Helen the HR Manager

Helen’s been on the job in HR for 10+

years. She knows the routine but she’s never gotten particularly comfortable with the
technical topics her managers cover. She’d like to know more, but a lot of her day is
taken up with fairly standard issues like benefits management, vetting employee
situations, and setting up infrastructure for new hires. She feels a little stuck in the
admin area- facilities, accounting, etc. She’s like to engage more in the other
functional areas of the business. Helen’s job in terms of hiring is to help the functional
manager write the job description, identify channels for recruitment, and perform
initial candidate screening.

She doesn’t have deep knowledge about software development, so she’s getting the
functional manager to give them the detail they need on job descriptions to screen for
specific qualifications. That helps but it’s kind of arbitrary. The system for getting the
list is unstructured and highly imperfect. From her point of view, a more systematic
ready-to-go system for screening candidates and passing validated screening
information to the functional manager would be great. Bad hires are Helen’s least
favorite part of the job- it’s a really unfortunate thing for the hire as well as the
company. Unfortunately, she has little visibility into whether a hire will work out.

She does the screening and passes the recruit for the functional managers for further
screening. Having a more systematic view of why hires don’t work would be highly
desirable but she hasn’t gotten a lot of traction with the functional managers on doing
those post-mortems. The HR department may or may not be involved in ongoing
skills management for existing employees. However, it will almost always be
involved in employee assessment for anything financial, such as raises or bonuses. If
the functional managers use a quiz to determine a raise or bonus (particularly if the
HR manager initially created the quiz as an objective criteria), Helen’s likely to be
involved in the administration and/or review of the results. Helen likely pays the bills
for Enable Quiz, especially in a larger company.

Thinks Helen thinks the hiring process should be so much better- more systematic,
fewer bad hires. Professional development is something they’ve identified
that they want to do better, but the functional managers aren’t engaged
enough to get the whole thing started.
Sees Helen is at the tail end of every bad hire and sees the damage it does to the
employee and company, alike. Helen sees that online learning has rocketed
 forward in the last few years. If someone wants to learn a specific skill,
there’s a number of high quality options online, many of them free. They just
need a way to help employees organize select into these courses.
Feels Helen feels like crap whenever they have to let someone go. She hates it. The
employee hates it. The manager hates it. It’s incredibly destructive and de-
motivating for everyone involved. Helen would love to be more involved,
more included in functional skills evaluation and improvement. She’s love to
have a success story to talk about. Most HR departments don’t do a whole lot
in this area.
Does Helen is responsible for recruiting 6-12 new positions per year, screening 25-
50 candidates for each position.

Problem Scenarios/ Current Alternatives Value Propositions

Jobs-to-be-Done
Helen sources and screens She calls references to get We’ll offer her a new
engineering candidates for a general sense of their capability for meaningful
open positions, sending performance on the job. screening of technical
only qualified candidates candidates, increasing %
to the hiring manager. of successful hires and
Many of the skill lowering Frank the
requirements are outside Functional Manager’s
her background. workload on recruiting.
Helen writes job Right now she just gets We’ll offer a best practice
descriptions with Frank the lists from the Functional of menu of possible skills
Functional (hiring) Manager and basically linked to popular job
Manager. In a perfect passes them through (to descriptions. They can
world, they’d continually job postings, etc.). then pair each of these
improve these based on with quiz content to assess
hiring outcomes and candidates’ familiarity
employee job satisfaction. with target skills.

She’d like to put a
company-wide
professional development
program in place. A few of
her peers at bigger
companies are doing it and
the employees love it.
Vendors have come in to
see her with various
programs but she isn’t sure
how to assess what skills
the employees and
managers would like to
develop.
Right now she just works Presenting the quiz
with the functional application as an entry
managers if she can point for the HR manager
convince them to do to make it easy for the
something on a case-by- functional manager to
case basis. assess a starting point for a
skills management
program might be a good
way to deliver on this
problem scenario.