One tech company is taking a different approach to hiring. sturti—Getty Images
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Many companies leave their recruiting to HR, where a single generalized team handles hiring for the entire organization. That allows a small group to have a birdseye view, streamline their process, ensure hiring practices stay in line with regulations, and make sure candidates are a good cultural fit. But one tech company has taken a different approach—they embedded recruiting into each department of their organization.
Verkada, a cloud-based tech security company founded in 2016 and valued at $3.5 billion with more than 1,700 full-time employees, started placing recruiters on individual teams early on, when it had under 100 employees. CEO Filip Kaliszan tells Fortune the move helped them quickly identify and recruit key talent needed to scale the business.
Each department has its own recruiters who work with them exclusively, allowing them to develop their own distinct recruiting strategies to “divide and conquer,” according to Kaliszan. For example, the engineering recruiting team hosts hackathons while the sales recruiting team hosts events at baseball games.
“I wanted to make sure that my head of sales can meet his hiring targets, and that has no bearing on engineering and vice versa,” says Kaliszan. The system allows recruiters to focus on their team’s specific talent needs and develop a granular hiring strategy that works best for that group.
Kelly Larson, who oversees hiring for Verkada’s engineering team, which hires an average 23 engineers per quarter, says the biggest benefit of having a close relationship with a specific department is that recruiters can better sell the company and role to job seekers.
Instead of “checking a couple of boxes and looking at logistics, we’re able to give a peek into what the culture is like, what the projects are like, because we spend all of our time with the engineers,” she says.
Larson says that approaching recruiting this way has also helped Verkada hire faster, and keep up with smaller startups that can usually hire more quickly. Kaliszan agrees.
“I attribute our ability to grow our talent at the rate that we have in part to this setup and system. That’s been probably the most positive outcome,” he says.
It’s important to note, however, that Verkada is still relatively small, without the headaches of recruiting for an organization with hundreds of thousands of employees. Larson says that her close relationship to company leadership allows her to act as a business partner and help ensure the recruiters who work under are delivering on the company’s overall strategy.
“There’s not a ton of layers in between who the decision makers are, and the ones who are actually going out and finding candidates,” she says.
Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion
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