IDENTIFY PRIMARY + SECONDARY OBJECTIVES
Good strategy solves what’s in front of you; better strategy solves what’s beyond it.
It all begins with identifying primary, secondary, and tertiary objectives. Doing so clarifies organizational priorities and provides an advantageous vantage point when exploring potential solutions.
In this case, the organization’s primary objective was to meet hiring targets during their most aggressive year. Secondary objectives were to optimize onboarding speed, improve collaboration, and create more advancement opportunities within their staffing team.
A strategic team redesign was proposed and quickly favored, as it offered the opportunity to solve for multiple urgent challenges. Metrics for success were determined as time to hire, business and employee satisfaction, retention rates, promotions, and progress towards goals.
1
REDUCE SCOPE OF TRAINING
When faced with tight deadlines, it’s imperative to cut away everything that doesn’t help to meet immediate objectives.
In this case, the onboarding process was vast and included everything that a new hire may eventually do.
Taking an approach that limited the area of coverage per resource, a massive amount of training was cut from the initial onboarding period and new hires were able to quickly focus on the things they were specifically responsible for.
2
DECENTRALIZE COMMAND
A system was crafted in which team members could have more autonomy over day-to-day tasks while syncing more with the overall strategy.
Dividing the team into small “groupings” allowed for subject matter expertise to be developed faster and more reliability and drove credibility with the partnering business teams. Decentralizing the leadership structure fostered quicker decision-making and created more scope for individual contributors.
3
GROW SCOPE
Along with the team model changes, there was an opportunity to raise the profile of a historically undervalued role.
The sourcing function of the team previously assigned work in a “next person up” arrangement. Consequently, there was no opportunity to develop specific area expertise or grow business parter relationships.
Shifting to a dedicated support structure helped the business feel more attended to, created greater developmental scope for sourcers, and fostered increased standardization and production across the board.
