Agile Product Management into Talent Acquisition or "how to ride a hiring tsunami on a scrumban board"

“We have enough people onboard - let′s not hire anyone!” - said no hiring manager ever. 

Sure - the statement above might be a bit exaggerated, but looking back into my own experience from the last 10 years in various tech-companies, it's actually not too far away from the reality. Ambitious startups and big tech-companies tend to grow suddenly and at the speed of light. If you, as a Talent Acquisition (TA) leader, don't have the magical power of seeing into the future, then the chances are high that your team will not be ready for these hiring tsunamis. However, there are some ways how you and your team could surf on that wave, and here is one of them:          

One of the best ways to prepare your team for such high-growth times, is by establishing agile ways of working that will help them to manage the “new” unexpected high workloads in a systematic and aligned way, while reducing the frustration and improving the collaboration of the team.    

In this article I would like to share with you some practical tips on how to make your workflows in TA efficient and easily adjustable in a constantly changing environment by using a Scrumban framework. In particular, this guide should answer the three following questions:    

• What is a Scrumban framework? 
• How can the TA teams benefit from it? 
• How to apply it in operational TA?

Let′s get started… 

 What is Scrumban and when should it be used?

Scrumban is a process/product management framework that is a mix of two widely used agile product development methodologies: Scrum and Kanban. In TA, the Scrumban framework aims to help the teams to establish more structured ways of working while enabling them to be more agile, transparent and efficient in their recruiting operations. The three essential parts of the Scrumban framework are the: 

1. Scrumban board - which helps to visualize the workflow and the progress of the team.
2. Weekly / bi-weekly standups - that provide a moment for the team members to share their progress. 
3. Moderator / Scrum Master - the person who facilitates and drives the standup

Which problems does the Scrumban framework solve?

The 3 main goals of the Scrumban framework, in this context, are to provide transparency, clarity and alignment to the recruitment team on the hiring progress and the priorities. Simply said - it helps to answer the questions of “Where do we stand?” and “What is important?”. Additionally, if applied well, it will help your team to celebrate the successes, manage the workload and create better partnerships with other teams that are involved in different stages of the candidate′s journey, e.g. employer branding, HR admin/contract management and hiring managers.     

How does it work?

The three cornerstones of the framework are weekly standups, scrumban board and the moderator. 

Scrumban board

The board itself helps to visualize the hiring progres for the vacancies and is usually split into three main stages as follows: In queue, In Recruiting and Hired. Further breakdown into additional sub-stages of the process might be applied where needed (see examples below). For each vacancy there is a separate ticket that includes usually the name of the vacancy, the hiring manager, the date when it was opened, and any other details that are relevant for the process. The best format for the Scrumban board is a physical whiteboard where post-it′s are used as tickets. However, in the light of the current pandemic and distributed/remote teams, multiple digital tools can be used for this as well. As a rule of thumb - the board and the tickets should be based on your needs and reflect the data and hiring processes that are relevant. Below you will find two examples with templates - a digital (Trello) and an analog one. Feel free to use them and adapt where needed. 

Trello (link to the example board)

Trello ticket example:

The details of the tickets would usually reflect the standard steps and/or process that are in place in the organisation. In this case, the colors are being used to indicate the priority of the vacancy (high/low) and whether a sourcer is assigned for this role or not. This helps to visualize, without having to open the ticket, what is high priority and which roles is the sourcer working on. Additionally, such details as the time when the vacancy was kicked-off can be added for future reference - helps to keep track of how long the vacancy has been in recruiting already. Also the standard steps can be added as a checklist to make sure that no important step has been forgotten. Lifehack: You can automate the incoming recruiting support requests by enabling an “email-to-board” function. This will allow to create the tickets automatically by sending an email to an unique email address. In practice this would mean that your hiring managers can simply send an email to this unique address (with the information about the new vacancy) and this email will automatically create a ticket “In Queue” stage, which you can then discuss in the next standup or assign to one of the team members right away. This way you will have a streamlined and transparent process where no vacancy gets lost in the email box of someone.  

There are also many other similar digital process management tools out there (e.g. Asana, Jira, and etc.) - feel free to experiment around!

As soon as we all will start to return to our offices (if there still will exist such places…), I will also add an example of an analog scrumban board - with a real whiteboard and post-its - for the teams that prefer in-person face-to-face standups :)        

Standups

Once (or twice) a week the recruitment / TA team members get together for 15-20 min short “stand-ups” where each recruiter goes through each of their own vacancies one by one and shares in 1-2 sentences a short status update of the particular vacancy. Additionally,they might address any roadblocks that they experience in the hiring process - e.g. slow feedback from the interviewers, thin candidate pipeline or etc. While sharing their insights, they should be moving also their tickets with a respective vacancy to a respective stage on the board (for details see “Scrumban board” below). After each recruiter has finished presenting, there might be a short questions round for clarification. The moderator would be coordinating the conversations and advice on further actions where needed (see below: “Moderator”). The standups help to create more transparency in the team and improve collaboration between the team members. 

