41% of British people would like their own business at some point, adding to the more than 5.5 million small businesses already in existence. Most of them will know the challenges they might face if they pursue their dreams. Will their business idea be viable, where will they source the capital to become a startup, can they survive the first year, the list goes on.
One area that most of them probably don’t think about is staff recruitment. How could they compete with larger businesses and corporations in an often competitive jobs market? How can they offer opportunities for career progression and promotion? One tactic in this area that is seeing increasing use is agile recruiting. Just what is agile recruiting and how can it help SMEs?
What is agile recruiting?
You may be wondering if there’s any connection between agile recruiting and agile development in the world of software development. If you were, then the answer is yes. The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001 as a set of guidelines and values for developing software. In essence, the manifesto could be summarised in three main points.
- Breaking work down into smaller sections, working on them, and delivering results.
- Ensuring that value is delivered to customers and stakeholders.
- Embracing change, especially where it adds value or streamlines workflows.
Since its successful adoption, the ideas contained in the Agile Manifesto have been adapted to other areas such as project management and human resources (HR).
Agile recruiting takes those principles and applies them to the hiring and recruitment process. The goal is to create a collaborative and flexible process that streamlines your talent acquisition efforts, and that can be adjusted according to needs and based on informed insights provided by real-time feedback.
At its core, agile recruiting is intended to be able to adapt to the needs of your organisation and your HR professionals. The adjustments you may make to your process could be small but are intended to facilitate positive change in the process.
If applied correctly, agile recruiting can improve your important recruitment metrics such as time to fill, cost per hire, and candidate experience. You should also see a higher degree of collaboration and better results when it comes to the relationship between the requirements of the job role and the candidates you have in your hiring funnel.
Benefits of agile recruitment
When an organisation’s C-suite considers any new system or process, one of the first things they do is look at what benefits the new proposal will bring. Knowing these benefits is a major step toward implementing agile recruiting.
- Time. While some staff turnover is known well in advance, some can be at short notice. If that person’s role is a crucial one, then you want it filled quickly. The average time to hire in the UK is 36 days but agile recruiting can streamline your hiring process and reduce time to hire.
- Costs. Recruitment and hiring costs can be high, from advertising the role and receiving resumes and cover letters to the interview process to onboarding and training. An agile recruitment process can not only reduce your time to hire but can also help reduce overall costs by providing you with a more efficient recruitment pipeline.
- Collaboration. Recruitment can be about more than your HR team. Managers and supervisors may want input as to their ideal candidate. AR can give you set touchpoints that encourage collaboration and can identify any pain points quickly.
- Mistakes. A more streamlined and collaborative process can help your team avoid mistakes when it comes to hiring a candidate. Increased discussion and collaboration can develop your ideal candidate persona.
- Focus. More discussion and a determination to deliver value to all relevant parties means any team working on a recruitment campaign will be more focused on end results.
Agile sprints explained
One of the most common terms you will see in relation to the Agile Manifesto is ‘sprints’. This applies to both agile development and agile recruitment. What are these sprints? If you’ve ever watched a long-distance race, you will have noticed that there are periods where the runners maintain a steady pace and others where they accelerate to a sprint. It’s the same philosophy here.
In agile recruiting, a sprint is a period (usually a week but you can adjust this to your own needs) where the team focuses on a specific stage of your hiring process. Depending on your time-to-hire goals, you would break the planned total period into smaller increments, each with its own identified goal. For example, you could plan out the process as follows.
- Sprint 1: Use Oleeo’s resume parsing to whittle down applicants based on your requirements.
- Sprint 2: Carry out candidate screening by phone or video call.
- Sprint 3: Candidate assessments or tests. These will be based on the needs of the organisation and the job role.
- Sprint 4: Interview the candidates who made your shortlist.
Tips to help you adopt agile recruiting
If you like the idea – and the benefits – of agile recruiting and want to adopt it, how do you start to implement a new process?
1. Build a team
Before you have a recruitment campaign, you need to have an agile recruitment team. Now, you may decide to have some permanent members and some ad hoc members. The ad hoc members might be involved in specific job roles. For example, you need a new senior IT worker to help you implement information technology lifecycle management. For that scenario, your ad hoc member could be your IT manager.
Each of your permanent members should have a clearly defined role that helps drive the process forward. While AR teams can consist of as many as nine people, SMEs may look at smaller teams of around three. This number reflects the specific roles required.
