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!





