Preparing a recruitment campaign for mobilisation

An illustrative scenario. It follows the approvals, candidate decisions and joining requirements behind a mobilisation date, not a project delivered for a named customer.

The situation.

A contract has been won and several roles have to be filled and on site together on a fixed date. Recruitment is being tracked in a spreadsheet, agencies are submitting candidates by email, and the weekly report counts applications received. Nobody can say with confidence whether the date will be met.

Why the report does not help.

Counting applications measures the part of the process that is not the constraint. The constraint is readiness: documents, medicals, permits, inductions and whatever else has to be complete before somebody may start. Those have lead times that cannot be compressed in the final week, and they are invisible in a funnel view.

How the work would go.

Model readiness as a state on the candidate record rather than a note, with each requirement and its lead time. Start the clock on anything with a long lead as early as it is lawful to. Move agency submissions out of email into a route where ownership and response times are recorded. Then report against the mobilisation date, backwards, so the question each week is which requirement is now at risk rather than how many applications arrived.

What the organisation ends up with.

A view that answers the question actually being asked, which is whether the date holds. Escalation that happens when a lead time is threatened rather than when a deadline is missed. And a record of which agencies deliver candidates who are ready, as opposed to candidates who are available.