Establish a means to record and use hard-learned business practices to build and maintain long-term agency success.
There’s this great scene in the first Matrix movie where newly recruited Neo is jacked into the Matrix and has everything about kung fu implanted into his brain. He’s an instant martial arts expert. Wouldn’t it be great if you could instantly impart the knowledge of how to get things done “your way” to everyone in your staffing and recruiting agency?
Unfortunately you can’t. Yet it’s those hard-learned processes – the knowledge and experience gained over time by yourself and your staff – that are perhaps most important to your continuing success.
So how do you institutionalize knowledge and experience?
You and your co-workers know how to get things done. Make the sale. Recruit the talent. Fill the order or make the placement. And do it all profitably. But how can you ensure that every new internal hire or new branch office or line of business can be just as successful? You have to make sure that they have the knowledge the rest of your team has already worked so hard to gain.
Following the lead of such organizations as General Electric, Siemens, and the World Bank, the knowledge management of your staffing or recruiting agency should consider using these three techniques for gathering, storing, cataloguing and making available this knowledge:
Determine what’s important
First, use in-person methods to identify the knowledge that is critical to capture. According to a study by the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), while electronic communication (email, on-line chat, etc.) has its value and its place, it does not and cannot take the place of knowledge gained in face-to-face interaction. Such human interaction opportunities include:
- Senior management meetings
- Interviews with internal subject matter experts
- Internal or external communities of practice and/or interest
- Internal conferences
- Focus groups
- Exit interviews
Record it for future use
Second, establish methodology, infrastructure, and practice of capturing tacit and explicit knowledge for use.
- Recording and reporting tools. This includes information systems (such as your staffing and recruiting software) that record activities and other business processes, meeting notes and related documents, or even audio or video tapes of events
- File storage and access. This may be hard copy files for some information or any form of digital information storage, such as databases and document management systems
- Establish review and validation process for captured knowledge
Use it every day
Third, establish methodologies and practices for the access and use of knowledge.
- Knowledge databases should be easily accessible and updateable
- Business staffing and recruiting software systems should be able to implement your own and standards-based processes and experience as work-flows
- Establish rules, techniques and processes for the management of your business data that tracks employee use and prevents its loss or unauthorized use
- Train, train, and train some more to use and reinforce what you’ve learned, while keeping the goal of learning more
An experienced business systems consultant I know often tells his customers, “What gets measured gets done.” Similarly, developing a knowledge-based culture in your own agency as described here can help you to establish measurable practices that will serve as a base for ongoing success.
This is not to mean that those practices should become hide-bound dogma that precludes flexibility and learning. Things change. Remember that learning is key to growth. But so is having a place to start from. Having “knowledge on tap” – just like Neo in the Matrix – can play a big role in the ability of your staffing and recruiting firm to deliver continuity in its customer service, recruiting, and operational processes. And that’s good for your bottom line.