James Hudson

Please, for the love of all that is holy, start your customization journey last: Begin by white boarding the entire end-to-end value chain, and thoroughly interrogate whether your current process is fit for purpose. Remember that every hand-off (person to person, team to team, system to system) is a point of friction, and therefore attrition, so remove as many as possible. Then, and only then, think about hanging the tech around the process. And remember the second you customize, you immediately make ongoing support and future enhancements 100x more complex. So, wherever possible, go with what comes out of the box.

I’ve never been convinced that the juice was worth the squeeze on this one. Why are we investing time effort and energy into cultivating candidate relationships for some theoretical future need? Those resources could better be deployed on filling current open roles quicker, and on building out more responsive talent plans to anticipate future growth areas. IMHO it’s better to think about this holistically: are we going to build / buy / rent talent vs spending time cultivating talent that we may or may not want to ‘buy’ in the future

I really like Glassdoor’s new feature that allows you to filter feedback by demographic. This works whether you identify with a dimension of diversity or not: Look at the aggregate company score, and then look to see how women, LGBTQ+ folk and people of color rate the company. Almost everywhere (sadly) there’s a delta, but where the delta is particularly large, that’s a good indicator that the culture is toxic. Individual reviews will always skew really positive or really negative, but looking at scores in aggregate can give you more of a steer. Once you’re interviewing with a company ask if they have ERG’s, and if you can meet some members as part of your interview process. They’ll tell you what it’s really like.

Hiring for a start up should really come down to: 1) can they do the thing we need them to do? 2) can we get along with each other? Anything beyond that and you’re over-complicating it. Once you get to be a larger organization you can have all the competency frameworks you want, and it *still* won’t make it a foolproof process. So whilst you’re still small, keep it really simple.

Honestly I don't believe it's HR's job to help employees manage their time. HR's role is to ensure that people managers feel equipped to manage their teams, which of course includes tactical things like managing their time. One of the largest issues we face as a profession is being seen as a proxy for 'management', which at best gets in the way of delivering strategic value to the organization. At worst it turns us into highly paid administrators doing outsourced people management tasks that the business don't want to do themselves.

The whole premise of this article is completely erroneous. There is not a single ATS currently on the market (see my profile for an exhaustive list) that does this. In many countries (including here in the US) this would be unlawful, which is why the functionality doesn’t exist. Please let’s stop perpetuating this nonsense.