One of the most time-consuming activities for managers is managing the employee lifecycle while ensuring it remains fair, transparent, and understandable for everyone. To address this, I have developed a comprehensive playbook that serves as a clear guide from hiring to the departure of an employee. Ideally, you would have a dedicated business partner from the People team to handle these processes for you and your fellow managers, rather than having each manager handle them individually and potentially inconsistently.
1️⃣ Employee-Driven - As an employee, you are responsible for adhering to this playbook. This approach empowers employees to actively participate in and drive their own career development, fostering a culture of accountability and engagement.
2️⃣ Fairness through Reproducibility - Ensuring consistency in processes promotes fairness. By maintaining similar procedures for all employees, you can create an equitable and transparent work environment.
The hiring process is the starting point of the employee lifecycle and sets the foundation for the bond an employee has with the company. Mistakes made in this phase will hurt you with an order of a magnitude more along the following process assuming you are still achieve to hire the person. But luckily the same applies for the opposite - investing into the future employees starts with the hiring process.
There are various channels through which we can establish first contact with a candidate. We prioritise our efforts in the following categories.
The people that come recommended are always our first choice and therefore must be incentivised through a referral program. Those that we have worked with and know how they function are the easiest to onboard. Recommendations by employees also means they have skin in the game. Those people, through a recommendation of an employee can skip the challenge and go straight into culture check (see more about this below). Furthermore if you invested into hiring the fitting people into your culture, this referral program will further amplify the culture. At the same time, if you hire, and nobody refers, this is a smell that must be investigated.
The people we actively sourced are our second best choice. Through recruiters, but also with the help of hiring managers for key roles we can use tools such as LinkedIn or others to look up great candidates and actively write to them via the hiring mangers profile. Reaching out via your own profile can be extremely powerful. I observed 50%+ opening rates if I reached out to potential candidates vs. 30%+ outreach done by recruiters.
People that apply are our last best choice. We optimise to cut through the mist quickly and specifically look for talent. Seniors usually don’t apply through those channels and they are filled with mass applications. Use tools that automate this, because a good brand can easily attract hundreds of applications on a new role. Search here specifically for candidates that are not amplifying your existing culture but enriching it.
<aside> 🎯 Inbound to decline/offer in 15 days in 90% of time
</aside>
The hiring process is a statement to our efficiency and agility when attracting people. The interview process is a reflection of the companies ability to show pace. Any candidate that comes into the funnel should be filtered out or get eventually an offer in not more than 10 - 15 work days. In the priority of the inbound channels. The core reason for the breach of SLA is availability of the candidate.
Overall we must challenge ourselves to find within 3 - 4 hours of investment with the candidate a clear picture to be sure we hire great people.