Hiring Hack: Get Crystal Clear with Time Tracking! ⏱️💼

Are you getting ready to hire a new employee? Whether you are a hiring manager or you run an HR group, I think this is a really important topic and it is the pre work. Before you ever write the job description, this is going to be the first of a several part video that's going to go into the different steps of pre work that we recommend our clients before they write their job descriptions. So without further ado, let's dive in. The first thing that we recommend that our clients do and something that we do internally at my company as well is what we call time tracking. Now this I have to give total credit to the Mike Michalowicz Clockwork Method. This is a book that I actually had my leadership team read at one point and it is a philosophy that we employ within our company to this day. And it is simply whenever we are ready to hire a new person, all of the people who want to hand something off to that individual take a little bit of time to do time tracking. And when I say time tracking, I mean pretty ridiculously detailed time tracking, which means try and choose at least one week, if not two weeks that are normal, whatever your normal is. So try not to be traveling or have some large event going on, but whatever you consider sort of a normal work week and commit to tracking every minute of your day. So this includes the stuff that you do want to hand off to the person and the stuff you are not going to hand off to that person. And if you are planning to hand off pieces of multiple people's jobs to a new individual, each of those people should take the time to time track so that they get a really good idea of what their day to day looks like and what they're going to be handing off. Now this might seem like overkill, but trust me on this, when you are going to hire a new person, it is really nice to get clear on the details and how long the things are going to take that you hope they will do. Although you may be faster at doing something. For now, once they get in and they really get in the groove, they are going to probably take about the same time you would or less depending on their skill set and also how much activity shifting they might have to do during their day. For example, if I'm going to do 15 different things during my day, it takes a little bit extra time to get refocused on each thing. If you can give somebody a more cohesive job description where they're not shifting their focus multiple times a day, they might be more efficient than you are at Doing the thing you're handing off to them within a matter of weeks. So if you get really clear on the actual details of the role and you take the time to track your time, you'll be able to get a good idea of how much time this actually should take your new person. Now this is important because many times when we are looking to hire a new person it is because we don't like doing something on our plates or it's taking us away from valuable other work we must be doing. So in our minds we might conflate this to be a huge time suck. When in reality, when the time is all added up over the course of the week, perhaps the thing that you want to hand off only takes 10 hours of your time. This is a key point because if you find out through your time tracking that the thing you hope to hand off to somebody is not actually a full time job, you have a couple of options. Option number one is to give them more things so to look around your company and see what else might be able to go on their plate. Again, time track for that particular task and try to piece together what would be full time meaningful work for the person that you want to hire. Option number two, you might decide not to hire a full time person and instead to hire a contractor who can be really dedicated to that one task that you want to hand off. But maybe they don't need to be here full time. So you can hire a contractor for 10 hours a week and you can maybe streamline your business a bit. To give a real life example, Often when we're looking to hire a new communications person within Recruitomics Consulting, we will look at all of the folks within the communications team, have them all time track and decide what they want to hand off. And in the process we build a really detailed job description with all the tasks that will be handed over to this person as well as an estimation of how much time that new person will spend on each task. Then we can get really specific when we actually go to write the job description about the skills and the requirements without guessing or conflating a task in our minds that maybe is not going to be full time. There are a few reasons that task time tracking and getting a very solid understanding of the tasks you're going to hand off and the time commitment is really helpful before you write your job description. First, it's going to let you get really clear on the skills required, both the hard skills and the soft skills. Second, it's going to help you to create a breakdown of that person's day, which you're going to use when you do your interviews. And third, you'll be able to develop a really clear picture of what success looks like in this role. And, and we're going to go into that in another video. But this is really key because when you're communicating the expectations of a job to a new candidate, it is nice for them to understand what success looks like in your eyes. Another factor to consider is work satisfaction when you are creating your job description. Again, if you have conflated some task into this big long time consuming thing, but it really ends up being a part time position, you will end up with an unsatisfied, bored employee and that means you're going to have turnover. That person will not stay for that part time job that's not fulfilling. So if you have a clear picture going into it, you'll be able to avoid that situation and perhaps load them up with work that is going to be meaningful and fulfilling. Or again, choose to hire a contractor and not the full time person. One great exercise to do with your team while you're time tracking is to have them track what they like and don't like to to do. So this is different from what they're going to hand off and what they're not going to hand off. This is a planning exercise, but you can do it at the same time because why not? You're already time tracking. To do this, you're going to have each team member simply jot down whether they like or dislike each task that they're doing and whether they want to hand off or keep each task. This is going to give you a picture at the end of things that they like and want to keep that they dislike but want to keep, perhaps for quality control reasons or that they like but want to hand off or dislike and want to hand off at the same time. You're going to have each of your team members make a list of things they want to be doing, maybe areas of career development or aspiration for them, and perhaps you'll find something interesting. So for example, we found in a recent time tracking that one of our employees disliked and wanted to hand off a task that another employee put as their wish list and something they wanted to learn how to do. It was a really beautiful process to have the first employee train the second employee on the thing that they wanted to hand off while providing career development. I wouldn't be surprised if you haven't read the Clockwork method book. It is really geared toward business owners for operational efficiency but it's something that we've gone back to over and over in our hiring process because it's so valuable to understand what exactly we're going to be handing off to a new employee, how much time it's going to take, and how we might be able to shift around our internal resources to make everybody happier. In the next video, we're going to talk about how to craft clear vision for success for this role so that you can communicate it to your candidates and inspire trust and build a long term relationship with your new employee. If you found this video helpful, I would love if you would like it and subscribe so that we can reach more people with this content.