Have you ever wondered how some of the most popular Fortune 100 companies handle their recruitment processes? What are they doing differently? Should we employ those strategies?
Here is a brief breakdown of what these two large corporations are doing to recruit and maintain top talent and what we can learn.
Google
This tech giant is able to employ the very best because of their recruitment process which tends to shock most new managers at the corporation. Google insists that there is a consensus from a group of people who were involved in the screening/interviewing process.
In other words, not just one or 2 people are responsible for pulling the hiring trigger. A hiring manager cannot single-handedly give a “yes” and hire someone because they believe all suitable candidates must be passed on to a hiring committee for review and then be approved.
We can learn one main lesson here from this process: utilizing a group or panel to contribute to the final hiring of an employee means you end up with a more well-rounded workforce.
This gives your organization the opportunity to have multiple managers (some technical, some not), HR employees, and even team leads or co-workers pitch in to be sure that who you’re hiring is a fit culturally as well as possessing the aptitude to perform the job.
Research can show that you end up with less biased decisions and a more diverse workforce.
This large organization with a sprawling campus in Menlo Park prides themselves on their recruitment strategies which begin as most companies such as recruiter screening and discussions with potential team members.
After this they then have the prospective employee come onsite for interviews and a tour of their campus. The tour can help applicants feel a bit more at ease before sitting down to answer pointed interview questions.
Technical applicants are given a take home coding test or white board exercise to complete where interviewers are asked to gauge not just the correctness of the answers but how long it took to answer the questions and what problem solving skills may have been involved to get to the resolution.
The interviewing team then submits “yes” or “no” responses for each interviewee as far as the person’s ability to do the job on a 4 point scale. Each hiring team member can see the answers and scores of the other team members for each candidate interviewed.
Final hiring decisions are also made by a committee where all of these things are taken into consideration as well as compensation.
While part of this process is similar to Google, Facebook does do a few things differently. They have candidates take a tour early on in the process to help set them at ease before asking them onsite interview questions which can be stressful. They pool the answers given to the members of the interview team and submit them to the hiring committee who also takes into account how diverse someone’s background is.
When it comes to Facebook the more diverse their background, the more easily adaptable an employee can be to roll with changes or move into a new role within the organization.
Google and Facebook are some of the most popular companies or “brands” in the world and must be careful about what practices they use to find the right talent. Using a hiring “team” or “committee” has obviously made for successful recruiting efforts.
This gives them a diverse, well rounded workforce with less biased decisions and increases the odds of hiring someone who is not only capable of doing the job efficiently but someone who can fit into the company culture.
After all, the ultimate goal is to hire top talent, do so efficiently, spend time training them and set them up for success so that they will in turn help your company boost its revenue and continue its reputation as being one of the best companies to work for.
