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Archive for the ‘LEAN recruitment’ Category

Jump Starting Your LinkedIn Network

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

At our Sister Company – - The RIO Group – - they like to have friendly competitions to bring fun/play to the work place (think FISH Philosophy!) and find/hire more quality people! :)

One contest they had recently was around “Growing your LinkedIn network”. Of course the value of growing your network is to gain access to the 120 million + (and growing) community.

During a recent meeting they were discussing how it was progressing and . . . one of RIO’s finest (Nicole) mentioned she had just jumped her network by over 800 contacts!

For most folks, this is a phenomenal ‘net growth’ in LI contacts in a short period of time. This spurred a ‘best practices’ discussion on growing your network.

Mike McLean (http://www.linkedin.com/in/mikepmclean), thanks for taking the time to consolidate the ideas you and the team had around this topic (see below)!

I hope everyone has a Perfect Day!

________________________________________

David -

Here are some of the top suggestions that were shared (thanks Nicole, Karen and Yvonne!).

If you have any questions – let me know. Mike

  • If you don’t know what a LinkedIn LION is . . . read the Wikipedia link for LION. This explains what a LinkedIn Open Networker (LION) is.
    • Anytime you see a profile with the following in their title – - LION, EMAIL ADRESS, A NUMBER SUCH AS 14,000+, A LION as a profile picture, etc – - -or on their page I would link with them! They are open networkers!
  • Here are some groups you can join that are loaded with Super Users!! All these folks “are open networkers”…
    • Members (123,300) TopLinked.com – I recommend signing up both within LinkedIn and also on their website. If you go to the website you can gain access for FREE to spreadsheets that have the contact information to close to 2000 Open Networkers. From these spreadsheets you can upload and send requests to link in. You can also pay a nominal fee to be added to the list.
    • Members (60,000+) OpenNetworker.com: part of TopLinked.com.
    • There are other groups that may also be more relevant to your industry so make sure to do a search under the Groups directory section and join.
  • When you have a candidate whether from Monster or LinkedIn or other sources, check to see if they have a Linkedin profile and have them connect with you. This does two things:
    • It keeps the candidate as part of your connections and if they leave their current firm or post they are now looking you know they are open game.
    • It connects you with co-workers of their past and present employers (easy to see the value in that!).
  • On your home page, in the upper right side, you’ll see an area called “people you might know.” Click on the See More. Linkedin provides an endless list of people related to you by keywords in your profile and their profiles. You can request to connect with people right from there.
  • Remember to diversify your group. Look for at least 1 person from every target company you have or link into a special Group that is for that skill set to get a good mix of professionals. The Open networkers group will always help put someone above the mark.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but it is a great starting point if you are looking to grow your network quickly with Super Users and/or folks within your industry disciplines.

If you would like to start growing your network feel free to LinkIn with me :) (Mike M).

How Does Your Email Look on a Prospect’s Phone!?

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

Given the fact that a majority of people:

  • Don’t pick up the phone unless they recognize the phone # (myself included :( ).
  • Are addicted to their mobile media device (aka – smart phone)!

I would bet a good majority of your candidate prospects are receiving your “first contact” on their smart phone while at their desk, sitting in a meeting, at the coffee shop, etc. 

During a session on Monday, I received a great question from Ryan that honestly . . . I haven’t spent a ton of time researching.

“When sending an “Attention Grabber” email (Crafting and Delivering an “Attention Grabber”), how does it look when it is displayed on your mobile phone?”

