A federal regulatory agency was struggling to hire the top talent it needed, often losing candidates to the private sector. To improve its ability to compete for talent in a tight market, the agency knew they needed to shorten their time to hire. Despite regulations intended to give them more flexibility, the agency struggled to make the process more efficient. They faced hiring challenges with the involvement of multiple offices in the hiring process, along with several procedural steps making it cumbersome. The agency was also simultaneously dealing with other process changes and new technology, further complicating their hiring processes.
They turned to Eagle Hill to help chart their talent management strategy for developing greater hiring efficiency and improved competitiveness in the marketplace.
Goal
Better compete for top talent by re-engineering the agency’s hiring process to improve efficiency and reduce time-to-hire.
Unconventional consulting—and breakthrough results
In recoupable hiring costs
Reduced time to hire
Reduction in the number of process activities
Our starting point—discovering root causes
When Eagle Hill began our assessment, one point was clear: hiring at the agency was an across-the-board pain-point. During our fact finding, we learned that 83 percent of client stakeholders cited hiring as a primary challenge related to their administrative functions.
Much less clear was why the hiring process remained excessively long and why it continued to cause so much dissatisfaction for hiring managers and administrative staff. To get started:
We dug deep to uncover the true root causes of the hiring challenges our client faced. Eagle Hill recognizes the importance of addressing root causes when making any kind of recommendation to our clients. Our investigation revealed that employees believed hiring challenges stemmed from understaffing. As we dug deeper into over 500 process activities, we discovered that bottlenecks were actually caused by work product quality issues and frequent “kickbacks” at various points of the process. Furthermore, hiring managers faced unclear guidance and frustration compounded with excessive layers of approvals along the way. In short, the issue was not lack of capacity; but rather, lack of complete understanding of all the nuances of the process to get things done right the first time.
We culled the hiring process challenges into four root causes and clearly laid out targeted areas for improvement based on numerous data points. We meticulously analyzed 255,000+ lines of historical system data, conducted 35 interviews with leaders in key operations and administrative positions, and conducted a deep-dive into hundreds of available documents. The sheer amount of information to investigate required not only attention to detail, but the ability to fill in gaps when faced with missing or bad data. Our tenacity helped the agency make sense of the sometimes murky data and identify actionable next steps for improvement.
The roadmap to success—paving the way forward
We ideated solutions to address root causes and displayed them via future-state process maps.
We validated solutions with key client stakeholders, ranking and scoring them based on likely impact and level of effort.
We summarized our customized recommendations into a digestible report, outlining the actions necessary and feasibility for each recommendation.
Today, the report serves as an easy reference to help the agency prioritize improvement efforts. The process maps are being used to clearly communicate the process to hiring managers – contributing to a smoother, more efficient hiring process for the agency.
