Trying something new to tackle an old problem

RILA recently partnered with Karen Hold, president of Experience Labs, to help RILA’s Internal Audit Committee develop proactive solutions to the industry-wide challenge of recruiting, training, and retaining millennial talent. At the recent Internal Audit Committee Meeting held at Tractor Supply’s Headquarters, Ms. Hold led attendees in an innovative and  interactive "Journey Map" exercise that provided a structured approach to identify and better understand an ideal millennial candidate, discuss current companies’ hiring and training processes, and think about ways in which those processes can be improved. The “Journey Map” exercise created a fun, high energy and collaborative environment that stimulated robust dialogue and fostered actionable insights. The response from the Internal Audit Committee was overwhelmingly positive with attendees excited to share the Journey Map process and insights learned with company team members.

At the start of the Journey Map exercise, attendees of RILA’s Spring Internal Audit Committee Meeting were split into small groups. The first step was to create a “persona” for an ideal internal audit candidate. Once the ideal candidate “persona” was created, the focus shifted to the six different phases representing major milestones in the hiring process:

1. Internal Audit Department Personnel Needs Assessment, Internal Approval to Hire, Writing Job Description
2. Job Posting, Recruiting and Candidate Interviewing
3. Hiring Decision and Making an Offer
4. Onboarding New Employee
5. First Year – Training and Professional Development
6. Performance Review and Retention

Each group was assigned one phase to discuss and map out the steps that a company would take during that phase and a timeline for each step. Then, the groups were challenged to view the process from the candidate’s perspective and highlight points where steps in that phase was working well and identify pain points or obstacles in the process. Once the groups finished mapping out each phrase, it was time for everyone to come together and view the entire journey map process from beginning to end. This led to a great discussion session as groups shared their maps and provided feedback on others.