My colleague (and our self-proclaimed resident “recruiting geek”), Mike McLean, had some excellent advice that I thought I would share with you all:

That is a great question. Having a uniform email that will display exactly the same on all smart phones would be extremely difficult (due to personal configurations, overrides, system setup/parameters, etc.). But there are a few things you can do to ensure that your emails will look the same to as many folks as possible: 

  1. Write all of your emails in Arial.  Arial is the default font for most applications and most people don’t change their settings off of it.   The 2nd most popular is Tahoma but not as many applications use it as a default.
  2. Compose your emails in Rich Text Format (also known as RTF) or HTML not text. RTF is the most common language used in word processing software so this will cause the least amount of issues.  If you are sending an email as HTML it is being sent just as it would present/look on a Webpage whereas if using RTF your email would look the same whether it was an email, word doc or webpage etc.  This means that an email in RTF is less likely to have its formatting changed when being read on different formats.
  3. Always send a test email to yourself and check it on your phone as well.

If you have any other great advice to share on this topic, please let me know!

Another Approach to Recruitment Resource Planning!

Friday, August 5th, 2011

For those that follow us, you know we are not fans of the “Requisitions per Recruiter” formula used for recruitment resource planning.

Our reasons include:

  1. It doesn’t take into consideration hiring demand/workforce planning (IE – what types of people do you need? How many? When? ).
  2. It doesn’t factor in the amount of time to source/find candidates to fill difficult/critical/visible positions.
  3. It doesn’t factor in staffing supply chain efficiency (IE – how many applicants must be dispostioned? how many candidates must be routed to the hiring manager to fill a position)? 

Our more advanced resource planning methodology is aligned with Materials Release Planning (MRP) methodology that has been used in JIT production manufacturing environments for years. 

We wrote an article on this subject that you might want to check out .

Ultimately, we believe that you should use this methodology for recruitment resource planning BUT . . . .you must have accurate process efficiency metrics for it to be a useful tool. 

If you have those metrics, we can assist in your planning efforts. Contact us.

If you are working towards developing the systems, ATS status codes and reporting required to use this methodology :) . . . another simple solution is utilizing your Annual Recruiter Productivity Metric. 

This is a simple calculation: 

# of positions filled (internal & external) / # of recruiter FTE

In our Healthcare Recruitment Metrics Benchmark Study, the Mean productivity per recruiter was: 243 positions filled per recruiter (over 100 healthcare systems are participating)!

 

Mean

25th Percentile

50th Percentile

75th Percentile

Total Positions filled /Total # of FTE Recruiters

243

135

208

294

 

So if you know historically that a recruiter can fill 243 positions a year. And FY2012 hiring demand is 2543 positions filled.  You would need 10.46 FTE recruiters to meet hiring demand. 

Now I know this is a fairly simplistic model that doesn’t take many things into consideration (including those outlined above) BUT . . . if you do not have the metrics required to migrate to staffing supply chain model, I would encourage you to consider this method OVER “req’s per recruiter” (which I still don’t understand how it works :) ).

Have a great week

3 Tips to Deal with an Urgent Request

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

In the world of recruiting and HR, it seems that everything is portrayed as urgent requiring an immediate response, as though we’re living in a constant state of emergency! We’re under siege from a constant stream of urgent requests from internal business partners. For example, a talent acquisition manager of one of our clients recently shared that much of her time, and that of her people, was spent responding to “urgent” questions or issues from internal business partners, rather than managing the business of talent acquisition – sound familiar?

In reality, what is often labeled “urgent” simply is not. But because we live in the age of smart phones, everyone assumes we’re available 24/7.  So as we all know, people sit in meetings tapping away at their mobile devices and catch up on phone calls while walking to and from the bathroom. In some ways, technology has turned us into rapid-response junkies.

One of the most difficult aspects of this rapid-response culture is figuring out how to respond appropriately to clients and customers. On one hand, we know that our customers expect and value responsiveness, which we want to provide. On the other hand, not every request needs an instant response. In fact, doing so too often will not only reinforce the customer’s expectation of rapid-response on everything, but also might not always yield the best results.

