Lean HR and Recruitment Podcast

15/08/2018/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

The Chrysalis Consulting podcast invited Tom to talk about Lean Recruitment and Lean HR. Chrysalis Consulting are ripping up the rulebook and transforming HR and learning for the 21st century. Their podcast includes interviews and discussions with industry experts discussing how we can create and develop the workplace and workforce of the future and include ‘A catch up over Coffee’ with Kelly.

In this episode Tom talks about his journey through Recruitment and into Lean Consulting and how he is helping transform HR using lean consulting and agile thinking. Tom gives some great advice and tips, and so have a listen and see if you pick anything up for your process.

The new Lean Recruitment Workshops are coming soon!!

10/08/2018/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

Lean HR and Recruitment Workshops

Our Lean HR and Recruitment workshops are confirmed and up and running for the next 6months. If you are keen to learn more about how to analyse and fix your own Recruitment and HR processes, then get in touch

Recruitment is sooooo stressful. Improve your process

Learn the small changes and tricks to improve your recruitment process

Sign up to our lean recruitment workshops

LeanHR Talk at DisruptHR

08/06/2018/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

Had great fun talking about LeanHR at DisruptHR London earlier this week. If you want to see a man get 4 years experience into 5mins and look like a nutter doing it!!!! Check out the DisruptHR video below, 6min 30 seconds!! Might make you laugh, and you never know you might learn something!

Lean HR: Fix It Yourself | Tom Money | DisruptHR Talks from DisruptHR on Vimeo.

A verbatim Summary in case you cant watch the DisruptHR video:

How to manage and improve your own workflows and processes with DMAIC and Lean methodology

Define the problem – what is the real problem? Assess where the actual issues are and what the bottle necks are. Speak to your customers to understand what they want. What is the real problem. What are we trying to solve. How do we define the problem, who says its our problem?….the CEO, what does he really know about life in the trenches of Recruitment or HR. Ascertain the problem by speaking to your customers, people that actually pay for your services. In HR we have internal customers, HR is usually a central shared cost. Business/department managers expect a certain service from you to help them deliver what they are accountable for – they expect Hire to retire (Recruitment, onboarding, training, coaching, development, great place to work, equality, rem and ben, employee growth, reward and recognition etc)

What your customer wants – what you are doing = your problem

Measure the problem – how big of a problem is it? Is it anecdotal negativity that has blown out of proportion or is it a “small issue” that is having huge effects further downstream. How long does this issue really take…. They take a week to get back to me, measure it. Agencies cost too much…. Measure it. The candidates are not prepared… measure it. The recruiter sends me too many CVs… measure it. Hiring managers are non-compliant…. Measure it.

Analyse the problem – Ascertain what the root causes of this problem is. Who is doing what, what isn’t working, why isn’t it working

Improve the problem – implement a new solution based on data, analysis and customer and stakeholder input

Control the new solution and ensure that the changes stick through analysis, a continual feedback loop and a change program

Gaining Executive/leadership sponsorship. Why we need it, benefits of it, and how to maintain support and report back to them

How and why we need to map our processes. To get to where we want to get to, we need to know where we are now. I.e what are we really doing today? How is this deviating from what we are “supposed” to be doing?

Voice of the Customer sessions – Most important, listen to your customer. Talk to them and ask them what they want, this is called listening to the voice of the customer. This is not a survey every 3months that hasn’t been changed in 3 years. Its speaking to them, proactively reaching out to them and asking how you could improve the service or work as a team to hit goals. Just because you are hitting your dated SLAs and KPIs doesn’t mean they are happy. Things can always be improved. This is what will keep them coming back to you for business and not your competitors, because you are delivering what they actually want and asking them!

Weve all had a Bad experience at a hotel or a restaurant. The waiter did everything that they are KPId to do, sat you down, brought you food and cutlery. They hit their basic KPIs. But the restaurant was freezing because the door was open, the food was cold, the toilet was disgusting, they gave you too much tomato when you asked for no tomato, they charged you service without asking.

The Waiter asks you if everything is ok. Yes, fine thankyou. However you aren’t actually happy! If the waiter asked you on the way in, what would be the best experience for you today and then delivered that experience, you’d love it. But the waiter never asks you… they assume. As do we with our hiring managers and stakeholders. People, teams and businesses change. Let’s ask them what they want from your team, process and outputs.

Running Client/customer facing workshops and how to capture feedback and data. Run workshops and get DATA, DATA, DATA. You need system data but you also need to hear anecdotal data from your managers/clients. If you get them in a room they will be happy to tell you what they want from your process or team

How to analsyse the 8 wastes of HR – Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non Utilised Talent and Intellect, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Extra processing

How to develop solutions and analyse what are the best solutions.

