Taking Recruiting Functions From Service Providers to Trusted Advisors
About this Episode
"When you feel like you're in it with the business, you just make so much more progress. When it feels like you're on the same side of the table versus across the table, now you feel like you're more in this trusted advisor and partnership, and you make just faster and greater success and momentum."
Recruiting is a complex process. It requires finding the best possible talent with the right skill set and personality for the job. But recruiting is also a key business goal.
Topics
This Episode's Guest
Adam Ward
Founding Partner @ Growth by Design Talent
Before co-founding GDT, Adam held a recruiting leadership role at Qualcomm, was one of the first recruiting leaders at Facebook — where he saw them through IPO — and led the recruiting function at Pinterest, scaling from 200 to 2000 and through IPO. He’s harnessing his deep knowledge of how recruiting can bolster business to tell you how to make it happen, too.
Key Learnings
Recruiting is a crucial part of business, and the greatest businesses are the ones that invite recruiters to the table as key strategic investors and valued advisors. You can cultivate that image by knowing how to present yourself and the TA function, and always coming to leadership prepared.
Major takeaways:
- Recruiting should have a seat at the table. Recruiting plays a much more vital role in a company than in the past. Adam says, "What we're seeing is that companies are looking for a different level of partnership with their recruiting and talent leaders. It’s coming to a head as the markets have shifted; companies are looking to adjust in the current environment. We've found, historically, that recruiting leaders and recruiting teams weren't prepared to show up at the same level of depth, accuracy, data, and insights that sales or finance or engineering leaders have."
- Is recruiting a service provider or trusted advisor? What's the difference between a service provider and a trusted advisor in terms of recruitment? Adam explains, "If recruiting gets handed a headcount number at the beginning of the year, you might be a service provider. If recruiting is in the room talking about capacity, the market, the company’s challenges, and how to get into alignment, you might be a trusted advisor."
- Recruiting is a key business goal. It's important to look at recruitment as a business goal. Adam tells us, "Recruiting has to be one of those top-line goals and measures, and when you get it put into that echelon, you get the treatment and visualization in the same way. But it's also important to be measuring those goals in the same way, in the same cadence, and in the same format that you would any other business goal. If you think about sales being important to a company, they’ll have a clear cascading arrangement of goals into the organization. They're measuring the right things and signaling when they’re behind. Recruiting is no different – you want to be thinking about recruiting, being reported in progress, at the same cadence and in the same way, and hopefully in the same conversation in the same room as any other key business."
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