So the next time you get that email with the little red exclamation point or the voicemail at 10 PM, try these three tips for determining how to respond:

  1. Don’t assume urgent means right now. Talk with your boss or your customer about what he/she wants to accomplish and when it’s really needed. His/her interpretation of “immediately” may be different than yours.
  2. Respond, but don’t necessarily act. Sometimes a client or colleague wants you to commit right away to a plan of action, but doesn’t need more than that in the short term. Explain what you will do and your intended timeline to be sure that meets his/her needs.
  3. Be prepared to say no. At times, you need to discern between a true crisis and a cry of wolf. Even if your customer thinks he needs it right now, it may be best to decline.

Have a great week!

Should You Keep Hiring Managers Waiting?

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

I read the Harvard Business Review www.hbr.org as often as I can.  We apply many of their concepts here at Lean.  This recent article caught my eye.  It ties in nicely to the approach we take with Hiring Managers regarding Service Level Agreements.

“Think Customers Hate Waiting?

How often have you found yourself staring at your computer screen as a progress bar tracks the machine’s fitful loading of an application or completion of a search and wondered, “What’s taking so long?” Good managers worry about wait time because a great deal of evidence (not to mention common sense) suggests that reducing it can increase customer satisfaction. Our research, however, demonstrates that a different approach — simply showing people what is taking so long — gets better results. Customers find waiting more tolerable when they can see the work being done on their behalf — and they tend to value the service more.

This holds true even when what’s shown is merely the appearance of effort. What we term the labor illusion — a demonstration of effort, whether literal or not, expended to meet the customer’s request — can be so effective, in fact, that many customers who endure waits but see a running tally of tasks end up happier than those who don’t have to wait at all. People even prefer waiting with the labor illusion to playing an interactive game of tic-tac-toe.

In one experiment we conducted, participants searched on a simulated travel Web site for a flight. Some watched the typical boring progress bar. Others could see each airline being canvassed. The second service received higher ratings, even when those using it were forced to wait for as long as a minute. In another experiment, each participant booked the same trip through two different sites and received identical results. One site delivered the results instantly but invisibly, whereas the other took either 30 or 60 seconds but showed the labor being done. A majority preferred the transparent — and slower — site.

Many of us have already experienced the labor illusion online: The travel Web site Kayak, for example, shows customers each airline it searches. We’ll increasingly encounter it in other environments as well. Apple recently augmented its automated voice response system with the prerecorded sound of typing, creating the impression that the digital operator is physically keying in the caller’s query. ATMs at the Spanish bank BBVA show an animation of bills being counted as customers wait for the machines to spit out their cash. The U.S. Postal Service has installed screens that show customers each step being taken by the postal worker who is helping them. Starbucks now requires that baristas steam milk for each drink individually — a process that increases wait time but allows customers to see what’s going on.

Transparency has long been heralded as a virtue in accounting and public relations. Our research suggests that operations can reap important bottom-line benefits from it as well.”

As we’ve discussed in our previous posts on Managing your Hiring Managers  and Mission Health System’s Lean Journey using a Service Level Agreement can improve customer satisfaction by communicating a number of actions that are occurring during the recruiting life cycle. 

Most relevant to Hiring Managers is communication about what is happening at each stage of the lifecycle and how much time each step usually takes.  The Service Level Agreement will outline this to both parties.  Hiring Managers will know, for instance, that in the first 10 days of a requisition being opened, Recruiting is sourcing and screening resumes to then forward along to them. 

If Recruiting is using SLA’s often enough Hiring Managers become aware of what’s taking place, and by whom, at any given time in the process. The relationship between Hiring Manager and Recruiting immediately improves  simply because they know there is effort taking place on their behalf, even if Hiring Managers cannot physically see it!

If you’d like to learn more about Service Level Agreements and how you can apply them to your organization please contact us.

Have a great week!

Overall Average Time to Fill Metric – Does it Really Capture What is Going on?

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

One of the most compelling things we identified from our inaugural Healthcare Recruitment Benchmark Study was related to time to fill (TTF).  We first reported on this back in November, 2010.

The data clearly demonstrated that average TTF does not represent what is actually going on with respect to staffing performance.  

