How To Improve Your Recruitment Process With An Agile Team

Innovation can help unlock rapid growth and success in the modern business arena. In recent years, the Agile methodology has become the dominant blueprint for fostering innovation across teams in organisations large and small.

While the agile framework was originally associated with software development, its reach has expanded considerably in the last two decades. With their emphasis on collaboration, feedback loops, and short iterative projects, agile teams can be highly effective in recruitment as well.

In this article, we will explore the basics of the agile approach, highlight the essential features of agile teams, and understand how you can deploy the same into such a critical activity as recruitment.

A Quick Guide To Agile Teams

The agile methodology is a popular approach in project management and software development. In simple terms, agile revolves around the concept of incremental improvement of a product (or prototype), where you innovate to make small but frequent releases.

According to the Harvard Business Review, its origins can be traced back to Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles from the 1930s, and later innovations by Japanese firms like Toyota, Honda, and Canon.

The agile framework comes with a unique vocabulary and operating principles. To learn more about the basics of agile teams, please read our in-depth article on the topic. When you deploy agile principles in recruitment, the result is 'agile recruitment’.

The Importance of Scrum In Agile Recruitment

Scrum is the most popular agile framework used by teams to achieve a well-defined goal. It uses an iterative approach, with short and intense development cycles or ‘sprints’. At the end of each cycle, you track the progress, check for feedback, and make any changes/tweaks if necessary.  

An agile team following scrum will have the following roles:

• Development Team: made up of members with different specialisations who work together to create the product/service. In agile recruitment, the team is made up of specialist recruiters.
• Scrum Master: a specialist manager whose job is to ensure that the team is following the Scrum best practices.
• Product Owner: the individual serving as the connecting link between the development team and the customers/users of the product. In agile recruitment, the role is renamed ‘project manager’.  

Some FAQs About Requirements And Backlogs

All products need certain key elements to be successful on the market. These include special functions, standout features, and associated services. In an agile project, these elements are called requirements. They provide vital goals for developers in the agile team. 

How does an agile team maintain requirements?

In the beginning, the agile team with collaborate with customers and other stakeholders to develop a strong requirements document. After each sprint, the feedback received from clients allows the team to further refine and tweak these requirements.

During this entire process, the team maintains the requirements in a product backlog. It is a structured and ordered list of all the requirements needed to improve a product, maintained by the product owner/manager on platforms like Jira.

How does an agile team obtain clarity on backlogs?

It is the responsibility of a product owner to maintain clarity on backlogs in an agile team. They discuss the backlog with the entire team between iterations and create user stories to simplify things.

Product owners also run backlog refinement sessions during an iteration to maintain clarity.  Developers can also reach out to the product owner if they have any doubts during an iteration.

How Agile Teams Can Improve Recruitment

Since the publication of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, the approach has been quickly adopted by many firms and has quickly spread outside of software development into other sectors with a focus on rapid innovation.

In a 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review, Sutherland and Takeuchi noted how agile had spread beyond IT development into C-Suite management. These days, it has shown tremendous promise in HR and recruitment as well.

Here are four reasons why agile is an ideal framework for recruitment practices:

Reduced Errors With Feedback

In traditional recruitment practice, there is often a disconnect between hiring managers and the recruiters in charge of the screening process. Instructions and ideal candidate profiles are poorly communicated, or misunderstood.

Consequently, hiring managers are forced to interview candidates who are not a good fit for the available positions. In agile recruitment, such situations can be easily avoided using the feedback loop.

If there are any errors, the hiring managers can quickly pass the word on to recruiters using the feedback loops between sprints.

Improve Flexibility And Adaptability

Workflows and deadlines can change at a moment’s notice in recruitment. The sudden departure of important executives and employees in strategic positions can leave your company scrambling for alternatives.

Conversely, changes in financial outlook and wider economic situations may force a rethink in hiring policies. With the agile approach, your recruitment team is better positioned to react to such sudden changes.

Faster, More Productive Teams

In an agile recruitment team, there is an emphasis on constant communication with the major stakeholders – namely, the hiring managers and the candidates. A product owner will oversee this process, with automated email alerts ensuring that nobody is out of the loop.

This speeds up the pace at which you complete your recruitment targets.  The glacial pace of hiring is a common complaint at many organisations – it can often take a month or more to recruit a new employee. This can be remedied through the adoption of agile methodology.

Happier Managers, Candidates, And Improved Reputation

With agile recruitment, hiring managers have a better chance of interviewing high-quality hires. And the constant communication and updates ensure that the candidates also enjoy a superior experience working with your agile team.

Companies with inefficient recruitment get a negative reputation, particularly in online reviews. This is less likely to happen with agile recruitment, making it easier for you to attract better-quality candidates in future.

A Quick Blueprint To Agile Recruitment

There are many ways to adopt an agile framework in recruiting. A lot will depend on the size of your company, the HR policies, and recruitment targets. Still, this basic 5-step guide should give you a good idea about the basics of implementing agile recruitment:

1. Create a Baseline – talk with all the stakeholders, including business leaders, HR professionals, and various department managers to clearly define the available resources, hiring objectives, and expectations.
2. Assemble an Agile Team – if you are following Scrum (the most popular agile framework), you will need a scrum master and project owner who will work alongside your cross-functional team of recruitment professionals.
3. Execute Hiring Sprints – once your team is ready, the project owner will set the recruitment backlog, divided into multiple sprint cycles. After developing plans for each sprint, the recruitment team can start the hiring process.
4. Track the Progress – Kanban boards allow agile teams to visualize the sprint strategy and track individual performance. You can use both physical boards with post-its inside the office, and digital boards available on project management platforms.
5. Analyse KPI Metrics – key performance metrics (KPIs) allow you to evaluate the progress of your hiring sprints. Include appropriate recruitment metrics in the sprint analysis meetings to efficiently identify areas that require improvement in future cycles.
6. Rinse and Repeat – agile recruitment is a continuous flow of iterative sprints. Keep holding daily standup meetings, sprint evaluations, and strategy meetings to improve your understanding of the hiring process.

Agile Recruitment – Ideal For Complex Positions

There is a lot of leeway in adopting an agile framework in recruiting. You don't necessarily have to revamp your entire setup. For entry-level positions and lower-level hires, the traditional recruitment pipelines should still work well, with some modern tools.

But as you move higher up the talent and experience levels of candidates, the agile framework becomes more attractive. Agile teams work best when dealing with undefined or open-ended projects – in hiring terms, niche positions and unorthodox roles with complex job descriptions.

According to Gartner, organisations experienced a 22 per cent reduction in hiring times, a 31 per cent increase in recruiter productivity and a 37 per cent decrease in cost per hire. Those are some very compelling numbers indeed, and they further reinforce the case for an agile approach to recruitment.