XO Group has been around for about 20 years, yet it has the energy and creativity you’d expect from a much younger company. As a public company with over 600 employees, XO Group has done an amazing job scaling quickly while maintaining a very open, collaborative, and innovative culture.

So at 600 people, how have they been able to maintain a collaborative recruiting culture?

The answer is simple. Hiring manager alignment.

XO Group relies heavily on its ability to enable, collaborate, and communicate seamlessly with hiring managers throughout the interview process. In order to scale the recruiting function, there were a few practices they implemented to ensure consistent hiring manager engagement and alignment around the hiring process.

Here are a few ways they stay aligned:

• Recruiters sit down with hiring managers and map out the hiring plan together before they start talking to any candidates
• Recruiting provides a scorecard and interview kit to hiring managers that include specific questions and attributes to cover in the interview
• Recruiters will prescreen candidates and @mention hiring managers they think would be interested in speaking with certain candidates
• They automate everything they can: task management, collaboration, candidate emails, and alerts around decision making
• They have a constant feedback loop with hiring managers– Not letting them see feedback from other interviewers until theirs has been submitted is a great motivator for getting feedback in quickly
• They leverage reporting tools to identify coaching opportunities for interviewers– and help improve the candidate experience

Xo Group ties performance reviews back to interview plans. If a candidates performs well (or poorly), the can see if they covered those areas in the interview process or not.

Drew Koloski says “The hiring managers like to use Greenhouse– they actually log in everyday, and it’s a big part of what they do at work. That is unbelieveable to me. That is something I’ve been waiting for as a talent acquisition leader for a really long time.”

Drew understands that a scalable talent operation is not a matter of having more recruiters, or doing more activities. It’s a matter of getting everyone on the same page and helping everyone at the company get better at recruiting. He’s focused on driving a recruiting culture at XO Group, and implementing recruiting optimization best practices like collaboration, communication and feedback to hire the best candidate, every time.

Learn more about XO Group's strategies and recruiting culture by watching the video.