Earlier this year I wrote series of blog posts about my first few weeks as the Recruitment Manager at Toca Boca. It started as an idea after I did a talk at TechRec in Berlin called “How to be a one person recruitment team”.

As a little bit more than half a year has passed and I’m back at work after enjoying a well-deserved summer break, I thought it’d be the perfect time to look back to see if those plans I had back when I started actually worked. In my previous posts I covered three keys areas in how to succeed – Collaboration, Automation and Optimization. To keep things simple, I will stick to those key areas now as well.

 

Collaboration

Collaborating with the hiring managers and teams has continued to work well. I think the key is to have a good start-up meeting where you set the expectations of all involved, and decide on a process everyone can agree on. You have to be prepared to completely scrap those though and start again if things don’t work out as expected.

Together we have hired 25 people over the past 6 months, well done to us! I would not have been able to make all those hires on my own, it truly is a collaborative effort between me and the teams.

 

Employer Branding

Our employer branding is also a collaborative effort. I don’t know all the ins and outs of every team so need their help when creating content. To begin with I focused all our Employer Branding efforts on LinkedIn as we already had a page up and running with a good amount of followers already (and that was without ever having posted a single update).

 

LinkedIn

When we started working actively with Linkedin we had 6000+ followers. We now have 8000+. A 2000+ increase in the past 6 months. I’m quite pleased with that but have set an even higher goal for the end of the year.

I’ve loved doing the employee interviews. Not only are they a great way of letting applicants know about their potential new colleagues but it as been a great way for me to get to know my new colleagues a bit better.

But my favourite part about all the effort I have put into LinkedIn is not the number of followers but having applicants tell me that they have seen our posts and therefore chose to apply. People have written it in their application or mentioned it to me if they’ve made it to the phone screen. THAT’S the reason I’ve been creating content. The actual numbers of followers mean nothing if they aren’t enjoying the content.

With a new Head of Marketing in place I’m hoping that collaboration on the employer branding side will be even more prominent.

 

Glassdoor

I decided that LinkedIn wasn’t enough to reach all our potential applicants so in May I started looking into Glassdoor as this is our third biggest source of applications. (LinkedIn & our own career page being number 1 & 2). Tracking where our applications come from is something I started doing during spring.

I started by claiming our Glassdoor page which already had some reviews on there. The employer ones where 100% positive but the interview ones were all negative and that didn’t sit well with me as a recruiter. Is started by asking some of our recent joiners to write some reviews and soon enough the majority of the reviews where positive.

I have put together a Glassdoor started together with our People Operations Manager. What I would like to see are more positive review on the recruitment side, not just from those who got the job, as well as some great Employee reviews.

 

Candidate Experience

I have put a lot of effort into our candidate experience. I want everyone who applies for a job with us, successful or not, to come away with a good impression of us. There are a few things I do to ensure this:

1. Quick feedback on application. Everyone who applies should have a yes or no within 48 hours. It might not always be possible, but that’s what I’m aiming for.
2. I give feedback quickly after the phone screen, sometime even in the call itself.
3. Everyone who has an interview gets a phone call with personal feedback the day after their interview. If there is a delay for some reason, I make sure to let them know and keep them updated.
4. If requested, everyone get written feedback on their assignment.

I think my efforts have worked. One of the candidates I did a phone screen with, Durval, wrote a post on LinkedIn about his experience with me/Toca Boca, even though he was unsuccessful (he has since found a job, yay!).

This led to me doing a interview with him that’s available over on my YouTube channel. I though it would be interesting to hear things from the candidate’s perspective. I’ve also had candidates who didn’t make it all the way give me referrals.

On more than one occasion have I looked at an application for one particular job and thought “not right for this position, but could be great for this other position”. And I have been surprised at the reactions from the candidates when I have called them to let them know. It seems that it’s very rare for a recruiter to suggest another position.

 

Automation

I do love a bit of automation, especially when you have to look after everything yourself, making sure the boring stuff as admin runs smoothly is key,

 

Zapier

Those of you who have been following me for a while know I’m a big fan of Zapier. As mentioned in Part One, one of the first things I did was set up meet-up scraping via Zapier. As it turns out, this was unnecessary. I’ve not had to use any of those lists as so far, I have managed to solve all our recruitment needs via ads and referrals.

However, all the zaps I set up for admin purposes has proved great help. I’m always looking at what other solutions I can use Zapier for.

 

Calendly

Calendly has been awesome, such a time saver. At one point though, I was so jam packed with work people couldn’t book themselves in for a phone screen for 2 weeks. But that’s not to do with Calendly but my workload at the time. That’s when the collaboration aspect came in, and one Hiring Manager did the process all by themselves with my support.

 

Optimization

I’m always striving to improve. Improve myself, the processes, the candidate experience and so on. Things can always be better. I had a few things in mind at the beginning of the year that I was going to try.

 

Time management

Time-blocking. This has not worked as well as I had hoped, mainly down to my own attention span. Even if I have blocked time for something else I’ll keep checking the ATS for new applications, or answer Slack messages etc. The one thing that does work great is the social media tool as when I slow period I can create content and it sorts itself out when busy.

 

ATS

One thing I mentioned was that I wanted to use our ATS better, and source candidates from there. I’ve not yet been able to do this. However, I have created a structure for tagging candidates as “Great future hire” so that the ones that I have been in touch with, perhaps even interviewed, are not forgotten. Sometimes you can find an applicant, see that they have been in a process in the past, but how no clue as to why they weren’t successful. Hopefully my new tagging system will help with that.

 

Candidate Experience

Candidate Experience is a crucial part of successful recruitment, we all know that by now. I keep on thinking of ways to improve by re-writing the messages sent from our ATS, making sure people get feedback via phone etc.

I think the candidate experience we are currently offering is great for those who make it past the CV screening, but I know we can improve it for those who get rejected on a CV level.

So all in all, the 6 months of the year has been great and I look forward to the rest of the year recruiting for such an awesome company as Toca Boca.