Scaling Up – The Forgotten Art of Process Design

Process is not sexy. It’s boring and getting people to follow any process design in any business is often hard work. However, it underpins the success of a scaleup and is often forgotten – especially in the Talent or HR space.

A lot of time and energy is invested into designing a product, service or technology that will change the world. Then more time and is invested into securing funding to take the business to the next level and when that funding lands the exciting task of hiring 100’s of people is now a reality.

But, most businesses at this stage have to start building a Talent function that is fit for scale, it’s at this stage that a process design is required too. However, a focus and investment on the talent team is often overlooked and undervalued.

The current talent team operating model got us to a good place, but a new model is now needed. ‘The talent team needs to be structured in a way that allows for specialization, with different processes, decision-making flows, and reporting lines, otherwise those specialist skills are not leveraged to the fullest’ according to Beamery.

With this in mind, its important to think about how your resources are allocated? Which roles have the biggest impact on the business and how is your talent team going to deliver them?

For example:

• If 25% of our roles are business critical this year based on their overall impact to the company.
• Therefore it makes sense to dedicate 2 out 3 of our recruiters to them and 1 of our recruiters to the other 75%.
• Once some progress has been made on the critical hires, then resources can be reallocated.

When our Partners are aiming to achieve serious scale we always do a review of the process design to make sure they are fit for purpose. We ensure our Talent Partners who embed with them deliver maximum results and the process design in place can prove to be a huge potential barrier.

“What if we put a zero on the end?”

We have found the question above is the key for process design that is fit for scale.

Ask yourself the question… If I “put a zero on the end” of the volume inside this process does it still work?

What we mean by this is:

• I currently do 50 interviews and year. I now need to do 500. Does my process still work?
• I currently process 10 offers per year. I now need to process 100. Does my process still work?
• I currently onboard 10 people per year. I now need to onboard 100. Does my process still work?

Often the answer will be no or maybe. There will be huge opportunities to automate process and drive efficiency and the capacity in the process designed needs to be ready to take on even further demand as the business keeps scaling.

The good news is that there is a fix, however without it you will find fast that hiring and onboarding  at scale can be a painful task and unfortunately will hold the business back.