How do you scale your team using the latest technologies available in recruitment?
When I started with recruitment back in 2008, there was no such thing as an Application Tracking System (ATS).
While they were emerging,there was nothing like what we have today.
Scaling Recruitment Through Applicant Tracking Systems
So the ATS that I first came across in South Africa was something called Placement Partner.
It blew my mind that there was a device, an instrument that was able to help me do so many of my mundane tasks like building a candidate pipeline, automate sourcing, etc.
Better yet, it was capable of doing it all in one space designed for those exact needs.
Now, fast-forward a few years later and we have access to Ashby. Which allows me to build candidate pipelines and basically do the work of roughly 10 people, because I can filter and set up interviews and manage a lot of the day-to-day work at the click of a button.
Even better, it’s designed for recruiters.
Essentially, one of the most important things that you can do if you’re wanting to scale a team and adopt new technologies is start using an applicant tracking system.
If you haven’t done that already, make it your step number one.
Tackle Your Scorecarding Process
For step number two, have a think about your scorecarding process and how laborious it can be.
Fear not. A lot of these applicant tracking systems actually have a way of score carding within them. And this is essentially a way that you can benchmark your existing team members against the applications coming in.
So when you meet and you test a candidate, you want to establish whether or not they have certain strengths and certain areas of weakness for development and so on.
This is a way that you can do that and remain unbiased in your approach.
I asked my lovely team the question, “how do we benchmark against not just technical skills, but soft skills and keep track of all of that in a way that’s available?. More specifically in a way that data or business analysts put their information together and present it to their managers.
I wanted to be able to do the same thing.
Fortunately, there are tools out there that allow us to do that with technical skills, as well as with soft skills.
On the technical side of things, there’s a range of different tools, but we use TestGorilla and that allows me as the recruiter to send out my candidates the same test so that they are being benchmarked against internal team members, as well as the other applicants with Python, SQL, Java skills and all the rest of it.
So we know where they are at and whether they’re junior, mid, senior, or whatever level they’re at. We’re essentially able to benchmark against who we have internally, which is immeasurably important as you can imagine.
And at Teraflow, we also heavily weigh soft skills.
So the question again, how do you benchmark soft skills? How do you determine somebody’s EQ and their problem solving abilities, or who they are as a team member?
And we came across an amazing tool, which is called Thrive Technology.
I’m not going to turn this into a whole thing about Thrive, but that’s what we use in order to benchmark our soft skills.
Simplify Job Descriptions Using ChatGPT
Now super, super exciting is ChatGPT.
And if you haven’t started adopting ChatGPT in your recruitment processes, it’s going to blow your mind.
Putting together job descriptions is a thing of the past, by the way.
You literally put in there, “act like a recruiter and give me a job description for a data engineer,” and it’ll give you exactly that. Plus, it takes a few seconds. You then have your document to take to the hiring manager and team leads and say to them, “okay, what do you wanna take away here? What do you wanna flesh out? What do you wanna add in?”.
And you put together something that historically would take me maybe a week to nail down in a matter of seconds to put the initial template together and then maybe 20 minutes to refine it and have something ready to go in terms of job requirements.
So that’s a huge one. There are so many uses for ChatGPT that I’ve put together an entire video just for that.
Weave These Tools Together
To summarise, an applicant tracking system is an absolute must if you want to scale your team. Then, something like TestGorilla for testing for technical skills in a way that benchmarks against internal team members and external applicants. Next, using Thrive or some such tool for benchmarking in the same way, but with soft skills in mind.
Very, very important, especially if you care about your team culture and your company culture.
And finally, ChatGPT. OpenAI across the board is just going wild and I’m bringing it on and bringing it in, in every possible way that I can into my job because it’s automating things that are so mundane and boring on a day-to-day basis.
I’ve just gotten used to it.
It’s like water off the duck’s back.
If there’s anything that can be automated, it’s automated and beyond. So go and check it out if you haven’t done that already!