What will have most impact, what can be implemented quickest and what will be easiest to implement…. These are the ones you want to focus on for quick wins.

How to get out of the office and get in the “trenches” of where the real work is happening. See the “shop floor’ and witness the wasted time and effort first hand

Measure it…. Develop The metrics that really matter. Your customer will tell you what they want and what needs to be measured. Make sure these metrics are SMART Metrics. Have to measure it, to prove you’ve improved it.

You knew where you were and decided where you wanted to get to…. Did you get there? Prove it

Establishing Visual Management Boards and Daily Team Huddles to ensure that you keep on top of your customer’s requirements and metrics

How to develop change management programs

If you want to learn more about LeanHR click here

Thanks again to the team over at DisruptHR London. It was a great night and they conduct DisruptHR events all over the globe. Get onto the DisruptHR website and check them out.

DisruptHR – https://disrupthr.co

Talentlink and ATS implementation Projects

08/06/2018/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

Talentlink and other Projects

Improve and Consult has been busy these last few months growing our client and partner database and working on large scale Talentlink projects. Talentlink is an ATS product owned and sold as a SAAS offering globally. Some of our recent partnerships include Broadbean, StemX and YearWood Associates. We have just delivered a successful Onboarding Review for StemX and are now their preferred onboarding partner, managing the onboarding process for larger clients.

As a delivery partner for Lumesse, we have been flat out implementing Lumesse Talentlink (ATS) and process consulting with some large clients including Pukka herbs and IHG, and huge the RPO groups; Interquest, WilsonHCG and Cielo Talent Management. If you are looking to implement a new ATS or HRIS and want need someone to work client or vendor side, feel free to reach out. System Implementation and Project Management

LeanHR – free one page problem solving template

11/02/2018/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

Free problem solving template

Looking for some quick changes and improvements at work, but don’t have time to fix them? Use our free problem solving template, handily all on one page and which can be used with clients and hiring managers, as well as HR team members.

The A3 one pager contains all the info you need to define, solve and plan for the improvements…. Fix it yourself with LeanHR!

We used this recently at Hillingdon Council to help their Recruitment and HR team analyse, measure and improve their Recruitment process.

They had an issue with Time to Hire and we managed to reduce it by a lot…wont tell you how much, but it was a lot 🙂

We got the recruitment team together and helped them map out what they did on a day to day basis in their main recruitment process. We then mapped out 2 other recruitment processes to see how they compared and if the amount of work and process varied. Interestingly it did…. their internal process was much bigger and contained far more wasted effort, time and administration…. thats our first area to focus on!

How long does each step take?

Once mapped, we went through each segment to ascertain how long each area took to process = obvious areas to improve.

Next step, come up with some solutions and implement them, which we’ll be doing next week.

Get in contact to join our mailing list and receive lots of other free Lean documentation.

Lean Recruitment Bitesize is up and running

11/01/2018/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

Lean Recruitment Bitesize is up and running

Many of you are aware that we help businesses and HR departments with their HR and Recruitment processes, well now we are offering free advice and tips on our Video Blog, Lean Recruitment Bitesize.

Its essentially 60-90 second videos discussing recruitment and HR focused topics and throwing out some tips and tricks based on our experience as Recruitment and HR Managers. Each episode focuses on a different topic and contains useful information and tips to help your teams manage their own processes and create a culture of continuous improvement.

Ive listed a few of our episodes below, subscribe to the youtube channel to see the newest episodes.

We have over 13 years HR and Recruitment experience, have a look through, you never know, you might learn something……

For more info on Lean Recruitment Bitesize or our services, visit the rest of the website www.improveandconsult.co.uk

A Recruitment Audit, Best practice Documents and Templates for…..

17/12/2017/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

Introducing our new Recruitment Audit, Documentation & Templates service

As part of our new Recruitment Audit process, we give you our years of experience and knowledge in documents and templates….don’t reinvent the wheel.

Audit

Speak to your hiring managers – find out how your teams are performing, they are the customer after all.

Map your day-to-day process – find out whats really happening

Run a Kaizen improvement workshop – to develop a new and improved process

Careers Page – Lets review your careers page to ensure that it is attracting the best and deflecting the rest

Competitor Analysis – To show where you are falling short and they are winning ground

“They no longer work here…” – When your staff leave your organisation, where are they going and why?

GDPR Compliance – Are you going to pass?

Measure – Your performance with real numbers and metrics

Supporting Documentation

Employee Value Proposition – Why would talented individuals want to join your organisation?

