Creating a plan on how to involve your hiring team with Spark Hire will ensure a smooth transition to using the tool, and a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of each party involved. We recommend following 3 simple steps to make using Spark Hire for your team an easy and effective process!

Step 1: Communicate the problems that Spark Hire will solve

Before jumping in, it’s important to communicate the “why” behind your use of Spark Hire to hiring managers.

You can accomplish this through a variety of mediums, but our initial recommendation is to send an email to all hiring stakeholders introducing them to Spark Hire.

Here’s what your announcement should include:

• What problems will Spark Hire solve for us?
• How will Spark Hire solve those problems?
• What’s in it for the hiring managers?
• What do you need from the hiring managers?

“In an effort to improve the quality of candidates that you end up meeting with later in our hiring process, we’re implementing Spark Hire as a quality check.

With Spark Hire’s one-way video interview solution, candidates will record video responses to our interview questions on their own time. We can then share these video interviews so we can collectively decide on who to move forward with.

This ensures that we’re only setting up final interviews between you and candidates that we’ve all deemed to be a solid investment of time and resources.”

Being clear with the intentions of Spark Hire, where it fits within your hiring process, and what’s in it for your hiring managers is critical to getting everyone on the same page. 

After all, this is more than likely something new for your hiring process so it’s important to commit to managing the change.

Step 2: Assign roles and responsibilities

Before determining specific roles and responsibilities with regards to the use of Spark Hire by your team, it’s important to decide how you and your hiring stakeholders are going to interact.

First, let’s categorize two different buckets of people - "recruiting" and "hiring stakeholders."

With these two groups of people, let’s review the 2 ways these groups typically interact on Spark Hire. 

The recruiting team evaluates interviews and passes a shortlist on to hiring stakeholders.

• Pro: Limit the amount of work your hiring managers are doing and your reliance on them
• Con: Less collaboration at the screening phase

Hiring stakeholders will be completely responsible for reviewing and evaluating interviews. 

• Pro: Empower hiring managers to make decisions
• Con: Hiring managers might not want to commit the time (even though it benefits them later on)

So, how do you determine what’s right for you?

• Ask yourself: What’s the priority and what aligns with your process as it stands today?
• Get with your hiring managers to make this decision
  • Remember, nothing is set in stone.
  • This also might vary based on the job and/or hiring manager.

After determining how your team is going to interact together, the next step is to clearly define:

Oftentimes, successful Spark Hire customers will create a Hiring SLA (or some variation) that defines these things for each step of the hiring process.

Putting this in place is a great way to create alignment and accountability on your team.

The best method for working on this is a hiring kickoff meeting which leads us to step 3.

Step 3: Hiring kickoff meeting

We strongly recommend setting up a hiring kickoff meeting each time you hire for a role.

A hiring kickoff meeting is a meeting between all the parties involved in hiring for a specific job to collaborate on the end-to-end hiring process that will be followed.

While there are a variety of topics to cover during a hiring kickoff meeting, the most important things to discuss as it relates to your use of Spark Hire include:

Next steps

• How to structure a hiring kickoff meeting
• How to structure your one-way interview questions
• How to evaluate interviews on Spark Hire