LEAN, Just-in-Time Recruiting!



Archive for September, 2010

Managing Your Hiring Managers, Part One

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

I’d like to share some highlights from my recent presentation at one of our local SHRM chapters, “How to Manage Your Hiring Managers”.

The most important thing to remember is you need to understand what your hiring managers want! You can’t manage a relationship if you don’t know what your customer wants or expects.  Below are some good questions to keep in mind:

  • What are your hiring managers’ business goals?
  • What are their challenges?
  • What are their business drivers? 
  • How does your department help your hiring managers achieve their goals? 
  • Can you show alignment to these goals? 

As we approach the end of the year and start to plan for the New Year the above questions can be used to help guide you and your hiring managers’ planning discussion for 2011.  Be sure to capture and review the “wants/expectations” with your hiring managers on a regular basis to make sure you are on track and nothing has changed. This relates to one of the topics explored during last week’s webinar on planning for 2011.  If you are interested in getting a copy, please email us.

Another great way to assess the needs of your hiring managers is by analyzing the “Voice of the Customer”. This can be achieved by using a variety of tools such as; surveys, polls, and focus groups.  However, it’s always important to consider: 

  • What is your customer’s expectation throughout the process ranked by importance?  (See illustration below)
  • How does your customer rate their experience?

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Once you’ve gathered this data, you’re now armed with the information you need to address your hiring manager’s needs. You’ll be able to add this metric to your talent management dashboard under Quality.  This is commonly referred to as Hiring Manager Satisfaction. 

In the next posting we’ll focus on building credibility with your hiring managers, and close with how to effectively manage those relationships.

If you’d like to see some examples of the tools we use to gather “Voice of the Customer”, please contact me.

Posted in Bradley Savoy, Elite Recruiters, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Managing Your Hiring Manager, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Strategic Business Partner, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Compelling Time to Fill (TTF) data — It can be misleading

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

In a recent blogcast, (Time to Fill – Are You Managing A Key Metric You Are Measured On?), we discuss how time to fill can be misleading and . . . not a good indicator of hiring manager satisfaction and overall “responsiveness” to the truly critical hiring needs of the organization.

While most organizations might be able to track TTF by job category, they only report the overall average to key stakeholders. Unfortunately, this statistic becomes a “blended” rate of all positions regardless of priority, cost of vacancy, criticality to organization, difficulty to fill, etc.

And if an organization is not structured to truly support priority, critical to fill, or difficult to fill positions, there often is a big gap with respect to TTF between what we call Business As Usual Req’s – (AKA – BAU’s – repetitive positions that most often are filled by active, internal or referral candidates) and  priority/critical/difficult to fill ones. 

Some very intriguing data from one of our healthcare clients illustrates this point.

While there overall TTF for Q2 was 33 days (very, very good especially compared to our benchmark median of 41 days.

  • 300 positions were filled in an average of 23 days
  • While 49 positions took on average 89 days to fill!

This provokes the questions:

  • Do you have the right organizational structure to support BAU and priority/critical/difficult to fill positions?
  • Do you have the right process to support these distinctly different types of positions?
  • Do you have the right resources to effectively screen through the active pool of candidates while proactively sourcing top talent not found in those circles?

If you haven’t done so recently, I would slice your TTF data by BAU and priority/critical/difficult to fill categories and analyze how well you are performing. 

If your data is similar to the organization outlined above, then seek to develop strategies, processes, etc. to improve timeliness on the positions most critical to your organization!

I hope you’re having a good week. 

Posted in David, David Szary, Elite Recruiters, Just-In-Time hiring, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Boot Camp, Recruiter Sales, Recruiter Top Gun, Recruiter Training, Recruiting Buzz, Sourcing, Strategic Business Partner, Talent Aquisition, Time to Fill, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Value Stream Mapping — Eye Opening Exercise!

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Over the last two weeks, I have facilitated Value Stream Mapping exercises (a Lean Principle) with two recruitment organizations.  If you have not participated in one of these before (a Lean Principle), the goal is to analyze a process (in this case, the recruitment/hiring process) and identify:

  • Process Time (AKA – Value Added Time)
  • Delay Time (AKA – Non value added Time)

Examples of processing time would be performing an intake session and/or phone interview, i.e., the time you spend actually processing the “candidate”.  Wait time examples include waiting for candidates to call you back from an interview, waiting for a background check to clear or the most popular – - waiting for a manager to make a decision on interviewing a candidate, making an offer, etc.!

When you go through this tedious process (it is really tedious but . . . well worth the effort), it is amazing how little time we spend processing candidates and how much time we spend WAITING.

For this one particular healthcare organization, their average time to fill is pretty darn good for their hiring volume (38 days). As we analyzed their process using the value stream mapping methodology we found:

  • Total Process time – Low end: 8.5 hours – High end: 3.83 days (most of the difference was associated with sourcing for difficult to fill positions).
  • Total Delay time – Low end: 12.33 days – High end: 195 days!  (this was mostly attributed to difficulty in finding quality candidates, hiring managers not making a decision, relocation issues, etc.)
  • Average Lead time (Process + Delay time) = 38 days (start to acceptance)

Once we identified current state process and delay times for each step, the team started to come up with solutions to eliminate waste. It was amazing to hear some of the easy to implement, no cost solutions they identified! 

