Developing a love of process maps is one of three key lessons that Carole Donaldson, resourcing manager at major retailer John Lewis, has offered resourcing teams looking to centralise the recruitment function.

Process maps, typically flow charts which graphically represent decision-making processes and procedures, were amongst the aspects Donaldson discussed last Friday [15 February] at a seminar organised by e-recruitment software firm WCN. John Lewis has worked with WCN for over a decade, attended by Recruiter and in-house recruitment professionals from across the retail sector.

Outlining the process by which John Lewis centralised its recruitment, although acknowledging that their experience was “not [meant to be] a blueprint by any means”, Donaldson outlined three lessons learnt from their ongoing “journey”.

Lesson One

“We didn’t ask questions early enough,” Donaldson said.

She described that through the process, the central recruitment team’s discussion with local recruitment functions uncovered assessments tests developed by individual hirers that “we never knew existed”, and discovered that there were over 70 different types of employment contracts across the business.

Donaldson suggests more discussion earlier on would have been beneficial, commenting: “I would absolutely recommend you have that conversation first… it saves those meetings with providers when they ask ‘what do you want?’ and you say ‘actually, we’re not sure’.”

Lesson Two

“You need to love process maps,” she said, adding: “I never thought I would be the sort of person to say this! We have a process map for every system in the workstream. It really helps you.”

Lesson Three

“Have someone with you who understands technology from day one. You need someone who speaks technology,” Donaldson noted.

The layman might think that he or she is able to express what they want to know and do, but when dealing in technological issues and speaking with a technology provider, Donaldson’s team did find itself “having to revisit areas where we thought we had been clear and evidently we had not”.

Success

As the centralised model came in to place, John Lewis now finds itself directing 99.5% of recruitment through its website, “and that will probably increase”, according to Donaldson.

And another pleasing outcome is having to tell the business to prepare for this success. “We had to warn the business we were going to get faster,” Donaldson says. She explained that when you recruit a sales assistant within two weeks rather than the three weeks that would previously have been expected, you don’t want to end up paying their wages for an extra week if they were not needed that early.

Donaldson went on to say that John Lewis has an 85-strong recruitment team, with 20 full-time equivalent staff handling seasonal recruitment needs at Christmas, Easter and during the summer.