Author: SourceBreaker

Interdepartmental Communication is just as crucial to the success of your recruiters as your company’s reputation is to your success; if your employees are comfortable communicating with colleagues across departments, you’ll soon be maximising productivity across the board.

What do we mean by interdepartmental communication?

In most organisations, it’s customary for employees to have some communication with colleagues in other departments but it can be rare for Heads of Departments to know everyone in the business – especially if you’re in a large company. However, there are many downsides to this.

.

Essentially, it’s crucial employees have contact with colleagues from all levels within the organisation and vice versa. This mutual knowledge can be particularly valuable when it comes to performance as employees who understand your expectations are more likely to meet them – and maybe even exceed them.

Benefits of Interdepartmental Communication in Recruitment

Flexibility is a highly valued trait within the organisation, leading to greater productivity and less absenteeism. If employees have the opportunity to learn from one another’s strengths and talents, they’re going to look for ways to better contribute to the team’s success.

.

As a result, you’ll find that, after a while, your entire team will become more productive and flexible. Not to mention, if there’s a massive performance slump, the team will be able to identify the problem quickly and find a way to improve, rather than sitting on their hands and hoping for the best.

.

But what are some other benefits we hear you ask?

Improved Recruiter Productivity

By helping your employees to know what everyone else is doing and making sure they’re communicating, you’re helping to streamline recruitment activities. If new employees have the benefit of learning from a colleague’s experience, they’re more likely to get on with the job – as well as be more productive.

.

Overall, encouraging your employees to communicate with one another leads to a happier workforce, a faster organisation, and a more creative environment.

Provides Value to Clients

Having a more responsive and efficient team can help achieve better results for your organisation and improve communications within your company which ultimately has knock-on benefits for your clients.

.

The hard work you put into encouraging communication will be repaid by their willingness to offer their own solutions rather than relying solely on you to solve their problems.

Promotes a Positive Culture

One of the best things you can do for your company is to ensure that your employees are happy and feel valued. You’ll soon find that they’ll work harder and more efficiently for you – not just because they like you, but because they know how much you value their efforts.

.

So do your employees a favour: encourage them to communicate with colleagues from other departments and help them feel appreciated. In turn, they’ll work harder and more efficiently for you – resulting in an increased revenue stream but more importantly, happy employees.

Ways to Promote Interdepartmental Communication at Your Company

You may be wondering how exactly you can promote interdepartmental communication; luckily for you, it’s not too hard and can be pretty fun!

Company Socials

Find a way to engage your employees in company activities. Whether you set up company socials or host an internal ‘get-together’, ensure that the company is involved, both on and off the premises.

.

If you go down the road of social media, why not have a company group chat and encourage team members to bond, praise one another, and be creative?

Employee Feedback

Every employee has the potential to offer feedback on a company’s initiatives – provided that it’s constructive and effective. By being transparent with your employees, you can cultivate trust and offer both positive and negative feedback in a manner that humanises management and aligns your goals.

What problems could a lack of interdepartmental communication create for your business?

A lack of communication is one of the most common causes of employee dissatisfaction but it doesn’t just affect individuals – it can cause difficulties for companies as a whole. For example, a lack of communication within your business can cause decision delays, waste, overheads, and missed opportunities.

What happens when we don’t communicate well enough with others?

Because a lack of communication can disrupt the workflow and flow of an organisation, it’s something that your business should be mindful of – both in how it communicates with employees and operates internally.

.

Some of the more obvious problems that stem from a lack of interdepartmental communication include:

1. Lack of Collaboration

Colleagues who don’t get along with their team members or don’t know them are less likely to contribute during meetings. In cases like this, you may miss out on new and innovative solutions to problems and have only a handful of perspectives on concerns as opposed to several.

2. Errors and Mistakes

Without constant communication and exchange of information, mistakes will happen more frequently and directly impact business. Prioritise keeping colleagues informed to ensure you mitigate the risks surrounding misinformation or lack of knowledge.

.

Another thing to remember is that human errors happen, it’s why there’s an entire term coined for it. Instead of promoting a culture where mistakes are feared, frame them as a learning experience for your employees to develop. This error management approach works to open the doors for collaborative troubleshooting and enables your team(s) to share knowledge at every turn.

3. Inefficiency

Poor communication can be another reason you have difficulty achieving efficiency and productivity across your business. If employees don’t have channels to discuss and explore their productivity in relation to everyone else, there is no sense of urgency, and complacency is more likely.

4. Lack of Community

Working alone or in small groups tends to create a bit of a clique, which can be awkward and unproductive to the larger team. Promoting socialising and team building is a great way to encourage employees to work well together.

Managing Internal Conflicts

Internal conflict is inevitable and can cause as much trouble for your employees as it does your business.

.

It can be good to have employees who can speak up for themselves when their opinions differ from those of their direct managers. However, if your employees feel uncomfortable bringing issues forward with their peers, this conflict can affect their work negatively.

.

When everyone feels uncomfortable raising an issue, no one does.

.

For this reason, encouraging interdepartmental communication is so important – it ensures that everyone understands what everyone else is doing and enables everyone to contribute better to the team.

Improving communication at your workplace

Interdepartmental communication is beneficial to your company in all areas. If you encourage communication and working together across your organisation, you’ll find that your company is more efficient, that your employees are happier, and that the business is more profitable.

.

So what are you waiting for?

.

Open those lines of communication further and find out how you could be maximising productivity!

TL;DR Key Takeaways

• Interdepartmental communication is essential for maximising productivity across the board as it helps employees understand expectations and work towards meeting them.
• Improved communication leads to a more flexible, productive, and creative work environment, reducing absenteeism, and providing value to clients.
• Promoting interdepartmental communication is easy and fun and can be done through social events, company group chats, and employee feedback.
• Lack of interdepartmental communication can cause employee dissatisfaction, decision delays, waste, overheads, missed opportunities, lack of collaboration, errors and mistakes, and inefficiency.
• Mistakes should be framed as a learning experience to develop employees and open doors for collaborative troubleshooting and knowledge sharing.

