Hi everyone, and welcome to pre-hire practices. My name is Alison Anderson, and I'm going to be your tour guide on this adventure through our hiring practices. Just to give you a little bit of background about myself, I've over 20 years of HR experience. I don't like saying that because it definitely admits my age. But that's also where we're going to get the examples, and the scenarios, and the situations that I've been through. I definitely teach via those real life examples and how this works in industry. I think, regardless of what industry you're part of, for myself, I've worked in global defense. I've worked a lot with nonprofits and still do on the side. I've also worked in entertainment, but I have spent the bulk of my career within biotech and pharmaceuticals. So the bulk of the examples that we're going to talk about in the stories and scenarios are probably most likely going to come from that biopharma industry. In addition to that, I hold my Masters in Health Law and Policy, and I've had amazing experiences and abilities to be able to work at the US Capitol, for the White House and work on ACA, which is the Affordable Care Act. So I've definitely had some tremendous experiences and very appreciative for those and we'll dive into some of those as we go throughout this semester. Here's an overview of the first module and the items that were going to be covering within it. We're going to start with the mission, vision and values. This is going to be colossally important, regardless of the organization type, design, profit, nonprofit and what we're going to do is we're going to define that. And we're also going to talk about the importance and how we tie that into the talent life cycle and even thereafter. We're going to tie that into employee retention and just see this reoccurring theme throughout the entire process. Next, we're going to look at an overview of the hiring process. This is just where we cover the various stops and explain what those are as well as what we're going to be covering throughout this course. Finally, we're going to land on job descriptions. These are colossally important as well, and we're going to dig into that accuracy, how we get there and why that's so important. We're going to be talking to various stakeholders. We're going to be gathering information and data. So often we see folks pull, do a Google search and copy and paste and that's what we want to try to avoid. Certainly we can use those, maybe as a guide or some help with a bullet here or there. But we definitely don't want to rely on someone else's interpretation with their organization or company for what our needs are. I want to start this module with passion. So this might seem like an unlikely place to start, and I completely understand that but I promise that I'm going to tie it in there. And make sure you understand why this is so important and why we're covering this. So while we're going through this module or even today, or maybe a week from now, I want you to kind of think about what your passion is and what this means for you. Just really briefly, when we do presentations and stuff in the course that I teach. It's very interesting to me that if I have a student up there presenting on a topic that given to them, that presentation. That level of enthusiasm, that engagement is so different than if they're up there talking about something that they truly love. And I just have to think back to one of my students that I make my students create a company every semester. Obviously, fictitious company, his company was actually tied to basketball because he absolutely loved basketball. When he was up there talking about basketball versus another assignment where he had to talk about an HR law, I had a completely different student. And so it's just something interesting to know, and it just totally changes the paradigm, the person, the engagement and that presentation. When we talk about this through the talent life cycle, if we're looking for people with passion and with purpose that align with the organization with the mission, vision and values. Those people are going to stay around for a long time. I had a great example, just last week, we had made an offer to a candidate. It was for a scientist position and she called me because she wanted to talk about it, and unfortunately she turned our offer down. But she did this an explanation to me because the company that she was going to work for where she had another offer was actually working on a cancer drug that was close to her heart and to her family. So in that case, that was her passion. So her passion was that cancer drug. But maybe your passion is the work that the company's doing. Maybe your passion is the team that you're working with. I completely related to her in that in my own experience my mom is a survivor of stage four Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. But there was a point in my career where I just happened to have a couple of job offers come at the same time. Sometimes that's just how it works. And in that case, one of the companies that had made me an offer their lead drug candidate was in Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. So it shouldn't be any surprise which position I ended up taking because that was my passion and I wanted to be part of that cause. I've had other even students in my class who worked for amazing companies like Vans. They love their sneakers. They love the products they love the clothes. So in that case, and in that capacity, that was their