1 Starting an HR Department from Scratch at Bizpros, Inc. Background “And last but not least, what are your salary expectations?” asked Jane Dionisio, one of two new Recruiting Coordinators at Bizpros, Inc. before closing out the interview. Pranav Singh was a candidate for a software engineering position that Dionisio was screening applicants for. Every candidate was asked about their salary expectation in the screening interview to make sure it lined up with what the company was expecting to pay. Candidates with a history of short-term contract work often had much higher compensation expectations since the uncertainty of contracts was typically balanced by higher rates of pay. Candidates usually knew that the security of full-time employment came with the trade-off of slightly lower pay, but it was important to check before moving a candidate forward to the longer technical interview with the hiring manager. The last thing the company needed was to waste what little time managers had to interview candidates who would ultimately decline the job offer. In December 2021, Bizpros, an information technology (IT) consulting and management firm, hired Dionisio and her colleague, Vivian Tomasz, to act as in-house recruiters and replace the former system involving a third-party recruiting firm, which had handled the entire hiring process, from advertising the job to communicating the final job offer. Bizpros was growing quickly, and Singh was being interviewed for one of 8 openings at the company, which ranged from SQL Database Developers and Administrators to Customer Service Technicians. They were even currently hiring for a senior Director of Project Management position. In fact, in the two months since Dionisio started at Bizpros, the company had hired 3 new employees, and new positions were constantly opening as the company rapidly expanded its business. The new Recruiting Coordinators were tasked with developing a hiring process for Bizpros from the 2 ground up. Delays in hiring meant lost business, and potential harm to the company’s reputation. Figuring out how to go about filling new positions quickly and effectively was imperative to the company’s success. Jane Dionisio Jane Dionisio was new to Bizpros, but had plenty of prior experience managing human resources issues. Prior to beginning her role as Recruiting Coordinator, Dionisio had spent approximately 10 years working at a high-end health club, first as a part-time supervisor during her undergraduate degree, before moving to full-time upon her graduation in 2015. In 2016, she was promoted to an assistant manager position where, in addition to training and onboarding new employees, she started to become involved in hiring decisions. In 2017, she was promoted again to manage the childcare facilities at the health club, where she managed a staff of 65-100 employees (with more staff in the summer months to run summer camps and account for seasonal changes in demand). The majority of Dionisio’s work in this role was staffing, which involved screening hundreds of applications and conducting screening interviews, holding group and individual interviews, and administering work-sample tests (i.e., having applicants demonstrate their ability to perform a specific task that would be necessary on the job, such as developing an activity schedule, or responding to a critical incident that had occurred on the job in the past) on an ongoing basis for three years. Although she had no formal training in human resources management or staffing at that time, Dionisio was able to quickly learn on the job and develop a robust staffing procedure for her department. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, health clubs were closed for multiple extended periods and Dionisio was furloughed (temporarily laid off due to a lack of work) 3 several times. After changing jobs within the health club and dealing with significant employment instability, Dionisio eventually left the health club and began her role at Bizpros. The Company: Bizpros, Inc. Bizpros started in 2008 by building mobile apps for corporate clients. In time, clients began to ask the company to solve their various IT problems, so eventually they pivoted to providing and maintaining IT infrastructure for clients who did not have the in-house expertise or capacity to deal with their own IT issues. Bizpros offered a wide range of services, from relatively simple IT solutions, such as password resets, setting new hires up with their employee accounts/email, and server maintenance, to more complex offerings, such as cloud hosting and migration. Basically, any organization that required IT services, but without internal IT expertise, could outsource the work to Bizpros. Bizpros was based in Irving, California, USA, and by January of 2022, employed 88 people, the majority of which were located in California. Some employees were based in other parts of the world, including Dionisio who was located in Ontario, Canada. Bizpros serviced clients around the world across a wide range of industry sectors, such as healthcare, hospitality, and tourism. Bizpros had maintained a flat and decentralized corporate structure