Introducing our new Recruitment Audit, Documentation & Templates service

As part of our new Recruitment Audit process, we give you our years of experience and knowledge in documents and templates….don’t reinvent the wheel.

Audit

Speak to your hiring managers – find out how your teams are performing, they are the customer after all.

Map your day-to-day process – find out whats really happening

Run a Kaizen improvement workshop – to develop a new and improved process

Careers Page – Lets review your careers page to ensure that it is attracting the best and deflecting the rest

Competitor Analysis – To show where you are falling short and they are winning ground

“They no longer work here…” – When your staff leave your organisation, where are they going and why?

GDPR Compliance – Are you going to pass?

Measure – Your performance with real numbers and metrics

 

Supporting Documentation

Employee Value Proposition – Why would talented individuals want to join your organisation?

Corporate Brand – What is its effect on Recruitment

Candidate Journey – What experience are your candidates having and how can we improve this?

Social Media Strategy – This is the future and where talented candidates search for jobs and research on organisations

Position Descriptions – Work Instruction templates

Job Briefing Forms – Ensure your recruiters are taking the best requirements

Hiring Policies – Internal and External hiring policies

Recruitment Project Plans – Make sure that you plan your recruitment timelines

Work Force Plan – Map out how your workforce will look this year

Phone Screen & Interview Guides – Give your Recruiters & Hiring Managers guidance

A Database of Interview questions – Maximise the efficiency of your interviews

Performance and Development Form – Track performance and non-performance

Recruitment Metrics – Let us show you the best measurements of performance

Satisfaction Surveys – For Candidates and Hiring Managers

 

Get in contact for more info on our recruitment audit and documentation – info@improveandconsult.co.uk

 

You don’t need an RPO or new ATS…. Ask your team members how to make things better!

I have been attending a lot of HR networking events recently and I keep hearing the same stories.

“Things aren’t working, we’re thinking of implementing a new ATS”

“Things aren’t working, we’re not hitting our targets, we’re thinking of outsourcing the whole function to an RPO, and they can clean up the mess”

These solutions seem to be what HR Directors go to, when they aren’t sure how to improve things.

A new ATS or system is not going to solve the ingrained inefficiencies and wasted energy of your Human Beings and HR stakeholders

An RPO will bring the efficiencies and best practice, but will cost an awful lot of money, and is a big change for your hiring managers.

I’m about to save you an awful lot of money, time and stress!

Step 1) Get a selection of your managers, recruiters and HR stakeholders in a room

Step 2) ask them what they want from a recruitment or HR process

Step 3) ask them how they think it could be improved

Step 4) make the changes and map them

Step 5) Measure the changes

A couple of tweaks to a process can save a lot of time and hugely improve a candidates or hiring manager’s experience. If this doesn’t work then feel free to spend £££££ of a new system…. try and fix it yourself first.

Visual Target Boards & Daily Huddles are not just for Sales

What does Waste mean, what is DOWNTIME and how does it affect the world of HR?

Toyota created a lean framework with the following 8 lean manufacturing wastes, the acronym for these eight wastes is DOWNTIME. The wastes below are present in all of business processes and if you can address them and strip them out, you will save your teams a lot of time, effort and cost.

Defects

Overproduction

Waiting

Not utilised talent

Transportation

Inventory excess

Motion waste

Excess processing

 

Lets looks at DOWNTIME in a little more detail

Defects
Forms completed incorrectly and then had to be re-completed and resubmitted.

Writing an advert or job description for a hiring manager, only to find out that the location is wrong.

Overproduction

Finding 6 candidates for 4 roles, as per the workforce plan, which is incorrect and those roles no longer exist in the new structure

Poorly applied automation in the Recruitment and HR process

Waiting

Waiting for a colleague in finance to send you the requisition approval before you can begin your job

Unbalanced workloads in a process will lead to bottlenecks

Not utilised talent

Not speaking to the HRBP who used to work in Recruitment, Finance and HR to ask how we can streamline things… they know better than anyone.