For most organizations, it showed that roughly 75-80% of the positions were being filled very quickly (20-30 days) while the other 20-25% of the positions were being filled in 90-100+ days! 

Conclusion:

Recruitment organizations are designed (and excel) at filling what we call “business as usual” req’s with internal/referral/active candidates.  However, they struggle to fill “critical/difficult/visible” req’s that typically require a more proactive, aggressive sourcing strategy (targeting passive candidates). 

Based on these findings, we added the following TTF related questions to our study:

  • Number of positions filled in less than 60 days
  • Ave TTF for positions filled in less than 60 days
  • Number of positions filled in 60 or more days
  • Ave TTF for positions filled in 60 or more days

Of our Benchmark Study respondents so far, the data continues to support what we initially found:

  • % of positions filled in less than 60 days:  73%
  • Ave TTF for positions filled in less than 60 days:  23 days
  • % of positions filled in 60 days or more:  27%
  • Ave TTF for positions filled in 60 days or more:  113 days

If you do not currently measure TTF thru this lens, we encourage you to do so!

It will help you:

  • Understand how you’re currently performing with respect to time
  • Provide clarity around staffing/sourcing priorities
  • Provide guidance around developing a staffing model that will help you reduce TTF for critical/difficult/visible positions.

If you’re interested in participating in our Healthcare Recruitment Benchmark Study please contact us.

I hope you’re having a perfect day!

A Perfect Week, The Perfect Day

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

Many of you are familiar with me as the Director of Marketing at LEAN Human Capital.  But I spent many years as an Executive Recruiter.  During that time, I had the privilege of working with David Szary and was exposed to a lot of best practices in recruiting. One of the most valuable lessons I learned, and thankfully early on, was how to manage my time!  Our entire team utilized a very effective time management tool called “A Perfect Week, The Perfect Day”.

Recently, I sat in on LEAN Human Capital’s recruitment educational session dedicated to this topic and was inspired by this time management tool all over again! 

 A Perfect Week, The Perfect Day

Note:  Be sure and check out this contest winning short video dedicated to “A Perfect Week, The Perfect Day”! To view the video click here.

“A Perfect Week, The Perfect Day” routine helps you set a strategic course for the week yet still allows for changes.  The most important element involved is dedicating time each day for planning!  Ideally this should take place at the very beginning of your day or the end of your day. 

Step #1 – Prioritize

The first thing to consider is the nature of the activity at hand.  Is it a “Billable” activity or “Non-billable” activity?  Of course, everything a recruiter does collectively contributes to achieving his/her goals.  But some activities relate directly to filling positions (“Billable”) and others do not (“Non-billable”). 

Examples of Billable Activities:
Qualifying requisitions
Prospecting
Interviewing
Extending offers

Examples of Non-billable Activities:
Data entry
Paperwork
Department meetings
Training

Step #2 – Schedule your activities into a Time Based Plan based on their priority (Billable or Non-billable):

Most people manage their schedule by using Outlook or some other online scheduling system along with a “To Do” list.  Most of the action items are not sequenced in order of priority and most people don’t embed them into their daily schedule.  Time based planning assigns a specific time to each of the items on your “To Do” list based on their priority.  Rather than having my day scheduled and then trying to map my “To Do” list to it, the two are embedded together!

The above steps are just the basics.  We offer a full module dedicated to “A Perfect Week, The Perfect Day” as part of our Lean Human Capital Recruiter Certification Program. Our next public class is scheduled to begin on September 27th.  If you’re interested in learning more about the program please contact me.

If you’d like to see an example of the template we use to create our “Perfect Week/Perfect Day” please contact me.

I hope you’re having a perfect day!

Just in Time Hiring – Is It a Dream?

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Building candidate pipelines to migrate towards JIT hiring has been talked about for years with little to no progress towards a solution.

From all the benchmark data I have seen (including our recent Healthcare Recruitment Benchmark Study), most organizations have time-to-fill metrics that hover between 25-90 days+ depending on the type of position they are trying to fill.   While most discussions around this topic focus on the challenges of pulling off this feat, I want to discuss some pragmatic solutions that are realistic and achievable to implement.

