We dedicate a lot of time on this show to talking about technology-driven change. It is also important to recognise the role process innovation is playing in the evolution of recruiting. Agile recruiting and Lean recruiting are just two of the phrases we are hearing a lot at the moment but what does this all mean in practice?
My guest this week is Craig Brown from Just-In-Time-Recruiting. Craig is just the right combination of cutting edge thinker, and pragmatic recruiting practitioner needed to explain the current landscape adequately.
In the interview we discuss:
- Theory versus practice
- A framework for using lean and agile methodologies
- The key elements of the “Lean Recruiting “Canvass.”
- The importance of ratio analysis
Craig also talks through some specific examples of these methodologies in practice to illustrate their benefits.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:09]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 173 of the Recruiting Future podcast. We dedicate a lot of time on this show to talking about technology driven change. It’s also important to recognize the role that process innovation is currently playing in the evolution of recruiting. Agile recruiting, lean recruiting. These are just two of the huge amounts of phrases that are being thrown around at the moment. But what does this actually all mean in practice? My guest this week is Craig Brown from Just In Time Recruiting. Craig is just the right combination of cutting edge thinker and pragmatic recruiting practitioner to explain the current landscape to us.
Matt Alder [00:01:56]:
Hi Craig, and welcome to the podcast.
Craig Brown [00:01:59]:
Hi Matt, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:01:59]:
I’m very good, thank you. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just quickly introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Craig Brown [00:02:06]:
Yeah, sure. My name is Craig Brown and I’m the founder of Just-In-Time Recruiting.com and the author of the Lean Recruiting Toolkit.
Matt Alder [00:02:13]:
Fantastic. Now, you know I’ve known you for a few years in sort of various different guises and I think before we sort of get into talking about exactly what Just In Time recruiting and Lean Recruiting are, it would be good just to. For everyone, I think, just to hear a little about your story, how you got into recruitment, some of the things you’ve done and some of the frustrations that you’ve experienced that you’re currently trying to solve.
Craig Brown [00:02:40]:
Yeah, sure. Well, I guess probably in total, I have about 15 or 16 years experience in the recruitment space overall. I mean, like a lot of people, I have some experience as a hiring manager and then some corporate HR experience as well. And then I was involved with an HR tech startup for a while and really for the last sort of six or seven years I’ve been running my own recruiting agency, which I Kind of got into without any previous experience, which I probably wouldn’t recommend, but that’s the way it happened for me. So as I sort of moved along through my agency experience, I’m a big fan of process optimization. And as I went along, I’d sort of learn new ways of doing things and make things happen a bit faster and a bit more smoothly. And I gradually tried to work that forward to make a very smooth recruitment process for myself and for my customers.
Matt Alder [00:03:37]:
So when it comes to sort of process optimization in recruiting and trying to find sort of more efficient ways of working, whether that’s for agencies or for employers themselves, words like Lean and Agile that come from sort of, you know, various other, you know, various other industries, you know, manufacturing processes, Silicon Valley product development processes seem to kind of get thrown around without much thought about what they actually mean and how they can be adapted to recruitment. I know this is an area that you’ve kind of really, really thought about and really kind of looked into. Can you sort of tell us a little bit more about what Lean and Agile mean to you?
Craig Brown [00:04:18]:
Well, I don’t think they have to be overly defined. I mean, what it’s really all about is making things work better and more smoothly and coming up with better over time. So, like a lot of people, I’ve been hearing a lot about Lean the last few years. You hear people give talks about it and how it can be applied to recruiting, but it seems a lot like people trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It works in manufacturing, so can it work in recruitment? It works in the startup world, so can it work in recruitment? But for me, the real problem with it until now has been that it’s a lot of theory, but there’s not much in practice. So what I’ve tried to develop is a very real framework for using Lean and Agile principles and implementing real takeaways for the recruiting function.
Matt Alder [00:05:07]:
So you’re kind of calling this just in time recruiting. Tell us about it and how it works.
