English version

So often managers ask a recruiter: how many vacancies can you handle at the same time and how many vacancies do you expect to fill in the coming year? If you work a lot in tech, you often end up in an environment where people are used to work with scrum. And that's how Recruitment Sprint Planning came up. This is a free interpretation and especially do it the way you want. I will try to explain how I apply it.

Situation:

• There are a number of hiring managers, each with a number of vacancies.
• There are 1 or more recruiters working on these vacancies.
• Open vacancies are considered the backlog for the recruitment department.
• Hiring Managers realize that there are more vacancies than recruiters can fill in the coming weeks.
• The hiring managers would like to know where they stand and the recruiters would like to manage expectations !!!

The recruiters should have insight into the complexity of recruiting for their vacancies and can therefore give an indication of how difficult it is to find and recruit a good candidate for a particular vacancy. Now every recruiter can handle a certain workload. Suppose that every recruiter has to spend 100 points per month. Please note; do not to talk in hours .... we use points only!!!! A new recruiter can get a lower workload and therefore has fewer points to forgive. A more experienced recruiter may have more points.

Starting:

• the average recruiter has 100 workload points per month (a usual sprint is 2 weeks, but for recruiting a months works better)
• the recruiter determines how many points a vacancy will have based on his/her experience. Example of points: 30 points for an UX developer; 20 points for a scrummaster; 40 for a backend engineer, et cetera. In the beginning this will be an "educated guess" and by doing this sprint planning more often, the points will become increasingly realistic.
• First sit down with the recruiters to practice and discuss how many points a particular vacancy will get.
• If there are 2 recruiters, that means that there will be 200 points are available that month.

The Recruitment Sprint Planning session:

• Invite all hiring managers (of the department) and recruiters for a planning session
• Request the hiring managers to write each of their vacancy(s) on a post-it
• Place a vertical line on the board in the middle.
• Ask the managers to paste these post-its on the left side of the whiteboard.
• Paste ( or move) the more important/urgent vacancies higher than the less urgent vacancies.
• Let the hiring managers discuss among themselves which are the most important for the organization.
• If desired, you also invite the "CXO" for the session, so that it can help determine what is more urgent/important to the business.
• The recruitment lead could play the role of scrummaster. Or ask a scrummaster from the organization to help with this planning session.
• The whiteboard now fills with all vacancies. Please remember. Recruiters should stay out of the discussion, leave the discussion about the relevance of the vacancy with the hiring managers.
• When all post-its are on the board, the scrummaster writes down for vacancies the number of points that the recruiter has given to each type of vacancy.
• Put a horizontal line on the right side of the board.
• Now hang the 'most important' vacancies on the right above the horizontal line of the board until the maximum number of points of 200 is reached. Paste the rest underneath with the most important ones higher than the less important ones.
• In the coming period the recruiters will only be pro-actively busy with the vacancies above the line. The others are 'open', but do not receive extra attention.
• Take a picture of the board and share it with all stakeholders, so that everyone knows what is going on and which vacancies have priority and are being processed

And:

• If you do this planning session every month, everyone involved has an excellent picture of what is happening.
• If there are (too) many vacancies under the line, it may be a reason to use extra recruiters. This is the start of your business case
• Process improvements will have a positive effect and therefore fewer workload points may be allocated to vacancies.
• When new vacancies arrive, they will not be included until the next sprint. Filled vacancies will be removed/disappear.
• Unscheduled changes can only be made by organizing a new planning session.
• During every planning session, recruiters will be able to improve their estimation better and better on how many points are associated with a certain vacancy and the forecasts will become increasingly more accurate. As a recruiter you know that there are many variables that influence recruitment and its process, therefore the (workload) points for vacancies can become both higher and lower.
• If you have more vacancies for one position, sourcing efficiency will automatically reduce the number of points for that vacancy.

Good luck and if you have any questions, you know where to find me now.

#recruiting #recruitment #sprint #scrum #agile #planning