By Jessica Miller-Merrell
Growth is a great thing. In fact, in business it’s the most
obvious sign of success and is what every CEO and company is looking for.
However, there’s a reason the term “growing pains” was coined so long ago. We
all understand that after the celebration comes to an end, growth is
accompanied by change, stress and business needs. The company’s human resources
team is often sought out to become the hero and fix the growing pains that
seemingly popped up over night. This is a both a major opportunity and significant
challenge for HR departments to exhibit their value to an organization.
In order to be able to step up when the time comes, you’ve
got to be prepared ahead of time. Take the reigns and scale your efforts when
your company starts to hyper grow by implementing these four steps:
Create
a process
Any time you hope to duplicate something, the first stop is
evaluating how you currently complete the task, in this case successfully
recruiting a new employee. By evaluating how you do so, a pattern will likely
emerge that will become your process. After your natural process has emerged,
you’ll want to record it, which means identifying steps and the order in which
they work best. This is no different than a recipe in a cookbook. What
ingredients bring about the best end result and how do you put all those
ingredients together so that they’re each optimized?
Document
everything
After you’ve established your own process, step outside
yourself and get into the minds of your best recruiters. You know what your
secret ingredients are, but what else are the most successful recruiters using
to make their secret sauce? Uncover and document the timesaving tools, creative
resources and technologies that those around you are taking advantage of so
that those you want to be successful in a short amount of time have a head
start.
Communicate
Communication is the key to any successful team. Whether
it’s with your hiring managers, business leaders, new hires or former
candidates, you’ve got to set expectations, ask questions and sometimes hardest
of all, manage expectations. Most importantly, you and your team should work to
exceed those expectations every single day. The only way this can be achieved
is through ongoing information sharing, holding people accountable and peer
mentoring among those you bring on during times of growth and current team
members.
Make
it fun
Periods of hyper growth can be extremely hard on many areas
of the business and HR is no exception. Recruiters can easily get burned out,
so it’s important to stay grounded and remember that people are human. Set
goals, work smart by using your data and dashboards to track results and
continually encourage creativity. The best results happen when we manage to have
fun with our friends and succeed at the same time.
Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell.
