Sources of Dissatisfaction: What’s wrong with your recruiting process?-EN

There aren’t many times when someone can say they have had a good experience in a hiring or recruitment process where they’ve been dismissed, or even hired for that matter. This experience is not only apparent to the world outside the organization; it also has its internal impact among the areas involved in recruitment.

More and more, organizations have realized the importance of good hiring processes in their organizations and the impact they have on their culture, their employees, and the perception others have from outside their organizations.

If you’re considering giving your recruitment process a whirl, a good way to get started is to use STATIK.

What is STATIK?

STATIK (Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban) is a system-based process that guides teams through a series of steps when they start working with Kanban.

Get the details on exactly what is included in each of STATIK’s 8 steps in our STATIK Process: The Lean Kanban Path to Jump Start Agile in HR (complete with infographic) article.

In this article, I want to focus on the second step of the process – Identifying the Sources of Dissatisfaction. This means that we question, both internally and externally, the currently quality of the service we are providing.

Understanding the context of the team, and the sources of dissatisfaction that are uncovered, can emphasize the rational for changing a process. It can also help us to understand whether that change makes sense or not. When making any change, it is important to be clear why the change is being implementing and that we have a well-defined objective. To do this you have to understand the selection process from the point of view of each of the “impacted” people.

Ask various stakeholders directly or do an exercise that positions yourself at a point in the process to understand the sources of dissatisfaction that might be relative to that moment, in this case – the Recruitment process, and internally how we are working.

Sources of Dissatisfaction

Some of the questions that can help us complete this exercise for a recruitment process are:

• How well are customer expectations satisfied?
• What problems do customers have?
• What sources of internal or external variability affect the people who provide the service?

In the context of recruitment, we typically find the following stakeholders: Recruitment Team, Human Resources Business Partners (HRBPs), Business or Hiring Team, and Candidates.

Sources of dissatisfaction will vary from team to team but I find these are the most common. Hopefully this quick cheat sheet can give you a baseline to start with.

Recruitment Team

• A lot of work. Each recruiter usually carries a high volume of processes, with all the work that each entails, at all levels. Filtering offers, answering candidates, interviewing, documenting processes, follow-up meetings, updating processes in tools, proactively searching for candidates, etc. The feeling among recruiters is that the work is unlimited.
• Lack of prioritization. The reality of the recruiter is often that all processes are urgent. The lack of prioritization means that they have to commit themselves to very tight deadlines, which are a source of stress and a sense of not moving forward.
• All processes are worked on at once. That makes all of them slow down, and therefore deadlines are lengthened. The feeling is that you are always running behind, and therefore feel that you are not doing your job well.
• Lack of vision of the end-to-end process. Information is often missing about the job opening or in some cases about when the opening is no longer vacant. This information can help you cope with the process and keep your candidates informed on the status at each stage of the process.
• High volume of reporting. Recruitment processes typically have weekly follow-ups, which involves a lot of work on reporting and documentation. All this is multiplied by the number of processes you have open. Much of a recruiter’s time is taken up by this.
• This situation usually creates a poor experience for the recruiter. They feel they don’t get to everything they’d like, and quality and motivation are affected…

HRBP’s (Human Resources Business Partner)

• On many occasions, the HRBP is the person who collects the business teams’ needs and transfers them to recruiters. In case processes do not progress as expected, they are the visible faces of the process and therefore the ones that have to respond to the concerns of the Hiring Managers.
• They feel like the processes are very lengthy in time.
• Since they are separated from the execution of the process, they need process status reports to be able to track and share them with business areas.
• At the end of the day, recruiting is a small part of their work, and they just want the processes to go well and for their customers (the business areas) to have their needs met.

Business/Hiring Manager

• Many times, HR is seen as a blocker when it comes to being able to select people, because it extends timelines and adds complexity to the process.
• There is a lack of transparency during the process; reports do not always show all the information in the process.
• Sometimes they do not see value in the recruiter’s role since they feel that they’re the ones actually doing the work, and that they have to screen and validate each step the recruiter takes.
• Sometimes they feel that the recruiter or the recruitment team just hasn’t understood their needs.

Candidates

• Once again, candidates suffer through the extended process with long wait times.
• There is a lack of transparency about the state of the process. Sometimes there is even a lack of information when it comes to being rejected from the process.
• The candidate is rarely given quality feedback on the process and his/her candidacy.

Next Steps

Once we better understand what these sources of dissatisfaction are, we can decide which of them we want to work on as a team to improve the experience of everyone involved in the process. Understanding the needs, concerns, or pains of those involved gives us clues about what we should focus on to make things better.

In the case of recruitment processes, the main sources of dissatisfaction can be summarized in two points: lengthy process times and lack of information. We already know that we want to improve, so we already have a clear objective as a team on what we want to change.

Gracias,

— Pablo

Need to change your recruiting process?

All processes have sources of dissatisfaction. Our Agile in HR course can help you take the leap into improving all your processes in an often overlooked, but vital transformation area.

Agile in HR