From the beginning…
When we created our team-sourcing framework, we were tired of the typical agency model focused on the competition, where “a recruiter is a wolf to a recruiter”. It often happens that the success of one recruiter is the loss of another recruiter from the same team… To change this, we decided to build a new quality on the Polish market.
That’s how Team Up was born in 2019 – a collaborative IT recruitment agency where teamwork is evident at every turn!
What is team sourcing?
We use this term to describe the phenomenon when more than 1 person works on 1 item in a planned and coordinated way.
In the traditional sourcing process, 1 recruiter alone handles at least 1 recruitment, more often 4-6.
Some use team sourcing as sessions, such as pair sourcing, when two recruiters work together for a set period to search for candidates for a specific project, comparing their search results and message patterns. In our business, 95% of recruitments are conducted and closed by dedicated project teams working together.
How does it work?
There is no single template on how to put this idea into practice and everyone has to find their path.
At Team Up we used an existing Scrum software development framework which we adapted for our own recruitment needs.
This was quite a challenge, as the specifics of the work of a recruiter and a developer are significantly different. We were also aware of unsuccessful attempts to implement pure Scrum for recruitment in other organisations. Nevertheless, following the principle of leaving what gave us value and discarding or transforming what did not, we arrived at a methodical and agile model that works! After two years of practice and improvements, our recruiters value it very much, as they recently expressed in anonymous surveys:
What does a team sourcing recruitment project look like at our agency?
In a nutshell:
- After the briefing with the client, the team meets at the scrum board where they agree on the sprint goal, the best strategy to achieve this goal and the sprint schedule (daily, review etc).
- The strategy is transformed into concrete tasks, which are then assigned to the right people in the backlog – the team itself decides on the choice of tasks.
- During daily and reviews we check progress towards the goal, discuss project challenges, share ideas and lessons learned.
- After two sprints we provide the client with an action report, constructive feedback and a market report.
What are the benefits of team sourcing?
There are many advantages, even a whole list!
– Organises teamwork in a methodical and reproducible manner – Clearly divides responsibilities and sets objectives
– Enables team knowledge sharing and brainstorming
– Sets clear timeframes
– Provides a platform for mutual support
– Allows corrective action through joint sprint reviews
– Offers the client a convenient and insightful view of the project’s progress at any stage
– Allows for faster processing of large groups of candidates
– Gives a sense of collective effort and rewards it
Is it therefore an ideal solution?
Unfortunately, there are no perfect solutions and team sourcing in our edition also has its challenges. It requires effective training of all members of an initially quite complex system and a lot of discipline from the project managers in sticking to the framework.
As with any methodology, there is often a temptation to take shortcuts, which in the long term will lead to a decrease in the value the system brings to the team and hiring managers.
Organising the start of the project itself also requires coordinating the calendars of several people, which sometimes delays the start of the search somewhat compared to the traditional one-person model.
Still, it’s worth giving this model a try and unlocking the potential of your recruitment team! Especially now that the home office forces isolation, team sourcing allows for frequent interaction and helps build a sense of community within our teams.
#letsteamup!
You can hear more about team sourcing in the interview Mateusz gave to Anna Sykut for Traffit!
