From Diagnosis to Vision: Kickstarting DART’s Talent Acquisition Redesign.

About the Client

DART is a regional transit agency created in 1983, serving Dallas and 12 surrounding cities across roughly 700 square miles with light rail, commuter rail, bus, streetcar, and paratransit service. This engagement followed directly from Iknow’s July 2019 progress assessment of DART’s Human Capital Department, which had identified the talent acquisition process as the department’s most urgent unresolved priority.

Industry Context

APQC’s Cross-Industry Process Classification Framework is one of the most widely used business process taxonomies in the world, giving organizations a common structure to organize benchmarking work regardless of industry — well suited to a public transit agency benchmarking its recruiting practices against best-in-class organizations across any sector. Service Design, the methodology Iknow introduced for the redesign itself, is a human-centered discipline rooted in design thinking that has historically been applied more often to customer-facing services than to internal, back-office HR processes. That makes its deliberate application to DART’s recruiting process a somewhat distinctive choice — one intended to bring the same rigor to the candidate and hiring-manager experience that organizations typically reserve for external customers.

Current Situation

Iknow’s July 2019 follow-on assessment found that none of the major recommendations from DART’s original Human Capital business process re-engineering project had started in a meaningful way. The talent acquisition process was one of the areas of greatest concern: its business process cycle times remained extremely long, with no improvement since the earlier project. Improving this business process became a top priority for DART, and Iknow was asked to help kick-start the redesign.

• A confirmed, high-priority process failure with no forward motion. DART’s own recent progress review had already established that talent acquisition was the most concerning HC process gap, with cycle times unchanged since the original diagnostic years earlier — the department needed to move from diagnosis to actual redesign momentum.
• No established methodology or shared vocabulary for the redesign. DART’s recruiting staff and leadership had not previously been introduced to a structured process redesign methodology, risking a redesign effort that started without a common framework or approach.
• An overwhelming amount of potential best practices to sort through. Hundreds of external sources on leading recruiting practices exist, but DART needed those distilled into what was genuinely applicable to a public transit agency’s specific HC environment, not a generic best-practices list.
• Redesign recommendations needed genuine staff buy-in to succeed, not just leadership sign-off. Given the department’s recent history of approved recommendations failing to progress, this redesign needed the people who would actually execute it to be invested in its outcome from the start.

• Identify leading recruiting practices from credible external sources.
• Introduce the Service Design Methodology to DART’s recruiting staff and leadership.
• Evaluate and prioritize the identified leading practices for DART’s specific environment.
• Establish DART’s recruiting future-state vision.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement around four sequential activities, moving from practice identification through methodology training, structured prioritization, and synthesis into a future-state vision.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Identification of Leading Practices. Iknow’s analysts conducted a comprehensive literature review across hundreds of sources, including books, published articles, and online databases and content repositories, leveraging paid subscriptions to SHRM content repositories, APQC benchmarking databases, and ISO standards. Iknow cataloged the findings using APQC’s Cross-Industry Process Classification Framework, focusing on the “Recruit, source, and select employees” process (APQC 7.2) and its five sub-processes — managing employee requisitions, recruiting and sourcing candidates, screening and selecting candidates, managing new hires and re-hires, and managing applicant information. For each practice, Iknow documented its applicability, resource requirements, and implementation timeline before distributing the consolidated list to DART’s internal recruiting team.
• Service Design Methodology Introduction. Based on its prior work at DART, Iknow introduced the Service Design Methodology (SDM) as the optimal approach for reengineering the recruiting process — a human-centered design approach that places equal value on customer experience and business process, giving organizations an end-to-end, surface-to-core view of their services. Iknow prepared a 73-page training presentation, a half-dozen training exercises, and a 12-page written handout summarizing key takeaways, then delivered the training in a three-hour session to DART’s HC recruiting staff and leadership team.
• Evaluation and Prioritization of Leading Practices. Iknow’s research identified 52 potential leading practices applicable to DART’s recruiting process. DART’s recruiting team members each prepared a standardized one-page summary rating an assigned practice on multiple dimensions, and Iknow selected two dimensions for prioritization — how well a practice served internal DART business customers, and its time sensitivity — plotting each APQC subprocess group’s practices on a 3x3 evaluation grid. The prioritization was run as a collaborative group exercise during an intensive two-day, in-person visioning workshop with DART’s entire HC recruiting team.
• Establishing DART’s Recruiting Future-State Vision. After all the leading practices were evaluated, Iknow synthesized the highest-rated practices into a future-state recruiting process vision and concept document.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked directly with DART’s entire HC recruiting team and its leadership throughout the engagement, with the recruiting staff actively participating in researching, rating, and prioritizing the leading practices that ultimately shaped the future-state vision.

Distilling Hundreds of Sources Into a Genuinely Applicable Set of Practices

A generic best-practices list drawn from hundreds of external sources risked being too broad or theoretical to guide a specific public transit agency’s HC environment. Iknow addressed this by organizing the entire literature review and cataloging effort around APQC’s established Cross-Industry Process Classification Framework, giving the work a consistent, credible structure across five defined recruiting sub-processes rather than an unstructured collection of best practices. Iknow also documented concrete applicability, resource, and timeline information for each practice rather than leaving prioritization to guesswork.

Building Genuine Staff Buy-In After a History of Stalled Recommendations

With the department’s recent history of approved recommendations failing to progress, a redesign vision handed down from outside risked meeting the same fate. Iknow addressed this by making DART’s own recruiting team the ones who researched, wrote up, and rated the 52 leading practices themselves, then ran the prioritization as a collaborative, in-person two-day workshop with the entire team. This ensured the resulting future-state vision was something the team had built and rated together, not something delivered to them from outside.

Operational Outcomes

• Reviewed hundreds of external sources across books, published articles, and online databases and repositories, cataloging findings across five APQC-defined recruiting sub-processes.
• Identified 52 potential leading practices applicable to DART’s recruiting process and prepared a 73-page Service Design training presentation, a half-dozen training exercises, and a 12-page written handout.
• Delivered a three-hour Service Design training session and ran an intensive two-day, in-person visioning workshop with DART’s entire HC recruiting team.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

DART’s Human Capital Department ended the engagement with a clear and comprehensive future-state vision document to launch its recruiting business process reengineering initiative. Because all of DART’s recruiting staff actively participated in evaluating and prioritizing the leading practices, the resulting vision carried strong buy-in from the employees most affected by the coming changes, and many of the practices it contained were assessed by DART’s own HC staff as readily implementable. The recruiting team also came away with a working understanding of the Service Design Methodology, equipping them to engage with the redesign approach going forward.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow completed the engagement within four months, converting a previously stalled improvement priority — identified in Iknow’s July 2019 progress review — directly into a concrete, staff-endorsed future-state vision.

Core Skills

• HR and Recruiting Process Benchmarking
• Service Design Methodology Training & Facilitation
• Best-Practice Evaluation & Prioritization
• Future-State Visioning & Process Design

Methods & Frameworks

• APQC Cross-Industry Process Classification Framework
• Service Design Methodology (human-centered design)
• Collaborative, workshop-based prioritization
• Multi-dimensional practice evaluation grids

Technologies & Tools

• SHRM content repositories
• APQC benchmarking databases
• ISO standards references