CXR Recommends: 40 Ideas to Shake Up your Hiring Process

A way to evaluate your own hiring practices

Harvard Business Review’s recent article, 40 Ideas to Shake Up Your Hiring Processby Joseph Fuller, Nithya Vaduganathan, Allison Bailey, and Manjari Raman offers an excellent ‘self-check’ list of current innovative practices for hiring, although that wasn’t their intended approach.

Here’s a sample of how we might ask ourselves, “Have we:

  • Re-written job descriptions for work that really needs to get done.
  • Sought out candidates who match 70% to 80% of the most critical skills for the role — and then developed learning curricula to equip them with the remainder.
  • Offered “micro-internships” (short-term paid projects) or apprenticeships to assess fit before committing to a full-time hire.
  • Employed gender-neutral language in job descriptions to attract more diverse candidates.
  • Expanded internal talent mobility (e.g., lateral job transfers, internal gig work) by drawing on a foundation of skills and aspirations and added development to support retention.
  • Embraced on-demand and gig platforms to increase labor-force flexibility.
  • Attracted alumni back to our organization.
  • Tapped into “hidden” populations, including retiredneurodiverse, and previously incarcerated workers.
  • Acquired companies with top talent — or entered into agreements to borrow and share talent with other companies.
  • Partnered with educational and community institutions, including job centers and community colleges, to offer tailored curriculum and term-time work experiences to build a talent pipeline with relevant skills.
  • Developed and marketed a more effective referral program, particularly for in-demand roles.
  • Broken work into its components to assign responsibilities more clearly across a team or to freelance workers, and improve your approach to sourcing.
  • Deployed talent more dynamically, by creating skills-based pools of talent that can be assigned to the most critical priorities on demand.
  • Used creative scheduling and shift redesign to allow lower-wage workers to move or switch shifts more flexibly while still providing adequate coverage.
  • Experimented with different flex models, including compressed work weeks, sharing jobs among multiple part-time employees, and/or scheduling split shifts to cover “rush hours.”
  • Redesigned work by eliminating, re-assigning, or automating less-critical responsibilities.
  • Embedded technology that improves ease of work, including language assistance and tools to accommodate older workers.”

    Read more from the source: Harvard Business Review
Picture of Gerry Crispin

Gerry Crispin

Gerry co-authored eight books on the evolution of staffing and has written 100s of articles and whitepapers on similar topics during a career in Human Resources that spans more than 40 years from HR leadership positions at Johnson and Johnson; to boutique Executive Search firms; a Career Services Director at the University where he received his Engineering and 2 advanced degrees in Organizational/Industrial Behavior; and, GM of a major recruitment advertising firm even as he launched CareerXroads 25 years ago.

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