Recruitment Retrospectives
How we onboard people to our teams is incredibly important, not just because we want to get them up to speed quickly, but because we want them starting off with the right momentum, allowing it to carry on for as long as we work together. We want them to get the feeling “this company has it’s !#!# together, that means I’d better as well”.
I have a friend who has a philosophy he calls “Make the new guy the hero”, which I think is a brilliant concept. But it’s not the bad starts that really gets me, it’s the lost learning opportunity that gets me. Never are people paying as much attention as when they are new, we need to make sure we have a facility for learning from this opportunity.
But before I get into that, a few horror stories to provide context.
1) One of my first ever office jobs I had, I showed up to work on my first day, bright eyed and optimistic. There was no place for me to sit. I was told my desk and chair were in a box somewhere around the office, I should track them down and put them together. Next, I was tasked with scrounging parts to make sure I had a computer to work on.
What did I learn from this?
This company is totally making it up as they go, and it’s fine for me to do the same.
What did the company learn from this?
Nothing.
2) I was once brought in to a truly monolithic company for a six month project. What I was doing is not important, but I was doing it as a consultant, so my time was not cheap. Once again I did not have a computer to work on and their IT policies prevented me from using my own. Every day I would sit around for a few hours until the person I reported to would tell me to go home for the day. After a few days of this, he told me to stop coming in and he would call when the computer was ready. I explained that since I was not able to take other customers during this period I would have to charge them for the time, this was apparently fine. It took three weeks for the machine to arrive.
What did I learn from this?
This company is a huge lumbering beast that simply throws money away, you could hide here the rest of your life and get paid if you wanted to.
What did the company learn from this?
Nothing.
3) I was asked to take the role of Scrum Master for two teams in a semi large organisation. I was excited about this role, as I had just come off the high of helping a truly brilliant team to improve their agility. I arrived on my first day and all the things with computers and desks and such went very smoothly. Then I was introduced to the teams. They did not know I was coming, they were informed of my arrival while I was standing there. As were the people who I would be replacing…
What did I learn from this?
This company has no respect for people, and I should expect a lot of resistance to change.
What did the company learn from this?
Nothing.
This is why we have the Recruitment Retrospective!
So that we don’t miss the chance to learn from these things, so that we can use these mistakes as a learning opportunity and harness them to improve ourselves going forward.
The implementation is very simple. One of the first things we do when a new person starts is to schedule a recurring follow up to capture their feedback on the hiring and onboarding process.
Many companies actually already do this, but the Recruitment Retrospective differs slightly from what most companies do.
Firstly, it is driven by the person who has just been recruited. The rest of the organisation’s job is to support them in this. They invite the people they believe are the most important to the retrospective depending on what they think is most important to improve, and we give them all the support they need. These could be organisational improvements with the onboarding process itself, or more team related things like how we share knowledge for example.
Secondly, experiments are proposed to address these issues next time. We do not simply make statements about “doing it better next time”, but we state specifically what we will do and how. The concerned people agree to make sure these things happen next time and assess if they were successful or not.
You can attempt to improve the onboarding process as a new employee, but the optimal solution is to have learning built into the company culture, and to embrace change.
Thirdly, this process continues for at least the first few months so that they have the ability to continually improve their introduction and constantly keep on the lookout for learning opportunities.
Finally, that person is asked to assist the next new hire with their Recruitment Retrospectives.
What do you learn from this?
That this company is serious about improvement, that they value your input, that you can have a lasting impact on the way the company works, and that this is the place for you!
What does the company learn from this?
Everything.
Tips
- Provide the person with a contact to turn to when they need help driving a point forward, for example finding the best people to speak with.
- Provide the person a contact who is experienced in retrospectives and improvement initiatives, for example a Scrum Master or Agile Coach.
- Write things down. Since you are trying to improve the process for all future employees as well, it’s good to document and follow up experiments.
- Periodically examine the onboarding process as a whole. With all the changes happening, it’s easy for this onboarding process to grow into a monolith.