The Empowered Recruiter: Transform from Transactional to Strategic [Webinar Recap]

There’s a lot of talk about how the role of the recruiter is changing. What we’re seeing is that recruiters can be empowered to focus on high impact activities, rather than on time-intensive administrative tasks.

In our recent webinar with Rackspace, they shared how they empowered their recruiters to transition from transactional to strategic with technology, analytics, and process.

Watch the webinar

1) Streamline Hiring: A Prerequisite for Empowering Recruiters

The first piece of advice Rackspace shared was to streamline the hiring process. If a hiring process is cumbersome or requires intensive management on the part of the recruiter, chances are they won’t have time for activities with really high impact.

While Rackspace’s hiring process varies from role to role, they shared their revised process for Customer Support Specialists:

Where previously a recruiter would both conduct a phone screen and schedule every candidate with a hiring manager, this process decreased time to fill and created more time for recruiters to build relationships with hiring managers. Candidates loved the process too: Rackspace’s candidate Net Promoter Score is 59.

2) Design a Recruiting Teams for Success

Another area where Rackspace excels is the structure of their recruiting teams and approach to hiring recruiters. Previously their recruiting teams were organized around different growth areas of the business. While great for building up those departments, this meant candidates who applied for a certain type of job in one area of the business would not be considered for that job type anywhere else. Now, Rackspace operates on with a pod model:

The pod model means that great candidates for a certain job type (that may not have any openings in certain areas of the business) aren’t lost in the shuffle.

They’ve also adopted a promote-first approach, to keep great recruiting talent inside Rackspace:

When recruiters leave, they take years of organization-specific knowledge and relationships with them. Where Rackspace’s high-level roles might be backfilled with an external hire, they now fill those roles exclusively by promotion.

To learn how Rackspace empowers their recruiters with robust analytics, as well as an incredible example of what can happen when a recruiter challenges a hiring manager, watch the full webinar:

Watch the full webinar

You’ll also learn the answers to these questions:

• Do hiring managers always get the same recruiter?
• How did you prepare your recruiters to drive these sorts of conversations with hiring managers?
• How long did it take to get hiring managers to buy in, and how does the conversation change depending on the department?
• Have you seen an impact on recruiter retention?
• What sort of consultation happens after the intake meeting?
• Do your recruiters also engage more with candidates (e.g. closing hard to hire candidates, etc)?
• When hiring managers trust recruiters to make screening decisions, is that the result of delivering high quality candidates consistently, or is it because of the pre-work during the intake meeting, or something else?