Several years ago, I was mentoring Jason Lew, one of my clients who lived in Boston and was growing chain of bilingual preschools called Pine Village Preschool. He needed to hire twelve new teachers by the end of August.
In our discussion I asked these questions about hiring:
1. How many resumes do you think you need to net twelve hires? He wasn’t sure.
2. Where do you plan to get all the resumes you need? Same answer.
Obviously, Jason needed some assistance. He needed a plan, and then he needed to reverse engineer it to make it a reality.
We started by listing every step in the recruiting process:
1. Applications
2. Auto-reply
3. An invitation to group interview
3. Pass group interview
4. Pass the one-on-one interview
5. Pass the classroom test
6. Pass reference checks
6. “Sniff Test”
7. Offer accepted and signed
8. …and finally, training.
During our discussions, Jason quickly realized that at each step of the process a certain percentage of the applicants would drop out and not move to the next level. It turned out he needed five hundred and twenty-two applications to end up with twelve qualified candidates to hire.
Then it got even more fun. I pointed out that to have the new hires ready to start on September 1st, each new employee would have to go through two weeks of training and have time to quit their current job, as well as perhaps take some summer vacation. We quickly realized that it was time to list every step in the recruiting process so the team would have all the steps needed to be done in order and with a person assigned to do each. It was going to require military precision to generate that many resumes in time for the fall.
Rising Medical Solutions is another company I mentored in Chicago, and they were hiring a vice president of sales. When I asked them to list all the things that had to happen before hiring a candidate, and put them in order, here is the list that they ended up with.
- Score Card For The Role Completed
- Job Description Written
- List Of Potential Candidates We Know In Writing
- Roles, Goals, & Expectations In Writing
- Networking For Candidates Started
- Comp Plan In Writing
- Job Posting On Key Sites
- Recruiting Firms Engaged
- Interview Questions
- One-On-One Interviews Done
- Panel Interview Done
- Ref Checks Completed
- Background Check Complete
- Drug Screening
As you can see, after the completion of this exercise, each step of the recruiting process was now thoroughly considered. Each step had one person assigned, and that person was accountable for completing the step. More importantly, each step of the process had a date attached to it. All they had to do now was ensure that the people responsible for a specific task had the skills and motivation necessary to complete the steps assigned to them.
The COO Alliance is here to help with these, and many other, challenges facing COOs today. For more information, apply now.
If you want to learn more about focused hiring (and interviewing) be sure to buy a copy of Double Double, and turn to chapter 4 – it had lots of great infomation that will help.
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