Transforming TA While Remaining Compliant

Part 4 of Allyn Bailey’s Series on Driving Talent Acquisition Transformation

In my last article in this series, Driving Transformation By Understanding Your Customers, ?I talked about the process of understanding your customer’s needs and framing your commitments to address them. If you missed that or any of the other articles in this series where I outline lessons 1 - 16, you could read them all?here.

In this fourth installment of the series, I am going to talk about moving your transformation program forward while dealing with the guardrails of compliance. Compliance is a loaded term in my opinion.?As a rebel at heart, I hear compliance and I feel like a big heavy iron glove is coming out of the sky to envelope me and prevent me from doing anything innovative or cool.?I immediately want to balk, throw up my rebel fist and begin singing Rebel Girl.?But I have learned over time that not all guidelines and rules are there to stifle creativity.?It is even true many of them were created to do good things like increase transparency, inclusivity, and fairness across the process.?Even these well-intentioned rules can become burdened by the weight of bastardization that occurs over time like a game of telephone, the guideline gets translated over and over from person or agency to person and starts to be seen as something that in no way reflects what it was intended to be to begin with.?And to add insult to injury, too many people chartered with managing, maintaining, or enforcing these guidelines lack knowledge of their original intent, so they are unable to make rationale evaluations of where the grey area might be.?The result is guidelines and rules that were created for good intent, become shells of themselves governed by individuals without the insight to know where the wiggle room is or isn’t.?As someone leading a transformation in the TA space the challenge of navigating the reality of our compliance landscape can sink even the best conceived strategies.?

Lesson 17: Take control of the compliance conversation.

As much as we may sometimes want to just ignore the realities of compliance due to the inevitable buzz kill, we must address it head on to tame it.?To do this as a transformation leader you must take control of the compliance conversation.?Make sure you are in the reigns of the relationship.?This means not approaching compliance representatives with your head down and bowl out asking for more scraps like the orphan Oliver.?You need to be the one to initiate the conversations, set the tone and drive the process for alignment.?If you manage compliance like an approval body, you will inevitably find yourself caught up in defensive conversation where you are asked to “prove what you are recommending is no against the law.”?As a driver in the conversation, you set the tone, by approaching compliance and driving them to, “show you how you can make X happen in a compliant manner.”?The nuance may seem subtle but taking control and setting the tone will change the whole dynamic of the interaction and often the outcome.?Remember because compliance is often treated as a gate keeper, compliance teams are rooted in preventing things from passing through, that’s how they manage risk.?You need to change the narrative and instead have them play the role of key maker.?They should feel they can create a key that opens the gates for you. ?

Lesson 18:?Do your homework.

The trick to making the take control strategy work, is ensuring you have done your compliance homework.?You need to know yourself what is feasible under the law and what is not.?As a leader of talent transformation, you should make it your job to know the laws that impact your strategies, the intent of those laws and all the places where you have wiggle room to interpret those guidelines or laws and remain compliant.?You need to do your homework.?Like a lawyer preparing for the courtroom, you need to know the law, and have lined up examples where you can point to precedent that demonstrates others who have successfully taken similar interpretations to the guideline you are addressing.?All this information equips you to engage in a productive conversation about options versus getting stuck in just listening to the compliance ruling.

Lesson 19: Know the difference between a process decision and a legal compliance decision.

Finally, when addressing rules or rules-based barriers in your transformation journey you need to be able to identify between roadblocks to your strategy that are rooted in laws and legitimate compliance challenges, and which are based in business processes developed by the organization or your stakeholders.?Business process rules often masquerade as legal compliance guidelines because somewhere in the history of the organization someone said or assumed the reason a process exists is “because it is the law”.?Remember in the opening, where I pointed out many well-intentioned people charted with managing compliance have no idea why a rule was put in place, well this also goes for many well intended business process designers who build process that reflect commonly held myths of legality. Let me give you an example.?Many of you face guidelines in your organization that say recruiters and or hiring managers cannot provide a candidate in depth interview feedback.?This is a common business process in many organizations that has been created and held up as a compliance issue.?So as a result, no one questions its legitimacy anymore we all just go along with the belief that that is the law and that is what we must do to be compliant.?But the truth is more nuanced than that. Not providing feedback is in no way a legal compliance regulation.?What is illegal is showing bias in your selection process.?So many companies are freaked out that recruiters or hiring managers will say something inappropriate when providing feedback that could put the company at legal risk, so they create a business process saying it can’t be done.?This is an example of something a talent transformation leader can easily take on and resolve with a better solution for both recruiters, hiring managers and candidates, but to do so they need to know it’s feasible because the rule is a business process decision made as a reaction to legal risk not an actual legal mandate.

It’s important to remember that legal guidelines are almost always created based on good intent to protect people.?These guidelines are not the enemy of innovation, they are guardrails to ensure we carefully assess the impact of our decisions and strategy on people.?That is why a strong transformation leader needs to become well versed in the guidelines that govern their sphere of influence and the intent of those guidelines, so they can proactively identify where guidelines are real and legitimate and where they are misinterpreted.?All in an effort to do the right thing for people and their organization.

Next week I am going to talking about leveraging technology as an enabler not a restrictor. And offer up some advice on building a technology roadmap that equips you to successfully deploy a transformational experience for your team and your customers.