From the Empire State Building, to Grace Cathedral, to Falling Water: The most beautiful architecture began as blueprints. If Frank Lloyd Wright began by asking his neighbors for spare materials and slapping them together haphazardly, we might remember his beautiful masterpiece as “Falling In The Water.” More likely, we wouldn’t remember it at all. A stunning end-result begins with a solid process. Recruiting is no different.
Read on to learn how creating strong processes gives you control over your commitments, mitigates risk, and leads to work-life-balance.
You’re Only As Good As Your Word:
Simply put, process drives predictability. Having processes in place means you can confidently make and keep commitments. You can predict how long it will take you to move a candidate through your entire recruitment funnel. This means you can keep your word to get back to someone by Friday with promised information or results. Even more importantly, you can accurately project that you can fill role A in X amount of time. With consistent processes, your hiring team will rely on your expertise, with confidence. Your candidate’s initial impression of your company will be one of trust, because you’ve kept your word. In this way, process focus translates directly to elevated brand standards.
Process mitigates risk
Creating an environment of predictability also means risks can be foreseen or entirely prevented. Building and following a process helps ensure compliance with government and industry standards. Following the same procedure each time eliminates decisions based on emotion, which reduces bias. Procedures ensure nothing falls through the cracks, building trust with your candidate, in you, and your brand. Securing that high performing candidate is never a sure thing but, with perfectly tuned processes, you can be sure you will never risk losing them to a silly mistake.
Process Improvement Starts With A Process:
Want to get better at what you do? To do something better, you must know how you’re doing it now. Process creates meaningful data (I will delve more deeply into this in future posts). Consistent process allows data to be accurately collected. Accurate data allows the process to be assessed. Assessment means the process can be improved.
Process Allows Growth Potential
Documented processes can be easily shared. When your killer recruiting leads to massive company growth, you’ll be ready to scale-up. Clear processes mean new acquisitions can be trained quickly to represent your brand with methods consistent with your own.
Processes = Shared workload = Work-Life Balance:
At different points in your recruiting process, you will need to pick-up or hand-off the ball to someone else on the team. Circumstances will be both predictable (your candidate is hired and moves to your onboarding colleagues) and unpredictable (you get the flu). Consistent and documented processes allow for a seamless exchange, regardless of cause. Any recruiter or teammate can step in where you left off and take over with a high likelihood of similar success. Want to enjoy a much-needed vacation? Process is key.
If you don’t have processes in place; It is never too late to start. Create and assess your recruiting process. Get it in writing. Build blueprints that yield stunning architecture that people will remember.
Process Focus is one of 14 key competencies taught in our Recruiting Immersion Training. Ready to delve more deeply into the processes behind kinder recruiting? Reach out to us.