Moderator (Scrum Master) 

The role of the moderator is quite simple but highly important - first, to make sure that the conversations remain relevant and don′t exceed the given time frame, and second, to make sure that the questions get addressed and the team members get unblocked where needed. If the discussions get too long, it's recommended to take the topic(s) “offline”. In many cases, the role of the moderator would be with the Team Lead or optionally be also assigned to the team members based on a rotation principle. Having the Team Lead in this meeting is essential, as their role will be to unblock their team members where needed, provide additional clarity and advice on which roles should be prioritised.        

Bonus track: Retrospectives

Once in a while it might be very helpful to have a longer session with your team to review and improve your ways of working. In many cases a 1-2 hours session with the team, where you try to find the answers on following questions, might have a huge benefit on learning from the latest experience: 

1. What did we do well?
2. What did we learn?
3. What should be done differently in the future?    

There are tons of best-practices on how to run retrospectives well out there. Feel free to explore and experiment with them around. Here is just one of the examples.  

Who is this format for?

Although this format might work in various teams, the biggest impact you might see is in the smaller full-stack teams that have 3-5 recruiters onboard and work closely together with sourcers and recruiting coordinators on up to 8 vacancies per recruiter. The reason for this is very simple - recruiters, sourcers and coordinators work very closely together and need a constant exchange to be able to act fast with the right focus in mind. Especially in the smaller teams where there is only 1-2 sourcers and coordinators that support multiple recruiters. Hence - they need to be very well aligned to make the “magic happen” as one team while focusing on the right hiring priorities. More than 7 recruiters and 8 roles per recruiter and you will end up in lengthy and inefficient meetings that no one enjoys. 

How can the TA teams benefit from Scrumban? 

The Scrumban framework helps the TA teams to become more agile while 1) gaining more transparency around their workloads, 2) increasing the ability to address the roadblocks in a faster way, and 3) align on the priorities across the whole team and improve collaboration.     

Some tips and tricks for success: 

• Scrumban is a team effort - make it fun and enjoyable!
• The goal of Scrumban is to create the transparency & alignment, and provide help - not to control and punish
• Keep the stand-ups short and crisp - if the discussion gets too long, take it offline
• Keep your scrumban board tickets simple and actionable - only relevant data should be there
• Your sourcers and coordinators have an essential role in your hiring success - encourage them to participate and speak up in the standups 
• Keep the amount of the work in progress vacancies (“In Recruiting”) at a healthy level with a small buffer for unexpected workload 
• Celebrate the successes during the standups, but don't make it a competition! 

In case you made it this far - congratulations - you have just completed the crash-course on how to ride the hiring tsunami-wave on a (Scrumban) board! Now it's time to put your knowledge into practice. 

You have some thoughts/experiences on this whole “Scrumban thing” that you would like to share? Just add your “two cents” into the comments or ping me directly - let′s have a chat!  

Here are some use-cases samples that help to understand how the Scrumban framework can work in practice: 

Use case #1 - Onboardingly  

Onboardingly is a high-potential mid-size startup with around 400 employees and an amazing product that helps companies around the globe to create great onboarding experiences for their new joiners. After 6 successful years on the market and the latest investment round, the company has an ambitious goal of hiring around 80 new commercial and tech talents in 2021 to improve their product and expand to the new markets. 

Onboardingly′s Talent Acquisition team consists of 2 tech and 2 commercial recruiters, a sourcer, a coordinator and a team lead - Judy. The most challenging part for her is to create the alignment and clarity within her team, as the team is quite new in this setup and the ways of working and the recruitment processes have not been established yet. Lack of processes and transparency creates quite some frustration in the team members as they don′t know how to handle all the incoming support requests for the newly approved vacancies. Also the prioritization is a real challenge, as the hiring managers are approaching each of the recruiters directly while mentioning that their vacancy is the most important one and requires urgent support. At the same time Judy get′s a lot of pressure from the management to fill the vacancies and to report the progress on a weekly basis on each role. 

After discussing this with her team, they′ve decided to try out the Scrumban framework with the goal of creating a better alignment, more clarity and prioritization in the team. It took Judy′s about half an hour to set up a Scrumban board in Trello and to schedule regular standup meetings twice a week - Tuesdays and Fridays. Few weeks down the road, the team has a clear overview of all the incoming requests, as each of them is being put first into the “In queue” stage and is being discussed and prioritized based on the input from the Team Lead in the next standup before starting the recruitment process. During the standup, the team discusses who will start working when on each of new roles, based on the capacity of team members and priority of the role. With the new framework, Judy can also provide much more transparency to the management team about the progress for each role and align with them on the priorities based on the business needs - and cascade it down to her own team. Just a quick peek on the scrum board provides Judy a clear understanding how busy her team currently is, what the progress for each role is and which roles is their sourcer focusing on. Starting with the next month, the TA team has decided to invite the two contract management team members to their standups to give a heads up on the upcoming requests for the new contracts in advance. 

#productmanagement #talentacquisition #agile #scrumban #recruiting #pm