The end goal of the Continuous Improvement (CI) concept is developing a set of business rules governing your recruiting process.
A “business rule” is a statement describing something your organization has agreed upon as an important component of a high-performing system. A good business rule will be simple, clear, and easy to remember.
While we’ll do our best to initially create the most effective business rules, they will not necessary remain static. Most business rules need to be tweaked and updated over time.
It’s the essence of the CI process. You never quite get to perfection.
How do you develop your own recruiting process business rules? Once you see recruiting as a defined and repeatable process, it flows more easily than you might expect.
Business Rule Development
When thinking about business rules, a number of people will connect this topic to software development and database management. Companies such as Oracle started using this term in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
The concept was simple. Developers wanted software to do the same thing every time it hit certain points in a defined process. A database system could contain thousands of business rules.
Since we now see recruiting as a defined process, the same principle applies. When you and those on your team hit certain points in the recruiting process, the same “right” decisions should be made every time.
For recruiting, we don’t need thousands of rules. By comparison, we need just a few, and the rules will be combined with good judgment rather than rigid computer logic.
Recruiting Process Business Rules
Perhaps the best way to demonstrate how to produce recruiting business rules is to provide some examples. Here are several we use inside HiringCenter, our company’s recruiting business process software platform:
After a person is designated as a candidate (responds to a job posting, manually entered by a recruiter, etc.), the company makes five attempts to contact the candidate over the following seven day period. The contact attempts consist of two phone calls and three emails.
Within 24 hours of a scheduled interview with a hiring manager, the candidate is contacted via phone (voicemail) and email reminding them of the interview.
Within 24 hours of a completed interview, a third party contacts the candidate to collect feedback on the interview.
You get the idea. In HiringCenter, there are more than 30 business rules similar to these examples.
Developing Your Own Business Rules
To do this on your own, a simple business process should be initially envisioned. Just start jotting some ideas on a whiteboard with your team. From these ideas, start to craft some of your own business rules.
Over time, more rules will need to be added, some rules will be removed, and some will be tweaked to improve the process. You’ll know what to change by applying the CI process steps we discussed in the last WorkPuzzle.
I know I’m making this sound overly simple. I’m presenting it this way to stress the importance of developing some business rules on your own. Just give it a try.
Perhaps you’ll select the wrong ones initially, but at least you’ll take the first step towards the goal. It’s a greater risk to do nothing.
If you don’t get started, you’ll never realize the benefits of the CI process and limit your capacity to execute at a high level.
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