3 Surprising Strategies to Streamline | 2-Minute Video

If we drew a picture of streamlining, it would look a lot like ducks in a row. 🦆🦆🦆🦆

And isn’t that what most HR pros want — their ducks in a row?

That’s why many leaders want and need strategies to streamline processes. The tighter the row, the more likely things get done well and on time. And when HR processes — especially hiring — are streamlined, HR leaders and hiring managers have more time to focus on what’s most important: candidate and employee experience.

Finding Best Strategies to Streamline

Streamlining has an abundance of benefits including (but not limited to):

• Increased efficiency, productivity and agility
• Improved communication
• documented procedures and greater visibility into processes
• Reduced errors, holdups, silos, missed deadlines and redundant work
• Improved compliance with industry standards
• Simplified employee training
• Improved employee adoption
• Improved accountability
• Increased employee morale, and
• Enforced accountability.

What’s Up in This Episode

In this episode of HRMorning’s 3-Point, our expert from United Airlines explains how they streamlined the hiring process so they could get higher quality candidates for roles across the organization. Even better, by taking the time to methodically streamline this one process, they freed up people’s time to focus on more strategic matters.

Click, watch and listen for more details on streamlining operations, too — not just in hiring. You can use these tips across the board to improve operations and get more done.

Transcript (edited for clarity):

Can you cut the fat in HR – especially when it comes to hiring?

You sure can – and more importantly — you sure want to.

Here’s why: More than 70% of recruiters admit they miss hiring key candidates because they have inefficient processes, according to a KarmaCheck study. There’s more: half of those hiring pros said scheduling interviews is a big issue. Right behind that: slow screening, evaluations and poor communication.

Of course, streamlining isn’t a new concept. But we often think it’s easy. So when it doesn’t come naturally, we give up and end up with cumbersome processes in HR.

Help to Streamline

Here’s help — streamlining tips from Jess Austin, the Director Of Talent Acquisition Programs, Processes and Systems at United Airlines. First up:

Austin: I think it’s looking at where are the bottlenecks. What is taking a lot of time and is there anything we can do to automate that?

To streamline the hiring process, Austin told me they looked at everything that was done manually –asking recruiters what they have to key in or write? And the more menial tasks they found, they worked with their tech partner on ways to automate.

And once they took those steps, the good stuff happened.

Austin: Again, it’s taking steps off our process, and that allows our recruiters to actually be more strategic. They’re not doing more administrative things and having to take more clicks. They’re thinking about the type of candidate they want to come in. They’re talking to the hiring leader about what type of person they’re looking for and the skills they have and what experience they have. And that’s allowing us to provide better candidates up front to our hiring managers.

So when you think about streamlining any process in HR:

• Look for the bottlenecks. Where do people get stuck? Where do things stall or stop? What takes too much time?
• Eliminate manual tasks. You don’t necessarily need new technology to do this. Sometimes it takes setting up alerts or creating automated responses in your existing tech stack.
• Think strategically. When people do fewer manual tasks, they can focus on strategy. Give them that time, not more tasks.

If you start streamlining within HR today, you can expect better results tomorrow and beyond.