Table of Contents
How to Implement Proven Talent Acquisition Strategies
Why Companies Hire
It’s no secret that companies need to hire new employees using proven talent acquisition strategies. There are several reasons for needing new hires. Maybe someone was promoted through an internal promotion leaving a slot to be filled. Maybe senior leadership had a clash with someone, so someone had to go. The business might be growing and expanding into new markets requiring the addition of new employees. Current employees may quit for a variety of reasons such as misalignment with the company culture. Perhaps senior employees have retired.
There are many reasons why companies engage in talent acquisition efforts.
What is Talent Acquisition
Talent Acquisition refers to the process of fulfilling staffing needs. It is one of the most important activities of HR professionals.
Talent Acquisition Strategies refers to how a talent acquisition team goes about sourcing candidates and new hires.
Talent acquisition teams include line managers, the HR department and other talent acquisition professionals such as dedicated recruiters and staffing agencies.
Talent acquisition involves finding highly qualified candidates.
There is a Business Need
A business faces manpower needs for different reasons and at different and unexpected times.
An internal promotion creates a need to backfill. A growing business needs additional help. Expansion into new markets generates the need for new teams. When current employees quit, they create a need.
Talent acquisition takes time and the hiring process may need to ramp up at unpredictable times.
Human Resource Management is an ongoing activity.
HR Needs a Pool of Qualified Candidates
Finding new employees is not an automatic process. Building relationships, sourcing candidates and screening potential hires takes time. HR departments use different methods to find talent.
Because talent acquisition is a time-consuming process involving different mediums and sourcing partners, a mix of talent acquisition strategies is usually required.
To meet the staffing needs of the business, HR uses a few different sourcing strategies.
Promotion from within and new talent acquisition come to mind.
Common Examples
Common examples include both internal and external talent. A robust HR strategy to find the right candidate with the right skill sets usually includes a survey and identification of potential employees for internal promotion. Additionally, talent acquisition from internal sources is very low cost whereas talent acquisition from external talent acquisition specialists is not only time consuming but high cost as well.
Sourcing from Internal candidates
Internal candidates are the most logical first choice for any job opening because the ideal candidate will already understand the business, their processes and the company culture. They are also the lowest cost, talented candidates available.
Internal candidates however, may not be top talent.
Internal candidates may lack needed skills
The ideal internal candidate however, may be lacking in one or more skills required for the job they are being promoted into. At this point the hiring manager or human resources manager needs to decide if they should try to develop the lacking skills of potential candidates further or extend the hiring process to include candidates from outside the company.
One issue to consider
Employees may not appreciate being passed over for internal promotions. Internal Employees fully expect to develop new skills, learn new things and of course be promoted when someone moves up creating an opening. People know when they are being passed over. Quite simply, they may not only be disappointed, they may think they have been wasting their time, loyalty and dedication to a company that perhaps thinks very little of them. Passed over employees may quit and move on or even worse, they may stay, hold a grudge and do very little from them on.
Sourcing from External Sources
The recruitment process is not often considered a marketing process but it is. Talent acquisition from external sources will, by definition, require a marketing campaign. One drawback is, writing marketing and business promotional and educational material is usually what marketing professionals do full time, not the HR department. Effective talent acquisition would involve a partnership between HR and the Marketing professionals.
Talent acquisition first touches Marketing through lead generation. A lead is nothing more than a person’s name and some way to get in contact with them for further discussions.
Attracting a qualified candidate usually involves an ongoing effort, not usually by the HR department, but by the marketing department to write positive information about the company, its beliefs, recent breakthroughs and many other things through its blog or web pages. These educational articles will hopefully attract the right people who share an interest in what the company is doing, to at least view the company’s website. Of course, one blog is never enough. Multiple recruiting related blogs are essential to get noticed by search engines.
Some articles can be targeted to ask the lead directly for a resume. Other articles may have a form where the person can download some additional information the lead is interested in, in exchange for the lead’s name and contact information such as email and phone number.
Since writing blogs and developing content for corporate websites takes time, this particular talent acquisition strategy is a slow process.
What is a Lead?
A Lead is someone who visited the company website and gave the company their contact information, either name, phone number or email. Leads show some interest in the company. A robust talent acquisition strategy will follow up with Leads to convert them to potential new hire candidates.
Once the lead has visited the website, then the job advertisement can be directly displayed to the website visitor. If the lead is looking for a job or a new job and if the talent acquisition team is lucky, the visitor will hit that “Apply” button.
Automated processes and workflows that interface with the company website can then enroll that “Lead” in talent acquisition software. You will often hear the phrase “ATS” which means “Applicant Tracking Systems. The job of the talent acquisition software is to track the progress of the Lead through the talent acquisition process. Some Leads will get qualified out.
What does “Qualified Out” Mean
“Qualified Out” could mean the lead was looking for a job but after discussions with them, it was discovered they were not a good fit for the advertised job for various reasons. “Qualified Out” might also means the lead was not looking for a job but otherwise gave the company their contact information.
Not all Leads will Make it Through
Some Leads will get stuck or stall out at some point in the hiring process. Others will advance through the talent acquisition process to become potential top talent candidates. Some of these final candidates, who make it all the way through what is sometimes a months long talent acquisition process, may get invited in for team introductions to see how well the potential new hire will fit in.
The talent acquisition team needs to attract potential new hires but before they can do that, they need to attract talent to their website and that will involve a marketing effort of some kind.
The Website is a slow go, PPC is a little Faster
Another option many companies use to attract job candidates is pay per click (PPC) advertising, using systems like Google or LinkedIn. While these can certainly be effective in finding and attracting candidates, they can be very slow to yield candidates and they can be very, very expensive.
