LEAN, Just-in-time recruiting!

I found an excellent report on Lean (Toyota production Systems – TPS) by Wharton and the Boston Consulting Group called, “Rethinking Lean: Beyond the Shop Floor.”

It provides excellent examples of how you can apply the principles of waste elimination and process efficiency within service organizations (including healthcare and financial service industries). 

As I read the report, it became evident why implementing the principles of waste elimination, worker involvement and continuous improvement within the recruitment/hiring process can be so successful.  

While the principles of waste elimination, worker involvement and CI haven’t changed much since TPS was created 50 years ago the results are very impressive.

In January, we will discuss eliminating the “seven deadly sins of waste” in the recruitment process.

If you are interested in how we use the principles of lean, materials release planning, and supply chain optimization to answer the age old question, “What is the acceptable number of requisitions per recruiter?” check out our published white paper on the subject.

I hope you have a great “pre-holiday” week!

Some snippets that I found particularly interesting from the report are outlined below:

• “Do you understand your customer segments?” Can you serve the most valued customer more effectively?
• Companies should always begin their lean efforts by asking, “What are you trying to achieve?” “It doesn’t begin with a rule. And it’s not about isolating one piece of the business and deciding its fate.  It’s about rethinking every business process.” “It’s not about cost cutting across the board,” he says. “It’s about judicious investing. It’s not about starving. It’s about building muscle, trimming fat.”
• Many companies struggle to align lead times, inventory and other data to financial measures, even with performance metrics in place.  This is probably because they are not measuring the right things. Instead of coming to a better understanding of your organization and how to improve it, “Many die a death of a thousand metrics.”
• “When people think about lean, they often associate it with reducing the workforce,” Faber says, “But the cost is not in the line labor; it’s in the overhead.”
• A key part of Lean involves looking at the business differently. You need to have metrics on moving applicants through the staffing supply chain. That requires sourcers, recruiters, coordinators, HR business partners, and hiring managers engage in a collective dialogue around ensuring efficiency.
• In manufacturing no one sees how things get made. They probably don’t care. But in staffing/hiring – customers see the process and it is extremely personal.  So if your service doesn’t track customer dissatisfaction you might never know what people thing about your organization.
• Lean initiatives begin with identifying and standardizing a process. “Try to think of your business as repetitive. Once you have that identified – think of how long someone stays in that process, the waste being created, the dissatisfaction occurring, and the impact of that person staying in that process. Next, measure performance.
• TPS is a way of life. A continuous improvement process that never stops. TPS wasn’t implemented just once. Its constant improvement, constant innovation and constant elimination of extra steps. The most important principle is that this is not a four-month project. You will see benefits, but you must do it continually.
• Key principles of lean ask the following questions, “What is important? What matters to the customer? What delivers value?”
• Lean is not new or rocket science. It’s like your diet. You know what to eat and how much to eat but old habits are hard to break. That is why behavior modification, measurement, accountability, training is so important.
• “Lean works best as a balanced top-down and bottom-up effort.” Christian Terwiesch, a Wharton professor, remembers trying to talk with hospitals about lean initiatives several years ago. “They thought I was evil. They said ‘We’re doctors. We help people.’ Now these same institutions have chief medical officers saying, ‘We want to run this place like Toyota!’”

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 11:23 am and is filed under Bradley Savoy, David, David Szary, Elite Recruiters, Just-In-Time hiring, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Training, Strategic Business Partner, Talent Aquisition, Time Management, Transactional Recruiter, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.