Assigning staff members to the wrong tasks

Transportation

Sending internal mail by post and then waiting 24-48 hours for it to arrive…. why are we posting things in 2017? Scan it!!!

Posting contracts out to new employees to sign and return by post.

Inventory

Thousands of HR and new starter packs and documents in a cupboard never to be used

Poor monitoring systems to assess inventory

Unreliable recruitment suppliers

Motion

Driving to the other side of the country for a meeting, to discover you could have dialled in

Walking up to level 4 to speak to someone, because you can never reach them on the phone.

Excess processing

Hiring Manager’s hands being held way too much through a process, because they are too busy, untrained or are being lazy.

Double handling of the same task, eg someone checking someone else’s work, why cant it be done right first time?

Re-entering data

If you would like help discovering and stripping out your DOWNTIME & waste.

Get in touch – Info@improveandconsult.co.uk or here

So you are looking to make your HR processes lean, what are the main ingredients of this recipe?

Ingredients:

1 Manager/Process owner

1 Engaged Team (all main stakeholder groups represented)

1 roll of Brown Paper

2-3 packs of coloured Sticky Notes

2 packs of coloured sticky dots

1-2 Files of sample Data

1 pack of blue tack

2-3 pens

1 Flip Chart with paper

Cooking Time: 2-3 hours

Recipe Prep:

Analyse data to understand where there may be issues, bottlenecks and waste.

Take Roll of Brown paper and stick to the wall with blue tack

Draw swim lanes on the brown paper to indicate the different position/stakeholder groups involved in the process (eg Recruiters, HRBP, Finance, HRadmin etc)

Preheat the engagement of the team and stakeholders to 180c, by explaining the structure of the workshop and benefits.

Many of these people live this process day in day out, and may get a little hot under the collar, you may need to be fan assisted.

Method:

Ask the group what is the first step of the process, and who does this action?

Write on a sticky note and place on relevant swim lane. Ask what is the next step, and note down again. Complete this for all steps until you have a nice and congested process map.

Ask workshop members to take 6 red sticky dots and season generously the map, where they feel the waste and issues in the process are, with 3 red dots on the action/task with the most waste, 2 red dots on the next issue, and finally 1 red dot on the action that is the third biggest issue.

At the end, you will have a map littered with red dots. If further seasoning is required to ascertain the issue, repeat the exercise. Once the red dots have been distributed, spend some time talking through the results and discuss why the group thinks these are issues.

Looking at the map, ask the group which tasks can be improved or removed. You’ll be surprised how many tasks are wasted time, effort or cost. At the end of the workshop you will have identified the areas that you will want to improve or remove and create a new lean process.

Next you will need to spend some time discussing the improvements and how to implement them. Then you will need to measure the new process, to see the new positive results and compare it against the original data that you captured.

If you liked this Recipe, please share.

For other definitions on waste see DOWNTIME.

 

You don’t need a new piece of software or an RPO, fix it yourself!

When your HRD or CEO says to you that recruitment/onboarding/Job approval and workforce plan “is not working” and we need to make a change.

What often happens is people jump straight to solution mode and follow the trend and look to a new piece of software as the old piece of software, “wasn’t working” or they’ll engage an RPO or outsourcing group to see if they can help them with their problem.

Before you know it, you’ve bought a new piece of software or RPO Contract that will “solve your problems”

Software:

• You haven’t solved your problem, you have found another way to display it or hide it
• Your Hr/Recruitment teams are forced to learn a new process, system and work arounds to do the same thing they were doing before
• Your Hiring managers are also going through more change, learning how they have to submit a request and a new approval process
• You are paying large fees for this “solution”, which hasn’t solved the real issue… you still don’t know what the issue is!

