Implementing a Process of Standardization for a Large Company

Problem

I work for a very well-established company, a large conglomerate with many smaller divisions to manage. Over the years, we have had a lot of things that needed to be renewed, digitally transformed to meet the needs of the present state of technology as it relates to our business. Doing so means working closely with our leadership and our other stakeholders, learning how best to convert processes to the current digital standard without losing anything important along the way.

One key project that I worked on was converting our hiring process into a consistent, organization-wide system. I wanted to outfit our company with a hiring database and a new job board. Before, we were simply sending out job descriptions through various channels, publishing to job boards. I wanted to make our approach more deliberate.

Actions taken

We own many companies under our corporate umbrella. The goal was one single system for the HR teams in each company to have access to in order to post their job listings and to evaluate potential candidates.

Whenever any candidate submitted a profile, their resume would now be stored in a common database that would make it easier for others hiring within the organization as a whole to access their applications. Included would be means of filtering through candidates. With these tools implemented, we would be able to call up a promising candidate who simply may have not been a perfect match elsewhere at the time.

Another effort was one to automate the first level of screening entirely. Those being considered would be given a link to a preliminary questionnaire before being invited for their next session with the team.

At the end of the day, implementing this system on such a large scale and at such a high level successfully ultimately depended on our ability to organize the information at hand into a final presentation that would not be misinterpreted or misunderstood by anybody involved. Devoting energy to this task was useful because there were so many different departments that this package of information attached to each candidate would be passing through. Making it easy to understand by everybody and well-presented improved our hiring outcomes greatly as more qualified fits were found across the board.

Lessons learned

• Half of the battle is gathering relevant and useful information. The other half involves organizing this information so that it may be interpreted correctly. This makes the information more valuable to the organization in the long run.
• Knowing what data has value and what data does not have value becomes much easier when everything has been compiled into an orderly system. Candidates are much less likely to be lost in the shuffle.
• Centralizing the process of hiring streamlines it and standardizes it across all of the different companies that are a part of our organization. Visibility and transparency improve as a result of this. Our newly-optimized process is now much easier to share with the rest of the company. We are able to gather a wide belt of feedback from all different types of people in our organization.