What is Lean Recruitment? “If your recruitment process doesn’t add value to your organisation, it’s waste!”
The main principles of the Lean Recruitment System are:
- Continuous Improvement
- Respect for People
- Long-term philosophy
- The right process will produce the right results
- Add value to the organization by developing your people and partners
- Continuously solving root problems drives organizational learning
Sound principles for any business or organization, yes?
Many people associate Lean almost exclusively with manufacturing. However, Lean principles can and have been applied to a wide variety of non-manufacturing processes and organizations, including RPO services
The primary focus of Lean is creating more value with less work, and considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customers to be wasteful.
Would your customers (candidates, employees and hiring managers) have any issues with you focusing primarily on creating value for them? Having a good understanding of the hidden wastes inside of the recruiting process will aid in your appreciation of what Just-In-Time recruiting is designed to accomplish.
If it Doesn’t Add Value – it’s Waste!
Overproduction
Many companies don’t even attempt to respond to all applicants, while others will send an automated reply. If you get so many responses that you can’t reply to them all or have to resort to auto-responders, isn’t that a clue that it is a wasteful process?
Inventory
In recruiting, your candidate pipeline is your inventory. More specifically, your WIP (Not Work in Progress but Work in Process) candidate inventory. Work-in-process is a production/supply chain concept, used to describe “unfinished” inventory in a production process -
When most recruiters talk about proactively pipelining candidates – they’re really referring to building work-in-process (WIP) candidate inventories. As such, recruiters are constantly trying to keep their candidate inventory fresh (finding new people to pipeline, maintaining contact with everyone to see if they are still available, etc.) because good candidates are perishable – they don’t stay ripe for recruiting long.
Defects
According to Lean, a “defect” is something that does not conform to specifications or expectations. When it comes to recruiting, candidates that are sourced, contacted, screened, and with whom a relationship is maintained that do not ultimately match the actual hiring need are defects of the recruiting process.
Defects arise whenever job specifications/requirements change from forecast, rendering pipelined candidates no longer qualified, or when candidates are no longer interested, available, or when their motivators change away from your opportunity. Forecasts are never perfect – they can’t be. Positions and requirements change, and people don’t stay interested or available forever.
Over-processing
Over-processing occurs any time more work is done than what is required by the customer. Engaging, screening and building and maintaining relationships with candidates that will never ultimately be submitted to a client/manager in consideration for an interview can be seen as performing more work than necessary and be classified as over-processing.
Your hiring managers don’t actually require you to maintain relationships with a large number of people who will likely no longer be available or interested or even qualified when you actually have a need. What value do these candidates ever provide to hiring managers?
Waiting
Lean defines the waste of waiting as any time that something is held in wait of the next production step. In recruiting, waiting occurs whenever candidates are not being advanced through the recruiting and hiring process. In most recruiting processes, a large part of a candidate’s life is spent waiting to be moved forward in the process. Most candidates that respond to a job posting or are contacted by a recruiter are never advanced past an automated response (at worst) or the relationship maintenance phase (at best).
Any candidate that doesn’t actually progress through the hiring process (at least to an interview with the hiring manager/team) is essentially stuck in a permanent holding pattern – indefinitely waiting. Maintaining relationships with candidates is not moving forward – it’s a holding pattern, which for many candidates, is permanent.