Outsource parts of your HR function to an outside group (RPO / HRO / BPO) 

• You haven’t solved your problem, you have just given it to someone else to hide
• You are paying them hefty fees to manage this problem, without knowing what it is
• You have given up control, responsibility and ability to manage it
• You’ve gained someone else to blame and further complexity
• Your hiring managers and stakeholders are going through more change and aren’t consulted
• You have better “numbers” and pretty graphs, but unhappy people
• Your current HR teams are either made redundant or forced to join the outsource group

STOP!

Before you do all these, spend a few hours in a room with your stakeholders and teams and see if you can work out what the problem is with Lean Workshops & Six Sigma!

Step 1: Get the people that matter (stakeholders in the process and the people doing the job) in a room and get them to show you what they want and what they are currently doing in their day-to-day work.
Step 2: Map the current process

Step 3: Ask them how to make it better and note their ideas
Step 4: Take these ideas and design a new way of working that everyone is happy with.

It may be as easy as sending a few emails or having a few meetings at certain points in the process that can make a significant improvement.

Improve your processes by consulting with your people

We’ve just saved you thousands of pounds in RPO or ATS fees…. you’re welcome 😉

Tweak your processes yourself, don’t pay someone to absorb your problem!

 

HR Metrics – make the unknown… known

Working from home is awesome…but is it right for you?

Being part of or engaging a remote workforce has many benefits

Advantages:

• Stop the long daily commute
• Escape the stress of the city centre
• Spend more time with family
• Improve your stress levels and mental health
• Plan your day around you not your meetings and public transport

The companies that realise this, have a distinct advantage when it comes to the competition for talent. It is still the exception rather than the norm and only after trust has been established, will flexibility be allowed. Often employees had to provide a strong case for it, stating family or health reasons; the point being, an employee feels that have to justify the option.

Nowadays, many companies are beginning to look seriously at it, take PWC. The onus is on the manager to provide a business case as to why a role cannot be done remotely or flexibly.

Disadvantages:

• You need to be disciplined – You can often find yourself still eating breakfast and reading the news at 10am in your dressing gown.
• Easy to become distracted – you think a colleague asking you if you watch Game of Thrones is a distraction, try a super cute 3 year old banging on your office door shouting “Daddy/Mummy, come and look at this, look what I’ve done… its amazing”. Its very hard to ignore. To be as productive as possible, you must be able to separate your work from your home life. If you can’t ignore the TV or the dog, then WFH probably isn’t for you
• Bad internet connection – Having video conference calls with a slow or poor broadband connection is not only frustrating but embarrassing. If you have a poor connection and have a call, get yourself down to the gym or costa to use their wifi!
• No VPN – you need to be able to access your work files and shared drives. Without a VPN or access, having 2 different types of work on different laptops is a nightmare, or worse, emailing yourself back and forth.
• Ineffective relationships – Sometimes you need to get in front of people to build lasting and effective relationships. Although working from home is great, you do need to get out and about to make it work!
• People are different – some people embrace and understand the idea of working from home; they understand that people have different priorities, brains and life goals…. others see it as someone being lazy and having a day off! Although these people are living in the dark ages and frustrate the hell out of me, they are colleagues, stakeholders, board members, we need to ensure that they see our productivity. We have to manage different personalities in working world, and so if you are WFH, and not in the office, make sure you are on the calls and make yourself heard.
• Where is Tom? Make sure that you let your colleagues know when you are WFH, a WFH calendar invite will do the trick.
• Feeling guilty – just because you are starting work at 930am, don’t feel guilty (unless you were meant to be on a call at 830am…. then…. you are naughty!), nowadays work is measure on output and productivity not clocking in and out. As long as you get the work done and to a good standard, who cares when you do it! 
• Don’t fake it – A few years back there was a trend to schedule for emails to be sent at 12am, to show your boss how hard you were working, a very sad but real trend! don’t fall into that nest of vipers! Show your productivity with output!

Businesses are now understanding the fact that a happier workforce is a more productive workforce, but also that a reduced number of people in an office is cheaper for running a business. For more info on my own personal Work life Blend Journey have a read

Onboarding and Orientation…. why is it rarely done well?