Whenever I facilitate this exercise, I am amazed at:

  • How much wait time “waste” is in our staffing process?
  • How we can, through a simple exercise, identify no/low cost waste to reduce wait time and ultimately . . . Time to Fill.
  • How much we often focus on the processes for “improvement” rather than eliminating waste for improvement.

If you would like more information about how we can assist your team in performing a value stream mapping exercise on your staffing process and share some best practices, let us know.

If you haven’t done this, and/or haven’t done one in a while, it is a worthwhile exercise as we prepare for 2011.

Hope you are having a good day!

Posted in David, David Szary, Elite Recruiters, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Training, Strategic Business Partner, Talent Aquisition, Uncategorized, Value Stream Mapping | No Comments »

Data Integrity — It is all about Education, Accountability and Visibility

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

As most of you know, we have just concluded a Healthcare Recruitment Metrics Benchmark Study highlighting key metrics relevant to a Lean, Just-in-Time recruitment strategy.  As expected, since many of the key data points relied on humans to enter and validate the data, most of the participants struggled to reconcile and validate that their data was accurate.   Those challenged by data integrity (or lack thereof), spent countless hours auditing the data to ensure it was accurate.

Of course the only way to ‘nip this issue in the bud’ is to ensure that the data is accurate at the transactional level, hence the often used IT cliché – - Garbage in, Garbage out! 

While I know this is not a profound revelation, why do most organizations still struggle to capture accurate recruitment metrics?

From my experience, the root of the issue is three-fold:

  1. Educational – Key staff members must understand the importance of capturing accurate data and what POSITIVE things result from ensuring the data is accurate.  It is only when you answer the question – What is in it for me? – that you typically start to see improvements in data integrity.  Some of the POSITIVE results of capturing clean data:
    • Enables the organization to develop performance improvement initiatives to save their organization time, money, and allow the teams to get more done in LESS TIME.
    • Allows the team to be able to quantify the ROI of their services to the organization.  Makes us look good! :)
    • Quantifies the amount of work they actually perform!   
  1. Accountability – While I like to point out the POSITIVE reasons of capturing clean data, at the end of the day the recruiters need to be held accountable and measured on their ability to perform this task.  I recommend that recruiters do a quarterly ‘self-analysis’ by reviewing their own data/metrics.  Holding them accountable to this activity is a great way to clean up your data at the source!  Some of the best in class organizations we work with instill an “audit” at the requisition close stage – before a req is closed, the recruiter goes back to ensure that all data is entered accurately in the system. 
  2. Visibility – I am a big believer in making your metrics “public”.  All your customers should see your overall team metrics (have trend charts posted in a visible area in your office).  All recruiter metrics should be public to the recruitment team.  Typically the only folks that do not like to make their metrics public are . . . the ones that are not producing or don’t have clean data!

If you are struggling to capture clean data, I would make sure your team understands why it’s important and put a system in place to ensure accuracy. From experience working with our clients, you will see immediate improvements in data during the first 90 days!

I hope you have a good “back to school” week!

Posted in David, David Szary, Elite Recruiters, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Boot Camp, Recruiter Training, Strategic Business Partner, Talent Aquisition | No Comments »

Who Is Blitzing?

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

In a recent blogcast , we talked about injecting some fun into sourcing for top talent.  Well, our team took it to heart and . . . over the last 4 weeks committed to having some fun while getting in dedicated sourcing time.  

As outlined in the blog, folks could ‘opt’ into 3 daily sourcing sessions (7:30 to 8:30, 11-12 and 4-5).  These times were selected based on thier experience of catching people live during those times.

During the first week, to check out who was going to attend a session, someone would send out an email – Who’s Blitzing!? (as in call blitz).  The folks who were doing to participate would quickly shoot back an email confirming participation. 

Over the course of the month, it was amazing to see these sessions ‘take off’ three times a day.  Most importantly, it was great to see how this ‘fun’ challenge drove some very positive behaviors including:

  1. Folks scheduling in sourcing time BEFORE other activities like interviews, meetings, etc. which is a key principle of our Perfect Week, Perfect Day Time Management methodology.
  2. Folks being prepared for each call session with enough names for the blitz.  This usually meant 2-3 hours of sourcing ‘research’ time to set up these call sessions. Again, another positive outcome of the challenge.
  3. Motivation – Everyone that has participated clearly agreed it increased the quality of sourcing time!  The 7:30 to 8:30 and 4-5 time slots were very productive and before this event . . . those call times were a hit or miss for the team.  Some would get hit and some would be missed.  Moving forward – - it will now become part of their routine.   
  4. Folks are seeing the benefits from this hard work!

Most importantly, everyone has seen increased candidate flow to some very difficult to fill positions during the month that often brings luke warm ‘effort’ as folks seek to enjoy the end of the summer!

I encourage you all to consider injecting some fun into your sourcing routine as we head into the last “official” week of the summer!

Have a great holiday weekend.

Posted in Changing Role of the Recruiter, David, David Szary, Elite Recruiters, LEAN recruitment, Lean Human Capital, Recruiter, Recruiter Academy, Recruiter Training, Sourcing, Time Management, Uncategorized | No Comments »