Webinar Recap: Performance Management for Talent Acquisition Teams
Welcome back for another recap from our Future of Talent Acquisition webinar series! Leaders in talent acquisition discuss new and emerging topics about the People industry, and occasionally question the status quo. Join our next conversation live to meet panelists and ask questions.
Firstly, thank you so much to our February panel, who discussed strategies and challenges of performance management on talent acquisition teams:
Camille Tate - Head of Talent at Strava
Jennifer Hasche - VP of Global Recruiting at Rippling
Kent Button - VP of Global TA at VMware
Let’s get started!
To kick off the conversation, we wanted to ground everyone in a common understanding because the term “performance management” can mean a lot of things to different people based on their experiences and the culture of their current and former employers.
Our panelists shared that it is commonly believed that performance management is the responsibility of the manager to create and track certain metrics for an individual to achieve in order to measure their success. However, our panelists challenge this ideology.
“Performance management to me is the management of your performance, not me managing your performance.”
To start, Camille shared that performance management isn’t about the manager managing the performance of the employee, but instead the employee owning their own performance. Granted it is the responsibility of the talent leader to grasp the objectives of the business and cascade a vision to the team, but the keystone is empowering the team to own their individual performance that contributes to their holistic success. Managers are there to support and create a framework with clear expectations to make sure that they can manage their own performance as mature, adult employees, teammates, and recruiters.
To build high-performing teams, Jennifer Hasche believes that managers need to help them win. Depending on the team, a win could be improving their performance, maintaining it, or pushing the limits of possibility in their performance.
Systems and Tools
“We can see different [data] metrics… but there’s also the qualitative, anecdotal metrics that managers need to paint a complete picture.”
Next up, we discussed the systems and tools that our panelists use to measure and understand a recruiter’s performance. Interestingly, as the panel dove into this topic, we discovered that metrics are not enough to assess an individual’s performance. In addition to the “cold, hard facts”, qualitative assessments are needed.
Imagine Van Goh’s famous painting, Starry Night. If we reduce his painting to black and white outlines, the village disappears into the background, the hills look like the ocean, and the landscape loses its depth. Surely, the painting is incomplete without the lines, but without the colorful paint, we fail to capture its true identity.
Similarly, quantitative metrics are only half of the story of performance management. Without qualifying the individual’s circumstances, we would fail to realize the true picture.
Clearly articulating defined goals with OKRs or KPIs helps managers identify when there needs to be course correction. Jennifer Hasche shared that Rippling, a startup, measured offer acceptance rates and conversion metrics so they could understand what’s working operationally in the business, but KPIs would look different in a more mature recruiting organization.
Kent Button continued to explain that his team at VMware quantifies hiring manager and candidate satisfaction NPS ratings, time-to-fill, and number of hires to assess productivity, and then pairs this data with the qualitative accomplishments of individuals, like stakeholder feedback, personal development, and professional learning endeavors.
“We’re not pizza delivery drivers… we don’t just deliver candidates. It’s a partnership between hiring managers and talent professionals.”
These qualitative accomplishments often reveal an individual’s circumstances that are out of their control, like stakeholder vacations, personal emergencies, and even the country’s economy. There are so many different things that can disturb quantitative metrics in the talent acquisition workflow. This is why Camille Tate prioritizes relationships with her talent teams, so that she understands “the why” of the person behind the performance.
How do you know if a recruiter is truly underperforming versus coping with circumstances outside their control?
The 5 Why’s is a root-cause-analysis exercise that asks "Why?" until the real issue surfaces. Jennifer Hasche shared that she has used this exercise when performance was usually satisfactory but then unexpectedly tanked. What she discovered was that it was rarely an issue with their productivity, but rather due to an outdated business practice or improper calibration on the role.
After discovering the source of the issue, managers can coach their teams back to success. Recruiting can be tiring, so asking recruiters leading questions can inspire them to self-reflect the next time they experience blockers, like:
When did the issue become a red flag?
If you were asked in an interview, “How did you handle a challenging time,” how would you answer it using this issue as an example?
Our panelists agreed that these questions were great at teaching individuals and teams how to problem solve independently, or even look around corners to avoid experiencing similar problems again.
What strategies do you use to keep your team focused and motivated?
Sometimes it can appear like a team or individual is underperforming because hiring managers set unrealistic expectations when they didn’t understand the process and its bottlenecks in the first place. In this case, the panel echoed that it’s important for recruiters to share accountability with hiring managers by clearly identifying what attributes of the role are necessary versus desirable, consistently communicating when things change, and recommending changes if results are not meeting expectations.
When recruiters and managers have an effective partnership, they will work together to get the best candidate for the job, ultimately resulting in the satisfaction of each stakeholder. This, in turn, breeds motivation, and when individuals or teams are motivated, they are more likely to focus.
This panel was eye opening, in that it revealed that there is a revolution emerging that puts people back at the center of the People industry, prioritizing positive relationships. This journey starts with a positive internal partnership, which includes managers acknowledging the qualitative accomplishments of employees as a formal procedure for performance management. Managers can use the full picture to enable individuals to manage their own performance, promoting self-ownership and accountability for their own quality of work.
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