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Perhaps you work at an incredibly successful company on track to keep getting bigger and better, which means more offerings, more customers, and more locations. It also means you’ll need to hire...a lot. This is a challenge we have faced here at salesforce.com, especially over the last few years. With rapidly increasing demands, it soon became clear that our days of sticking to a traditional hiring model, and simply throwing more recruiters at the problem, were officially over.
In 2010, we faced the huge challenge of more than doubling our workforce over the course of two years. Yes, I said doubling. I started with salesforce.com in 2003. Back then, we were able to successfully scale the growth of the company through pure hustle and strong recruiters. But by 2010, we had moved from hyper growth to uber-hyper growth, and being scrappy was no longer going to do it for us. We needed to change or fail. What company with similar growth plans could we pattern ourselves after? We spent time talking to hyper growth tech companies, but none of their recruiting models made sense for us. We needed to think differently, so we decided to look internally.
Our sales organization had built a model over the years that scaled and crushed it. It was a machine and we needed a machine. We realized that the key functions between recruiting and sales were largely the same: marketing, inbound leads, prospecting, competitive intelligence, relationship building, and closing. Why not mirror ourselves after one of the best sales organization in the world?
Earlier this month I presented this concept at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect conference along with my colleagues Jesper Bendtsen, VP Global Go to Market Recruiting, and Neal Narayani, Head of Strategy & Operations for Employee Success. One of the methods we shared helped transition recruiting to run like a sales organization by looking at the structure of our recruiting team.
Three years ago, we looked like most traditional recruiting organizations with three main roles: Recruiter, Outbound Sourcer (prospecting passive candidates), and Coordinator. What were we missing? What did our sales org have that we didn’t? The new roles we needed were Inbound Sourcer, Research, Operations, and Executive Search. So we created them, and then we had the makings of a machine.
Recruiters are the anchors of a strong Talent Acquisition team, just like Account Executives are the anchors of a Sales Team. Recruiters need to prospect, qualify, build internal and external relationships, and finally close the deal, just like an AE.
In years past, we had a model where a Recruiter did everything: they handled all inbound leads (employee referrals and career site applications), sourced passive candidates, managed 15-20 reqs (sometimes with 15-20 different hiring managers), screened candidates, conducted in-person interviews, and ultimately closed deals. A lot of recruiters view this as “full life cycle” recruiting and are proud that they can handle so much, but at the end of the day this method is silly and inefficient. Our recruiters were spending the majority of their time handling inbound leads and screening candidates (most not even qualified for the role), and not enough time finding and talking to the best candidates, building the candidate-hiring manager relationship, and effectively selling and closing candidates.
An example of a new specialized role we created and evolved is the Inbound Sourcer. We initially created this role to handle employee referrals and to fix our “black hole” referral situation. Today, we have a group of around 10, and almost all of them started out as Coordinators and hit the ground running. This team handles any inbound or warm leads coming to us through referrals, LinkedIn job postings, or our career site. They connect with the warm candidate lead and do the qualification, and also follow up with the candidate directly and the employee who may have referred the candidate. The benefits of this role have been tremendous. The candidate and referral experience has improved dramatically (our source of hire for employee referrals is up 20% vs 2010!).
Our recruiters spend more time pitching the company and opportunity versus qualifying, and their productivity and close rates are up from years past. We are also building our “farm system” like our sales org and have created a true career path that starts as a Coordinator and moves all the way up to a Recruiter. Promotions and internal movement are through the roof, and retention of our more junior recruiting team has increased significantly.
Hopefully everything we have experienced and learned here at salesforce.com will help you get thinking innovatively when it comes to transforming your recruiting team. If you’ve had success with this type of change, or you’ve tried another successful model, please let us know at editor@salesforce.com. We’d love to hear your feedback.
Check out the video of our LinkedIn Talent Connect presentation here and scroll through the presentation below.
This is the first post in a series entitled Inside the Innovation Machine, a behind-the-scenes look at how we run our business here at salesforce.com. By sharing our tips, tricks, and lessons learned along the way, we hope you--and your business--can benefit.
