Iterate to innovate
Continuous improvement in recruitment; innovation from iteration pt 10
If you’re focused on good service and have recruited for one employer for any period of time, you’ll probably have noticed that, all other things being even, it only gets easier to fill their vacancies.
Part of this is from learning over time – the business, its culture, what works and what doesn't. Listening and applying improvements.
Part of this is might be because you are someone who keeps learning new skills or adopting relevant tech, and applying these to what you learn elsewhere.
If you do either intentionally it’s because you have an attitude towards continuous improvement.
Kaizen is one of the fundamental principles of the Toyota Production System.
Alongside notions like Gemba, 5 WHY and their upside-down culture model.
Kaizen broadly translates as continuous improvement (CI) and is a philosophy of ongoing, incremental and breakthrough improvement of products, services, or processes.
It’s been adopted across many industries successfully, from Starbucks in how they improve their coffee and stores, to efficiency improvement and cost reduction at Genzyme.
And it meshes well with a culture of learning.
One of the lynchpin processes in CI is PDCA:
Plan – identify the problem, process or vacancy you want to improve. Define them clearly and measure their current state. Set goals for improvement
Do – implement the plan, adjusting existing processes as required. Start with the corner of the puzzle then build outwards (one reason I’ve been offering ad reviews this week)
Check – after the changes have been implemented, check how any outcomes are different. Are they as desired?
Act – decide what to do next. Are the results optimal? Or are there more improvements that can be found. If that’s the case, start with a new plan.
This is a classic iterative cycle and is very blah blah blah.
Beyond the blah though is a practical approach that we can use as a framework to improve how we recruit, and the outcomes everyone wants.
Recruitment is an industry built on iterative cycles, we just call them different things.
Such as feedback.
Consultants who feedback to employers.
Employers who show their agencies where they can improve.
Employers who provide feedback on and to candidates.
Candidates who feedback to agencies and employers.
Each piece of feedback is a gem which can be used with intent.
You might recall this line from a recent post on ‘negative space’:
“This isn’t just any typical food manufacturing company, with an as-is workforce that only requires handholding and firefighting.”
It came from my consultation on the role.
The employer had run with their own advert first, with many applicants and no candidates.
“What’s the problem Aladdin?”, I asked.
And Al said to me, “All the candidates come from typical food manufacturing companies, with an as-is workforce that only requires handholding and firefighting. They just aren't right.”
Paraphrasing - took a little more digging and editing to finish with this.
Not that this was mentioned in their advert, so I happily iterated myself to inspiration.
A built-in no for the commonly wrong applicants that attracted better suited candidates.
The solution for their advertising problem was trapped in their heads, and it’s my job to get to the truth of their vacancy.
That they applied their advert messaging to their outreach also held them back, an example of ‘how you do anything, is how you do everything.’
You can apply iterative improvement everywhere in recruitment.
Find opportunities from problems.
I’m a better recruiter because of all of the fluster-clucks I hear from job seekers about their nightmare job searches.
By helping them improve their job search strategy, I also become a better recruiter – that’s a nice bit of reciprocity.
Why reinvent the wheel if you can iterate something better?
It’s not like any of the cool innovations out there are actually brand-new. They are typically iterations of what went before.
Even a lot of disruptive tech took an awful long time to become good enough to disrupt.
But the real secret power of continuous improvement is retrofitting it.
Breaking down a successful set of processes and seeing why they work, so you can replicate them effectively elsewhere.
Why do you think Kaizen itself has iterated across industries?
My consulting process stems from years of learnint (and typos), and seeing the benefit of iterations.
It’s what I’ve been doing in these newsletters: laying bare my processes so that you can apply the same.
Plus the best thing about a good process is that, when you have all the fundamentals right, you can layer suitable tech on top to find even better improvements.
While sometimes you’ll find that shiny new tech doesn’t actually solve any problems at all.
After all, we’re dealing with people, not the Borg.
Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Greg
P.s While you are here, if you like the idea of improving how you recruit, lack capacity or need better candidates, and are curious how I can help, these are my services:
- Go-to-Market, operational and technical key hire recruitment
- manage part or all of your recruitment on an individually designed basis for one client. Get access to an expert recruiter without the cost of a full time hire. Save money, save time, hire better candidates faster. Map the market, build candidate pipelines.
- recruitment coaching and mentoring
- recruitment strategy setting
- outplacement support
Just hit reply to check if my approach is right for you.
Another great read Greg. One of the values we had in a previous team I led was "Innovate beats Imitate" (plus a few others "Real beats Fake", "Fast beats Slow", "Wise beats Waste", and and and). This would have been a good addition to it if we'd known at the time. Will though apply in the future.