Corporate Brand – What is its effect on Recruitment

Candidate Journey – What experience are your candidates having and how can we improve this?

Social Media Strategy – This is the future and where talented candidates search for jobs and research on organisations

Position Descriptions – Work Instruction templates

Job Briefing Forms – Ensure your recruiters are taking the best requirements

Hiring Policies – Internal and External hiring policies

Recruitment Project Plans – Make sure that you plan your recruitment timelines

Work Force Plan – Map out how your workforce will look this year

Phone Screen & Interview Guides – Give your Recruiters & Hiring Managers guidance

A Database of Interview questions – Maximise the efficiency of your interviews

Performance and Development Form – Track performance and non-performance

Recruitment Metrics – Let us show you the best measurements of performance

Satisfaction Surveys – For Candidates and Hiring Managers

Get in contact for more info on our recruitment audit and documentation – info@improveandconsult.co.uk

So whats all the noise about Lean Recruitment?

17/12/2017/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

Lean Recruitment

We have all worked in HR departments where things haven’t changed in 10 years and we still fill out the same old forms and no-one ever asks why? If you do ask why its always the same old answer “its how we’ve always done things”.

In my last job, we had a million pound system and yet we had to complete a paper form and take it up to “Doris and Ken” in accounts who put it in a file and into a drawer….. why? No-one ever questioned it.

Lean Recruitment is a new way to look at your HR departments and making your Recruitment and Onboarding process more efficient. It identifies and eliminates non-essential and non-value added tasks in your talent acquisition process, and matches your process to what your internal stakeholders actually want.

What does that mean in the world of HR?

Reduced Time to Hire and Time to Onboard
Improved Candidate journey
Improved Hiring Manager experience
Decreased advertising spend
Increased compliance to GDPR
Reduced Staff Turnover within Probation
Improved New Starter productivity

Continuous Improvement & Right First Time (6Sigma)

HR is one of the worst for getting you to recomplete forms or asking you to complete a form, only to find out it was the wrong one. Our aim is to fix a process so that it will be 99% right first time, with no resubmission required.

What does that mean in the world of HR?

The right forms filled out correctly
Correct information in CRMs
Employment contracts right first time
Managers following the correct process
New Starter access and hardware on Day 1

Put it together and you have Cheaper, faster, better processes and services for your stakeholders and hiring managers.

The main pillars of Lean Recruitment are:

Why don’t you give it a try?

Audit, Review and improve your HR Processes

10/12/2017/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

We can Audit, Review and improve your HR and Recruitment Processes in just a few days.

When was the last time that you reviewed the performance of your recruitment or HR teams? When did you last sit down with your internal customers and ask them “how are we doing?”… a multiple choice survey once a year with 4 questions does not count!!! Now is your chance to improve your HR and Recruitment processes.

In simple terms, what are we offering?

Lean Workshop Speak to your hiring managers and internal customers to find out what they want from your teams

This feedback will build you new process and way of working going forward

Map your process and suggest improvements based on the feedback and best practice To want to improve something you need to understand what is happening right now

Lean Workshop

VMB

Create a Change strategy to ensure the new way of working sticks. There is no point putting all the hard work in to make things better, if people carrying on doing what they know. People don’t like change!

Measure the performance of your new process how can you justify ROI and improvement without measuring it

Establish a Visual Metric/Management Board and Huddle/Scrum system daily scrums are vital to a culture of continuous improvement and performance

Establish a social media recruitment and retention strategy Social Media Recruitment is the future of Talent Acquisition.

We can do this in only a few days, with only a few hours out of our team member’s busy schedule.

We have over 13 years HR and Recruitment experience and always find improvements for our clients day-to-day processes.

What do you need to do?

1) open your email

2) type info@improveandconsult.co.uk

3) Let us know when is best to have a chat

Whats all the noise about #LeanRecruitment

Calling HR – Visual Target Boards & Daily Huddles are not just for Sales

10/12/2017/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

Visual Management Boards, Target Boards, Performance Boards… whatever you want to call them, they work.

By visually displaying performance and productivity in a daily huddle or scrum, you can:

a) Gain an understanding of a target that you might not hit, unless you change a few things.

VMB

“we’ve only organised 2 interviews this week, how are we going to fill the 3 jobs”

“we haven’t organised any quarterly reviews this week, how are we going to be able to complete the Workforce plan on time”

b) Enthuse and drive the team members who can see their own performance and how they are tracking to their own target and timelines

“okay, first thing i need to do is book those interviews and then ill check my email”

c) Celebrate team success and list feedback every day during your team huddle/scrum

“well done guys, we are 98% hitting targets, awesome work”

“This is the best service we’ve ever had”

d) Show colleagues from other departments that you are on top of your metrics with daily watchable huddles. If your CEO walks past and sees a Visual Metric Board, they will love it!

