Bel Germon is Zinc's Talent Lead. To hear more about her work scaling Zinc's team, follow her on LinkedIn.
Why siloed talent teams are missing a trick
In my experience, talent acquisition (TA) teams have increasingly become more siloed in the name of efficiency. Efficiency is always good, but this shift has introduced new challenges.
You need to be deeply embedded within the teams you’re hiring for — you can’t operate in isolation.
There is, of course, nuance depending on company size and hiring needs. But the fundamentals of hiring remain the same, and there’s a lot to learn from the fast-paced, agile recruitment of a startup, where resource optimisation isn’t a choice but a necessity.
The secret to growing from 45 to 90
In January 2024, Zinc was a 45-person team with a single recruiter. A year later, we’ve doubled to 100 employees, and the talent team has grown to two.
With such a lean setup, success depended on maximising every available resource. The most crucial thing wasn't a tool or a process. It was the hiring managers themselves — not just as stakeholders, but as the key to scalable hiring.
For many companies, there’s an ongoing struggle to make sure hiring managers and talent teams see eye to eye.
In an article for Cielo, Anne Butcher shared her research that 57% of recruiters feel that hiring managers do not understand recruiting and 63% hiring managers feel that recruiters do not understand the jobs they are filling.
Case study: Growing Zinc’s sales team
Hiring entry-level Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) is challenging. You’re looking for key skills like resilience and adaptability that aren’t easily reflected in CVs.
But with close collaboration between TA and hiring managers, we reduced our time-to-hire from 62 days to just 3.
The problem:
Zinc’s SDR Manager had built a six-person SDR team but struggled with long hiring timelines, with one hire taking 62 days. When I joined as the only TA, he was hesitant to relinquish control of SDR recruitment.
This came from a place of being invested in hiring, being engaged, but not trusting a TA to do the job well and include him in the process.
The process:
In this case, my relative inexperience was a huge benefit. I didn’t have any pre-existing beliefs of what was right and wrong. This meant that I went into SDR hiring with an extremely open mind.
We communicated daily, analysing interview outcomes and refining candidate criteria. I sat in on his interviews and shared observations from mine.
The results:
Over time, it got easier to identify the right SDR qualities quickly. Continuous dialogue helped shape a more effective selection framework.
Three months later, we resumed hiring. This time, a new SDR was hired in just three days.
The hiring manager’s engagement increased significantly, providing structured and timely feedback that streamlined decision-making. Improved collaboration had drastically enhanced efficiency.
What can we learn?
While scaling a startup and hiring within a large enterprise present many different challenges, the fundamental principles of talent acquisition stay the same.
Just as startups can use techniques from big companies, larger organisations can benefit from the agility and adaptability in startup hiring practices.
Efficiency is key for all talent teams and businesses, quality matters too. High-quality hires require hiring managers who aren’t just involved, but genuinely invested in the process.
Regardless of the size of your organisation or the challenges you face, these four strategies will strengthen hiring manager and TA relationships and improve your hiring:
- Introduce hiring retros: Running post-hire retrospectives shows hiring managers (and interviewers) that their feedback is valued, keeping them engaged and improving future processes.
- Add their score to your metric: Incorporating hiring manager satisfaction into quality of hire metrics demonstrates that their experience matters and aligns TA success with business needs.
- Implement real-time feedback loops: Ask hiring managers to rate each stage of the process, allowing for continuous improvements and ensuring alignment with their expectations.
- Clarify involvement levels upfront: Early discussions about how involved hiring managers want to be set clear expectations and show that their input is respected and acted upon.
Key takeaway: Optimise your resources
As the well-known saying goes, success isn’t about working harder, it’s about working smarter.
Talent teams dedicate extensive time and budget to technology, tooling, and process improvements. But how much effort is devoted to maximising the potential of hiring managers?
The best ATS in the world won’t salvage a broken hiring process if hiring managers aren’t engaged. The most advanced sourcing tools are meaningless if hiring managers lack clarity on what they truly need.
Before investing in yet another system, automation, or tool, ask yourself: are you fully leveraging the resources you already have?
Because the most valuable hiring asset isn’t software. It’s the people within your business who care about building exceptional teams.
Want to learn more about how Zinc can help you reduce time to hire? Book some time with our team.
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