve heard about that. Is it the scheduling? We’ve heard about that.

Is it that gap between final interview and offer, or is it candidates going quiet or dropping off because of delays? Let us know what that looks like for you. Tony, let’s go ahead and pull those results up, please.

See what that looks like for our audience today.

Ava, I’m gonna I’m gonna recommend we just give folks a couple of more seconds. We got five minutes.

I will take your lead on that. Let us know folks where is your hiring process slowing down the most, and we’ll pull that we’ll pull that up in just a second.

Alright.

That’s a good healthy number there. Let’s see those results.

Yeah. Okay. So another close one between the top two, getting feedback from hiring managers and that gap between final interview and offers. So understanding where those bottlenecks occur and, looking at what you can do to address those is is obviously a really important piece of this conversation.

I wanna move on to talk quickly about process and technology. Obviously, there’s a ton we can automate. There’s a ton that we can outsource the technology, but then there’s a lot of things that are still best left in the hands of a human. So let’s, I’d love to hear quickly from each one of you.

Where have you automated or restructured that freed up time for the parts of hiring that actually need a person? Let’s start with you, Taylor.

Yeah, I think we’ve leaned in pretty heavily into automating like the offer process. And you know, at Spark Hire, we love the custom fields and that they’re unlimited when it comes to our offer And so we have really built templates that are up for that weekend from a drop down box, pretty much add whatever verbiage we need for our offers to make sure that we’re customizing them to where we need to, but also keeping our standardization. So we have leaned in pretty heavily there. We’ve leaned into our process on the back end where we’re pushing criteria… Like, our our assessments, for example, and things like that. And we have really tried to find every opportunity where we can be running processes in parallel to also be shortening. And for us, Spark Hire is one of those tools that we really use to kinda keep that moving, and as automated as possible.

Beautiful. Yeah. Okay. What what does that look like for you, Gabbie?

Yeah. So the… We… Prior to us joining spark, on Spark Hire, our ATS did not have, did not allow for certain job boards to automatically be uploaded into the, into the applicant tracking system. So our recruiters had to download resumes from the job board that having applied there to then upload into the applicant tracking system. And while that seems like a very short process, if you’re doing it dozens and dozens of times over, it ends up taking up a lot of time. That… It’s it’s a small change, but, you know, Spark Hire really automates with a lot of job boards to just put everything right in that applicant tracking system, and that cut down on so much time. We’re able to filter through a lot more resumes from the recruiting standpoint standpoint, and then, again, the automation with the templates of, you know, making sure we’re able to reach out to so many folks and have custom tools in there. That’s been really, really helpful.

And being able to customize those evaluations as well has been huge.

Eva, for us, and I’ll try and answer a question in the chat from Emily as well because it’s related. Our two biggest points of automation are both related to hiring managers. One is on the scheduling side where we have hiring managers all connect their calendars. So HR or whoever playing the recruiter role in the process doesn’t have to go to the hiring manager and ask for availability and then play back and forth with the candidate. Hiring manager availability is synced so candidates can book a time immediately.

Part of that, the automation is great, but part of that is also us having a conversation with the hiring manager to make sure they open their calendar to create the availability so candidates can book as well. So there’s a little bit of a human element there to it. And then also on the automation front, Emily’s question was really like, how do you get hiring managers to stop sending you stuff via email that then as a recruiter, gotta go paste into the ATS?

That’s where we lean in heavily on automation as well in a few different areas. One, we put the evaluation in front of the hiring manager while they’re doing the interview. So the interview, they have it up, they have the questions they’re asking, the brief, everything like that. And then when they’re done with the interview, can just fill in the evaluation right then and there.

We also, if they don’t do it, as Gabbie said, sometimes they gotta run to another meeting or they’ve got other things going on. Sometimes it’s not realistic for them to do it right away. But we’ll automatically nudge them, which we used to have to do manually, but we do it by sending them reminders via email reminders, via Slack. So I think the biggest way we’ve got hired managers to put their feedback in the ATS versus send it via email is just make it easier for the hiring managers to do so. And for us, a lot of that is just like notifying them where they’re already working and in one click give them the ability to go do what they need to do. And it’s actually quicker to do that than for them to go into their email, start drafting a new email, put it in the format and all that kind of stuff. So we’ve addressed it in that way.