So your recruiting team is hitting their goals, adding new sourcers, managers, and analysts, and has instituted a successful employee referral program. What next? Bersin by Deloitte set out to discover the most common denominators amongst mature talent acquisition teams, and released their findings in a comprehensive report available to their members. To save you a click, we broke down the key findings right here on the Teamable blog. Here’s what they learned:

“Mature TA teams build the workforce through integration with the business.”

If you want to position yourself and your talent team as strategic partners in the business, you can’t focus only on filling open roles and running your recruiting process. That’s an important part of your role, of course, but you also need to look for ways to build partnerships and promote collaboration with other teams. This can involve working with hiring managers to set expectations, define roles, and improve hiring processes as well as creating and communicating employee referral programs that involve your entire company. Other high level initiatives that can be spearheaded by the talent team include diversity and inclusion, employee retention, and quantitative metrics such as cost per hire and engineering time per hire.

“Existing employees are recognized as a strategic resource, and internal mobility is a part of company culture.”

Research from Gallup found that 93% of employees left their former employer the last time they changed roles. This means that there’s a huge opportunity to look for ways to retain your motivated and ambitious employees. As a talent acquisition team, consider how you can create a process for internal applications and transfers. How will roles be publicized and what’s the application process? Can you make improvements to your existing internal transfer program to increase awareness and boost participation?

“Candidates are evaluated for work ethic, values, and potential as much as skills and past experiences.”

The industry leaders in talent acquisition are placing increased emphasis on diversity recruiting in order to welcome candidates from a broader range of backgrounds. And as Aubrey Blanche from Atlassian explains, hiring diverse candidates actually “raises the bar” for company performance—Atlassian’s most diverse class of new hires was also its top-performing class.

Similarly, high-performing talent acquisition teams strive to reduce bias in the interview process by using a consistent structured hiring framework. This approach defines the required skills and attributes and designs an interview process around evaluating candidates on these qualities.

Building a strong employee referral program can also help since your existing employees can vouch for the work ethic and values of the people in their networks. This means you’ll have a pool of pre-vetted candidates who are likely to be aligned with your company’s values.

“High performing TA teams construct a personalized candidate journey.”

It’s no longer enough to offer candidates a cup of coffee and a comfortable place to sit—next generation talent acquisition teams are thinking of the candidate journey more holistically. They understand external employer brand has a huge impact on candidates’ perception and consider every stage of the candidate experience from the careers page and application process to onsite interviews and post-interview communication.

And, of course, high-performing TA teams understand the importance of really rolling out the red carpet for employee referral candidates. Remember that employee referral programs rely on the goodwill of the employees who participate in them, so creating a top-notch candidate experience for referral candidates is paramount.

“Mature TA teams continuously regenerate because of dedication to upskilling, informal learning, and professional growth.”

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that recruiters LOVE to learn and share best practices. You’re here, right? So be sure to keep up the good work! We recommend subscribing to blogs (may we humbly suggest this one?), watching webinars, listening to podcasts, and, of course, attending in-person events where you can exchange ideas with other talent acquisition practitioners and thought leaders.

“Highly Mature TA teams use AI and predictive data analytics.”

According to the research, another sign of a wise and mature TA team is that they aren’t threatened by advances in technology, but rather see them as opportunities to become better at their job. Mature TA teams learn how to use the latest advances in data and analytics to better predict what will happen with their pipeline in the near to mid-term future, estimate how long it will take to fill specific roles, and communicate this information to hiring managers and company executives. AI and data analytics help recruiters take a more strategic approach to their roles.

Conclusion

Looking over these lessons from high-performing TA teams, how did you fare? If you’re not ticking all these boxes just yet, don’t worry. Share this post with others on your team and initiate conversations about how you can take it up a notch. The common threads include taking a more strategic approach to your role, partnering with others outside the recruiting team to make a bigger impact, and creating a more consistent, inclusive hiring process. Even making just a few of these changes can significantly improve your team’s performance and reputation. Give it a try and let us know how it goes!