  • Develop a hiring forecast in advance of need – I think we are missing the boat on this one.  While everyone is working on very complex workforce planning models (I’m not saying stop doing this – - I still think this is a worthwhile activity), most every organization I know of:
    • Has a budget headcount forecast
    • Tracks employee turnover
    • Can predict (to some degree of certainty) headcount needs related to new business growth 90+ days out.
    • Can identify employees that are flight risks, on the fast track to be promoted, or about to retire

This data will allow you to predict hiring needs with a variance of say 10% +/-.  Is it perfect? No. Will it give you a road map of what you need to recruit for 90 days out. . . Heck ya!

  • Identify the resources required to develop candidate pipelines to meet hiring needs.  In manufacturing, this is called Materials Release Planning.  Based on your process (and efficiency flows, time/resources required at each step, etc.) – you can identify the resources required to meet hiring demand throughout the ‘Staffing Supply Chain’.  Richard Newsome provides a glimpse of this in his recent article.  I have been using a more complex model with recruitment organizations for years!
  • Get Leadership to hold hiring managers accountable for time to fill.  Over the last 2 months, I have performed value stream mapping exercises with 7 recruitment organizations.  On average, less than 10% of the total time to fill was ‘processing candidates’.  90% of the time was ‘wait/delay’ time between processes.  Of the wait time, over 50% was directly caused by managers (I know you are shocked with these findings) sitting on resumes, not making decisions, ‘waiting’ for a purple squirrel candidate, etc. 

If managers were/are held accountable, you can expect to reduce TTF by 30-50%.  PS – I know this idea is probably the toughest to get implemented.

  • Have dedicated sourcers for Critical/Difficult/Visible (CDV) positions – I know this is not a new concept but . . . it works :) .  Most everyone underestimates how much time (sourcing) it takes to identify and recruit for these positions (no matter how savvy you are).  I would invest in doing a pure time study to understand how much time it takes to ‘source’ a candidate for each of your critical job categories.  Then you can truly identify how many resources you need to support hiring demand (again – check out Richard’s article ).

For many of you, these are not profound ideas and/or thoughts.  For some of you, you’ve probably implemented a few of these ideas with some level of success. 

So why are most organizations struggling to migrate to a JIT hiring solution?

  • We are not managing customer expectations and/or  educating them on what is required to meet their needs JIT (what they ask for when they say I want a req. filled ‘ASAP’ or ‘Yesterday’).  Basic concepts like Production Planning and Materials Release Planning have been used in manufacturing organizations for years.  We need to adopt them.
  • We are not investing the time to work with customers to understand hiring needs.  We are not investing the time to implement Material Release Planning concepts into our Staffing Supply Chain to identify the resources required to meet hiring demand.

I don’t want to make this sound simple. But let’s not make this harder than it needs to be.  If hiring quality (quality is #1) employees in a timely fashion is very important to your organization, it is time to take control!

I would love to hear success stories from organizations that have implemented these concepts to substantially reduce lead time/TTF  without any decrease in quality or increase in cost.

I hope you are having a perfect day!

Lean Journey at Mission Health System

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

If you missed it last week, Lori Halula, Manager of Recruiting for Mission Health System, and I conducted a webinar in partnership with HealthcareSource discussing how Mission engaged Lean Human Capital to conduct a Lean, Just-In-Time transformation.