This isn’t an article to skip, especially not when it’s titled recruitment mistakes to avoid and that’s because high-quality recruitment is about more than just sending CVs and getting people into a client’s inbox. It’s about helping clients engage and onboard candidates successfully with a detailed and strategic approach to candidate qualification.

.

Get it wrong, and time and money leak through an agency’s processes.

.

Get it right, and consistent billing and reliable revenue follow.

Understanding Candidates is Crucial

The level of understanding a recruiter has of their candidates is often overlooked as a meaningful differentiator from the competition. Most recruiters think of ‘differentiators’ in terms of brand, pricing, resources or infrastructure.

.

On a personal level, they may consider market knowledge as a factor – how well they know their space, the companies, and the trends within it.

.

But they might not think about the relationships they have with each individual candidate – a ‘USP’ that’s unique to each and every recruitment process.

The Importance of Qualifying Candidates

Recruiters who learn the art of expertly qualifying and understanding candidates for each role or process build a sizable advantage over their competitors and add major value for their customers.

.

But correctly qualifying candidates for roles isn’t easy.

.

A lot of recruitment training places the emphasis on template-based interrogation of the candidate, focused heavily on vetting for hard skills in an assessment-style approach. While this ticks some important boxes, it leaves other critically essential areas untouched.

.

And getting candidate qualification right is as much about knowing what to avoid as it is about knowing where to concentrate.

3 Recruitment Mistakes to Avoid

Here are the three biggest mistakes recruiters make and why they’re so costly.

Unconscious Bias

Unconscious bias can kick in really quickly when looking at a CV or a LinkedIn profile. Often recruiters decide after a glance that a candidate is ‘perfect’ for what they’re looking for, and this can negatively impact the rest of the process – even if the candidate genuinely is a strong match.

.

By deciding preemptively that a candidate is a great fit, recruiters can slip up by spending less time than usual with them in initial qualifying calls – skipping over important vetting questions or leaving the candidate not feeling sufficiently invested to commit fully to the role.

.

What’s not covered early on due to a rush of enthusiasm (other interviews the candidate may have, notice periods, family situation, relocation etc.) can come back to haunt recruiters later down the line.

Not digging into true motivation

Understanding candidate motivation is commonly understood as ‘what someone wants.’ Better phrased, it’s about why they want what they want.

.

Knowing that a candidate wants a pay rise, for instance, with no knowledge of their circumstances, life goals, financial situation etc. is borderline useless information when working with that candidate throughout an interview process.

.

Understanding, instead, what that raise would mean for them, their ambitions or their family, adds vital context that hugely increases the depth of connection in subsequent conversations.

Ignoring early warning signs

Too often, recruiters get excited over a strong-looking CV and put their fingers in their ears when something starts alerting them that the process is at risk of collapse.

.

Candidates agreed reluctantly to having their CVs submitted, being slow in their responses, and not replying to emails or calls– all basic signals of a lack of commitment, which plenty of recruiters are happy to ignore in blind pursuit of hitting activity KPIs.

.

An increased level of discipline helps recruiters separate emotion and enthusiasm from the reality of the situation, making better decisions and driving better outcomes.

Best Practises when Qualifying Candidates

By re-framing candidate qualification as a true deep-dive process to understand candidates at a more meaningful level, and following a rigid process that doesn’t bend for even the best CV, recruiters gain a valuable new level of control over their operations and can better invest their time where the highest chances of deals are.

.

Preparing candidates for an interview is about more than just equipping them with information. The right approach helps proactively vet their readiness to interview and transforms consultants from recruiters to personal interview coaches.

Ineffective Candidate Interview Preparation

There are many reasons why candidate interview preparation can be ineffective.

.

Among others, these include:

.

Each of these issues can create serious problems later on in the process – although recruiters can check off ‘interview prep’ on their workflows, they haven’t necessarily increased their chances of making a placement. In some cases, they may have made them worse.

Perfecting the Candidate Interview Process

At its core, an interview is flawed before it even starts. It’s flawed as a concept. Why?

.

Because an interview doesn’t actually give someone the chance to show they are the best for the role, it gives them an opportunity to describe or articulate why they’re the best.

.

What this means for recruiters is simple – they need to coach and enable candidates to articulate their suitability.

.

For many candidates, this won’t come naturally and it won’t be obvious how to do it. Recruiters will need to work with them to help them highlight experience, quantify achievements and better showcase their abilities.

.

But it’s also important for candidates to show clients the match between their profiles and what the client is looking for.

.

Recruiters who fail to specifically prepare their candidates in this area are leaving too much to luck – knowing what the client wants and what the candidate has to offer, but trusting that the client independently will make that link.

.

Coaching candidates to not just articulate their suitability but explicitly match their profile with client needs dramatically increases the chances of a successful interview, as well as consolidating the sense of a mutual fit on the candidate’s side.

Optimising the Interview Process

Great interview preparation isn’t about recruiters sharing their information with the candidate.

.

It’s about allowing or giving candidates the space to show what they’re prepared already, and helping them to improve.

.

By bombarding candidates with ‘insight’ and failing to assess their readiness or how they present their suitability or differentiators, recruiters have no way of gauging how likely their candidates are to perform strongly in interviews.

.

Consequently, they’ve got little to no insight into their own deal pipeline and future revenue. Making the jump from recruiter to coach might feel daunting to some, but with the right foundations, it’s a game-changer for consultants operating at every level.

TL;DR Key Takeaways

.