How to Use The Org’s ‘Team’ Function to Hire Better

A company’s teams and people should be front and center when it comes to Employer Branding. Today’s job candidates care about more than a paycheck – they are increasingly focusing on the people they’d work with and the projects they’d work on, per a recent McKinsey study. They want to hear more about employee experiences and what goes on behind the scenes.

Companies who embrace this reality can attract the best crop of talent. Given a choice of two employers, there’s a high chance that job candidates will gravitate towards the company that does the best job at demonstrating their teams and what it would be like to work there.

What is The Org’s ‘team’ function?

No two teams are alike. The Org’s “team” page provides insight into a specific team’s priorities and structure, giving candidates a taste of what their experience on it might be. This includes goals, coverage areas, meeting structure, major projects, tech stacks, career paths and day-to-day responsibilities.

What do you think is important to share about your team ahead of an interview or offer letter?

Why is it important to show off your team and how you work?

Attract the right talent

Organizations that invest in a strong candidate experience improve the quality of their new hires by 70%, according to Glassdoor.

Boost your candidate experience by providing potential candidates with helpful information that isn’t accessible anywhere else. Help candidates understand exactly what it would be like to work on your team. Managing these expectations upfront in the interview process can help speed up the time it takes to close an amazing candidate (or part ways earlier with candidates who might not be the best fit for your team). You want someone to learn more about your team and say “that team aligns with my work style and we share the same views on success, I want to work there,” or just as importantly, “I don’t think this team would be the right fit for me.”

Through this, you increase the overall quality of the applicants who want to join your team.

You can use this tool to set and manage expectations early in the candidate journey. You’re helping candidates understand who you are and what you stand for as an organization before they even apply.

Distinguish yourself as a top-notch team that talented candidates can’t wait to work with.

Career growth and recent promotions on the team

Show candidates how they could advance their careers. Talented professionals tend to consider the long-term path. They have plans and goals for where they want to be five, ten or twenty years from now.

We’ve already discussed how an org chart shows candidates where they would fit into your company. But it can also show them where they might go in the future. The visual nature of an org chart makes it easy for them to see how they might progress through the hierarchy of your organization.

You’re not just offering them a job. You’re offering a career — one with ample opportunity for advancement. That kind of value proposition is bound to appeal to top talent.

Retention

Many recent hires find that the company culture they expected before joining doesn’t match reality. This misalignment can impact organizations: 32% of people who left jobs cited company culture as a reason behind their decision, according to a Jobvite study. This is why it's so important to portray your company culture as accurately as possible during the recruiting process.

Clearly and accurately describing the culture, beliefs and work style of your team will make future candidates feel more comfortable accepting an offer. Don’t make potential hires work too hard to figure out how it is like working on your team and how they can make an impact at the company.

When you’re honest about who you are as a team and have a team page that reflects the lived experiences of your employees, you'll naturally attract more informed candidates that are better long-term fits.

Pro-tip: use the insider experiences feature for your colleagues to share any tidbits or stories about their time working on your team.

Win business and new partnership opportunities

People and teams are the backbone of a business. Investors, clients or potential customers want to know more about the people they decide to work with. Help answer questions — like, “who are we working with? Who do we reach out to in different situations?” — ahead of time by including your org chart and team on a pitch deck, email or client page. Your org chart and teams pages become a source of truth both internally and externally and provide real-time insight into all parts of your company. Your people and client teams can be the deciding differentiator between winning or losing new business.

Later down the road, knowing more about the people you have worked with may deepen the relationship and foundation between the two companies.

Reduce the cost of hiring

According to LinkedIn, a strong employer brand can reduce an organization’s turnover by 28%, reduce hiring costs by 50% and yield 50% more qualified applicants.

Workers who said they had taken a job only to realize it's a bad fit said they noticed their mistake based on a toxic work culture (46%), boss's management style (40%), job didn't match what was described in the job listing and interviews (37%) and a lack of clear expectations around the role (33%).

Ensure smooth cross-functional collaboration

By filling out the team page, you can better collaborate with colleagues from around your own organization. We know how public org charts help clear up the bottlenecks and information gaps that often form in professional settings. The team function helps take your productivity one step further. In addition to getting to know who you work with and tracking down the right person to answer a question, the team function also helps lay out exactly how team members work best, what their priorities are and what tools they use on a daily basis.

Not only will you save time by getting answers on who to work with, but you’ll also set yourself up for successful internal partnerships.

How can you use it?

Here are a few ways in which our users successfully use the team page to convert candidates and help improve the candidate experience:

• Share your team page with candidates in outbound messages and emails
• Share the page ahead of an interview or as interview prep (works great in both an email or in a calendar invite!)
• Include your team in your email signature
• Show the team page during the interview
• Send a link to the team page in a follow up email after the interview
• Share the team page as part of the offer letter
• Show the team page during the interview