Alive HR

HR Pro Victorio Milian holds us accountable when he asks us to “Put Up or Shut Up,” to publicly declare our intentions and publicly report on our progress or lack thereof. As such, I wanted to report on my progress since my last post on this.

LOOKING BACK: This year, my main Put Up or Shut Up focus was improving the candidate experience. In general over the years, my department has done pretty well with candidate experience. Oh, we’ll never be perfect and we’ll never hit 100%, but we do some things very well. We welcome interviewees into a warm, friendly environment. Our staff are relaxed and convivial, which helps put candidates at ease.  If it becomes apparent the candidate is a better fit for a competitor, I refer elsewhere. I don’t believe in adversarial interviews and I’m often thanked for making the interview experience comfortable. But despite all that, I knew that I could do a lot more to keep applicants informed on their status. So, I dove into the PUSU challenge and almost killed myself in the process, spending countless evenings and Saturdays updating applicants on their status. My family life suffered and I didn’t have time for blogging or much else.

Eventually, I realized I needed to approach the issue differently, more strategically. Working harder wasn’t going to cut it; there simply aren’t enough hours in the week to communicate with an endless stream of applicants. I began to focus more on yield ratios (applications to interviews; interviews to offers; and offers to hires) knowing that if fewer, more qualified applicants entered the process then managing and communicating with them would be less time-intensive at every step. Not only that, but I could do it better, more personally.  I realized that conducting fewer dead-end interviews would save AMAZING  amounts of time, not just in appointment time but  because the further the candidate advances, the greater the expectation around communication.

In the last months, I’ve reduced candidate overload through psychometric testing designed to separate candidates with exceptional characteristics from the rest. (As I study for my SPHR, I am reminded that carefully designed pre-employment testing has an exceptionally high validity co-efficient). Result: I’m getting caught up on positions and I  interview fewer people per hire. This means I need to advertise less, and there are fewer people to communicate with. I am spending less of my personal time e-mailing candidates and it’s all working out well.

LOOKING AHEAD: For the next six months, I will be studying for the SPHR, with this approach:

1. Read the section in my review book.
2. Google the topic and read several other perspectives.
3. At work, look for real-world ways to apply the subject.
4. Engage with the HR online community (Twitter, blogs, Facebook) about my questions and learning.
5. Repeat.

My goal is not just to pass the SPHR, though obviously I intend to kick that test’s little butt. Rather,  my new Put Up and Shut Up is to:

1. Learn as much as I can from my SHHR review,  use this as an opportunity to audit most aspects of my department, and take what I/we’re doing to a higher level.

2. Continue to write. I just started a second blog around remarriage and blended family issues

3. I chair a nonprofit HR association network made up of fairly traditional HR practitioners and I intend to continue to reach out to them and challenge them gently toward the HRevolution direction, if you know what I mean.

photo by fanz