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Great culture in corporate talent acquisition teams doesn’t just happen. It takes leadership and focus and investment.

With massive growth and constant change, culture has been hard to scale. As teams flex up and down, with hard-to-predict demands from the business, we — as TA leaders — need to put conscious effort into creating a strong team culture that can help anchor our team so they can thrive in any environment.

A recruiting team that scaled quite a bit in recent years is the one at Okta, a U.S.-based cloud software company. Brett Coin was Okta’s SVP of TA at the time and he grew the recruiting function more than 6x — from 27 people to 175 people over 3 1/2 years. My team got to partner with Brett, who invested in our Talent Advisor training, and we noticed something quite cool going on with his team.

People were happy. They were productive. They talked about being recognized for hard work and achievement — and not just individual achievements, but team achievements. They talked about helping to build Okta, which grew its employee base from about 1,600 to 6,000, and about building Okta’s TA function and culture. And much of this happened during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were remote and culture building was even harder.

I wanted to share some of what Brett did specifically within TA to build a healthy culture that achieved a ton of great results.

Culture needs to be in service to winning as a team while also helping individuals succeed

Brett was smart. When demand for recruiters was at its peak, he was posting photos and results that spoke to top TA folks. He was highlighting how his team was winning and how individuals were winning. All in a culture that was built by and for recruiters. And unlike some hardcore agency environments, where it’s recruiter vs. recruiter on the leaderboard, he created something where individuals and teams were winning — and the team wins were most important. 

“Some recruiters came out of agency roles and had that commission orientation,” Brett says. “They came from a hero culture that recognized and rewarded the individual recruiter in a very competitive environment. It can be hard to unwind that thinking. That can look like recruiters hoarding reqs and candidates — not sharing, not seeing a hire into the company as a team win. 

“I’ve realized in my years of TA leadership that the business doesn’t want a superstar recruiter who fills just one key req,” Brett adds. “They want a team of superstars who are filling all of the department’s reqs.” We have to ask ourselves as leaders, are we rewarding the right kind of behaviors when we elevate the superstar versus their peers versus focusing on the team win for the whole department?

Create a culture where team goals trump individual goals

Brett found that a key way to shift to a team focus was to move accountability for req allocation and department goals to the TA managers and to reward the whole team for hitting a department goal versus just rewarding the superstar individuals. 

“My TA managers were accountable for team goals,” Brett says. “That’s what I measured them on, and what they measured their recruiter teams on. So in this new model, a recruiter who hits their old target of let’s say 10 hires early in the quarter would move to a sourcing role to support their teammate who is only on track for seven hires for the quarter. 

“I wanted to build a team where recruiters were saying things like, ‘I know we’re behind by five fills for the quarter. Where and how can I help?’ I wanted our team to have a ‘win as a team’ mindset, and move away from just rewarding the individual recruiter who was hitting their numbers and maybe lacked an incentive to help the department and their team hit their overall goal.”

Brett believes it’s a false choice to say you have to choose between a culture that rewards individual performance or one that rewards team performance. “You can do both,” he says. “We did. It works.”

Rewards and recognition are key to creating a winning culture

Brett didn’t shift the culture single-handedly. He led many conversations with his teams as they were growing and getting hit with bigger and bigger hiring targets. He wanted and needed this culture shift to be developed for and by his team. Framing it up as a team win for TA and the business/department was key. And involving them in the recognition and rewards they’d get was important to making this stick.

What kind of recognition programs did his team come up with?

“We did all kinds of things,” Brett says. “We created a rotating Recruiting Cup that would move from team to team based on achievement of team goals. We shipped it around the country so people could show it off in Zoom meetings.

“We got the business to help fund a recruiting kickoff meeting — like a sales kickoff meeting — where we’d recognize individuals and teams. We created annual peer-to-peer rewards, such as a People’s Choice award, where a recruiter could recognize their teammates. We had all kinds of awards: the Learn It All award (as opposed to a ‘know it all’) for someone who developed their skills the most in an area; a Do the Right Thing award; a Rookie of the Year award; a Collaboration award.”

Brett says some of his recognition ideas came from the Talent Advisor training my team delivered to his team. “After your training,” he explains, “we changed up our hiring manager surveys to focus more on evaluating the team and also holding the hiring manager accountable. We wanted to reward the ‘hiring is a team sport’ mentality.”

