Welcome to another edition of #3NoMoreThan5 in 5, the SOS series! So last time, the call went out for an SOS. Laura, on my team was challenged with helping our cybersecurity organization access talent. We had a lot of positions to fill, we weren’t getting the talent quality we felt we needed, they weren’t working through the system fast enough to get hired, and now it was negatively impacting our business.
In order for me to Show Laura (in the Show Obersve Shape model) what could be done to be better? I needed to sit down with her and map out a plan. I went back to some of the things I did in my Enterprise world and I talked to Laura about how we can identify the gaps. What is causing us and our teams to run into this problem and how can we fix it?
The first gap we identified was with our talent acquisition parters. Unfortunately they didn’t quite understand the skills that our cybersecurity managers needed or wanted. So what did we do? We brought the talent acquisition people and managers together to really start to understand what type of work is being done in that organization and the skills the hiring managers needed for that work to be accomplished. Now, the managers could start to hold our talent acquisition team accountable for the quality of candidates coming in. They were speaking the same language, they’d all come together and said this is what we’re going to do, so talent and managers could start to build a better working relationships.
But it wasn’t all on our talent acquisition team! Laura and I also found that our managers were only participating in the process when they felt they were needed. Yeah, that’s not going to work. So Laura and I basically decided that we’re going to mandate that managers set aside designated dates and times that were going to be held for interviews. But Mylene, we don’t even have any interviews yet? That’s okay. While managers are holding talent acquisition people accountable for the quality of candidates, talent acquisition can now hold managers accountable for timeliness. If they’re bringing good candidates to you, you now have designated dates and times on your calendar to schedule these interviews and be efficient about working through the process.
Laura engaged senior leadership to make sure they knew what the plan looked like, got their buy in and participation, and there will be more on that in the third segment of this SOS series (Show Overseer and Shape).
I found a way to show Laura a process that could help prove what her business partners were experiencing. And in the third segment of this series will talk a bit about Team SOS — How through observation and shaping, we’re now turning this into a much more efficient process, an effective process for everyone involved.
So in the spirit of #3NoMoreThan5 in 5, stay tuned for the third installment of the SOS series. Until then, cheers!