We’ve been recruiting heavily for a while now and it’s been an epic journey from those early days 4 years ago when I started here at NewVoiceMedia to where we are today.
The Dev team has grown very quickly indeed and we’re still recruiting for talented Developers to join us.
I’ve been involved in pretty much every hire in to the Dev team over the last 4 years and have thoroughly enjoyed this recruitment process. It’s where the inspiration for this latest series of blog posts has come from. When you’ve interviewed 150+ people at various stages of recruitment you start to find ways to optimise this process, see interesting patterns and work out whether or not you enjoy it. I enjoy it 🙂
When you receive a tonne of good candidates each week it’s important to have a process that is efficient and effective. I like to use Kanban to visualise the process and aid with tracking people as they move through our recruitment process.
Kanban is a visual tool to show you your work in process so that you can start to make decisions from the information. LeanKit have a decent description of what Kanban is on their website so I won’t repeat it here.
Above is an image of a typical recruitment Kanban board. The above shows a simple recruitment process from the point of view of a recruiter.
Any Kanban tool will work for visualising your stages and process, from post-its on a whiteboard to a fully fledged Trello board. I like Trello because it’s super easy to use, is free and can pretty much be configured to map out any process. The above is a doodle I did in the Paper App.
For this example I’ll use a standard recruitment process that starts with a backlog of applicants, then a phone interview, then a coding exercise, followed by a face to face and then hopefully an offer and a “Yes”, or it may just be a “No” from any stage within the process. Testers and Scrum Masters miss the Code Review stage unless that exercise is relevant but essentially follow the same flow.
An important part of an efficient system is to ensure you don’t spend time copying and pasting details. If you work closely with your recruiter you should be able to get them to send an email directly to Trello (with or without salary details depending on your level of sharing) so the candidate they are putting forward appears directly in the backlog of your Kanban board.
On the backlog are people who are applying for a role (hopefully you’ll be as quick as possible to provide timely feedback for the person applying 🙂 ). Then it’s a case of moving them through the different phases as you do your interviewing. I think it’s important to include an “Offer In Progress” stage because there are sometimes delays and of course, until you receive the signed paperwork back they technically have not accepted.
Each stage will no doubt trigger some actions for you and your team such as sending the coding exercising, reviewing the code and then getting all of the contract preparation stuff sorted for example. Simply flow people through your system and use the Kanban board to show you where people are in the process, where your bottlenecks are and also give you clues as to how efficient your recruitment and interviewing process is.
I find Kanban a really effective way to see how applications are processed. I firmly believe in responding to every single candidate as quickly as possible and Kanban helps me to do this and avoid bottlenecks in our system.
How do you manage your hiring?