Brett also understands the value of swag, and many times even inexpensive things become loaded with meaning and matter more than just cash. “We created a swag store,” Brett says, “sweatpants, winter beanies, trucker hats, and more. The idea was that if I’m in a meeting and I see a colleague demonstrating some of our core values, I can send an email to our group admin, and get that colleague a hat with a personal note. People loved these hats — some folks felt like they were knighted with these hats.”

It takes great partnerships with hiring managers to hire great quality talent, at scale, with a focus on diversity, in one of the most competitive markets in many recruiters’ careers. So, Brett’s team wisely recognized hiring managers too. 

“We gave our TA managers the ability to get our hiring managers swag too,” Brett says, “for things like doing a great job closing a tough candidate offer or consistently leveraging diverse sets of interview panelists. We even recognized some of our partners in HR and finance. When we got back to the office, I’d be walking down the hall and see an HRBP wearing a TA team T-shirt.”

Career development is also a powerful way to build a strong team culture

Brett wanted his team’s culture to be focused on team results but also feature rewards and development for individuals. He wasn’t selling just an opportunity to make an impact as a recruiter at another cloud software company. His pitch had more to it: Come here to grow, to develop, to get great training, to get mentoring, to elevate your craft, and to learn from a bunch of smart people who want to help you win in your job.

“We invested a lot in growing people,” Brett says. “We also hired your team at Recruiting Toolbox as outside experts to help us grow our skills and confidence, especially in the hiring manager facing parts of our jobs. I know that that investment mentality is what attracted a lot of people to our team and also allowed us to retain so many great recruiters.

“I told my TA leadership team that if we do our job right, we should be able to say, ‘I hope you stay with us, but if you decide to leave, you’ll find yourself more developed and maybe you’ll even play a mentor role at your next company.’”

The Okta TA team hit their hiring numbers and improved on other key metrics

Brett shared that once his team was aligned and performing, they hit their aggressive hiring goals eight out of nine quarters. They went from hiring 200 people a quarter to hiring over 800 a quarter. And, as Brett notes, they did more than just “put butts in seats.”  

“We started delivering on what the company needed,” Brett says, “not just delivering against our capacity-based goals.”

When our TA leader clients ask my team and me about hiring goals, we try to steer them away from just setting capacity-based goals (reqs/recruiter x number of recruiters = goals). Instead, we need to ensure that our published hiring goals align to the business goals. When the business is getting the talent they need, we’re winning. And let’s not forget about winning for candidates too. 

“We improved our candidate experience ratings (gathered with an onsite interview survey),” Brett says, “from a negative NPS to a positive 37, with some groups hitting NPS ratings in the 60s. We improved our offer accept rates significantly. And my team’s employee engagement scores were among the top five in the company — we achieved an 84 rating, which earned me an invitation to speak to other VPs across our org about how to create a great culture.”

Final thoughts: Don’t forget that hiring is a team sport

Brett suggests that a cultural overhaul starts by getting the TA leadership team together to define how they want to be seen by the rest of business. “Define your cultural norms,” he says, “with input from your individual recruiting team members, of course.”

Ask the business, Brett advises, to fund some of your results-focused rewards. “At Okta,” he says, “20 recruiters earned a three-day sales club–style trip for getting 200 roles filled. When I worked at Intuit, we had an engineering leader who needed 80 more hires outside of plan in six months. I worked with him to identify a special team reward in advance and when we hit the goal, we got the reward plus some personal recognition by him for people in my TA org and in his engineering org.”

I think this last point is so important. When I led all of tech recruiting at Amazon years ago, I’d regularly bring leaders into my staff meetings to talk about the context for our hiring targets and to recognize my team’s hard work. They’d help me give meaning to the work of recruiters. In turn, I’d show up to their staff meetings to recognize interviewers and hiring managers for generating referrals, volunteering to help with interviews, delivering top rated on-campus presentations, and closing tough-to-close candidates. (Check out more ideas here in our hiring manager maturity model and culture of recruiting best practices doc.)

Don’t lose sight of one of Brett’s core principles: Hiring is a team sport.

John Vlastelica is a former corporate recruiting leader turned consultant. He and his team at Recruiting Toolbox are hired by world-class companies to train hiring managers and recruiters and help raise the bar on who they hire and how they hire. If you’re seeking more best practices, check out the free resources for recruiters at TalentAdvisor.com, on recruiting from underrepresented groups at WidenTheAperture.com, and for recruiting leaders at RecruitingLeadership.com.

In October, John will be leading two workshops at Talent Connect 2023 on Working with Hiring Managers: How to Create a Culture of Recruiting Ownership.

John also encourages readers to dig into the insightful posts that Brett Coin publishes on his LinkedIn feed.

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