Of course, advertising is not quite as simple as simply hiring an agency, throwing some money at them and having candidates flow in. To truly get candidates in at an acceptable cost using paid advertising usually also means optimizing your overall website using SEO and the right marketing strategy. While it’s always a good idea to work on these elements of your website, they take time to yield dividends, and in particular candidates.
Developing the Talent Pipeline
The talent acquisition process from external sources usually begins with a job analysis followed by writing draft job descriptions. Since hiring managers usually understand the job duties better than the Human Resources manager, they then review the draft job descriptions.
The most common ways to attract the best talent is through the company’s website and career pages, through networking events, job fairs, job boards, online forums, recruiting agencies and specialized job boards like Mapertunity.
If more candidates are needed, then filling vacancies might require developing a top talent pipeline using external sources.
HR needs to cultivate an ongoing process so they can find qualified candidates from a pool of potential candidates as part of the recruiting process.
Recruiting new employees isn’t always easy. The talent acquisition process should follow a strategic approach in order to identify top candidates and to fill vacancies effectively. In other words, a talent acquisition process is needed. Open positions can quickly fill up, leaving businesses scrambling to find the right talent.
The process of recruiting new staff can be a sensitive area. Hiring Managers need to be aware that currently employed employees may not want their employer to know they are in a job search. If they decide to stay at their current employer, they might be marked as disloyal damaged goods and not receive pay raises or promotions after that. Of course, competitors may also accuse you of poaching their employees.
Positive Candidate Experience
Regardless of how your company acquires a candidate, you need to ensure that your candidate has a positive candidate experience. To deliver this experience requires both IT systems, such as Mapertunity, your ATS and concerted efforts by all the members of your hiring process, including both internal and external members.
Ensure Third Party Recruiters are Working for You
While third party recruiters have a role to play in many recruiting scenarios, they typically are providing services to more than one client. This is especially true for those that bill themselves as Remote Process Outsourcing, i.e., external recruiters. They work a numbers game, often dialing and or emailing up to 300 (three hundred) potential candidates a day.
The Downsides of Third Party Offshore Staffing Agencies
While potentially effective as a candidate sourcing approach, using third party staffing agencies has many downsides.
They are very expensive.
Their fees range from a fixed price of a few thousand dollars to a percentage of the candidates first year’s salary which can run into 10-20’s thousands of dollars and even more for forward thinking executive and other leadership roles.
They are not very effective.
Good candidates get lost in their process. Not the least of which is the tendency to lose track of responses of candidates who may express an interest in your position.
The Keyword Matching Fails
The Keyword matching exercise that goes on when applicant tracking software, ATS Systems, is used, filters most if not all qualified candidates out of the running. For example, many ATS systems cannot distinguish the difference between “Likes to work” and “Liked to work” when comparing the requirements in a job description to what candidates write in their resume.
Without a one-on-one discussion qualified candidates are missed
Good Candidates are not even considered due to reasons as simple as a poorly written resume. Not everyone spends much time on their resume. Employees spend years learning how to do a job and they are absolute experts in their field or job function. But how do you explain in 500 words or less the vast amount of science, technology, business experience that you have built up over time. Certainly, the recommended 2-page resume will miss the mark. And when keyword scanners are looking for specific words, a high percentage of top talent simply get missed.
Often times, Third Parties are Simply a Waste of Budget
You hire an overseas staffing agency with no time to build relationships with candidates due to time and distance and other communication barriers. Additionally, they spend most of their time trying to hit a phone call quota list each day, this is called “Dialing for Dollars”. The problem with dialing for dollars is great, but on the candidate’s side who receives multiple calls per day from overseas recruiters, pretending to be local; this is not a positive candidate experience. Most candidates are no longer interested in entertaining such calls. As a result, your staffing budget is simply wasted.
How the Mapertunity Experience is Different
When we designed Mapertunity, we optimized for both the candidate and the hiring managers experience.
- Candidate wants to find jobs that are not only a perfect fit for them but are closest to where they are currently located.
- Hiring Managers wants to find the perfect candidate and would love to avoid the expenses of relocating someone.
Mapertunity brings both of these desires together. But it does much more than that. Mapertunity removes all the friction that the current system has built into it. There is no more guessing what candidates are available or what jobs are available. Both available jobs and available candidates in a geographic searchable region are simply displayed on the map to be further explored. In addition, contact information for neither the Hiring Manager or potential Candidates is not hidden. There are no barriers, like third party recruiters, between candidates and job posters. There is currently no system in the word that will tell a company how many actual workers are available within any geographic region in the world. Mapertunity can do this. There is also no system that will tell workers which companies are hiring in any geographic radius the work might be interested in searching.
Mapertunity reduces the global carbon footprint of both workers and businesses.
We believe the closer a job is to someone’s current location, the more likely they will stay in that job and the closer a worker is to a business, the more likely a business will be able to hold onto those workers. Economist calls this “being sticky”.
On Mapertunity you can Search Job and Candidates By:
- Job Title or Keyword
- City
- State/Region
- Country
- Postal Code
- Industry
- Distance from Map Center ( Search the whole Earth if you want)
In Summary
Companies fill open positions with reliable candidates who will help contribute to the success of the business. To do this, businesses need to have a good understanding of their needs and take the time to find top talent.
Recruiting new employees can be a challenge, but it’s important to find the right fit for your company. With the right strategy, you can fill vacancies quickly and efficiently.
Mapertunity.com is a new tool you can add to your talent acquisition strategy.
