Simplify and Speed Up Your Process
Recruiting is a wasteful process – filled with inefficiencies and administrivia. Using lean manufacturing concepts, waste is defined as any non-value-added process. Value-add means improving or moving a process to the next step with maximum speed and quality.
In recruiting, most processes are labor-intensive and time-consuming and lead to slowing the process rather than quickly moving a candidate along. We may feel that by moving slowly, we are being more careful in selecting candidates or more thorough in screening them, but there is no data to support those claims.
Improving our current process requires three steps:
1. The hunt for waste and its elimination.
Find all the steps that interfere with or slow the process of qualifying a candidate, helping the candidate get to know and understand the job, and making a hiring yes or no decision. We need to ask some tough questions: Where are the bottlenecks? Why do we do this step at all? What value does it add?
2. Understanding and eliminating variability in the recruiting process.
One of the core requirements for a lean process is consistency. To provide a consistent and seamless experience, the recruiter needs to know what causes variations and provide ways to reduce the variability or channel it to productive ends. Questions: Why did we take five days to hire one role and only two days to hire another? What is causing slowdowns?
2. Using technology to add efficiencies and consistency.
Are we using the tools we have effectively? Is one recruiter using a tool and another is not? Why?
Let’s look at each of these in greater detail.
Waste Elimination As we have just pointed out, recruiting is a wasteful process as it is commonly practiced. There are many non-value-added activities, including everything that has to do with handling data, scheduling and report writing, and much of the candidate and the hiring manager interface. Take a typical recruiting day. A recruiter may start her day by looking at an email or an ATS report and perhaps quickly scanning resumes that have accumulated overnight for the positions the recruiter has open.
A half-day or more may be taken up simply by scanning and screening emails and resumes, with no decisions being made and no candidate contact. The rest of the day may be taken up with phone screens for the few good candidates, many of who will turn out to be not so good, or in chats with hiring managers updating them on progress or querying them about the skills or background of a particular candidate.
There may be an interview or two or the need to meet a new hiring manager and determine the requirements for a new position. Out of all of these activities, only a tiny percentage is value-added.
Determining what adds value is one of the most challenging aspects of lean process improvement. Adding value in recruiting would be when you talk directly with a candidate to either close them or convince them to join your organization. Adding value is when you are directly conversing with a hiring manager about a candidate or a position. Value-added is when you are networking with potential candidates or communicating with candidates.
Waste occurs when you are doing data entry, filing, database searching, resume review, scheduling, and even some levels of interviewing where you are not a decision-maker. Waste also occurs when you have steps in your process that are redundant or unnecessary.
Lean processes are efficient, meaning they use the shortest time and resources possible.
Recruiting processes are filled with steps that do not necessarily lead to better or faster decisions. Law or corporate policy requires some steps, but many can be eliminated or shortened. The focus should be on determining the best theoretical cycle time – the minimum amount of time it would take for the perfect candidate to be identified and hired. If, for example, it were possible to identify and hire a person for a particular position in two days, given that everything went smoothly, all interviews took place efficiently, and so on, then that would be the cycle time you should aim to achieve regularly. You can then work backward and eliminate or reduce everything that gets in the way of achieving that.
Understanding Variability Recruiting is often cyclical. There are times when the demand for candidates is so high that every recruiter is frustrated, and other times when not much is happening. This is true of many functions, and one of the critical lessons of lean process improvement is understanding and leveling out these cycles or adapting to them.
One method is to use historical patterns to predict variability. It is common for organizations to have seasons when recruiting is very slow and others when things tend to pick up. As holiday sales increase, the retail world can safely predict a hiring “binge” every October and November. By using technology well, using resources in multiple ways, and by being able to reallocate resources quickly, it is possible to smooth out this variability and maintain low recruiter headcounts while still handling a high volume of candidates. Most recruiters could significantly increase candidate loads if they used technology better and eliminated waste, as we have defined it.
Remain Adaptable by Improving Processes and Applying Technology
Adapting to ever-changing customer demands and expectations – both those of candidates and hiring managers – is a skill we will all need in increasing amounts as we move into a renewed economy. Technology can help at every step. For example, social media can brand your organization, persuade and sell the organization to candidates, and screen candidates to a level where an investment of the recruiter’s time makes sense.
Technology can automate the scheduling and backend processes that are so wasteful in recruiting, and it can give the recruiter the freedom to be adaptable and move to areas that need attention while not being swamped with other activities. Every recruiting function could find steps in their processes that could be eliminated and procedures that could be streamlined or automated by technology. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit. I believe an average recruiting function could improve its capacity twofold and its candidate quality with a very tiny amount of technology and process improvement.
Applying these basic principles to your recruiting function can make you much more effective and improve candidate and hiring manager satisfaction.
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