It’s Time to Reinvent Talent Acquisition

talent acquisiton strategy

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Most executives believe that hiring top talent is their priority and that having the right talent on board is the key to company success. Who you hire defines your company, your leadership and ultimately your ability to compete.

Unfortunately 80% of Fortune 500 companies say that they are not hiring the best talent in the market. And over 50% of people have left jobs or are considering leaving their job because they think that their employers don’t recruit or retain high-performing individuals. At least 1/3rd of hiring managers is not happy with the performance of recruitment. 

In today’s world of transparency and high-tech Recruitment hasn’t always been able to deliver the value that is expected. With the pressure of a huge amount of open roles, recruiters have attempted to fill fast and used technology to spam, to reject and -often unintentional- disrespect candidates.

Jobs are more complex than they used to be, companies are changing rapidly and the market is a candidate-driven market. The attracting and matching process of talent is what recruiting is all about, but the process has become complex. In my past years leading Talent Acquisition in fast growing companies I clearly saw a few major bottlenecks: 

  • Hiring Managers don’t clearly define roles and both recruiters and hiring managers can improve on defining the talent needed to get the job done. A closer collaboration between Recruitment and Hiring Manager is key in identifying skills and behavior in order to select the best match.
  • Recruitment has difficulties finding and attracting the right talent. There is much more to sourcing than sending unpersonal InMail messages in LinkedIn.
  • We, Managers and Recruiters, do not assess and evaluate people properly. We need to focus on what it takes for the job to be done and assess the required skills and behavior in a structured way.
  • A lot of valuable recruiter time is spent on administrative tasks and we don’t have the right processes in place. There is a lot of technology available to help us be scalable, let’s use it in the proper way. 

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Recruitment is broken, time to reinvent Talent Acquisition

How can we, as Talent Acquisition department deliver more value?

How can we create a culture of recruitment in the entire organization?

The profession of recruiting is no longer just a transactional match of a candidate to a hiring manager, but a complex process that involves many diverse skills and it is the rare lone recruiter who can do it all. Hiring quality is of strategic importance to any business and it is a joint force and responsibility. Achieving the best hiring results depends on a few key area’s: a candidate-centric process, accountable hiring managers and a specialized talent acquisition team. With Recruiters who are true partners of the business, think like Marketers and trully care about each candidate. 

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Candidate Experience or if you like, Hostmanship 

It is more important than ever to attract and engage the best candidates in the market. The candidate journey involves the whole hiring process from the template to apply, the content they find, how the hiring manager treats them and how they receive feedback or rejection. It is how we communicate, with transparency, honesty, where we care for each candidate and appreciate that they showed interest in our company. You can turn every candidate, hired or not into a brand ambassador. From my own experience it can come to the point where rejected candidates refer strong new candidates. 

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Hiring Manager Collaboration

Hiring managers are responsible to build strong teams and should be at the center of recruiting. They own the vacancies in the team and they know or should know what great talent looks like in their department. It makes a big difference if they take responsibility and act accordingly; towards potential candidates and also in content sharing for candidate attraction.

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Hiring managers are responsible to build strong teams and should be at the center of recruiting.

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Recruiters are the experts in finding and identifying and engaging talent, including the human aspect. They need to manage a structured process and they are responsible for the candidate management. Good recruiting is a joint responsibility. The more time a recruiter spends on cultivating the relationship and getting a deep understanding of a role and what specific talent is needed, the better the hiring results will be. This collaboration is a joint effort, from creating thorough job profiles and setting up a good structured interview process to sharing content on social media, creating in-house meet-ups or events, to pro-active talent pooling and succession planning. 

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Raise the bar in Effectiveness

An effective Talent Acquisition team needs to have a set of sourcing strategies in place to effectively hire for high-scarcity, high impact roles up to mass hiring, low impact roles. The most effective talent acquisition teams operate like a marketing function with segmentation, transparent communication, clear processes, backed up by relevant data.

Bad recruiting experiences are created by Recruiters so consumed with the administrative and process aspects of the job that they don’t have time to spend with candidates. At least half his time is spent in activities that add little value but consume a lot of time. To recruit effectively this needs to change. Recruiters need to focus on their core job: deep business collaboration, selecting on potential and behavior and delivering great candidate experience.

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Modern talent acquisition teams should have the following specializations in the team:

  • Marketeers for job marketing and employer branding
  • Sourcers to find, prescreen hard-to-find talents and target groups in divers networks, platforms, also outside Linkedin
  • Recruiters who focus on the deep business collaboration, and are experts in the human aspect. They guide the selection and structured interview process and deliver great candidate experience for each candidate who applies
  • Coordinators who take care of the time consuming planning and support with events and meet-ups
  • TA Operations to embrace new technology to streamline processes, make routine tasks more efficient, invest in high-tech experiences like virtual reality and reports on the right metrics

Although finding great people is a constant challenge, I believe that Talent Acquisition teams can add way more value to achieve great hiring results. With the right focus for each specialization, the Recruiters can take care of the human interaction, their core job. The Hiring Managers know what to expect and the Recruiters can deliver on the expectations. And only then we can focus on our core job: bring the best talent in.

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Hiring top talent is our joint priority and by reinventing and re-focusing Talent Acquisition we can make the big steps needed in getting that excellent talent on board.

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like to discuss or know more? please contact info@mindscapital.nl

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