Recruitment tool and HR software

have you also sounded out the Rad HR community with this query?
it's the sort of thing that the forum there would likely be a good 'hive mind' to tap into:
https://radhr.org/

Good heavens, is this still a problem? I was struggling trying to find one 20 years ago. And couldnt for the same reasons. Wonder what they do at suma these days with 300+ people?

@bob cannell Unbelievable, isn't it?? We have spoken to Suma but they can get away with an expensive system as it is probably worth for the size they are now. Not great for for us unfortunately.

Hi Britta,

No, we don't have anything in particular! Please let us know if you hit on anything useful - at the moment we take job applications through google sheets, AL is also on a spreadsheet and monitored alongside payroll, and everything else is managed across our
various different systems. It's working OK at the moment but I suppose if we scale it won't!

All the best,

Ella

Things must have changed but....the systems I looked at were inappropriate or not value for money because they :-

Were all based around a single narrow job description which made reviews and performance monitoring easier. We needed a system that tracked skills competencies across a range of jobs for each person.

Were all focussed on promotion, hierarchy and salary grading. None of which fitted and were money for nothing.

Recruitment, selection, training and assessment were done using inhouse databases/spreadsheets. Because the proprietary systems did all this in a different way. Suma in those days used many different ways to manage these. Ways developed to look for what Suma wanted. The spreadsheets etc did not easily generate eg offer or refusal letters. Too much time was taken up doing all that stuff.

The off the shelf systems, like many mainstream systems in other parts of HRM eg H&S management either did not work with high initiative, self managing, multi skilled workers or tried to turn them into corporate drones requiring expensive and unnecessary supervision.

I would be very interested to learn how modern IT can be used to resolve these shortcomings of the old style rigid software packages.

We use google forms, spreadsheets, formbricks. It is better than using an HRIS. As you say Bob, they just aren't fit for a worker co-op purpose and are totally overpriced and bad customer service on top of that. I was hoping some worker co-op IT people had something in the drawer. Maybe one day.

We (Agaric Technology Collective) are small and have not felt the need for this software, although maybe we should. First step for a tech cooperative building this would be describing what needs to be done; it can be a bunch of what we call user stories ("As an HR manager i can X", "As a recruit i can Y") or where commercial software that has a way of seeing what it does publicly, well-described or a demo, and saying what it does well and what it does not well for co-ops.

❤️

The importance of recruitment and selection in worker cooos cannot be overemphasisied. The old HR saying ' recruit in haste, repent at leisure'. Small coops dont have the leisure. A bad hire can easily crash the business. I have several times had to persuade other members to gang up and force the impossible new recruit, who has revealed their real nature after gaining membership, out to save the business. Twenty year old coops can be destroyed in months.

And much more common are hire and hire tactics. If this one doesnt work try again but dont deal with the old one. No wonder wages are often low.

Designing and operating a new selection system at Suma, designed to recruit cooperators with skills rather than skilled operatives who might cooperate, transformed the coop and business after the first recruitment round in the mid 90s. By the third round in the late 90s we had an operating coop and a profitable business again after years of chaos. Once there was a core of cooperators it just grew and all sorts of financial and operational management were again possible.

These days surely it is possible to do many of the processes more efficiently and so spend more time agreeing who you are looking for and how to find them. The basic principles are probably similar. So small coops can recruit as effectively as bigger ones with more avaiable HR resources.

"designed to recruit cooperators with skills rather than skilled operatives who might cooperate" just love that quote Bob, wise words as ever!