- Scrum master. Scrum refers to the set periods you sprint in. Your scrum master acts as a guide and should have an intrinsic understanding of the agile process and the scrum framework.
- Project owner. You could think of this role as similar to a project manager. They are responsible for ensuring the team is effective and that it works in a collaborative manner. They will communicate with all relevant stakeholders and will create a recruitment backlog which is a list of everything you need in your AR process. Your hiring manager may be a good choice for this role.
2. Identify KPIs (key performance indicators)
KPIs and metrics are necessary to measure the effectiveness of any process. Your agile team can discuss what KPIs they think best reflect any success when it comes to progress. Tracking your identified KPIs can let you see if there are any pain points that can be eradicated with a little tweaking. Some of the KPIs you may want to consider include:
- Cost per hire.
- Time to hire.
- Candidates per source.
- Percentage of candidates who progress to the interview stage.
- Offer acceptance rate.
You may decide to change what KPIs you prioritise at some point, but by tracking the ones most relevant to you, you gather valuable data that can improve future hiring campaigns.
3. Set your sprint tasks
As discussed earlier, you want to break down the recruitment process into the important tasks and set time periods for them. These periods will depend on the urgency of the vacancy and how quickly you want a candidate hired. For example, you urgently need a staff member to work on lead generation. You could decide to set shorter time periods for each of the required tasks.
The thing to note is that these periods do not need to be of equal length. Depending on your needs, you can prioritise what tasks are most important and/or what tasks will need the shortest or longest time assigned to them.
4. Visualisation
Recruitment can be a complex process, especially if you have multiple candidates. Being able to see a visual representation of your agile process – and the progress being made – can be very helpful. You can use technological solutions such as a Trello board or you could just go old school and use a combination of post-it notes and a whiteboard.
The whole idea of visualising the process is to ensure that your sprints are working as intended and that there are no unexpected pain points.
5. Meet regularly
It can be very helpful, especially in the early stages of implementing an agile recruiting plan, to have the team meet regularly. These meetings could be in-person or by video conference using your online phone systems. Regular meetings can ensure that every team member has met their responsibilities and has made progress.
Meetings also afford the opportunity to identify and discuss any problems that have been encountered. This can prevent any logjams from happening in your recruitment process. Your meetings do not need to be lengthy (unless there is a lot to discuss).
6. Communication
In order to be effective, your agile team has to practise good communication throughout. This applies not only to members of the team, but to candidates where required, and to relevant stakeholders such as department managers (if you have not added them as an ad hoc member).
The agile recruitment process works best when the team has all the information they need to work effectively and when relevant information is passed to other parties. This is another area where tech can help, such as Oleeo’s cloud recruitment software.
7. Be remote-friendly
Many modern workplaces have adopted remote or hybrid working patterns and if this includes your organisation, then you need to recognise this in your agile recruiting plans. It may be that some of your team are working in these models, or it may even be that the current role you are working on offers remote or hybrid patterns.
The two keywords in effective remote policies are technology and communication. Remote working is dependent on good communication and this is best attained with solid tech tools such as video conferences, screen sharing, and so on. If any of your team works remotely, ensure you have the necessary tools to make the collaborative process easier.
8. Review and tweak
It’s rare to get things right the first time, but if you do, well done. One of the advantages of applying agile methodologies to your recruitment process is that if things aren’t working as expected, you can change them quickly. Rather than reviewing the overall AR process, consider reviewing each sprint cycle as it ends, so that you can see how effective they have been.
Look at every aspect of your agile team’s work and the impact on the recruitment process as a whole. This allows you to focus on things that work well and things that don’t. Look at your sprint cycles and overall collaboration and communication. With real-time feedback and an agile approach, mistakes can be easily and quickly rectified and you can nurture continuous improvement to the process.
The takeaway
Adopting an agile recruiting process can make a lot of positive difference to a small business. It streamlines your hiring process and can save you time and money. Agile recruiting methodologies can help you attract the right candidate in a timely manner. You want your recruitment efforts to not only make the process more efficient but to ensure you source candidates that are an ideal fit.
At the heart of successful agile recruiting lies effective collaboration. Your recruiting scrum team needs to work together and fully understand the agile recruitment approach. It can help develop your talent pipeline so that during any candidate search, you have qualified candidates and can then screen candidates to find your best shortlist. Agile recruiting can help any small business optimise its recruitment strategy.
