WITH skills shortages crippling the mining and minerals processing industries, the race is on to find and attract the best candidates before your competitors do. Michael Huggins of Partners in Performance says that's why CEOs need to ensure they are treating recruitment as a vital part of the production process.

Organisations put a lot of time and money into looking at their production bottlenecks and unblocking them. At one site recently, lack of staff as a result of slow recruiting cost the company $30 million per annum in lost tonnage from trucks parked up due to lack of drivers.

The key is to increase the speed of the recruiting pipeline; a key indicator of a company's level of competitiveness.

"Recruitment velocity" is the speed at which you get a candidate to accept a position and be on location. In a market where people have lots of choices, if you take two weeks longer to make an offer than your competitors, you are only going to get those who don't get offers from others.

How to increase pipeline velocity

This is a KPI we have found to be readily improved – in part because unlike volume and costs, it has seldom come under intense performance pressure. You are thus likely to get fast results and great returns on your time – tonnes will go up, crises should reduce and you should have more time to manage rather than firefight.

There are some simple tips that we would suggest to increase your pipeline velocity and get your roles filled faster: ensure you have a simple, transparent, recruiting tracking tool in place that both ensures the team can keep track of next steps, and helps you understand what is taking so long and why.

Develop simple review pages for both:

• The details of the number of candidates; time to return their call; time to first interview, percent of offers accepted etc; and
• Actions, by whom, by when, done/not done on every candidate.

These review pages bring you rapid insight into the process: which elements of it are working and which are not. Furthermore, they will give you the richness to see what the delays are and therefore help solve the problems.

These reviews should be attended both by HR and the line manager. Being actively involved in these reviews and driving performance from your HR team is likely to yield significant impact and results.

Often you will uncover assumptions from the recruiters that are not right but you didn't know were being made. Typically, they highlight areas where the operations are holding HR up and the lack of spotlight had not previously triggered the realisation from the line that they were part of the problem. Similarly, these reviews increase the performance ethic and focus in the recruiting team.

Next, generate ideas with the recruitment team on how to reduce the time through the recruiting pipeline. The approach here is to take each step and:

a) Ask if it is truly required and whether it adds value;
b) Work out how to do it faster (do it in parallel, cut out some steps, automate); and
c) Review it regularly.

By prioritising each activity and assigning someone accountable for delivery, you will see an effect in reducing the recruitment time scale.

If you take an active role reviewing performance on your recruitment pipeline and create an ethic of mutual accountability to deliver – you will get rapid and significant results. In our experience, this area has often lacked a highly focused review and proactive performance management in the past, so is laden with low-hanging fruit.

Typically our teams often get a 35-50% reduction in pipeline velocity within six weeks.

This results in:
• Vacancies being filled faster;
• Your site getting acceptances from the better candidates that your competitors were previously getting to faster in the past;
• Equipment not sitting idle due to "no operator" any more (more tonnes);
• Equipment being repaired on time on spec (increased availability, higher tonnes, lower costs);
• Your people not having to firefight as much and having more time to do their job; and
• You and your people not being so stressed from covering for the vacancies (higher retention).

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