To all the recruiters out there, put your hands up if you ever wished you could have mind reading abilities! Well, if you’re one of them, I bet you do spend half the time figuring out what in the world is my hiring manager thinking?!
I’ve got to admit, Recruitment is difficult! As a recruiter myself, I often find it very stressful to meet the hiring needs. Often, I try to solve issues but realised that the issues that I am solving are just short term relieves. It took me the longest time to find the perfect fit for the company & often I lay in bed awake thinking how I can improve this.
Yes, you’re right! Recruitment in Titansoft for me wasn’t all glitter, unicorns and sparkles (unless you mean my eyes were glistening with tears from all those resume filtering). One thing that I would not want to experience again is to swim in another pile of resumes and uncertainty.
In 2015, things got easier for me through the introduction of Agile in Titansoft. One day my Operations Manager, Jasmine suggested, “Hey why not use Agile in Recruitment?” At first it got me confused – “Wait what? Agile in Recruitment? “. Well, as you see, Agile is usually used in managing IT development teams and projects and at that point I wasn’t too sure how I am able to link Recruitment with Agile as what I am doing is nothing close to software development.
Well, for those who are unfamiliar with Agile, let me give you an overview on it. Basically, Agile entails using short projects or sprints to validate the task and getting agreement from all of the stakeholders (in Recruitment terms means our hiring managers) to move forward on a bigger task. In many ways, agile can be considered a feedback control process with the checkpoints being a form of group feedback.
You may ask “So how do I apply Agile into Recruitment??”
For recruiting, the idea is to validate that the recruiter is finding enough good candidates and the hiring manager is in agreement by testing each step rather than waiting until it’s too late to start over.
All in all, Agile recruiting is about doing a little recruiting and getting a little feedback, and making more progress along the way. Every time you interact with the hiring manager, you make sure you learn more about the position and what the hiring manager does and does not want. Agile recruiting is about creating a partnership and working towards a common goal quickly: filling the open position with the best possible candidate.
Through Agile in Recruitment, I have slowly come to value 3 things:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
An agile environment is more human centric and participatory and can be readily adapted to new ideas and innovations. If processes and tools are seen as the way to manage the recruitment and everything associated with it, then the recruiters and stakeholders and the way they approach the work, must conform to these processes and tools. Conformity makes it hard to accommodate new ideas, new requirements, and new thinking. While Agile approaches value people over processes.
- Quick, quality hires over comprehensive documentation
All projects require some documentation and this includes recruitment plans too! However, in agile recruitment you will just need to concentrate on documenting the necessary documents that best support you in achieving your goal (how many hires you need within 1 month). Basically, Agile approaches helps in simplifying the administrative paperwork relating to time, cost control, or reporting.
- Responding to change over following a plan
Embracing change is part and parcel of life. But how often do you embrace change when you are confronted with one? Relating it back to recruitment, if you want quick, quality hires, then change is a valuable tool for achieving such results. Applying Agile principals, recruiters are able to learn how to respond quickly to their hiring managers’ needs and then review and revise relevant and helpful plans that makes things easier for the customers.
Unfortunately, with the way traditional recruitment processes and done, change management procedures and budget structures that will not be able to accommodate all the new requirements thus making changes difficult. Approaching the traditional method of recruitment, you may often find yourself blindly following a plan, missing opportunities to create more valuable results.
This doesn’t end here
We have gotten this far for Part 1 of the Agile in Recruitment series and I hope that I am able to communicate to you how tempting it is! We’ve only gone through the gist of Agile in Recruitment, & there is still a lot more I would love to share about Agile recruiting in Titansoft! So, don’t miss the next post if you want to find out exactly how this benefits you as a recruiter, your stakeholders as well as your potential candidates! By clicking ‘Like’ on our Facebook page, you can keep yourself updated for the release of Agile in Recruitment PART 2!
T.8ytes by Titansoft 