Challenges of Filling Open Positions
by Lois MelbourneOpen Positions within an organization generally imply that budget has been approved to fill a position and, at least theoretically, there is an effort to locate a qualified candidate. It may seem odd that I’m making these statements with so many timid qualifiers. An open position is an open position – right? Well, the challenge for many companies is managing the open positions. Even with the plethora of great and not-so-great recruiting, on-boarding, and applicant tracking systems, the actual management and visibility of open positions is still an ordeal for many managers and HR departments.
Challenge number 1
A company knew they had many out-of-date open positions, but the positions were scattered across so many different managers who couldn’t realistically be given access to the recruiting software to sort through the positions and make changes or updates. These positions became out-of-date because the computer systems didn’t always get updated when a position was filled. A position would also be filled with a different job title than the original request was created with, thus the HR clerk didn’t always know if this was a match and they could mark the requisition as completed.
Value to solving the problem to Challenge number 1
After solving the “hidden open position” challenge (how to do that is later in this blog), the company was able to clean up 10.1 million dollars of budget sitting in unwanted open positions that could now be reallocated more productively. This clean up was not disruptive to any department, and took less than 3 weeks.
Challenge number 2
A company went through a major reorganization from a geographic organizational structure to more of a product line of business structure, while maintaining the back stage consolidations for departments, such as legal and finance, within headquarters. This reorganization created many changes with the workforce reporting structure. Managers who inherited new departments were unaware of existing open positions within their span-of-control unless they specifically looked for them through their department financial data for allotted budgeting for open positions. This led to many managers creating new, and unnecessary, job requisitions for the positions they needed filled in their areas.
Value to solving the problem to Challenge number 2
This company was unable to provide dollar figures to solve their problem, but you can imagine that the financial reward was large. The company cleaned up the open positions database, managers learned about budget dollars they could reallocate, they stopped the recruitment process on over 100 unnecessary positions including nearly 20 positions with annual salaries exceeding $180,000 and required advanced degrees (very difficult and costly positions in their industry to fill). Due to the huge load of additional recruiting the company thought had to be done, the current staff was so overwhelmed and overworked, they needed more assistance. They created two new recruiter positions to help with the onslaught of open positions the reorganization had generated and were trying to fill those positions. At the end of the clean up process, the two recruiter positions were cancelled.
Both of these challenges are repeated across many organizations around the globe. Blatant Aquire plug about to appear: We helped both of these companies make their open positions readily recognizable for each manager. By adding their open positions to the OrgPublisher corporate org chart, everyone could access the open positions they were responsible for and determine if they were accurate. The information regarding the open positions for Challenge #1 company was in their HRIS system and for Challenge #2 company, the data was in a different system. This didn’t matter to us.
We combined the data and showed the open positions in color coded boxes throughout the entire organization. The visibility allowed collaboration and discussion to clean up the data. Click on the thumbnail graphic below to see a portion of an org chart that includes open positions.
Another day I’ll tell you about open positions and recruiting from within.
Cheers,
Lois
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