Improve The Speed And Quality Of Your Recruitment Process

Trevor Vas (@trevorpvas), Director at ATC Events, and Rob Papworth, Group Recruitment Manager at MMG, sit down to talk about MMG’s ‘Recruitment Agreement’ and how it has improved the speed and the quality of their recruitment process.

Lessons from Rob Papworth:

• It’s not so much the recruitment brief but what comes out of the brief that matters most.

• MMG’s recruiters can take their briefs however they like, but the output must be a one page PowerPoint Recruitment Agreement.

• The Recruitment Agreement identifies the key criteria for the role; the actual sourcing plan, and; the selection plan, with a review date.

• This agreement aligns all parties to keep focused on the speed and momentum of the role, and the criteria keeps everyone accountable to make a merit based decision.

• MMG’s hiring managers have supported this process as it allows them to tell who’s doing what, when. The Recruitment Agreement has often helped the Hiring Managers shape their selection criteria, and often resulted in them rewriting  their original job descriptions based upon the mutually agreed selection criteria.

Watch the video interview or read the transcript below:

TV: G’Day Rob, Trevor Vas from TalentTalks, how you going?
RP: Good Trevor, always good to see you.
TV: Rob, you’ve been operating at MMG as the recruitment manager for how long?
RP: Almost three years now.
TV:Wonderful. One of the things you’ve told me about is your recruitment agreement that you feel is really been making a difference to your recruitment function. For the benefit of all the other recruitment managers out there, would you mind giving us a very small dissertation on how it works please?
RP: Yeah sure Trevor. Look I think over the years you always reflect and just improve the way you actually do things. Years ago I’d always be focused on taking a brief, and documenting that brief, but over time I thought it’s not so much the brief but what comes out of the brief that matters most. So the way I’ve shifted my team is that I don’t mind how they take a brief these days; it can be formal, it can be informal, they can use a document, the can go off the cuff, but what I have mandated is the output of that brief which I call the ‘Recruitment Agreement’. It’s a simple one page, one page PowerPoint and that has got some key things that says: what’s the key criteria for the role; what’s the actual sourcing plan, and; what’s the selection plan? Probably what makes it work really well is that the actual sourcing plan has a review date, so I’ve aligned all parties to keep focus on the speed and momentum of the actual role. The criteria keeps everyone accountable to make a merit based decision, and also the selection process is worded in a simple way that treats the hiring manager as a partner not so much as purely a customer, because they’ve got a role to play as well (by eden). So it’s a very simple one page document. It gives a benefit to all parties and I think it’s one of the key things in improving the speed and the quality of our recruitment process here
TV: Rob thank you very much that’s a very good initiative and how’s it been received by the Hiring Managers? Was it hard to get in?
RP: Well I think for them it wasn’t hard to get in because I think it’s a very clear and simple document and I think they can tell who’s doing what, when. Also I think that process helped them shape their selection criteria to often a much better degree than was in the job description, so often a key outcome was they would go back and re write the job description based upon the selection criteria that was agreed in that actual agreement.
TV: Rob, thank you very much for your words of advice
RP: Thanks Trevor.