Objective
Our client, a leader in Early Childhood Education and Care Services, had undergone a significant growth spurt, as well as dealing with the challenges inherent in the Covid lockdown environments. In particular, they had ongoing challenges in their recruitment processes, due to a generally lower level of potential candidates, combined with variable business processes in use by remotely working recruitment officers.
Additionally, a recent software change regarding the Recruitment and Onboarding systems had caused some controversy within the business, spitting staff into those that loved the change and those who did not.
We were engaged to perform a process review and uncover why processes had diversified so much and where the issues may be with the new software.
Solution Delivery
- Our client asked us to talk to each key staff member individually, in order to understand their current process and why they were following it. Management felt that this would be the best way to uncover the truth of the situation, rather than doing a combined review session.
- It became clear quite quickly that there were several reasons for the diversity in what should have been a common process. This was due in part to the different requirements within each Recruiting “Stream”, but more significantly, due to the new software having been implemented without aligning the recruiting process. There was a subsequent lack of faith (from the staff) that the new software would be able to provide them with the information they needed when they needed it. As a result, many “external” Excel-based systems had sprung up and were in use to provide the tracking or reporting that staff did not know how to find, or was not available, in the new software.
- As part of our deliverables, we provided a short report detailing our observations, as well as a “side by side” comparison of the Current State processes. This comparison was to be used by business management to review the differences, deviations and gaps in the process, which would then guide the final outcome – would process alignment be sufficient, or were software changes also required? The comparison Current State process was striking in that there were hardly any common process points between staff.
Achievements
- This project was unusual for us, in that our deliverable was the review itself, rather than the development of the Future State. However, since our client was still determining their own future vision for this process, our requirement was to provide accurate, measureable and actionable data.
- During review sessions with key staff, we were able to draw out significant anecdotal detail from each of them regarding why they followed certain processes and where their concerns were. This provided meaningful information for management to determine how best to handle the next stage of the Change process, ensuring that they addressed these issues where possible.
- Business management had previously had strong suspicions regarding where the issues lay, but did not want to influence our review. It was interesting to note that our review not only confirmed some of these suspicions but also highlighted certain people-based issues which had not been previously considered.
- Our client was able to use the information we provided in order to better determine their next steps forward and how to optimise this process.
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