Would You Consider Hiring Teams Instead of Individuals?

The hiring process is time-consuming and expensive. It can take weeks, if not months, just to bring on one new hire—and there’s always the risk that person will not work out, and you’ll have to start all over again. Any time you’re bringing on someone new, it’s a difficult task to assess whether he or she will truly be a good fit within the organization. It’s tough to really get a feel for whether the individual will have the soft skills needed to succeed. Even in the best of cases, it still takes a lot of time to get the new person up to speed and interacting well with others.

These reasons are why some organizations are taking a new approach to hiring: they’re hiring entire teams together. Entire teams who already know one another apply as a group and are considered as a group. In theory, this approach means you’ll shorten the path to productivity because you’ll already have a group of people who have a track record of working well together.
Read on for more possible benefits from hiring teams.

Benefits to Hiring Teams

Here are some of the possible benefits from hiring teams:

• Collaboration is more of a given and less of a struggle. This is because there is less time required for the individuals to integrate with the team they’ll be most closely working with; they already know one another and know how to interact well together.
• Integration should be faster. It may be faster for the new hires to integrate into the organization, since they will already have a built-in support system in each other.
• New ideas can be highlighted, not hidden. The new hires are less likely to simply conform to the company culture, which can be a great thing. Conformity, which often occurs when individuals try to fit in to a new organization, often means suppressing individuality and new ideas, at least temporarily. By allowing individuals on the newly-hired team to have a built-in support group, they’re more likely to be more aggressive with new ideas—which is what many organizations want when bringing in fresh talent.
• You’ll be hiring a larger set of skills. Teams are more likely to have skill sets that complement one another, making up for shortfalls in any one individual.
• It can means less time to full productivity. Team members who have already worked together should feel more comfortable helping one another out and helping the whole team get to full productivity faster.
• It’s faster. If you’re looking to fill several positions, hiring a full team can solve the problem all at once. You’ll be interviewing and screening whole groups—which should take less time than filling the same roles individually. (That said, the interviews may still need to be 1:1, but you’ll have a whole group to talk with in a shorter time frame.)
• One soft skill is already accounted for: teamworking. It’s already known that this group has at least a decent ability to work well with others; this factor is notoriously difficult to interview for, and hiring the whole team is less risky in that regard.
• It may be easier to assess past successes. You’ll be able to easily see the results the team has accomplished. This is because it’s easier to prove or verify past accomplishments when an entire group of people can discuss their joint achievements. Their accomplishments are less subjective; you can get actual stats on what they’ve done as a group.
• You may be less likely to have interpersonal conflict. Since the team has already worked together, there’s less of a risk that interpersonal conflicts or clashing personalities will derail their ability to achieve results.
• You may end up improving diversity by getting an already diverse group. This is because there’s less chance of individual biases (on the hiring team) keeping specific people from advancing in the process. You’re likely to get groups applying who already have different types of applicants represented.

While this is a list of benefits, there are, of course, drawbacks as well. Come back for tomorrow’s Advisor to hear all about them.