since the company began doing business in 2008, and as of December, 2021, didn’t have a formal management structure in place. In fact, the first task Dionisio undertook upon beginning at Bizpros was to create an organizational chart to try to better understand the organization, and to formalize reporting relationships (see Exhibit 1 for the company’s organizational chart in January, 2022). In general, there were very few true “managers” within the company, and most managers were “managers” in title only. Instead, managers at Bizpros typically performed largely the same 4 kinds of work as the other employees at the organization, but with the additional responsibility of identifying openings and contributing to the staffing process. In fact, most employees reported directly to one or more members of the executive team, although the chain of command had never been formalized, so it was not always clear who reported to whom. In fact, Dionisio and Tomasz, the two new Recruiting Coordinators, reported to the Vice President of Finance, who had previously overseen the hiring process directly. On the one hand, this loose reporting structure had engendered a lot of ownership among employees for their work – there wasn’t anyone watching over their shoulders and so employees felt a great deal of pride in completing projects themselves. On the other hand, it contributed to a lack of accountability for many activities within the organization – nobody was responsible for coordinating teams and ensuring certain tasks got done. The executive team simply could not manage the growing demands of the organization themselves and needed to begin delegating management tasks. The Issue: A Flawed Hiring Process Between 2008 and 2021, Bizpros grew steadily, filling new positions as necessary. Exhibit 5 of the appendix shows the number of new hires and turnover by year. Bizpros did not have any formal HR processes in place, nor any internal employees dedicated to managing the company’s human resources. Prior to hiring the two new Recruiting Coordinators, the hiring process was outsourced to a third-party recruiting company, Symphony-Maud, Ltd. SymphonyMaud dealt with every aspect of recruitment and selection for positions that Bizpros identified. This included advertising the position, screening, testing, scheduling interviews, and making final hiring recommendations. In fact, it was rare for the hiring manager to meet with job candidates prior to their first day on the job, and there was almost never any communication between the hiring manager and new employees prior to their first day at Bizpros. Symphony- 5 Maud was paid a commission of up to 30% of each new hire’s salary, which often meant Bizpros paid a commission of over $30,000 USD for each new employee as many of the technical roles received base salaries above $100,000 USD. When the new hires fit in with the company and performed well, this high cost was justified. However, as the company grew, management began to find that employees hired through Symphony-Maud were often not working out, and both voluntary and involuntary turnover had become problematic for Bizpros. Indeed, new employees would often begin their first day with the company without any idea of what their job would entail, leading to perceptions that the hiring process was fundamentally flawed. There was a feeling that Symphony-Maud was just recommending the first person to meet the basic criteria that Bizpros identified in order to quickly earn their commission. Prior to hiring their new Recruiting Coordinators, Bizpros had emphasized hiring applicants with significant experience in the hopes that they would be able to pick things up immediately and know what to do, and that worked for a while, but recruiter commissions and turnover had reached a point of unsustainability. The rapidly growing workload had resulted in a very fast-paced work environment, and new employees were expected to be able to learn quickly on the job. Dionisio remarked that, “There was so much work coming in that there just wasn’t enough time to train people. Not to mention that onboarding was almost nonexistent before Vivian and I started”. In the months prior to Dionisio’s arrival at Bizpros, several new employees had quit or were fired for poor performance within weeks of starting their jobs. It was around that point that the company decided to begin recruiting in-house and hired Dionisio and Tomasz as Recruiting Coordinators. Their role was to establish a recruitment and selection process, effectively from the ground-up, for a quickly growing company, in the absence of any other formal human resources structures. 