With the way the world has been lately due to Covid-19, it’s more important than ever to be up to date on remote working and how to recruit appropriately for it. More companies have moved to remote working after realizing that it created a culture of empowerment and trust-based high performance.
If you want to run your business like a winner, it’s vital that you focus on flexibility. Agile Recruiting can help you do that. It helps to lay a foundation and focus on better prioritizing your recruitment projects, team collaboration, and aids in hiring better talent.
What is Agile Recruitment?
To apply “agility” to a business means to create better, collaborative, and dynamic approaches to getting work done while maintaining the highest quality. The idea of adding this to a business came from the Agile Manifesto. Having been developed in 2001 it has since been implemented by not only technology developers but by business leaders from all over the world.
Even though it has been used for the past 20 years in the tech industry, the principles of the Agile Manifesto have changed and adapted into different functions of business, such as human resources, marketing, and manufacturing.
Benefits of Agile Recruiting
1. Speed up the recruitment process: The sprint methodology can help recruiters to structure their workflow around smaller tasks, meaning they will have more control of their workflow and the flexibility to shorten recruitment procedures.
2. Instant Feedback: Using sprinting means you are creating more touch points between your recruitment teams and aspects of your tasks at the same time. This helps to create more regular check-ins making engaging with stakeholders an easier task, allowing you to receive real-time feedback and make the appropriate adjustments.
3. Enhance group performance and team collaboration: Valuing colleagues and candidates over tools and processes allows recruiters to be released from a fixed procedure and instead encourages them to design a hiring process that is talent focused and optimized according to their own workflow. This can motivate everyone on the team which ends up creating a more cohesive workflow.
Setting up agile recruitment
While this is not the only way you can implement the agile recruitment process into your business, it is a place to start. The agile recruitment itself is more like a philosophy that one should take under advisement and change according to how their business is run instead of just following it to the letter. As long as you are allowing for adaption and flexible workflow then you are on the right track of creating your ideal workforce. However, if you are not sure where to start, here are 5 simple steps that will get you on the right track.
Step 1: Define your needs
The first step for anyone wanting to change their business workforce is to review the resources, hiring plan, and hiring strategy that your business already has set. Doing this will determine how you are able to adopt the agile recruitment process into your business and how it can then be applied. Some businesses will introduce an entirely new agile business model while others will only incorporate some aspects of it into their recruiting process.
Agile recruitment can also help with more complex positions that you are trying to fill, these are generally niche roles or roles that have never been created before unlike traditional ones.
Step 2: Assembling the right team
If you’ve ever heard of rugby then this next popular framework will sound very familiar to you. The Scrum approach is based on an empirical process control theory, meaning your new recruitment team’s structure will be different than traditional recruitment teams.
This new recruitment team will consist of 3 roles:
· Scrum Master: a person who is responsible for supporting and promoting the scrum theory within their team, making sure they are working on effective collaborative efforts between their team and those outside of their team.
· Project Owner: their responsibility is to make sure the team is maximizing their effectiveness. They work with their team and stakeholders to create strategies for the recruitment processes vision.
· Recruitment Team: this is the group of people who work to reach the companies recruitment needs. They usually possess a specialized skill that will help the team as a whole to perform their tasks.
Step 3: Have a clear plan and map the progress
Once you have your team, it’s time to set your goals and start planning out how you will achieve them.
You may start off with listing your Recruitment Backlog then create a clear list of agile recruitment goals. A backlog can be divided into individual sprint cycles based on your company’s hiring plan. Since a sprint cycle only lasts between 2 to 4 weeks it’s important that your team create a strategy for each sprint. This will help them stay better organized and work effectively between each sprint.
To make sure everyone is on the same page, the next step is to plan out or visualize your team’s process. This will make your tea’s performance transparent and anyone on the recruiting scrum team, or stakeholders, will know what’s going on. It will allow your team to adjust their workflow and performance which will make it easier and more effective to keep track.
Step 4: Implementing technology and setting metrics
Having a metric system in place to evaluate each task will help your recruiting scrum team to gauge their performance and assess their progress, allowing them to make the proper altercations if need be.
You can also use the latest HR tools and technology to help your HR team with automation and standardization. This is advisable for modern recruiters.
Step 5: Keep on sprinting and adapting
One thing to remember is to keep on following up with your team and remain in communication so that they can get appropriate feedback and adapt their workflow accordingly. This can be done by having short daily meetings before you and your team start your day, allowing your team to update their progress, and having everyone stay informed if anything has changed.
At the end of the day the agile recruitment method isn’t an exact science and, like anything else, has room for improvement. The method itself is not an excuse to cut corners as building a relationship with your candidates is still an important factor in the hiring process. However, if you take the principles and apply them to what you’re already doing it can definitely make the hiring process easier.
