Recruitment & Hiring

When you realize you need to hire a new employee, fill out the Request to Fill form in the HR ServiceNow Portal.    Once submitted, the request goes through a review and approval workflow before it is posted in the Harvard Careers portal. 

Once your request is approved, the job will be posted in the Harvard Careers portal and you will be sent a notification email with the requisition number.  Your Talent Acquisition Partner will contact you to schedule a meeting to review the job itself, sourcing strategies, candidate success criteria and establish an effective search process.

The Talent Acquisition Partner initially screens all applicant resumes and shares those that meet the basic qualifications and established criteria with you. You will access resumes directly in the Harvard Careers portal. Resume screening will be a continuous process as long as the job is actively posted. The Talent Acquisition Partner can conduct initial phone screen conversations to ensure that you are interviewing only viable candidates. 5-7 phone screens are recommended to narrow to 3-5 candidates to move forward to the interview stage. 

Your Talent Acquisition Partner can work with you on strategies to conduct an effective interview and provide resources to help you prepare, including sample interview questions. Keeping the candidate experience in mind and health and safety precautions, please aim to minimize the number of trips candidates need to make to campus during the interview process. Leveraging technology by conducting interviews via the Zoom platform in the first round is an excellent option, particularly for out of town candidates. As a best practice, we recommend interviewing 3-5 candidates during first round interviews, then narrowing to the strongest 1 or 2 finalists for the 2nd/final round interviews.

Once you have chosen a finalist, the Talent Acquisition Partner will collaborate to support your hiring decision. You may choose to request references before extending an offer or to extend an offer contingent on references.

Reference checks are conducted via SkillSurvey, a digital feedback tool. The SkillSurvey report includes both qualitative and quantitative data to support final decisions on moving forward with a hire. The typical turnaround from the time the candidate submits their references is 48 hours.  

As part of our inclusive hiring efforts, our best practice recommendation for reference checks is to conduct a SkillSurvey for your finalist. This is a data driven process that gathers both quantitative and qualitative information through a convenient, confidential, and anonymous (promoting more candid feedback) online survey.  The process not only streamlines efforts but also reduces unintended bias by ensuring all references are asked the same questions about skills and behaviors relevant to the job. You will receive an aggregated report of feedback from 4 references and the typical turnaround for results is just 48h from request.

All offers are to be made by the HLS Talent Acquisition team. Once the offer is accepted, the Talent Acquisition team will initiate the background check and reference checks. The team will also initiate the new hire’s onboarding tasks in the HR ServiceNow portal. New hires will receive a welcome email with their temporary login credentials, and the link to login to the HR portal. Once logged in, they may begin their onboarding tasks.

As the hiring manager, you will be copied on the offer letter email. Please be sure to review the offer letter. Once the new hire accepts their offer, you will also receive email notifications to complete onboarding tasks in the SNOW portal.