How we made HR friends with Process Intelligence

Hi all! My name is Natalia Stekunova, I am the head of the HR department at GlowByte. I will tell you about how and why we used Process Intelligence technologies in the recruitment process in the company.

Bottleneck

The big difficulty, probably, of any HR is that most often the business considers the HR department to be guilty of an insufficiently high hiring speed: management “earns money”, and service departments must “submit tools” faster. This misses the fact that the hiring process is like a game of ping-pong: the game continues only if the two partners respond in time to each other’s pitches.

For the GlowByte business, whose revenue growth largely depends on the speed of hiring developers, hiring is practically a bottleneck to scale faster.

As my practice shows, a point analysis of cases turns into a clarification of “who is to blame”. If management colleagues were not convinced the first time, then the next iteration will be longer and more difficult, but meanwhile everyone has deadlines, goals, etc. We decided that this is not very constructive and does not contribute to either improving the process or relations in companies. And in general, GlowByte is Data-Driven Design, so it would be strange not to involve analysts in the analysis of HR issues when analysis is a professional skill.

Further, using the example of the “Recruitment” direction, I will tell you exactly how we solved the issue.

Formulation of the problem

To begin with, let’s see how the recruitment process looks in the eyes of management, the personnel department and how it actually goes:

The biggest challenge for me personally was to synchronize the vision of processes: to make the recruitment process understandable, transparent and “observable” for both business and recruiters and, therefore, increase trust in data.

At the same time, as practice has shown, a particular dilemma was the task of creating motivation for both parties to change something for the better, because for all participants in the recruitment process there is both a zone of influence and a zone of responsibility.

Another pain that needed to be cured was the lack of managerial involvement. Where does it come from? The reports that we prepare are made for a certain period, but the situation may change in the process of preparation – and this can no longer be seen in the report.

So, summarizing, it was necessary to deal with the symptoms of absence:

• transparency, trust in data;

• motivation;

• involvement.

Shoemaker with boots: solution

What the process of solving a problem looks like if you try to figure it out alone – by HR. For example, for a report to management for a certain period, we, recruiters, will step by step:

1. collect data that we think needs to be collected (in this case, we will take into account only a certain amount of data in the analysis);

2. do additional data loading if we want to compare periods;

3. independently build dashboards or charts, manually highlight inconsistencies with the process / SLA / KPI, etc.

Agree: a complex and labor-intensive process, stretching in time.

As I mentioned above, we solved the problem together with the analysts of Process Intelligence GlowByte. All the same stages 1-2-3 with automation began to look like this:

1. ALL data for all processes are added to the analysis (and you can take into account all the data at the same time);

2. data is loaded automatically and allows you to observe the changes;

3. the dashboard is built automatically and highlights important points or deviations from SLA/KPI.

Process Intelligence is a set of techniques and technologies that allow you to analyze and optimize processes data-driventhat is, based on real data and, if possible, automated, and therefore objective, scalable and reproducible.

Let’s say we have a situation: the candidate preferred another employer because of the long process of interviews with managers, that is, while we were scheduling an interview, someone had already made an offer. How to show the manager the problem?

Process analysis allows you to see the distribution of hiring periods:

For clarity, the selection process itself is visualized:

Thanks to this visualization, it becomes clear to all participants how the delay in the process affects the hiring of new employees. As a result, it helps to build a constructive dialogue with hiring managers.

So, the result of our work is a set of dashboards that both managers and recruiters see at the same time. For example, we collected data on the number of vacancies, candidates shown on them, and responses from managers to candidates in one of the dashboards. With this approach, the recruiter sees his shortcomings (for which vacancies there is a small flow), the same data is available to managers, so you can’t hide.

Managers also see which candidates they responded to, but there were no agreed vacancies for these candidates, or they did not respond for various reasons:

• there was no need, but no one filled the vacancy;

• there was a need, but there was no time for an interview (perhaps it was necessary to resolve the issue of redistributing the load).

All of these cases increase the cost of hiring for the business and worsen the KPI for the HR department. When dashboards appeared, the dialogue between HR and the manager began to be supported by a clear visualization: where and how something needs to be changed.

Plus, the data is collected in real time, which means that each participant in the process understands that the situation is relevant and happening right here and now. At the same time, there is also historical data, they do not need to be searched manually.

A few examples of our dashboards:

results

By automating and visualizing the process, we came to the following results:

• the number of days for consideration of candidates has decreased;

• managers began to understand that they also influence the process;

• all participants in the process see mistakes – their own and the partner’s: both managers and HR are motivated to change.

Transparency of processes increases awareness, heals conflicts that have arisen before. There are no skeletons in the closet – there are no problems, there is an understanding of your mistakes – that means you will not blame others for shortcomings, but will strive to find a way out of difficulties together.

This is, without exaggeration, happiness for HR:

• be on the same wavelength with managers: look at processes together and change for the better;

• HR reports are no longer just HR reports: analytics are collected on a daily basis and look transparent to all participants in the process;

• management sees its area of ​​responsibility and is an equal partner in HR processes.

Finally, a checklist of the effects of using PI to optimize hiring:

Together with colleagues from Process Intelligence GlowByte, we created a system of dashboards in which you can look at processes even deeper, looking for hidden problems, improving processes together. Now this allows hrs and businesses to speak the same language, to be on the same side of the barricades. Based on the results of several years of such transparency for all participants in the process, I can confidently say that we have begun to understand each other better, we have a desire to jointly improve processes, and all parties are ready for dialogue.