During the webinar, Lori recapped the major milestones over the last year including:

  1. How Position Manager data and Lean Human Capital’s Healthcare Recruitment Benchmark Study uncovered areas for improvement – As you may have seen from our press releases and other blog posts, we are now an integrated partner with HealthcareSource. As a part of this partnership, any client of Position Manager will now have a FREE automatic data feed from Position Manager. This feed will allow you to seamlessly participate in our benchmarking study, as well as build deeper analytics to measure your process efficiency.
  2. Creation of a new, benchmarked analytics and performance metrics scorecard – As many of you have heard from me, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. It’s also more difficult to make key decisions and manage customer expectations without objective data to drive behaviors. A metrics scorecard can lead to a continuous improvement approach that drives the desired behaviors from your key stakeholders by using factual data that is very difficult to argue with.
  3. Mission’s transition to an optimized recruiting structure including new roles & responsibilities – Early in the engagement, Mission conducted a 360 degree assessment with their recruiters where they evaluated their competencies and skills compared to other healthcare recruiters, to uncover areas for improvement. Sourcing candidates and building pipelines scored lower than other areas. Based on this data, as well as additional research, we decided to migrate the team from a generalist recruiting structure (where recruiters do everything for everyone) to a model that includes talent and sourcing specialists. In the new model, talent specialists work primarily with the candidates and hiring managers while sourcing specialists work to source candidates and build active and passive pipelines.
  4. How conducting a Lean process audit and time-value mapping of Mission’s recruitment process reduced waste – In this exercise key stakeholders were documented for each step in the process as well as the process and delay times for each step. At the end the team worked on techniques to positively impact time to fill and improve customer service.
  5. How Mission implemented Service Level Agreements to better manage the hiring manager relationship and expectations – Lori shared their experience about how hiring managers can negatively impact time to fill by delaying the movement of candidates through the hiring process. By putting in place service level agreements, Mission has created greater accountability for hiring managers as well as recruiters.

Mission’s ROI since going live has positively impacted time to fill, reducing it from 48 days (2010) to 42 days (2011)! We look forward to seeing more improvements over time.

If you have interest in hearing the entire presentation, here is the link to the recorded webinar: Mission Health System’s Lean Journey Webinar.

We are excited to have Lori participate in our Advanced Metrics pre-conference workshop on Tuesday July 12th at NACHR’s Annual Image conference! If you would like more information about this workshop, please contact us.

I would also encourage you to participate in our Healthcare Recruitment Benchmark Study. For more information, please contact us.

I hope you’re having a great week!

Lean, JIT Transformation – Simply Brilliant ideas!

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

If you missed NAHCR’s webinar last week, Miranda Maynard (Employment Supervisor for EMH Healthcare) updated us on their Lean, JIT transformation initiative of 2011. 

It was an excellent ‘case study’ of what a continuous improvement journey is all about.

  • Incremental improvement over time can provide exponential returns.
  • Innovation doesn’t have to be rocket science. The best solutions are often simple which make them brilliant.

Some of the Simply Brilliant solutions EMH is implementing include:  

Capturing accurate Metrics – To migrate to a Management by Fact/Data Culture:

  • Eliminating “Other” and “EMH Career Site” as options for a candidate to choose for source of hire.  This has helped identify where top candidates are coming from to further develop cost effective sourcing strategies.
  • Recognizing that a sharp increase in TTF was a result of closing requisitions that have been open for a long period (a positive thing)!

Eliminating unqualified applicant flow – To spend Quality time with Quality Candidates:

  • Implemented pre-screen “Knock-out” questions prior to candidates applying for a particular position (most organizations implement these questions as part of the application process).
  • Implemented a behavioral-based online assessment (HealthcareSource’s Test source).

Make Time to Fill Service Level Agreements public and hold Managers accountable for achieving them:

  • Holding managers accountable for a 40-day Time to Fill metric ensures they are engaged in process. Currently evaluating  adding this SLA to their performance evaluation in 2011. 

Define/separate processes for ‘Business as Usual’ vs. ‘Critical/Difficult/Visible’ positions:

  • Immediate recognition of CDV positions and elimination of the time and cost associated with the “wait & see”/”post & pray” process.

We are excited to have Miranda participate in our Advanced Metrics pre-conference workshop on Tuesday July 12th at NACHR’s Annual Image conference!  If you would like more information about this workshop, please contact us.

I hope you’re having a great week!