Recruitment Process - Kick-off and rethinking teams
A set of suggestions for producing a recruitment process and use it on your advantage.
The following set of posts are addressed to people who plan, set, and perform interviews for technical subjects. My experience is mostly in recruiting highly technical positions related to IT. During the past decade, I have made several hundreds of interviews and recruited more than a hundred people to my teams. Some of these candidates were highly valuable professionals with several options on the table and I managed to get a win even on less attractive missions. Even I got lucky to have experience in recruiting people to positions where the market didn’t have the desired skills due to the novelty of the technology. For these positions, the focus was more related to getting profiles that provided guarantees that they would be able to learn and master a new skill set. This paragraph is to show you I have substantial practical experience on this matter, and I will share my thoughts about several practices I have seen, or from feedback given by friends or colleagues who were kind enough to share their experiences.
Start with Why
The question is: Why are you searching for a new profile? This is a fundamental question and sometimes you would be surprised with the answers. Some of the most famous answers:
Budget approval for X amount of FTEs
I am anticipating a possible launch of a new project
Addressing turnover
Address overwork or unbalanced work charges among the team
Cost reduction
It’s OK to proceed with recruitment if you feel and have conditions to onboard a new member of the team. I just want to deconstruct some of the reasons listed above.
Ah, the money! Managing the budget.
Having a budget is important to onboard and pay for new team members, but it cannot be the leading factor in moving to recruitment. There is a difference between having a budget and actual work to provide to the new person.
In a previous project, I had a budget for a large team but unfortunately, the program was run poorly, and feeding a team with work was a challenge. For this example, I refrained from recruiting all the FTEs I had on paper to have better cost efficiency and avoid loss of motivation from the team. If this situation speaks to you, it is better to address the faulty project procedures before making the problem worse to manage.
Highly performant staff don’t like to constantly beg for new stuff to do and it can severally hurt motivation levels among the team. And of course, as a Project Manager, your role is to guarantee that resources (both money and people) are used efficiently. Please note that the project budget doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the project sponsor or ultimately to the stockholder. Use that money wisely.
Handpick your starting rock stars.
Anticipating a project launch and recruiting difficult profiles make sense on paper and can even be a great help in reality. The problem arises when the project fails to start and you are stuck with several FTEs who are forced to work on a different project from what they were recruited on. If you want to anticipate recruitment on a yet-to-launch project, my advice is to do risk management and use talent in-house. Does your organization have people wanting to change projects or missions? Is there someone who is actively studying the skillset you are procuring and you overlooked? Did you ask around your organization if someone would be available? Recruiting an entire team before the project launch is not advisable at all, but sometimes it makes sense to reserve some hand-picked positions to help a smooth launch. Making these positions filled for in-house personnel has several advantages: Easier expectations to manage; Career planning; You already have direct feedback about the person and project; Cost efficiency since the new people will move when the project starts avoiding the burden of an entire recruitment process.
Nevertheless, make no mistake when a project fails to start it will create frustrations. This is unavoidable. The key here is to make the cost of failure low.
An opportunity called “turnover”.
If you are addressing turnover on your project or team, I would recommend taking this opportunity to rethink the skills needed. Some leaders simply replace the employee with another with similar skill sets. While this made sense at some point in time, depending on the project's evolution or maturity, you can develop other areas and use the turnover in your favor: for example, searching for a profile with different skill sets from the one who just left the team. Are there parts of your project that would benefit from a different set of skills not found on the team? Do you have a sufficient workload to accommodate the FTE? Or maybe make the thought exercise on how your project would benefit from replacing it with a consultant or a short-term team member to improve some specific areas of the project. The main message is: Use a turnover to your benefit and from a different view angle, ask yourself what you could improve if you had a different skillset on the team.
Is it overwork or inefficiency?
Addressing overwork, or unbalanced work charges on the team, mostly indicate two things: Lack of capacity planning and weak processes. Highly inefficient tasks can provide an illusion of overwork simply because the team had never an opportunity to rethink or improve upon the tasks. I have seen personally on BAU teams where the people unfortunately don’t have a Continuous Improvement mindset and despite the fact they complain about the workload they don’t do anything to improve the process or the task. They advocate their BAU is too high and cannot allocate time to improvements, even if those improvements could save them hours, or even days of work once completed. I am not advocating that you don’t recruit more people, I am just showing that process or task improvements could save hours of work and avoid more FTEs (Full-Time Employees). Check how inefficient the tasks could be and if you are not better suited with a set of improvement measures.
In conclusion
In prior paragraphs, you read plenty of cost-efficient concerns. But there is another reason why recruitment is done: To replace an expensive task force with a less expensive one. Also known as nearshoring or offshore projects. With the rise of remote working this will be a greater reality and will hit the western countries the most. It’s an entire topic on its own, but I will keep it short here: Be mindful of cultural differences and adapt yourselves as well. Strategize how you will handle the downsize of the current workforce and how they will be replaced.
When you clear all the dots on your reasoning, and if it makes sense to search for the next new colleague, you will start a very curious and intriguing journey.