Poka-Yoke your recruitment process

Do you know what I mean by Poka-yoke? 

I was away in South Africa last year with the in-laws and Paul, my father in law came out with a great saying. Poka-yoke. 

Paul is a director/CTO for a technology business that seems to have the majority of its customers in the manufacturing industry. The term, Poka-yoke, is a Japanese term used in manufacturing & is the methodology they use to increase efficiency, drive productivity & ultimately reduce costs. Of course for us, it was ensuring that we had set each day up, with a 5 month year old, to run as smoothly as possible! 

The principal is simple; write down a process end to end, list out everything that could possibly go wrong, then make a plan for each eventuality. For baby management, this is perfect stress mitigation (it works!). 

So then I got to thinking, where else could I apply this principal. The obvious place was recruitment. I worked in the recruitment industry for many years and saw the process fail far too many times, both when we were hiring ourselves & as candidates were moving between companies. 

Should you do this? How many candidates have you lost in the process?

Step 1: Create a list of all the different recruitment types you have. We’ll call them candidate journey’s. 

Step 2: Interview one or two employees you’ve recently hired into each of the journey’s, get their side of the 'journey,' right the way from when they started looking or were approached. 

Step 3: Add your process for each journey and you have your base line.

Step 4: Write it all on a board & start adding everything that could or you’ve seen go wrong. 

Step 5: Under each eventuality, write what could be done either to prevent it or the best way to react.

Step 6: Implement the preventative changes you’ve identified.

And that’s it! You’ve Poka-yoke'd your recruitment process. 

If you like this, what else you could Poka-yoke?

Packing for your holiday? 

A technology project? 

Your kids first day at school? 

I'm keen to see what ideas you have, leave me a comment with what you will Poka-yoke