passion. For me, I stayed there for many years from my students from Vans. I think he was there for over 12 years. You know it and still going strong at that point. So we really do have to talk about passion and really kind of digging into that. Why? Because we need to focus on what's going to get those employees, including ourselves through those rough days. Maybe a job title and a paycheck are only going to get you so far. But you really need to find other reasons and purposes for getting through those times. Mission, vision and values is going to be a critical theme that I talked about a lot throughout the course. This drives back the who, the why and the really the reason that we're here. The reason that any organization is in existence. So the first place I'm going to start with that is just a real basic definition. When we look at mission, we're talking about the concise explanation of the organization's reason for existence. Why they're here, why they're in existence? This is going to support the vision statement, and then it's going to reiterate those values and really just drive home the purpose of the organization. When we look at the vision and this is the one that my students get wrong or get confused so often time and time again, this is a forward looking statement. So this is where we're going to create the image or the picture of where this organization wants to be, why it's here. And then finally, what we're going to look at are these values. So what are these values? These are going to be the core principles that guide the organization. This is going to be what the reason that they are and what defines them and really helps to support both the mission and the vision. One of the best examples I can give you is Nike, so we all should be a little bit familiar with Nike, if not way familiar. But basically Nike's mission is to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. They have a little ampersand there and they specify that if you have a body, you are an athlete. So they're really trying to encompass everyone. They want everybody to belong. They want everybody to buy in. Their vision statement, again that forward looking statement, that's where Nike, they see a world where everybody is an athlete, united in the joy of movement. Driven by our passion for sport and our instinct for innovation, we aim to bring inspiration to every athlete in the world and to make sport a daily habit. So again, they're tying that back to everybody. You can see components in that vision statement that tie back to that mission statement that we first read. And then finally, their values. Do the right thing, be on the offensive always, serves athletes, creates the future of sport, and win as a team. And I want to notate again that the serves athlete, we're going back to that same ampersand where they're saying that if you have a body, you're an athlete. So just in knowing what we know about Nike, about what they do, about who we are, we can see where both those core values play into the mission and to the vision and to everything that they do. So what I want us to think about in the recruitment process, in the talent life cycle is really how we can drive that organization, your organization's mission, vision and values all the way through that talent life cycle and even into employee retention. This is so super important to basically tie back to, this is what our purpose is, this is what we believe, so this is why we're doing this. I have to give you an aside on this one. When I was in graduate school, my professor, one of my professors, I had him for two courses, both courses. He made us create a mission, vision, and values for an organization. He did it in the space to have us produce an elevator pitch, which is a very short synopsis where you would literally be able to give someone in an elevator, in that very short time period between your floors, a scenario of what your mission, vision, and values were. What's your organization's purpose and what are you doing and why are you doing it? I went through that exercise and I was like, God, why do we have to do this? I have no interest in this, and it wasn't until a year or two maybe after I graduated grad school and the light bulb went off. I was doing day to day stuff in HR land and it just clicked, and it drives back to passion, which we talked about on the prior slide. But it carries throughout the entire life cycle and really creates that overall purpose. So I can't explain enough how important this is. You are going to hear me talk about it throughout the entire course, and it's something that's fun to think about. So I know that for this module, for the first activity or discussion, what I'm going to have you do is pull an MVV of an existing organization. So make it something fun, make it something that you're interested in. And even if you wanted to, you could make up your own, if you wanted your own company. When I teach class, in person or in school, what I do have my students do is create their own company, obviously fictitious. And I do that on purpose, to have them go through the exercise of creating a mission, vision and values. And it can really be about anything that you love or that you want to be a part of. And it's kind of a tremendous exercise, and it lets you have insight and see things that you maybe wouldn't have otherwise seen. And certainly, these are things that can be molded, shaped, and kind of changed over time. I've seen a lot of organizations in my past go back and rebrand or reissue, say after