The pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives. From the rhythm of everyday life to the style of our work, employment also.

Do you remember working remotely or are you still working from home?

Observing the market situation, many companies were forced to make strategic decisions on many levels. They are also related to job cuts or suspension of recruitment in the company for some time.

And what now with the employment process?

This is the moment when HR departments, in which the business decision was to freeze recruitment, have no excuse. They can’t say, “We don’t have time to improve.” So where to start? The easiest way to start is to identify your waste and think about eliminating it. All activities in our work can be divided into those that give value to the stakeholder and those that do not. In particular, it is about those activities for which someone would be willing to pay.

Types of waste

Taiichi Ohno, in 1978 in Japan and later in 1988 in the United States, listed 7 types of waste in his Lean Management book. Today we are talking about eight or even nine. The additional 2 new wastes belong to the realm of these soft factors that can slow down our actions. To understand this more, let’s move on to discuss the individual with examples:

1. Overproduction

Producing more and sooner than needed. It is important here to identify, apart from the end customer, also the internal customer, i.e. the next process to which we pass the results of our work. This type is best translated as over-enthusiasm

Examples:

• Finding 6 candidates for 4 roles, according to the employment plan,
• Opening recruitment before a person for a given position is needed
• Poorly used automation in the recruitment and HR process
• Producing reports that no one is reading at the moment

2. Waiting

When employees wait for the next batch of tasks to be performed or the completion of the preceding process. In other words, this is a hidden unproductivity – as a rule, people are busy with “other” things.

Examples:

• Waiting for confirmation of the opening of a new recruitment
• Waiting for employment decisions
• System downtime
• System response time

3. Excessive processing

Redoing activities / returning to activities that were already performed in previous positions. In other words, when we touch on the same issues more than once. Unfortunately, without comprehensive process knowledge (VSM), this waste is virtually undetectable.

Examples:

• rewriting data that was previously created
• performing all or part of previously performed activities
• correcting previously performed activities

4. Excessive transport

Carrying out activities related to transport. The stakeholder pays for work that is not performing during transport.

Examples:

• organization of the workplace forcing to move the same elements multiple times
• holding face-to-face meetings when you can use the phone or videoconference (read: transporting yourself “from-to”)
• Sending internal mail by post and waiting 24-48 hours for it to arrive
• Send contracts to new employees for signature and return by mail

5. Warehousing

Storing elements that nobody needs at the moment. In other words, capital frozen from articles or work done and waiting for its turn. For example, your emails waiting for you to reading. Documents waiting to be dealt with, too many office supplies.

Examples:

• Thousands of HR and new starter kits and closet documents that you’ll never use
• Poor monitoring systems for employee evaluation
• Reliable recruiting providers

6. Excessive traffic

Hard to detect at first sight. But if you look deeper…

 Examples:

• a large number of icons on the computer desktop
• file search
• switching between screens multiple times
• lack of awareness about the possibilities of automation (e.g. data import) of the application functions
• walking between floors to talk to someone as you can never contact them on the phone

7. Errors and defects

An indispensable part of the job. It happens to everyone, everywhere. Regardless of the industry and company. And no matter if it’s TOYOTA or a small local recruitment agency. The only way to fight errors and defects is to say STOP and stop working exactly when the error occurs. Make a note of this fact, make a correction and at the end of the day analyze and try to prevent similar situations in the future.

As statistics show without STOP and error reporting – we remember a single error for a maximum of 5 days – and what if there are more of them and they repeat themselves irregularly? It is easier to detect a production error – because it is visible and most often it gets loud in quality control. It is more difficult for us services. Because the error that you meet is simply “secretly” corrected until it is revealed to the client. These are bad habits. Quality control should be built into the process of enjoying free time in your life and not spend it on corrections.

8. Untapped human potential

This is a problem of work organization. It usually occurs when a valuable employee performs work that is incompatible with his role.

For example:

• bad division of tasks / no delegation
• highly qualified people perform simple tasks
• a valuable employee does a low-paid job, and additionally has to perform a large amount of proper substantive work, and this is where overload appears

We’ve learned the types of waste, and what to do with them?

If you’ve learned the types of waste and can identify them in your team’s processes. Most importantly, it’s time to consider whether the tools your team uses in the process support waste removal and automate the appropriate activities.

It is worth answering the following questions:

• Do I use the right tools to be supported at every stage of the process in which I am involved?
• Is the tool I use able to shorten the work and automate it?
• If not, what is stopping me from changing the software?

Finally, watch this short, funny video to the end and think about what went wrong, what you would do in their place as a manager and as an employee, and how it translates into your work

HelloAstra, optimization for your employment process

In conclusion, as a team, above all, we believe that efficiency and simplicity of operation are the basis for effective operation. With our ATS you can quickly and easily eliminate the most frequent waste.

• only download reports when you need them
• engage candidates only in current recruitment projects
• automate your analytical work with our proprietary algorithm
• accelerate and automate the building of the candidate database through integration
• have access to the system 99.8% of the time per year
• do not need to collect candidate data in multiple places
• achieve better and better results without effort, thanks to thorough research, from month to month we reduce the number of activities in the system to achieve the same effect
• will involve all participants of the process in hiring the candidate