6 One additional challenge that stood in their way, however, was that they didn’t know how many people to hire each year. Each year they would go around to senior management and asked how many new hires they needed. No one had a definitive answer. When they inquired about this with senior management, the CEO told them to extrapolate the number of hires each year based on forecasted sales over the previous 5 years (see Exhibit 6 for historical sales). In their most recent discussion with VP Finance, they were informed that total sales next year (2022) was expected to be $1,500,000. You should assume the same amount of turnover in 2022 as there was in the past 5 years. The Current Hiring Process Since beginning at Bizpros, Dionisio had quickly introduced a multi-step hiring process. First, a hiring manager identified a role that needed to be filled. Dionisio would then be provided with basic information about the job, including the job title and keywords to look for when screening resumes (i.e., what is known as a “job requisition”). Dionisio would create a job ad and post it to several online job boards, such as Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and GlassDoor. Once an adequate number of applications had been received, Dionisio would review the submitted resumes to match them to the keywords supplied by the hiring manager (see Exhibit 2 for an example of keywords for an Azure Cloud Engineer position). Applicants whose resumes contained the correct keywords would then be invited to a screening interview with Dionisio (see Exhibit 3 for an example of a screening interview protocol). During the screening interview, applicants were asked a series of questions provided by the hiring manager about their technical experience, and were then assessed against minimum cut-off scores (see Exhibit 4 for an example of job-specific screening interview questions for a Cloud Solutions Architect position). During her first month at Bizpros, several hiring managers provided open-ended questions for 7 the screening interview, but Dionisio didn’t have the technical knowledge to understand the responses and score them. Since then, the company shifted to asking simplified, yes/no or numeric questions in the screening interview. After the screening interview, applicants who met the screening requirements identified by the hiring manager were scheduled for a technical interview, which was intended to assess more advanced, technical knowledge and experience, to ensure that the applicant would be capable of doing the job. Finally, applicants who passed the technical interview were scheduled for an informal “get-to-know-you” interview with other members of the team or executives. At that point, if the applicant was deemed a good fit, they would be offered the job. Facing Resistance Due to the rapidly increasing workload (and hence, the need to hire new employees), managers simply didn’t have the time to sit down with Dionisio to discuss the details of the roles they were hoping to fill. The majority of job openings were extremely technical in nature, but very little actual information about each job was provided to Dionisio. Further exacerbating the issue was the fact that nobody seemed to agree about the kind of person they wanted to fill each role, especially for senior management positions. The CEO and other senior management at Bizpros had decided that the Director of Project Management position, for example, would require five sequential interviews with the various members of the company’s top management team, but any candidate that had progressed through this series of interviews in the two months since Dionisio started, had been vetoed by one interviewer or another. Similarly, for every ten candidates that met the initial screening criteria and were invited for a screening interview, typically only three progressed to the technical interview, and one of those progressed to the “get-to-know-you” interview. The expectation set out for Dionisio was that job candidates that 8 passed the screening interview would be qualified for the role, but the knowledge required to be able to judge an applicant’s technical ability and competence was well beyond Dionisio’s training and experience. Dionisio remembered looking at some of the engineering job descriptions and thinking, “This is pretty much like reading a different language!” To top it off, because everyone was so busy, it was extremely difficult to schedule the interviews with hiring managers, who were expected to conduct the technical interviews. This was complicated further by the fact that employees lived in multiple time zones. Further, because employees at Bizpros worked almost entirely remotely, “standard work hours” were all but nonexistent, and most managers were unwilling to coordinate their schedules to accommodate and conduct interviews. Indeed, although many managers expressed a strong desire to be involved in the interview process, Dionisio recalled, “It is such a challenge to manage the egos of managers. They all disagree about the jobs and candidates all the time.” A Quick Win, But … When Dionisio first joined Bizpros, she thought, “Where do I even begin? I mean there are so many HR processes and procedures that need attention if this company wants to get to where they’re planning to go.” She decided to start with onboarding as she thought that might have something to do with the issue of new hires joining the company and then leaving shortly thereafter. She decided to make several changes including reaching out to new hires after they had signed their offers to keep in touch and to provide them with choices for their work technology; for example, letting them