Overcome talent shortage – a rigid business is a business prone to failure. But if you’re here, you already know this so we’ll skip the formalities.
The idea of human interaction must be the most complex thing we’ve done in human history. We have created constructs to accommodate our way of thinking, transferring the entirety of our lives into conventions that make our lives better.
Build Powerful Teams That Thrive In The Unknown
Ironically for a species that has achieved so much, we still haven’t found a recipe for communication and teamwork to help us achieve our best. So much so that I’m beginning to think it’s impossible.
My thought process when faced with impossibility is to find commonalities that allow us to build upon them to generate better results. One of these commonalities, and not just in the business world, is the resilience of the human mind. It’s relentless.
The more I think about it, I believe we’ve come this far because we’re never satisfied with our achievements. We’ve turned our biggest flaw into our biggest advantage.We wouldn’t be here had our ancestors been ok with just producing food for themselves.
So whenever faced with the impossible task of coordinating a team, trying to make them resilient is not just about the adversities of life, as you might think. It’s also about what I’ve learned to be human nature.
- It’s okay if not everybody in your team is happy about everything at every given moment in time. Because that’s an opportunity to make things better, right there. Assuming, of course, that that’s your common goal. Because without a common goal, teams are just heterogeneous gatherings of people doomed to fail. Giving your teammates the right to speak up and be truly heard at any time is invaluable, it’s the root of all progress. It keeps you all open to the idea of change, it keeps you in check towards this horrible bias of being in love with your own ideas, and it creates a climate of trust.
- It’s okay if someone leaves your team. We’ve built this social construct in our professional lives that it’s sad when someone leaves, when in fact they might be just pursuing their callings. In reality, whenever you decide to part ways with someone it’s most likely a beneficial thing for both of you (and not just in your professional lives, by the way). Needless to say but for this I’m willing to risk being superfluous, it stops being okay if that person leaves because of a toxic workplace. And we’ll be talking about red flags in the following content piece.
- It’s ok to get bad feedback. Moreover, I’m going to go on the record saying that the very best improvements I’ve made to a professional situation were almost always the result of bad feedback. Whether it’s from inside the team or from your end audience, every real stakeholder should be able to push your business one way or the other. If you’re not getting enough bad feedback, maybe it’s time you reassessed the quality of communication between you and your team. Because perfection doesn’t exist and consensus is not something you can ever naturally expect unless we’re talking about sheer brilliance, and that’s really hard to come across.
- It’s okay to have debates that seem to go nowhere. From my experience, clarity is not something we have per se, but something we gain from a healthy ping-pong of perspectives. Obviously it has to be controlled in order to work, and turning your business into a debate club is not the answer. But showing openness to dialogue doesn’t just improve your product, it also empowers your team to have different perspectives, and to own them – to explain every part of the process even when it seems that there’s nothing to explain.
- But more importantly, if it wasn’t already implied, your team’s flexibility starts with you. If you’re the kind of person who’s not willing to accept hard truths on a regular basis, professional development is going to be a hard path to follow.
Recruit Good Fits For Your Existing Teams
Building a flexible workplace starts from the top, and works its way towards the bottomless pits of challenging everything. I’ve never met anyone magically able to create value. But I have seen professionals so devoted that they have exercised their ways into being able to take a step back and look at the entire process.
Recruitment should not be a one size fits all process since each role has different requirements and expectations – sometimes assessments should be done before the first interview, or there could be educational materials that require reading before receiving a case study.
We know that an adaptable recruitment process gets you the right candidates faster and with less effort in repetitive tasks. Since all processes have stages that simply take longer than others no matter what, we took on the challenge of identifying unnecessarily long processes and coming up with tech solutions that shorten the distance between candidates and employers. At first, we kept a close eye on where recruiters spend most of their time time
Where recruiters spend most time in the process:
- Building talent pipelines for each open role and not re-engaging candidates
- 2/3 of time to hire is spent during interviews (on average time to hire cross industries is around 3-4 weeks)
- Giving feedback to the rejected candidates – it takes more time to reject a qualified candidate, who was interviewed, than to make the hire by a factor of over 3 days
- Waiting for answers from passive candidates
It is proven that engagement speeds up all processes involving communication between two actors. Therefore we combined engagement with top notch technology and came back with small improvements and big features to speed up recruitment. By allowing recruiters to add pre-assessment and learning earlier in the process and putting in place more checkpoints where candidates can express their interest and motivation, we made the process more efficient and modular to some extent.
How quality and speed can go hand in hand:
Create Pipelines of Candidates That Can Be Easily Re-Engaged
Continuously building pipelines for certain high demanded skills like exotic programming languages or specific sets of skills (for example in Community Building) does wonders for the time to fill. Start building pipelines based on skills and not on specific jobs in order to use them for multiple roles now and in the future. Look for platforms that allow you to keep track of the candidates you interact with and make sure you find them easily when the next opportunity appears.
Think Long Term
Challenges, courses and other upskilling techniques can be looked at like add-ons on your recruitment process for either assessment or learning. By creating a healthy environment for your candidates to grow, to develop new skills and to become more valuable for different roles you may need to occupy now or in the future, you are actually creating a pool of qualified individuals, who would be easily integrated in one of your existing teams.
The technical aspects of the jobs you’re recruiting for are dictated by your current needs, but finding someone who is a great cultural fit is easier when you can afford to upskill them yourself.
Additionally, you can use a matching system that allows you to interact with candidates through a multiple touchpoint system, and to call them for an interview whenever you may think they are technically ready.
If you’re looking to build a flexible team or to grow one, book a short demo and we’ll tell you everything about our human capital management solution.