Craig Brown [00:05:14]:
Well, basically the theory part of it is that in order to be successful in recruiting, you really need three main things. So the first thing you need is skill, right? So whether that’s interviewing skills or your skills at conducting Boolean search or whatnot, and that’s largely reliant on your knowledge and your experience and your education. The second thing you need, of course, is technology. It’s hard to imagine recruiting nowadays without some form of technology. And the third component, which I quite often find missing, is the strategy component. It’s great to have skill and technology, but that only means you’re going to be successful some of the time, and then when you’re not successful, you’re not going to know why. So what I offer is sort of the strategy component. So strategy, whether it’s in recruiting or any other part of business, really is going to consist of two main things. It’s going to consist of a plan and it’s going to consist of the built in capacity to change that plan when new information comes to light. So for our plan, we’ve developed something called the Lean Recruiting Canvas, and probably a lot of your listeners will be familiar with that terminology. There was the business model canvas was come up with by a guy called Alexander Osterwalder, which was adapted by another gentleman called Ash Moria who created the Lean Startup Canvas. So we use that to make our initial plan and there’s a number of categories or boxes on this one page plan. And then as we go forward, we analyze our progress and we measure it and we make changes as and when necessary to the plan to make sure we get closer and closer to the perfect hire over time.
Matt Alder [00:06:51]:
So can you tell us a little bit more about the recruiting canvas? You know, what are the elements, how, you know, how does this kind of way of doing strategy differ and how does it get results very, very quickly?
Craig Brown [00:07:05]:
Well, I think the important thing to remember about the Lean Recruiting Canvas is that it doesn’t. It’s not meant to give you all the answers. What it’s meant to do is ensure that you ask yourself all the right questions. So there’s 10 different boxes, but they largely fall into two categories. One category would be looking at the business, business needs, business requirements and return on investment for the business. And other. The other section would basically be on internal things you need to look at, such as identifying what the ideal employee would look like compared with the type of person you need to hire. And based on the ideal employee, what process, what recruiting process you need to use for that type of role. And basically you’d have one canvas for each type of hire that you need to do. So you’d have one Canvas, for example, for your iOS developers, one for your electrical engineers, one for your administrative assistants, one for your accountants, and so on.
Matt Alder [00:07:59]:
Okay, so from that point, so it’s kind of creating a canvas. It sounds to me like it’s collecting a lot of information and really thinking about the way forward. How does the process move forward from there?
Craig Brown [00:08:11]:
So from there, well, you implement your hiring process. And what I encourage people to do is once a week to kind of sit down with themselves or a colleague and measure how their results are going. So we would identify as part of that canvas key metrics that you want to look at. I’m a big proponent of sort of ratio analysis between the steps. So for example, for every 10 candidates, you get to sit a behavioral assessment, how many of them pass and proceed to the next step, and out of the ones that get to the next step, how many get to the next step, and so on. And if you see one of your areas ballooning, that’s when you sort of sit down and say, okay, well, something’s not quite working here. We need to check that out. Essentially what we’re looking for is something I’m calling catalysts, which I guess in common parlance would be more like when you run into a problem or there’s a blip in the road. But we call them catalysts because it’s an opportunity for change. So essentially there’s two types of catalysts. There’s obstructive catalysts and latent catalysts. An obstructive catalyst is something everybody would recognize. It’s when you’re looking for a candidate for a role and no matter how hard you look, you absolutely cannot find a single solitary person. So you’re obstructed from proceeding to the next step, which hopefully is hiring someone. So those are pretty obvious. But latent catalysts are something that really only become obvious upon regular sort of weekly inspection of your process. Maybe your numbers are ballooning on one of your ratios and you need to find out why. Or perhaps your hiring panel, they’re focusing more on nice to have characteristics than must haves and they’re getting a bit off track.
Matt Alder [00:09:57]:
I think that’s interesting because obviously that’s an advantage of using a process like this. What are the other advantages of working in this way?
