Problem
In a busy 24/7 365 day operations business, the directors realised that they were facing difficulties with providing staff to support their clients.
Providing suitable staff at all times was crucial to the success of the business. With some corporate clients, service delivery was reviewed each month. So having the appropriate staff with relevant skills and accreditations was an important part of the service delivery.
The business had a good reputation, with customers and employees; their staff turnover was one of the lowest in the sector. Even so, due to the nature of the job, staff did move from one company to another; and replacing them was a process of recruiting new employees could make or break that success.
The business was growing, and the directors realised that the recruitment process needed to be smooth, effective and more timely. And the ‘recruitment load’ was increasing too. Not only that but the business was finding candidates had already accepted other employment by the time they could offer the job to their successful candidate.
How the Problem was Solved
The first step was to work with the client to review the whole of the recruitment process, from ‘we need a new person’ through to ‘Onboarding - Day 1’. This investigation involved Operations managers, HR, Business Support, and others.
One of the focus areas was the ‘make the job offer’ process; firstly, to confirm the actual process ‘As-is’ before trying to understand what was needed. Each task was mapped to ensure it had the right activities, in the right sequence, and to check how well they address the issues in hand. Here’s a map showing one section (Post Interview) of the overall process.
Then the development phase - making revisions for the improvements, it’s a work-in-progress, of one part of the design process for the ‘To-be’ stage. Here is a revision showing the developments on in the 'Post Interview' stages.
One change in particular, the action of making the call to the ‘Successful Candidate’. Whilst it may seem to add more tasks it has become very beneficial. Firstly, if the candidate rejects the job offer, the company now knows immediately and can review other candidates who had performed well in the interview stage. It removes the time wasted and effort of creating, and sending a job offer, and the subsequent delay whilst waiting for a ‘No’ response. In a more positive way, it also starts the communications between the recruit and the company, helping the onboarding process to motivate inclusion more effectively; and most importantly makes sure good candidates aren’t lost to other employers.
The project went on the re-create the overall process, removing tasks that were no longer necessary, and making the communications throughout the process much more effective, especially for the candidates.
Various adaptations were made – at the ‘front-end’ authorising the ‘Job Advert’, by which the business meant having authority to recruit a new member of staff, was simplified by becoming an agenda item on the weekly management meeting. Doing this cut out random communications, and delays in launching the job advert. Additionally, in several process activities, processing the information was simplified, in this organisation by rationalising the previous plethora of software packages being used.
Business Improvements
The management team recognised that new staff are now recruited more easily. Whilst there are no published stats on these developments, they were confident that the process workload would not now grow exponentially as the size of the business increased.
Not only that, the Directors stated - “Since taking a business–oriented approach we were able to identify processes [that were holding us back], we now have well-designed processes which will help us continue to grow effectively”.
