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Adaptive Agile Sourcing and Recruiting

Recruitment is a profession requiring a mix of skills – it’s part HR, part sales, and part marketing. These separate functions all embrace Adaptive Agile Project Management. Progressive organizations that have successful recruiting models have shifted towards Adaptive Agile recruitment.

As a recruiter, you have two customers – the organization that’s retained you/internal stakeholders, and also the candidates. If your candidates don’t feel well served, they’ll withdraw from your process at any time. When a candidate withdraws at the end of a selection cycle, this is costly to all concerned, so it pays to validate the connection between the role and the candidates sourced at the earliest possible time. As in other applications of Adaptive Agile process, it’s about getting early feedback and delivering maximum value around customer needs.

Pinpointing the real needs of both the organization and the candidates can be complex. It’s not always possible for organizations to articulate precisely what their business needs and this can lead to an extended recruitment cycle, sometimes lasting several weeks or even months. Over this time, candidates become unavailable by taking up positions elsewhere, reducing options and possibly the value of the outcome for all concerned. Adaptive Agile recruitment offers a shorter recruitment cycle, an opportunity to fine-tune requirements after each iteration, and a collaborative process that should ensure all stakeholders achieve the value they need. The four principles of the Agile Manifesto offer a valuable perspective on recruitment:

Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools

Recruitment processes can be unwieldy and overwhelm a personal approach. Personality profiling, in-box exercises, panel interviews – all these have their place but should be looked at with a view to their value in each individual case rather than as a one-size-fits-all process that cannot be adapted.

Effective Results Over Comprehensive Documentation

An Agile approach doesn’t remove the need for documentation. What it does is to encourage this to be streamlined and used only where it delivers real value. How many hours have people spent filling in application forms that repeat what’s on their CVs, or adding detail that no one will ever need or use?

Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation

Negotiating the contractual detail of a recruitment assignment at the start may lead to opportunities being missed. By focusing on communication and collaboration throughout the recruitment process, the needs of the organization have the space to clarify and evolve. The recruiter can then adapt the strategy and methods used to source candidates, to respond to new information as it emerges.

Responding to Change Over Following a Plan

Recruiting is complex. Organizations need to match people with their culture, as well as finding those that can do the job and deliver the right results. Candidates need to fulfill their development goals, as well as satisfy financial needs, and identify an organizational ecosystem where they feel likely to thrive. The likelihood is that these things cannot be defined in detail at the start. By approaching recruitment in short iterations, priorities can be adapted as the process surfaces more detail about what’s needed. From an Agile perspective, this is not a case of ‘changing your mind’ but responding to new information and gaining insight.

Our Adaptive Agile process focuses on collaborative working and feedback cycles that create a deeper understanding of what needs to be achieved. This class provides a huge opportunity for recruiters to manage their processes efficiently and productively.

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