MindMeister as a Recruitment and HR Tool

One of the great things about MindMeister is that its usage possibilities are endless. Whether you’re mapping out your next business move, organizing chapters in the book you’re writing, or planning the family vacation, MindMeister can do it all. To this end, I started thinking about some of my positions prior to MindMeister, and how mind mapping could have helped solve a problem here or there.

While I couldn’t find much use in cruise ship deckhand (although it still remains as one of my all-time favorite jobs), my prior position as a recruiter immediately stood out. Let’s take a look at three examples where recruiters and HR professionals can benefit from MindMeister.

Sourcing Strategies

Every recruiter worth their salt will tell you that your end hire is only as good as your sourcing strategy. Needless to say, in the highly competitive world of talent acquisition, each recruiters’ technique is different, some successful, others less so. So how do you as a recruiter go about setting up your sourcing strategy?

One of the first things that recruiters need to do is break out their needs. What type of skills does a certain employer or position require? Is this a temporary/seasonal job, or one that needs to be filled permanently? What is the appropriate education level for this position? And the list goes on. Certainly, this data, and the associated answers can be stored in a variety of ways, but only MindMeister allows a recruiter to have a complete overview of the entire process at a glance.

Applicant Tracking

Due to the complexities of Human Resource law, MindMeister might not be a good solution for applicant tracking itself. However, MindMeister will allow recruiters and HR professionals alike the ability to have an overview of their applicant tracking process. Where are resumes coming from? Which sourcer is consistently bringing in top quality candidates? How does recruiter A deal with sourcer B’s applicants vs. recruiter C?

Using MindMeister as a planning tool can also aid HR professionals in determining needs and requirements. Do we need an Applicant Tracking System (or upgrade the current one)? How many employees do we need for next year? How are we going to get resumes into the system? What reporting features do we need? Should approved jobs be automatically distributed to job boards? Etc… By using MindMeister’s collaboration and integrated chat features, recruiters and HR professionals can work together from either across the office or across the ocean.

The Onboarding Process

Onboarding or Orientation as it’s been previously called, has received quite a bit of attention over the past few years. Plenty of HR professionals and recruiters have word documents or PDF’s packed full of useful information, and while an index can point them to this information, it’s far from an exhaustive overview. A good onboarding process is also one that’s continually being improved. The question is – how is this process being improved?

Enter stage left – MindMeister. By mapping out their current onboarding process in a mind map, HR professionals can easily and effectively spot problem and/or weakness areas, as well as continually adjust the process and plan improvements. Using our exclusive History View, users can easily review their entire process, how it’s changed, what’s improved, and what hasn’t.

Internal Sourcing

Not exclusive to recruitment, but setting up a Wiki Map for internal use can be a great way to not only give HR professionals a go-to spot to review all human capital needs and wants, but also facilitates inter-office collaboration. The possibility might arise where your operations manager knows of a few college students that are looking for summer work. The production floor is reporting that 3 widget makers resigned this past week. Et voilà! Positions (almost) filled.

Likewise, by setting up internal HR and recruitment needs and desires, time lines, and requirements, further transparency is automatically introduced to the corporate culture. Naturally, the owner/creator of the map can choose who to share the map with, as well as format and customize the map to match corporate branding, thereby making it a seamless fit for the organization. The map below is a wikimap, go ahead and play around with it.

Please keep in mind, these examples are in no way meant to reflect an exhaustive list of the HR/Recruitment possibilities with MindMeister, but should serve only as jumping off points. And therein lies the beauty of mind mapping with MindMeister; one single idea can lead to many, many branches with subtopics, and even completely new avenues of conversation and collaboration.