If technology has eaten the world with software advancements, then agile methodologies have eaten the software development world. And now that agile practices have advanced to other domains as well, it is not reserved just to technology anymore. From developing products to manufacturing them and getting involved in their marketing, the agile method is changing how organizations perform their basic departmental tasks of hiring, staffing, developing, and managing their people as well as products.
HR leaders are now adopting an agile mindset to carry out HR functions in their company.
What is Agile HR?
One does not even need to adopt agile in its entirety when it comes to it. Agile lite is an application of standard agile principles except for all the tools and protocols borrowed from the tech world.
Agile HR is a shift from a pre-planned approach having fixed rules to a faster and less-complex feedback-driven model. Human resources professionals are now following an agile manifesto while hiring the best talent for their roles.
According to a 2017 Deloitte survey, almost a whopping 80% of all global executives said that agile has been successful for performance management. It has started to cover other HR processes successfully. And is now onwards considered to be an organizational priority.
3-Step Agile Approach for HR
The transparent and authentic approach for acquiring Agile HR is a 3-step guide. These are basically the core characteristics that the organization’s agile teams embrace for successfully exercising agile HR.
STEP#1: Taking the smaller team approach
The number one fundamental law of agile is to undertake an autonomous cross-functional team of practitioners who share a mindset of principles. Agile focuses on working in short cycles on considerably smaller tasks. Agile works on getting consistent feedback from the significant market or end-user.
When agile first started off in the department of performance management, the main focus of the HR team was generating teams on a laid-out systematic basis. Despite the hard and fast rule of bureaucracy being the ideal substandard to drive a corporation, many people have adapted to agile because teamwork is not new and complex to understand.
Most of us have been a part of one team or the other where it was easy to communicate. Our group is like a mind of its own where everybody trusts one another to analyze, decide, and act as a single unit.
It was the agile approach that figured out the high performance generating factor of smaller teams relative to bureaucracy. The system worked with rewarding results as everybody had their significant input and say. There was no commander-in-chief to whom one needed to report. Much opposed to old adage of bureaucracy where the team was reporting to the team lead, who reported to the manager and then upwards where there was a never-ending line of top corporate bosses waiting to be fed.
Recruitment software, Jobsoid brings your entire team together on one platform and helps you take collective hiring decisions. You can create a small hiring team for every job role you are hiring and collaborate to hire the best talent.
STEP#2: Taking the customer-focus approach
The second law of agile application is delivering value to the customer. As we saw that agile’s initial approach was to generate high performance through smaller teams. But, one drawback here is that these teams have little to no contact with their primary customers. Instead, a proxy representative who just happens to know what the customer wants represents the customer.
Once the high-performance team-based approach was perfected, the power gears shifted from the seller of the product to the buyer. Much to the shock of those bureaucratic giants, the customer was now the king. The question of ‘how to know what the customer wants’ became urgency.
For the HR industry, customers meant candidates. External factors like globalization, deregulation, and advancement of new technology like modern tools and software which can benefit HR departments, all played in the hands of the candidates. Reliable information became easily accessible for ease of making a decision, and candidates took full advantage of their power. Now they could easily dismiss the company that did not serve value for its worth and replace it with something that did.
As a result, firms started rethinking their strategies to retain their candidates. As more candidates gained awareness, they learned that if a particular company fails to provide to their demands, they can move on to another. Employer branding and candidate experience thus became the most important aspects of the hiring process eventually.
Jobsoid has some advanced tools and features that will help you build an amazing employer brand. It helps you deliver an outstanding candidate experience as well.
STEP#3: Taking the network approach
The third and the final law that forms the 3-part base for agile is the rule of the network. Agile is a philosophy behind viewing the organization as a transparently flowing network of individuals working towards a common goal, i.e. to make the customer happy. It turns out that having small task-oriented teams who strive to make the customer happy is not enough to make the organization agile to its core in the long term.
The law of the network is the new forefront that agile drives agile hierarchy. It works to make the organization less of one robotic machine and more of a system of many smaller interfaces working to provide value efficiently.
Jobsoid offers you an exclusive candidate referral portal for your employees. You can ask your existing employees to refer candidates to you. Thus, making them a part of your recruitment process. As your employees exactly know what kind of candidates you are looking for, they will be in a better position to refer only those candidates who would be the best fit. You no longer have to hunt down talent. You can also offer them some tangible awards for their efforts. This will also be an effective strategy for employee happiness.
Agile HR – Yes or No?
To sum up, the question today is not whether HR can become agile or not. An agile organization is the business of a big business bureaucrat at its core by the end of the day. However, it is the hierarchal difference that puts them apart. An agile HR team will operate with a two-way communication dynamic to add value for the candidates, instead of working the other way around.
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