How to Achieve Hiring Team Alignment with Plum

When it Comes to Attracting Top Talent, Quality Output Requires Quality Input

In recruitment and selection, the success criteria that your applicants are assessed against must be specific to the role, accurate at the time of posting, and created by job experts who know the role well.

Hint: that means you can’t just copy and paste job descriptions from your competitors’ websites.

The success criteria on the Plum platform is called the Match Criteria, which is determined by the Match Criteria Survey. All job experts take the Match Criteria Survey to determine which talents are most important for success in the job. These are the criteria that applicants for the job are assessed against. 

Quality output requires quality input. Quality input needs due diligence from the hiring team to achieve alignment on the success criteria. Due diligence ensures:

•         A structured and consistent approach.
•         The capture of diverse inputs and collective wisdom.
•         A reduction in bias that results from human judgement.
•         The opportunity to surface concerns or new information.
•         Improved buy-in from all Hiring Team members.

Plum recommends a 5-step process to ensure due diligence and ultimately, team alignment.

Step 1: Identify job experts during the role intake meeting

For all roles, whether existing or new, there will be a role intake meeting between the Recruiter and Hiring Leader to discuss the goals that should be met during the hiring process. As part of this discussion towards building a successful recruitment strategy, it is important to identify which job experts should complete the Match Criteria Survey. Job experts can include the Hiring Leader, Direct Supervisor, Top Performers, Recruitment Consultants, or others. It is strongly recommended that a minimum of three individual job experts complete the Match Criteria Survey for each role to ensure quality input and the benefits noted above.

Step 2: Invite job experts to complete the Match Criteria Survey

Once job experts have been identified for a role, they can be invited to complete the Match Criteria Survey, an intuitive and streamlined 8-minute job analysis. Each individual job expert should complete the Match Criteria Survey before discussing it with others in the Hiring Team. This discrete input is vital to minimize inherent bias associated with group interactions and group decision-making.

Step 3: Match Criteria review

When all job experts have completed their Match Criteria Survey, the overall Match Criteria average and visualization of each individual input can be compared side-by-side. During this review process, determine areas of alignment and misalignment among the Hiring Team. Misalignment indicates disagreement over the success criteria for the role.

Step 4: Facilitated alignment meeting

In instances with unacceptable misalignment, a facilitated alignment meeting should take place with all members of the Hiring Team to discuss areas of convergence and divergence. If necessary, request individuals to edit their Match Criteria to address areas of divergence. An alignment meeting will serve to refine the success criteria for the role, increase applicant-role fit, weed out incorrect assumptions, improve Hiring Team relations, and raise buy-in for a structured hiring process.

Step 5: If necessary, edit the Match Criteria

We’ve heard your feedback, and we’ve made it easier than ever to action on your facilitated alignment meeting. Introducing, editable Mach Criteria. Now, job experts can edit their Match Criteria based on the results of the alignment meeting, and individual inputs can also be removed from the overall average.

Not to mention, we’ve now combined the Match Criteria summary and individual job expert details into one, easy-to-use tab (in other words, no more unnecessary clicking to see each job expert’s Match Criteria details). It’s all part of how Plum is making user experience and Hiring Team alignment smoother than ever.

Hiring Team alignment requires due diligence to ensure a consistent approach, a reduction in bias, diversity of input, and improved buy-in. If five steps feels like a lot, take a moment to reflect on your organization’s current process to outline role requirements and write job descriptions. How much time is taken up thinking of role requirements from scratch? How many previously unplanned meetings have to spring up due to misalignment and miscommunication? How much time, energy, and resources could be saved by simply creating a process for hiring team alignment?

By following the Plum 5-step process, the Hiring Team will develop the best possible success criteria for the role, ensuring superior applicant-role fit, and achievement of hiring goals.

Happy hiring!

Laura Reitzel is currently the Manager of Project Operations at Plum. Prior to that she held the role of Customer Success Manager. Laura holds 3 degrees, most recently completing an MBA degree at Wilfrid Laurier University. Laura has a diverse background of education and work experience.  Together with a passion for learning and entrepreneurial strategy, she is always eager to tackle new tasks and problems.