VMB

e) Break your HR processes and productivity into bite size targets, that we can manage.

1) Get a whiteboard
2) Break your process into targets (ideally time or numbers based)
3) List the targets and measurements on the board
4) Get your team together every morning and have someone different present each time (inclusion)
5) Write your daily position up on the board to ascertain red flags and possibilities for not hitting targets.

A daily huddle is a great way to start the day, as it gets everyone pumped up and allows people to prioritise their energy for the day. If you finish a huddle and you are way behind on Points A & B, your team aren’t going to spend 45mins checking their emails, and getting a coffee, they are going to get on the phone and catch up with where they need to be.

As per usual….fix it yourself.

Audit, Review and improve your HR Processes

You don’t need an RPO or new ATS!

09/12/2017/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

You don’t need an RPO or new ATS…. Ask your team members how to make things better!

I have been attending a lot of HR networking events recently and I keep hearing the same stories.

“Things aren’t working, we’re thinking of implementing a new ATS”

“Things aren’t working, we’re not hitting our targets, we’re thinking of outsourcing the whole function to an RPO, and they can clean up the mess”

These solutions seem to be what HR Directors go to, when they aren’t sure how to improve things.

A new ATS or system is not going to solve the ingrained inefficiencies and wasted energy of your Human Beings and HR stakeholders

An RPO will bring the efficiencies and best practice, but will cost an awful lot of money, and is a big change for your hiring managers.

I’m about to save you an awful lot of money, time and stress!

Step 1) Get a selection of your managers, recruiters and HR stakeholders in a room

Step 2) ask them what they want from a recruitment or HR process

Step 3) ask them how they think it could be improved

Step 4) make the changes and map them

Step 5) Measure the changes

A couple of tweaks to a process can save a lot of time and hugely improve a candidates or hiring manager’s experience. If this doesn’t work then feel free to spend £££££ of a new system…. try and fix it yourself first.

Visual Target Boards & Daily Huddles are not just for Sales

Voice of the Hiring Manager…. What do they want from your teams?

09/12/2017/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

Ask your Hiring Manager what they actually want from your HR and Recruitment teams

If I hear “We know exactly what our hiring managers want and are hitting our targets” Im going to go crazy.

When was the last time you asked a hiring manager, recruiters and HR teams what they wanted from your processes. What is the output that they want?

“We meet with our hiring managers once a week face 2 face and they love that personal service”

Do they want to have a 1 hour meeting every week? Why would they want to give up 2 hours of their day to get to a meeting and back, that they could have on the phone every 2 weeks.

“Finding candidates as quickly as possible and filling the vacancy is the most important thing to my hiring manager”

It may have been last year, now it might be on-boarding and hitting the ground running. Its all very well, finding candidates and getting an offer accepted, but if it takes them a week to get their logins and access….. whats the rush?

“We know what the problems are and how to fix them”

How do you know? You don’t, you are presuming! ask your internal customers and give them what they actually want.

“things are fine at the moment, we haven’t heard any complaints from the business”

If you go for a meal and the food is average, and the waiter asks you how it is, 99% of Brits will say “fine thanks” Its the same with our internal customers and Hiring Managers. They are not going to complain unless there is a huge problem with “their meal”. Let’s ask them how they think the meal could have been improved.

“We are hitting our KPIs quarter on quarter”

Who created your KPIs? An HR director who is out of touch with the businesses and has been out of the trenches for too long? A recruitment manager who has only been in the business for 6 months? Time to Hire and a hiring manager feedback survey is not good enough anymore

Step 1) Get a selection of your hiring managers and HR stakeholders in a room

Step 2) Ask them what they want from a recruitment or HR process

Step 3) Ask them how they think it could be improved

Step 4) Make the changes

Step 5) Measure the changes

You dont need a new RPO or ATS!

What are the 8 wastes of Business and HR?

06/11/2017/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

What does Waste mean, what is DOWNTIME and how does it affect the world of HR?

Toyota created a lean framework with the following 8 lean manufacturing wastes, the acronym for these eight wastes is DOWNTIME. The wastes below are present in all of business processes and if you can address them and strip them out, you will save your teams a lot of time, effort and cost.

Defects

Overproduction

Waiting

Not utilised talent

Transportation

Inventory excess

Motion waste

Excess processing

Lets looks at DOWNTIME in a little more detail

Defects
Forms completed incorrectly and then had to be re-completed and resubmitted.

Writing an advert or job description for a hiring manager, only to find out that the location is wrong.

