I am fortunate to be part of an elite talent acquisition team at Spectrum Health. We are a team that gets results, results generated through recruiters who are passionate about excellence. The fun part is improvement.
We’re improving through recruiters driving change and functioning as front-line influencers. The road from good to elite comes with obstacles, but it doesn’t need to come with a 3-5 year implementation plan.
Below are tips on how to change quickly and why change should be implemented without relying on memos.
Getting bogged down with disconnected, transactional work is all too common in today’s corporate environment. Avoiding this when implementing change is critical.
One solution: determine what is important, talk about it often and talk about it in depth. Daily tactical “huddles” can assist with this, huddles rooted in process improvement and delivered with precision help to elevate recruiters above the weeds. Shift the discussion from “I had to reschedule my hiring manager’s interview three times” to “why are we scheduling someone else’s interview?”
If you expect others to buy into your change, you must upgrade the service you provide. Upgrade doesn’t mean pleasing the masses by saying yes to every frivolous request that comes in, but instead upgrading core value. In many cases, this is empowering your recruiters to say no — empowering them to truly consult with leaders by offering forward-looking data-driven solutions. With that, the expectations you set with your team must rise and subpar performance corrected.
Having your team articulate the business case for change in real-time is a much more effective mechanism than sending an over-engineered memo announcing change. Three reasons why: 1) Just because it’s written doesn’t make it so; 2) Confronting change on the front-line reinforces a culture of continuous improvement; why distribute a memo when taking calculated risks should be an expectation?; and 3) Any memo more than a few sentences long typically does more harm than good.
When implementing change, everything will not be perfect. That’s OK. What’s important is to be nimble enough to adjust, not to look back. Reverting to how things use to be should not be an option. There are many difficult things in life but changing processes for the better doesn’t need to be one of them.
Some of the Related Conference Sessions at the ERE Recruiting Conference in San Diego:
