How Method Grid has enabled staff induction at The Pi Group

The user

The Pi Group is a leading, US-based talent advisory business focused on the consumer goods industry (a Hunt Scanlon “Top 50” firm). With offices in Connecticut and New York it delivers a number of strategic propositions to an enviable list of marque clients ranging from professional search, talent mapping and retained C-suite talent acquisition through to career management, executive coaching and high-performing team transformation programmes. Founded in 2013, and fostering a unique “never settle” but “don’t take yourself too seriously” culture, The Pi Group has been in high-growth mode since day one.

---

The challenge

The war for talent is well and truly underway with respect to The Pi Group’s own recruitment challenge. To meet its ambitious future growth plans, the company seeks to recruit, and professionally induct, a new joiner every three weeks. This is challenging in this sector and in this geography: the economy is booming and many of their competitors are doing similar! As such, the first challenge is to continue to attract the best into their company and, also, to ensure they are trained up as quickly as possible: ready to serve their clients and to commence revenue generating activity soon after onboarding.

---

How Method Grid was used

Lauren Rath, the Director of People and Culture at The Pi Group, was instrumental in harnessing Method Grid to completely overhaul their staff induction process. Method Grid is used across the business for multiple ends – developing and selling client service propositions, capturing internal procedures – but Lauren saw the opportunity to use the platform to enable her recruitment and staff development remit.

Lauren very quickly developed a new grid (The Pi Group Training Programme) with twelve stages (mapped to a 12-week induction regime) and multiple themes/rows covering key dimensions: Company Overview, Recruitment Cycle, Candidate Management, Client Management, Business Skills, Client Sectors, Company IT systems etc. Thereafter, a number of discrete lesson modules were captured (as discrete elements in this framework) and each assigned to a Pi colleague for content completion. Lauren color-labelled these elements according to their work-in-progress development – only turning them green as and when they passed her quality assurance.

Figure: Screenshot showing the Pi Group training program grid and how they are using labels to track progress

A typical element (lesson module in this grid context) contains: a descriptive of why the lesson is important, relevant videos, schematics and information uploads along with, crucially, all the tagged experts in The Pi Group who stand ready to collaboratively answer any further questions their new colleagues may have – with respect to this specific knowledge item. Whilst the master grid continues to develop (a never-ending act of continuous improvement) – with this focused team effort, it was only a matter of weeks before it represented a structured, deeply-resourced staff induction toolbox.

Now, whenever a new consultant starts at The Pi Group, Lauren creates a cloned copy of the master training programme (staff  – as a specific instance for this individual. Cleverly, the element labelling protocol now switches to a new logic. As inductees work their way left-to-right through their personalised grid they update elements according to their confidence levels: ranging from a green “all good” to a yellow “completed but have some further support needs”. This allows Lauren, in a graphical snapshot, to see how all the new inductees are progressing and to allocate further collegial support as required.

Figure: Element from the Pi Group training program grid describing the company core values

---

Video case study

---