Hiring and recruiting: A case study
Partnering with Full Umbrella to provide full-support DEI hiring and recruiting support to an early-stage HR start-up
Read through this example to learn how we help clients build customized equitable hiring practices, and highly-qualified, diverse candidate pipelines.
The Client’s Challenge
An early-stage HR tech startup was navigating commonly-faced complexities while expanding their team:
No time to source or recruit candidates.
Misalignment within the team
Trouble defining the hiring criteria as needs evolved
Lack of demographic diversity in the candidate pipeline
Solving for the Hiring Bottlenecks
Step 1: Partner with Natania, DEI expert, to pilot a more equitable and efficient hiring process.
Natania guided the hiring manager through co-developing a new, scaleable evaluation process. This included:
Aligning all team members on the purpose of the role
Developing criteria/qualifications for the role
Figuring out how to evaluate for each qualification
Training interviewers to use the new process
Mediating discussions between team members who disagreed about candidates
“Natania was there to support and coach us on all aspects of hiring, and now I feel confident in knowing how to use these tools in the future to hire fairly, based candidates’ experiences and competencies. The process we built means we don’t hire or not hire anyone based on “vibes” or gut feelings, but rather by making strategic business decisions.”
DEI Search Strategy
Step 2: Partner with Full Umbrella Talent, a talent search firm, to recruit candidates.
The search begins! Once the interview and search criteria were in place, Full Umbrella Talent could efficiently find and interview a diverse range of candidates. Ultimately, this allowed for an intentional candidate experience and quick results in finding quality candidates who all self-identified into one of the client's diversity-add categories.
“We always distill back to qualifications for each candidate rather than rely on “culture fit,” but having the client (hiring manager) on board through their work with Natania gave us additional confidence that we could all adhere to an equitable and smooth process. The criteria they’d developed were thoughtful and easily actionable for us.”
The Results
Candidate placed and a challenging hiring cycle smoothed!
The client now uses their new hiring process for all of their open roles, since they find it eases the challenges they’d been regularly facing. As for the hired candidate, we’ll let them speak for themselves!
“I felt really connected to the entire process. Full Umbrella checked in with me very regularly, was really supportive, and would prep me and debrief with me. The interviews themselves were unlike any other interview process I’ve been through – the Hiring Manager was intentional and her questions aligned with what was important to me.”