five or ten years. Or maybe they've achieved a milestone or they've set a new one. So that certainly is possible as well. But this is definitely going to be one of the core principles that I talk about a lot and something that we are going to see throughout this process. When we start the recruitment process, we really want to take a couple minutes to just step back and look at the entirety of the process to make sure that we have our steps outlined. We're not going to be missing anything. And we know what we need to do in order to get this posted and recruited successfully. So the first place we want to start is identifying the needs. Who do we need to make sure we have approvals from? Who do we need to have sign off on the requisition? Is everybody knowing about this position, approving of this position? And most importantly, is it budgeted and planned for? So a lot of times, at least within the biotech space, we have to go through this with our board of directors. We have to provide them with the hiring plan, with what positions are going to be hired, what those salary ranges may look like, that bonus, that equity, whatever that is. That's all on a huge spreadsheet, and it literally gets voted on once a year, and so those needs have to have already been identified. I can't tell you how many times a chief medical officer or VP has run down to my office and said I'm going to hire this person, no requisition, no approval, and not in the budget. Obviously, there are times where they get their new hire regardless, but those would generally be the exception. And we would want to see these steps in place prior to getting there. For the requisitions, generally, we see the signatures from the hiring manager, possibly department vice president. We also generally see at least one signature from HR, and then we're also going to see a signature from someone in finance. So maybe that's your chief financial officer or possibly a controller or someone else of a high level position. When we talk about planning, we're kind of formulating the idea of where we want to post for this and how we're going to post for this. Now, as we're dealing with a very virtual, very remote workplace, we kind of want to tailor our recruiting to those efforts. I still, and we're going to dig into this more, but I still would want you or anyone else to kind of go a little bit out of the box with this. Where can you really find the target candidates that you're looking for? And maybe it's not a general, LinkedIn and stuff is absolutely great. But maybe it's something more specific. Maybe you have a specific, like in HR, we use SHRM, so Society for Human Resource Management. So here's another group, or an outlet, or an amazing place to post HR positions. But we'll kind of get into that in more detail later. But just really kind of thinking and planning what multiple facets you're going to use to be able to post your position. When we talk about the search, that's going to tie into that as well. Social media is a huge, huge platform for this right now. I already mentioned LinkedIn, and as I said, as we progress to the course, we're definitely going to talk about that a lot more. We talk about candidate selection. This is where you're going to be involved in going through and leading through those candidates. There's definitely an HRS component that can be in play for that, and that's really where we're using an automated system to make selection choices. But there's also a lot of individuals and organizations that prefer to do it the old school way where we're actually looking through the resumes ourselves. When we get to the interview plan, what does that look like? So kind of sketch out, do you initially see a phone screen followed by a panel, zoom interview, and then maybe one final wrap up interview, or maybe that's something completely different? From that interview plan, hopefully you can pull, I would say two, no more than three really top candidates that you want to be able to offer that position too. Specifically, and just recently, we had a position where we had one manager level position open. But we had two amazing candidates and ended up using another requisition for a different position to kind of split that manager position into two so that we could hire both exceptional candidates. And so this is really kind of going a little bit out of the box. We did have a requisition and budget. But we had two amazing people and we wanted to be able to utilize both of their talents, and so that was how we solved that situation. Certainly, next up is going to come the offer and the negotiation. So when we go through this process, it's not always about that base salary. So maybe this gets into equity, this gets into stock grants, maybe you have a company bonus, or oftentimes what we see is, if we can't come up to that salary, we offer a sign on bonus. So a one-time, here's 5,000, 10,000, whatever it might be to try to ease the pain or the transition between what they wanted or were expecting versus what you're able to offer. And then the next step would certainly be the accepted offer and new hire orientation. New hire orientation is one of the items where I really drill in. There's so many folks that say, okay, your first day is over, you're done, great job. And that's not it at all. That new hire orientation, when we get to that step in that process, I want you to understand that that orientation goes well beyond the first day, even the first month, and sometimes even after the first year. But this should be