Using Your Own Best Practices
Social recruiting is great. We love it. It’s a very powerful tool that has changed the way the talent acquisition process is handled. There’s a great line I’ve stolen from friend of the show, Jay Kuhns, to that regard:
A lot of companies recruit the same way Abe Lincoln did: Put an ad in the Gettysburg Post and wait… Maybe someone will call.
That kind of realization will make you sit up and take notice… and in the case of adding social media to our recruiting processes? Seems like it has.
And that’s why I think that talent acquisition has advanced faster than other areas of HR over the last few years; at least in terms of process documentation and improvements. They have taken notice. My suspicion behind the ‘why’ is that is has something to do with recruiting being the least active part of our profession. I know it sounds counterintuitive; but there it is. While the need to fill a role may be driven by another action; recruiters rarely face the challenge of a weeping employee or a manager with hair aflame demanding we fire someone RIGHT THIS SECOND!!! We generally get a little more time to listen, evaluate, plan and respond. Which ultimately means recruiting is an area much more agreeable to process design.
Some will get, without discussion, why process design matters in recruiting – they’ve lived through what happens when you don’t. For most, it’s an experience they don’t care to repeat. There are so many legal and compliance issues that line the path of talent acquisition, strong processes are required to ensure nothing important is missed and to prove you are giving everyone a fair chance. Big time stuff. So while perhaps not the most alluring discussion topic; the simple truth is that process documents are your best friends.
Can HR Learn From Recruiting?
Can the rest of our professional fraternity learn from this? Of course! Recruiters that have lived as part of a well-oiled machine know the power that comes from standardization, automation, integration and acceleration. Candidates who experience it know something is different; even if they can’t define exactly what “it”may be.
Building a Framework
So how do we leverage what recruiting knows in other areas? We’ve talked in the past about why a best practice is so tough to get right: It’s not about copying the practices; but instead about learning it well enough to recognize the concepts that are valuable to you. The same idea applies here. Just because your Organization is great at recruiting, doesn’t automatically make you good at retention (in fact, some could say the inverse is implied!). Even so, you can take a few ideas and apply them in orbiter functional areas.
Job Queues
One of the more interesting & effective changes I’ve seen in the last few years is the recognition that a limited number of resources cannot work on an infinite number of tasks without a loss in quality. This has brought about the wider use of job requisition queues; as a recruiter only has a limited number of jobs available for which to source. Ideally, no more are added until one is closed. If your team is running their workloads at 100% capacity and there are requests that at are aging beyond what the business has deemed an acceptable length of time? Then you know you are understaffed. It’s the classic ‘kanban system’ with a different twist.
Let’s think about how to leverage this in another area: How much training can one organization absorb? At what point does the cost of the time spent in classes and seminars overtake the value returned? You may have a “learning organization,” but in the end your goal is more than learning. In order to protect your business goals & positive ROI; you should know just how many training hours you can absorb before the productivity curve starts to drop and govern accordingly.
Service Level Agreements
Typically, when you think of “Service Level Agreements,” agencies & vendors come to mind. But, the mark of any well-organized recruiting function is a strong set of SLA documents. They explain up front who does what, how often, how fast, and for how much. No one in the process chain should have and doubts about what is expected and what will be delivered. Having them in place means phone calls and emails to check status are reduced; which means the recruiters are allowed to focus on… get this: recruiting.
In recruiting, we often say “Employees are our customers.” But once they join the organization; we tend to forget employees can be notoriously needy when it comes to certain issues, such as leave processing. With good reason, I would add: they’re complicated & often confusing. Too often our benefit processes are long chains of difficult to decipher rules and regulations. In our quest to be compliant and fair, the ‘customer’ gets lost in the shuffle. Think of the impact a well crafted SLA could have in this area: Your customer knows their needs will be met, by whom, on what schedule, and what the contingencies will be if anything goes off track. They know they will be taken care of; allowing you the space necessary to focus on doing it instead of fielding calls. Genius.
The key to this kind of thinking is to discover the repeatable processes in your Talent Acquisition functions (or others that may have latched onto these ideas). Get to know your internal strengths and the returns will be multiplied. Hopefully you have some great documented processes with which to start. If you don’t, however, speak up! There are plenty of people in your organization that can help & everyone in your organization can benefit.
Join us on Tuesday, May 15th at 4p PT | 6p CT | 7p ET as I join the #TalentNet crew (Matt Charney, Crystal Miller, Craig Fisher, and Marianthe Verver) to talk about how processes aren’t evil & can, in fact, make #SocialHR & Recruiting BETTER.
