Demonstrating the impact of your talent-acquisition team

When it’s time to ramp-up hiring, recruiters are often brought on first. When it’s time to slow down or freeze hiring, recruiters are often the first to go. Does talent acquisition need to operate with this cycle?

We talked to San Francisco-based Phil Haynes from Amplitude, a digital analytics company, about how to break that cycle and stop operating on a “capacity model.” 

Do you believe that this hiring-and-firing cycle for talent acquisition can be broken? Talk to us about that. 

For the third time in my career, I’ve watched TA get decimated because of either over hiring or expense control, whatever companies want to call it.

We've focused so much of our energy on production, on transaction, on volume, and not on quality, the impact that our efforts make, the difference to the business that our efforts make. 

I'm focused on using analytics and using data to try and quantify and focus on a different thing for my business leaders than just, hey, ‘TA filled 32 reqs this quarter.’ We want to know, “What was the downstream impact of that? How did we impact revenue? How did we impact customer retention? How do we impact product design and development?” 

From a TA leadership perspective, following up on the hire and learning the impact of the people we're hiring is a big change. 

What do you do to measure this impact? 

We're toying with it right now. I don't know if anybody's really cracked this code. 

One of the things that I've done with our go-to-market team, which is going to be an easy place to start, is to have a table of ramp times based on the role. When you hire a solutions consultant, for example, you expect that consultant to be 100 percent ramped in their fourth month. 

We're going to measure, as an initial quality-of-hire measurement, how the people we're hiring are ramping. Are they ramping ahead of pace, at pace, or post-pace? 

That’s one measure of quality. As we address sales employees, it’s very easy. Are the people we're hiring hitting quota once they're fully ramped? Are they continuing to hit quota? For non-quota-bearing roles, are people being promoted faster based on the quality of the person that we're hiring versus what it was? 

Right now, we’re in the phase of trying to baseline some of these measurements so that we can then show increases or decreases, but whatever the measurement is, we have to baseline it. So that's where I am today in the journey. 

The ramp time... Is that number coming from the manager, like the sales leader, or is that coming from something that you and the TA department are deciding? 

That's coming directly from our sales operations team. They handle enablement, so they're also measuring the ramp time based on their enablement efforts. I'm just piggybacking on a measurement that they're already looking at: whether our people are ramping quickly enough.

Can we speed up time to ramp, time to full productivity? Translating that into a software engineer or financial analyst will be a little bit more difficult, but I don't think it's impossible. 

Are you saying that this cycle of hiring and firing recruiters can be broken because when there aren’t many new hires to make, they will work to improve things such as ramp time?

I equate it to an Amazon production center, where during the holidays you ramp up because you've got a lot of boxes to stuff, stack, and push away. And then when the holidays are over, you let all those people go because all they were there to do was put widgets in boxes and ship boxes. We've got to break that cycle of recruiting because if it's just tied to how many widgets we put in boxes, it's always going to be this way. 

I'm in a 700-person company, so this probably doesn't apply to a Ford Motor Company and so on, but for some of these smaller to mid-sized businesses, the CEO, the executives, and even the board of directors would pay attention if they were presented with data that said the company's productivity is increasing, and that it can be tied back to the quality that TA is bringing into the company. 

It’s often said that if you're going to keep your recruiters during slow periods, they can improve your technology, they can improve your career site, they can improve your branding, they can build talent pipelines, talent communities, improve the way you screen and assess, and so on. What you're saying is that those are good things, but it's more about the mindset change, as you described with the Amazon example. 

Exactly. All those things that we have struggled to do or try to do and scramble to do when we see hiring volumes go down are really just so that I can tell my boss and they can tell their boss that the TA team is busy.

We’ve been operating on a capacity model. And that capacity model kind of puts us in a box of a widget-stuffer, right? When we start to talk about capacity models, I'm trying to reduce that [mindset] a little. During the heyday of the dot-com boom, we may have been filling 15 reqs per recruiter per quarter because it was just about cranking out widgets. 

Now, if that's seven per quarter per recruiter, but the quality and the impact of the company are greater, we see less variability in the staff that we need because we've leveled out the capacity a little bit. 

(edited slightly for clarity)