a continuous program to make sure that that new hire that you just spent all that time, energy, and money on has been successfully assimilated into your company's culture. So when we talk about the hiring process, we have to mention retention. So retention is where we're keeping those folks that we've spent all that time, energy and money to get in the door. We want them to be happy and we want them to be able to stay, we want them to want to stay, right? Part of this ties back to that passion like have we honed in on some aspect of their passion? Are we making this everything that it can be? Certainly not hiring the first person that comes along and instead hiring the best person is going to be the best method. I always say that hiring is is like a puzzle piece, it can't just fit on one side, it has to fit on all sides. That's both for the candidate, for the organization, for your HR department, for the team that they're working with, it just has to be well rounded and it has to be the right fit. So often we have managers who want to just hire this person because they went to the school or they have this degree and those folks are not the right hires. And generally speaking, when you're in HR, even if you haven't gone through the interview process with say one of your colleagues did, you still consent that inability to fit in if you're just dealing with through say an offer negotiation. So those flags and after you build some time and some experience within HR, they're just going to come second hand to you and you're going to be able to spot them very quickly. And maybe even without all of that time you can do that right quickly, so it just depends nut always you have to pay attention to your instincts with those hiring choices. Certainly you need to be competitive with the offer, money isn't everything but it's certainly a huge component of it. So as we're talking in negotiations and things, maybe you can't come up in base salary and I did mention this but maybe there's another bonus you can offer. Maybe there's extra stock grants you can give or maybe it's an extra week of vacation, I will say that over the past year, most of my negotiations have not come back with being about money or title. Most of my negotiations have come back with wanting extra vacation time. So it's kind of very interesting and I think that those things and those patterns yield to maybe change is that we're going to be seeing within our marketplace in the near future. We obviously want to offer a comfortable office environment and friendly culture. So office environment is an interesting topic right now because of everything that we have going on with COVID worth working remote in all cases and in my case all of the staff are not able to work remote. We have a laboratory setting, they have to be on site, they cannot set up a Bunsen burner and run their essays and their tests at home. So they have to be able to come into the laboratory so we need to make that a comfortable space. We need to make that a safe space but above all, we want a friendly culture so we still want some aspect of here's some fun, Valentine's candy individually wrapped, not touched by others. But to be able to still do those things we did over the holidays we ordered some lunch is to have them catered in. Everybody selected their meals ahead of time, everything was individually wrapped individually bagged, so just those little things, because they really make a big difference. One of the largest things or one of the things that most often comes through when people are leaving on an exit interview when it's what could we have done different or what would you like to see different. Training and development always comes to the top of that list, they don't feel that they were provided enough opportunities to do further training to develop their career. And so this is something you really want to keep in mind. It's so important to do surveys and to get feedback from your employees, not wait until they're leaving or it's an exit interview. But as you're going through this process, maybe every so many months, just to get a feel, a sense pulse of what's going on, I wouldn't necessarily know if I would want to do it monthly. That's way too much. I think they would get tired of it but I could certainly see semi annually or maybe even quarterly if it was focused on different areas, but really listening to your employees, listening to what they're saying and giving them feedback to. We can't always make all of the changes that they're requesting. That's just not possible. But there may be compromises, or there may be things we can dio. And the biggest component here is going to be communication communicating back that, Yes, I've heard you. This is truly valuable. We've had multiple responses in this area and we're investigating opportunities to improve. That s o just being honest, being transparent that that's huge. And I think the biggest biggest thing whether you're just being hired or going through or you've been there for 20 years, whatever it is is everyone wants to be recognized for their accomplishments. Everyone wants to hear, thank you, or you did a great job or you're doing a great job, whatever it is. And we all know that for ourselves. And so we can certainly appreciate how employees would want to hear that whether that's maybe from H R or their supervisor. Or maybe the president may be on a all employees meeting, whatever that is like. Folks just really want to hear that they're being recognized for their accomplishments.
