It’s time to start thinking like a supply chain manager. To get you started, we’ve put together our top three tips for trimming the fat and optimizing recruiting workflows.
It’s 2015 and it’s on. If your recruiting process is frozen in time with recruiting workflows that were implemented in 2011 then you’re already feeling the pain. Wait. You don’t remember 2011? Let me refresh your memory. Pink slips prevailed and HR focused on damage control caused by downsizing. If you were a recruiter, you were probably clinging to your job.
These days, with 49 states reporting that employment rates have risen between July 2013 and July 2014, the landscape has shifted and employers find themselves behind the eight ball again, playing in an applicants’ market. These swings in the employment sector have left many recruiting processes fragmented, bloated and rife with bad habits and inefficient recruiting workflows. For employers that want to improve recruiting in 2015, it’s time to make some updates. It’s time to reimagine your recruiting workflows and and improve your recruiting processes. It’s time to think like a supply chain manager.
HOW TO THINK LIKE A SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGER
When you distill hiring to its discrete parts, it’s a linear process driven by a series of yes and no decisions. In short, hiring is like an assembly line. You set out to build a product (a hire). You tool the process (configure recruiting workflows and resources). You collect inventory (applicants). You process the inventory (interviewing process). You hire (finished product).
Clearly, we’ve simplified the notion of recruiting here. That’s the point. All too often recruiting professionals (with good intentions of course) put recruiting workflows in place that create more work, require more resources, generate more reports and so on. So, instead of adding more nuance to your recruiting process, we suggest to try thinking like a supply chain manager for a minute.
To get you started, we’ve put together our top three tips for trimming the fat and optimizing recruiting workflows. Adopt these supply chain principles and you’ll be well on your way to eliminating wasted steps and periods of inactivity, maximizing resources and promoting consistency. At the end of the day, you’ll hire faster, save time, money and resources and create a stronger “hiring culture”.
TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR RECRUITING WORKFLOWS
1. Simplify everything.
The easiest way to hire better people faster is to simplify your recruiting process by eliminating wasted steps, paper forms, complicated approval processes and anything else that creates unnecessary friction in your process. Dissect your entire recruiting process starting from the initial job approval to requesting a background check and making an offer. Remove anything that will create inefficiency. Next, standardize the stages of your recruiting process across your company, organize resources that will execute at every stage and make it easy for everyone to access applicant information and recruiting pipeline data online.
Pro Tip: Get rid of all paper forms, excessive consensus building and anything else that creates unnecessary inefficiency. Avoid over customization and the urge to create different recruiting workflows for each job and department.
2. Create Recruiting Workflows that Drive Decisions
For nearly every employer, the hiring process is comprised of discrete, sequential events that are driven by a series of yes and no decisions that act as stage-gates. This makes the hiring process a natural candidate for an efficiency overhaul (a “supply-chaining”). By sharing decision making responsibility amongst recruiters, HR and hiring managers in a streamlined, consistent manner you will drive hiring decisions and eliminate periods of inactivity (waiting). Waiting kills a hiring process (time kills deals).
Pro Tip: Make it as easy as possible for decision makers (hiring managers) to access information and to make key yes and no decisions. Choose an applicant tracking system that promotes visibility and decision making without requiring massive customization and training. Complexity kills.
3. Be Consistent
Build your process, engage decision makers and be consistent. Ultimately, consistency drives more than just efficiency or cost reductions; it’s also critical for promoting compliance and producing measurable analytics (often the number one gripe we hear from HR leaders). Only a lean recruiting process with well-defined stages will efficiently capture all the required compliance outputs, bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
Pro Tip: Standardize recruiting processes across your company and avoid dramatic customizations for specific departments and locations. Remember, you’ll only capture data and stay compliant if everyone participates in the process consistently.
Looking for a system to help you improve your recruiting workflows? One of the core advantages that sets Newton apart from other applicant tracking systems is Newton’s inherent ability to work the way that recruiting works from day one with very little customization required. Green is go. Red is no. In between is a flexible process that works for just about every company on the planet. To learn more and to request a sales demo, visit us at: http://newtonsoftware.com/contact/
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