Overproduction

Finding 6 candidates for 4 roles, as per the workforce plan, which is incorrect and those roles no longer exist in the new structure

Poorly applied automation in the Recruitment and HR process

Waiting

Waiting for a colleague in finance to send you the requisition approval before you can begin your job

Unbalanced workloads in a process will lead to bottlenecks

Not utilised talent

Not speaking to the HRBP who used to work in Recruitment, Finance and HR to ask how we can streamline things… they know better than anyone.

Assigning staff members to the wrong tasks

Transportation

Sending internal mail by post and then waiting 24-48 hours for it to arrive…. why are we posting things in 2017? Scan it!!!

Posting contracts out to new employees to sign and return by post.

Inventory

Thousands of HR and new starter packs and documents in a cupboard never to be used

Poor monitoring systems to assess inventory

Unreliable recruitment suppliers

Motion

Driving to the other side of the country for a meeting, to discover you could have dialled in

Walking up to level 4 to speak to someone, because you can never reach them on the phone.

Excess processing

Hiring Manager’s hands being held way too much through a process, because they are too busy, untrained or are being lazy.

Double handling of the same task, eg someone checking someone else’s work, why cant it be done right first time?

Re-entering data

If you would like help discovering and stripping out your DOWNTIME & waste.

Get in touch – Info@improveandconsult.co.uk or here

Map it, remove waste and Improve your HR process

06/11/2017/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

Every company I have ever worked for had waste in its HR and shared service processes. What do I mean by Waste?

Forms completed incorrectly and then had to be re-completed and resubmitted
Hiring Manager’s hands being held way too much through a process, because they are too busy, untrained or are being lazy.
Waiting for a colleague in finance to send you the requisition approval before you can begin your job
Not speaking to the HRBP who used to work in Recruitment, Finance and HR to ask how we can streamline things
Sending internal mail by post…. why are we posting things in 2017? Scan it!!!
Driving to the other side of the country for a meeting, to discover you could have dialled in
Double handling of the same task, eg someone checking someone else’s work, why cant it be done right first time?

We have worked in the HR industry since 2005, we understand that you are stretched and under pressure and don’t have time to have lunch let alone improve the status quo. Let us come in and help run an audit or improve your processes with Lean Workshops.

What can we do for you for £750?

Come to your offices and run a workshop to map your current processes
Work with your stakeholders to discover where the waste is in your way of working
Offer solutions as to how to strip out this waste
Develop a new more efficient LEAN process

Get in contact to discuss – Info@improveandconsult.co.uk or here

What are the 8 wastes of business and HR?

Lean HR Recipe – What Ingredients do you need?

06/11/2017/in Uncategorized /by Tom Money

So you are looking to make your HR processes lean, what are the main ingredients of this recipe?

Ingredients:

1 Manager/Process owner

1 Engaged Team (all main stakeholder groups represented)

1 roll of Brown Paper

2-3 packs of coloured Sticky Notes

2 packs of coloured sticky dots

1-2 Files of sample Data

1 pack of blue tack

2-3 pens

1 Flip Chart with paper

Cooking Time: 2-3 hours

Recipe Prep:

Analyse data to understand where there may be issues, bottlenecks and waste.

Take Roll of Brown paper and stick to the wall with blue tack

Draw swim lanes on the brown paper to indicate the different position/stakeholder groups involved in the process (eg Recruiters, HRBP, Finance, HRadmin etc)

Preheat the engagement of the team and stakeholders to 180c, by explaining the structure of the workshop and benefits.

Many of these people live this process day in day out, and may get a little hot under the collar, you may need to be fan assisted.

Method:

Ask the group what is the first step of the process, and who does this action?

Write on a sticky note and place on relevant swim lane. Ask what is the next step, and note down again. Complete this for all steps until you have a nice and congested process map.

Ask workshop members to take 6 red sticky dots and season generously the map, where they feel the waste and issues in the process are, with 3 red dots on the action/task with the most waste, 2 red dots on the next issue, and finally 1 red dot on the action that is the third biggest issue.

At the end, you will have a map littered with red dots. If further seasoning is required to ascertain the issue, repeat the exercise. Once the red dots have been distributed, spend some time talking through the results and discuss why the group thinks these are issues.

Looking at the map, ask the group which tasks can be improved or removed. You’ll be surprised how many tasks are wasted time, effort or cost. At the end of the workshop you will have identified the areas that you will want to improve or remove and create a new lean process.

Next you will need to spend some time discussing the improvements and how to implement them. Then you will need to measure the new process, to see the new positive results and compare it against the original data that you captured.

If you liked this Recipe, please share.

For other definitions on waste see DOWNTIME.