choose which headset and monitor they preferred. She would then ship out the equipment so that the new hires had their home workstations set-up in advance of their first day. Dionisio also contacted each new hire’s manger to confirm details for 9 the new hire’s first day and to encourage them to reach out, introduce themselves, and preview what would happen during their first day and first week. This new process was a dramatic improvement. Dionisio recalled the old process, “Someone would be hired, sent an offer letter with a start date, and then if they accepted their offer, no communication with them would occur until their actual start date arrived. I mean the hiring managers didn’t even realize that they should reach out and then the new people would generally have no idea what to expect on day one.” Her formalization and enhancement of the onboarding process provided a quick win as she was receiving positive feedback from new hires and managers alike, but there were still clear issues with the way hiring was done. Dionisio needed to turn her attention to dealing with those issues next. 10 Exhibit 1 Current Organizational Chart CEO Controller VP Finance Accounting Clerk Sr. Account Executive Staff Accountant Recruiting Coordinators Sr. Program Manager Marketing Coordinator Service Now Solutions Architect Service Now Developers Sr. Security Engineer Solutions Architect Applications Architect Cloud Solutions Architect Technical Analyst Service Desk Manager Software Developers Systems Engineers Network Engineers Note. Jane Dionisio and Vivian Tomasz’s roles as Recruiting Coordinators have been bolded. Service Desk Manager Service Desk Team Members DevOps Team Lead DevOps Engineers 11 Exhibit 2 Azure Cloud Engineer Screening Keywords • • • • • • • • • • • • • • AZ-104 AZ-500 AZ-303 AZ-304 Azure BluePrints Azure Bastion Azure Recovery Service Vault Azure Vnet Peering Azure Backups Azure VNG Azure Site Recovery Azure Migration Appliance AKS (Azure Kubernetes Services) Azure Networking 12 Exhibit 3 Recruiter Interview Notes Name: ___________ Position: ___________ Salary Expectations: ___________ What prompted your interest in this role? Can you tell me about a bit about your day to day with your current role, and what your position entails? What is something you really enjoy about your role? What is something you see as an area of opportunity or something you would like to improve upon in your role? Are you comfortable working in a fast-paced environment, learning on the job, and willing to jump into projects on day 1, learning as you go? □ Yes □ No Candidate Questions for recruiter: 13 Exhibit 4 Pre-Screening Questionnaire for Cloud Solutions Architect Score Minimum Do you have any Azure certifications? What kind? □ 0 - No certifications □ 1 - Azure Fundamentals certification □ 3 - Azure Security or Azure Network or Azure Virtual Desktop specialty certifications □ 5 - Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification ___ How many years do you have architecting complex IT solutions? □ 0 - no experience □ 1 - 1-2 years □ 2 - 3-4 years □ 3 - 5-6 years □ 4 - 7-8 years □ 5 - 9+ years 2 with Azure certifications ___ How many years do you have architecting IT infrastructure solutions? □ 0 - No experience □ 1 - 1 years □ 2 - 2 years □ 3 - 3 years □ 4 - 4 years □ 5 - 5+ years 3 with Azure certifications ___ How many years do you have implementing Azure cloud solutions? □ 0 - No experience □ 1 - 1 years □ 2 - 2 years □ 3 - 3 years □ 4 - 4 years □ 5 - 5+ years 4 without Azure certifications 1 with Azure certifications ___ How many years of experience do you have working with one or more of the following automation technologies? Terraform: ___________ Ansible: ___________ Powershell: ___________ Azure Resource Manager: ___________ 3 without Azure certifications 2 without Azure certifications 1 with Azure certifications ___ 2 without Azure certifications What development methodologies have you practiced? Looking for clear and concrete response with one or more of the following Agile Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Iterative Development (RUP)? □ Don’t know or no clear answer □ Waterfall: ___________ □ Iterative Development or RUP or Kanban: ___________ □ Agile Scrum: ___________ □ Certified Scrum Master or PMP: ___________ ___ 1 How many years of IT consulting experience? ___ 1 14 □ 0 - No experience □ 1 - 1 years □ 2 - 2 years □ 3 - 3 years □ 4 - 4 years □ 5 - 5+ years How many years of customer facing experience? □ 0 - No experience □ 1 - 1 years □ 2 - 2 years □ 3 - 3 years □ 4 - 4 years □ 5 - 5+ years ___ Total Score 1 15 Exhibit 5 Number of new hires and turnover by year Year 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 New Hires 2 2 2 3 5 5 8 14 12 10 20 22 25 15 Turnover 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 3 3 5 7 9 12 15 16 Exhibit 6 Sales per year Year Service Sales 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 $0 $0 $10,000 $12,000 $20,000 $50,000 $75,000 $150,000 $225,000 $250,000 $350,000 $400,000 $550,000 $625,000 Product Sales $5,000 $5,000 $7,500 $12,000 $13,000 $40,000 $70,000 $86,000 $140,000 $200,000 $325,000 $450,000 $600,000 $675,000
