Hiring is considered similar to sales and has a funnel that starts from awareness to talent onboarding. How companies define their funnel can vary depending on the organization’s needs. However, here are the universal stages of a typical recruiting funnel. The health of your hiring process and ability to convert prospective candidates to new team members rely on several factors. And often in today’s time, it seems to be challenging to optimize the hiring funnel reduce the churn rate while continuing to grow at high velocities. Often engineering hiring managers or talent acquisition professionals complain that their candidates get churned out from the funnel despite several efforts. Hence in our recent episode of Hiring Diaries, we considered understanding our guest speaker’s perspective on solving this.
For those unattended, Praveen Nair is the Head of Talent at Indian technology unicorn – Meesho. The company is on its way to reaching 100 Million monthly transacting users on its e-commerce and is backed by companies such as SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, Facebook, B Capital, Fidelity Investments, and many more. Before joining Meesho, Praveen has led talent acquisition for marquee companies including Bounce, Flipkart, and Ola. He has also co-founded GreyFlex Consulting, which advises a range of enterprises in the Asian region.
Mudit Srivastava, Host:
“Now that we’re talking about hiring at scale, one of the things that are typically discussed is optimizing this process. Because one thing is setting it up, pulling it off in a short time. And once that is set up, the problem of optimizing the process comes kicks in. Based on your experiences, what are some of the practices that have worked to optimize the hiring funnels?”
Praveen Nair, Guest Speaker, Meesho:
“Well, that’s a great question. And that’s one of the questions that most TA folks, you know, work with regularly. See, you have very like, like I said, one, the talent pool is limited, so the supply is minimal. Number two, your attention span of this talent pool is minimal. Number three, their opportunities are very high in numbers. In this scenario, which is virtually not in your control or in are not favoring you, per se, as a recruiter, there are only a few things that the recruiter can do and do well. And if they do well, those are the ones that remain the differentiators.
One of them is creating that right employer brand, right, in a sense. What is it that you’re communicating back to this community, and how much are you speaking. Are you over-communicating this or not? What does your brand stand for? What are the problems that they’re solving? How well are they solving for what is the current range of technology stacks that you use, and what is the sort of a peer group that you get to work in this whole, this whole gamut of things that encompasses what is called the employer brand is becoming very, very critical. So that is one factor that optimizes this.
The second thing to consider while optimizing your hiring funnel is your presence on social media. It involves thinking about aspects like How do you communicate – how do you interact with this particular community – How often do you do that – How qualitative is your conversation with them. Because this community is very active on sites like LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on, it would be best if you communicated with them regularly. Number three, are you describing the purpose like telling the very definition of your business? Right, and the purpose of the person’s work there? And how does that purpose of the person’s work in your company relate to the purpose of the business? And how do you marry that real impact that the person can create? Over and above this, where do you find this set of suitable candidates? I mean, where do you reach out to them? What is your methodology to communicate with them? These four-five points bring about the optimization of the channels.
And the most important among all of this while optimizing the hiring funnel, and the one thing which stitches through all of this, is the success of your employees. So how many of your employees in the current scheme of things are successful in having practiced or having problems solved for you? And how about grown? How have they become success stories internally in your company or externally? And how are they been people who got developed as an individual personality? All this stitching together four-five factors optimize how you try to get across to this particular community.
The approach to this community is not a simple game because it is complex because of a few factors. One is the tremendous amount of money coming into the Indian investing diaspora and, therefore, the virtual ballooning of many startups. And thus, the sort of problems statements that we are trying to solve and the real-time advantage technology that everybody is using. So, today, nobody talks about using an old-time, just the Java game and stuff. I mean, you’re talking about the latest tech stacks that you’re using, and therefore, that differentiation is lost. I mean, you’re not just talking to only the best caliber; you’re talking to people who can work for you in scale. And therefore, all of these matter in terms of optimizing a particular hiring funnel.
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This excerpt was taken from a recent episode of Hiring Diaries with Praveen from Meesho. Our entire conversation covered several topics, including:
- The best practices for optimizing hiring funnels at scale.
- Culture-first tech hiring in a time of skewed supply-demand.
- Surging recruitment with the right technology stack
- Forging the right partnerships at high velocities
- Preparing for hiring sprees at growth-stage startups
- And more.
To view the entire discussion, visit here – https://skllspace.ai/hiring-diaries-203/.
More about Skillspace.ai and Hiring Diaries
The goal of Skillspace.ai is to deliver better experiences for end-to-end technical assessments with scale. In our platform, you can hire tech talent through coding assessments, AI challenges, take-home assignments, 1-on-1 interviews, and much more, all in a highly condensed and simplified manner. From early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies such as Cisco, Alibaba, and Capgemini, we have earned the trust of companies across all industries.
We have created Hiring Diaries to support the engineering and talent acquisition communities that have trusted us so far. The goal is to create a series of live discussions with the top 1% of talent and technology leaders who share our passion for giving first. Hiring Diaries covers various topics regarding scaling technology teams and hiring the best talent. You are welcome to attend any of our upcoming events if you wish to learn more.
