In Conversation: Colet Coelho, Head of Talent Acquisition, Recruit CRM
An in-depth version of this interview has been published on The HackerEarth Blog.
Hire IQ by HackerEarth is a new initiative in which we speak with recruiters, talent acquisition managers, and hiring managers from across the globe, and ask them pertinent questions on the issues that ail the tech recruiting world.
Next up in this edition is Colet Coelho, Head of Talent Acquisition, at Recruit CRM. Being Women’s History Month, we wanted to understand the diversity mandates at Recruit CRM and more importantly, as a woman in tech, what would Colet like to change for welcoming more of such awesome women into the tech recruiting space.
Settle in, and let’s get to it!
P.S. If you missed the first edition of HireIQ where we sit down with Charles Rue from IHS Markit, you can read it here 🙂
HackerEarth: A lot of recruiting jargon has made headlines in the last two years. Candidate experience, remote hiring, employee burnout, and of course the ‘Great Resignation’. If you had to pick one jargon/phrase to attach to the future of ATS platforms, what would it be and why?
Colet: If I had to pick a jargon out of the mentioned, I would pick two — candidate experience and remote hiring. The candidate experience we design reveals a great deal about who we are as an employer. Prospective workers will judge our company based on their experience with the recruiting process, and a negative applicant experience will discourage future job seekers from applying.
Although, providing an excellent candidate experience can be a problematic aspect of the remote hiring process. Enhancing the overall candidate experience in remote recruitment is a vital function of an Applicant Tracking System. ATS platforms automate hiring while streamlining this entire process.
HackerEarth: How have your internal hiring policies changed in the last two years? Since DEI has been a priority in the tech world, have you initiated any new processes for improving inclusion at your workplace?
Colet: Our hiring policies have been pretty consistent. Since we have always been a remote functioning organization, the last two years haven’t affected our recruitment methods too much.
Our organization has a fair distribution of employees from different backgrounds, ethnicities, and locations spread across the globe. We host regular meetings with all our employees where everyone is heard and allowed to present their views forward.
To create an inclusive culture, starting at the very beginning is critical. We preach, advocate, and encourage inclusivity as an essential component of our organizational principles. We’ve started sharing it on our social media, websites, and in interviews so that any potential employee is aware of our inclusion goals.
We have also begun to streamline the recruiting process by enabling candidates from various community outreach initiatives, job fairs, and hiring consultants to participate. This guarantees that we have a varied range of abilities.
Inclusion at the workplace is pointless if people are not valued for who they are.
The pronouns that a person prefers are entirely up to them. We will begin to include a section on the pronouns employees prefer on their identity cards. In addition, we will guarantee that all of our job descriptions include gender-neutral language.
HackerEarth: As a woman in the tech recruiting space, what are some of the changes you would like to see in how companies attract talented women? How about expanding the conversation to include the non-binary community, and if yes, then how can recruiters begin to do that?
Colet: Flexibility is one of the top perks a firm can offer an employee, not just to women but also to men. As a woman in the recruitment sphere, I’d like to see companies offer women more flexibility regarding where, when, and how they work.
To attract non-binary candidates, recruiters can start by allowing a range of pronouns in different areas. Leaving gender boxes unfilled or providing the opportunity to add additional gender or pronoun categories in both paper and online HR forms/platforms will encourage non-binary employees to apply as well as feel like they belong in the workplace.
HackerEarth: Data has become an important tool for recruiters today. In your opinion, what do you think are the three most important markers/data points that recruiters should be looking at when hiring? Additionally, do you think there is a data point that recruiters are overlooking?
Colet: The three most important data points that recruiters should always consider are quality of hire, cost-per-hire, and time-to-hire.
While assessing hiring quality might be subjective, it is probably one of the most critical criteria to monitor. Poor performance can indicate that you have an individual performing the wrong job, regardless of how quickly you fill a role or how much you lower the hire cost.
The cost per hire is simply the money spent on recruiting in a given year divided by the total number of hires made. The recruiting costs vary for every organization, so it’s a good idea to benchmark the typical expenditures for various jobs in your firm. The time-to-hire metric measures how fast an applicant progresses through the various phases of the recruiting process.
The total amount spent on recruitment in a given year divided by the number of recruits is the cost per hire. Again, the recruiting expenses differ from one organization to the next. Therefore, it’s good to benchmark the average expenditures for various roles inside your company.
A critical marker that recruiters occasionally tend to neglect is the source of hiring.
Knowing where your best candidates and applicants are coming from is quite helpful, especially when it comes to recruitment marketing. With this indicator, you can discover those sources and channels that bring in the most qualified candidates for your available positions.