Craig Brown [00:10:05]:
Well, for me, it just ensures that nothing really gets forgotten. I guess that’s the main thing. But. But it also gives you a framework that you can show to other parts of the business. So if you have a hiring manager who’s left a role with you for a month and they’re not getting any results, then you can go back to them and say, well, here’s the process that we discussed and perhaps agreed on, hopefully agreed on. I’ve tried X, Y and Z for a month. None of these have worked. Here are my recommendations for change. What do you think? So really it kind of gets buy in from business as well and shows them that there’s a lot more to actually recruiting than a lot of people think.
Matt Alder [00:10:46]:
Now, I know this is a process you use yourself and it’s also one that you teach to other people, either from something that you’ve done or through stuff that’s come out in your various workshops. Can you give us a practical example of say, a specific role and how this might work?
Craig Brown [00:11:04]:
Yeah, so I had one participant in one of my workshops, they were looking for sort of mid level software salespeople, sort of two to five years experience. And one of the, one of the points we identified on when we were sort of filling out the ideal candidate section is that, you know, a lot of employers will sit on, you know, two years plus or three to five years. And I just pointed out that’s rather sort of arbitrary number. Why not 1.5 years or 1.3 years, as long as they can prove that they can do the job? So I think with her in particular, that really struck home. And when she went back to home office, she sort of thought, well, rather than looking for a set number of years experience, why don’t we look for someone who can prove to us that they can sell what they said that they can sell? And those proof points are a little more difficult to find rather than looking for two years or three years on a resume, but they can be found and they’re kind of necessary to prove as well, particularly for sales roles. So in a nutshell, they drop their number of years requirement and actually managed to make some hires with people with less experience but appropriate experience.
Matt Alder [00:12:15]:
So it sounds like the process of going through and filling out the initial canvas is absolutely critical here. Can you tell us a little bit more about the canvas and a bit more about the process that people need to go through to fill it out effectively?
Craig Brown [00:12:31]:
Yeah, sure. So generally speaking, what people do is they start with the problem identification. Normally when you say problem people think about the recruiter’s problem. You know, Bob’s quit, so he needs to be replaced. But what we’re really talking about here is the problem that the company has encountered that needs to be resolved. So just to give you a quick example, just because somebody’s quit doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to be replaced. Maybe the company is going through a slower time and that’s the reason why the person quit and they don’t need to be replaced. Another example would be on the more positive side. Let’s say an employer has more leads for business coming in than they can currently deal with. And if they don’t hire a new salesperson, those leads kind of Fall through the cracks and get away. So the first part is the identification of the corporate problem and then we move on to the solution, which normally is hire full time employee, but not always. So, you know, maybe one time out of 20 you actually don’t need to hire someone that saves your company money, but it’s also good for morale as well because you don’t have people hanging around not doing enough. So from the solution, we go on to identify what we need in an ideal employee. So most roles have three or four main functions. You need to do X, Y and Z to be successful in this role. And you would build the ideal employee profile out of that. You’d come up with sort of three to five bullet points that are critical to the role. And those are the points that you need to prove as you’re going through the recruitment process. So from there you move on to the process section. Build out your process based on what you need to prove about the ideal employee. You obviously want to tackle the easiest things first and move on to more challenging things as you get through the process. Decide your channels, decide what metrics you want to measure as you go through it. And then toward the end, we want to tie it all back to the business. We want to work out how much this new employee is going to cost us to hire, how much it’s going to cost us to employ them, and then what value they’re adding to the business. So basically, when you’re completed making this whole plan, you can go back to the hiring manager, get sign off from them and get agreement. You might have to make a few more tweaks, but then when you have agreement, it tends to make things move a little bit more fast. You know, you’ll get probably faster turnaround times from the hiring manager as well if they’re on board with the process that you’re using. And it shows them that you’ve given it quite a bit of thought as well.
Matt Alder [00:15:11]:
So final question, where can people go to learn more about this process and where can they find you?
Craig Brown [00:15:18]:
So my website is just in time. Recruiting.com There’s a fair amount of information on there. Of course we have the book, we have an online course as well, and I conduct regular workshops on this process.
Matt Alder [00:15:29]:
Craig, thank you very much for talking to me.
Craig Brown [00:15:31]:
Thank you, Matt. Much appreciated.
Matt Alder [00:15:33]:
My thanks to Craig Brown. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your app Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
