Optimizing Your Recruitment Process with the Theory of Constraints
We use pattern matching to solve problems at scale all the time and one of my favorites concepts to use across many verticals is The Theory of Constraints, outlined in Eliyahu Goldratt’s book “The Goal”. It’s been an incredibly useful theory to fall back on when trying to make improvements in any process and I would highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t already read it. If you are looking for the engineer’s version you could also try the The Phoenix Project instead.
In a similar narrative this story is told as a parable that illustrates the principles of DevOps and overcoming constraints in technology organizations. It has been very influential, helping to spread DevOps principles and methods throughout many businesses. The novel follows the character Bill Palmer through his struggle to turn around the failing technology transformation effort, Project Phoenix, at the fictional company Parts Unlimited. It highlights themes around optimizing DevOps metrics, remedying bottlenecks, aligning organizationally, and using data to guide decision making.
The recruitment process is crucial for any organization to achieve its goals, but it often becomes bogged down by bottlenecks and inefficiencies. The Theory of Constraints, provides a framework for identifying and alleviating constraints in a system. By applying this theory, recruitment teams can streamline their hiring process to improve results.
Step 1 Identify the Constraint
The first step is determining what is constraining your recruitment outcomes, whether that is lack of candidates, high time-to-hire, biased hiring practices, limited resources, or something else. Analyze where candidates tend to drop out of your process and what is impeding your ability to fill roles with the best talent as quickly as possible. This constraint is the “weakest link” in your recruitment chain.
Step 2 Exploit the Constraint
With the constraint identified, the next step is maximizing its efficiency. Determine ways to get the most out of your constraining resource or system. For example, if time-to-hire is the constraint, explore ways to speed up your process by eliminating excess steps or using technology to automate where possible. If lack of high-quality candidates is the issue, focus your efforts on optimizing your sourcing and job marketing strategies. The goal is to get the greatest hiring throughput from the constraint.
Step 3 Subordinate to the Constraint
Ensure that all policies, procedures, resources, and efforts support and align with alleviating the primary constraint. Anything that is mismatched or working against your critical constraint needs to be reevaluated. All parts of the recruitment process should work cohesively together towards maximizing the efficiency and productivity of your constraint.
Step 4 Elevate the Constraint
If exploiting and subordinating to the constraint does not provide enough improvement, the next step is elevating it. This means adding additional resources, technology, or tools to increase the capacity of your constraint and gain even more throughput. Using a recruitment marketing platform, for example, could give you access to more candidates. Adding extra headcount to your recruiting team elevates your resources. Elevating constraints in this way boosts your hiring productivity over the long run.
Step 5 Repeat
Improving recruitment is an iterative process.
Recruitment constraints may change over time based on your initiatives, technology, tools, and overall hiring environment. Repeat the steps to continually identify and alleviate new constraints as your system evolves. Regular analysis and optimization of your recruitment process using the Theory of Constraints framework can drive ongoing improvements in productivity, quality of hire, and time-to-hire.
In summary, applying Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints can help diagnose and remedy issues slowing down or constraining your recruitment outcomes. Focusing on maximizing, aligning with, and elevating your primary constraint fuels faster, more effective hiring. With continual reapplication of these steps, you build a highly efficient system where constraints are alleviated and optimum throughput is achieved.
Overall, recruitment teams can benefit greatly from using the Theory of Constraints to optimize their hiring process and we’re making it easy to automatically implement these improvements using Glyde without the need to so much as read the first chapter.
