Recruitment – which, if you are living in the modern corporate world, is now widely referred to as Talent Acquisition – continues to evolve enough so that we recruiters have become our own organization and not just part of the HR group anymore.
Lets face it. Right behind sales, in a close second, recruiting is the pointy end of the spear. We talk to potential customers, employees, ambassadors and everyone else across the spectrum.
What do CEOs worry about? Ask a few and you’ll hear about Talent. Are we bringing in the right people to the organization, at the right time, with the right attitude, skills, and overall demeanor that fits our culture?
What do you think drives company culture? The answer is the people – or the talent – that you acquire. There you go.
Gone are the days of help-wanted advertisements and personnel departments. I hope that this is the case in your world. None of us long for the days when headhunters – that’s right I said it – headhunters – relied on their Rolodex to place candidates.
The ATS is the heavily invested tool that technology-enabled companies rely on for recruitment activities and reporting. Excuse me, Mr. CFO? You don’t know what an ATS is…hmm…well, I’ll give you a hint – it’s not an HRIS.
Yes, it can be cumbersome and clunky, and demand step-by-step processes, but if you are growing and are serious about this endeavor called Talent, then you must have one. Get a Best-in-Breed system, one that’s cloud-based, like Jobvite, or a similar tool.
Some are better than others. Yet, the purpose of the ATS is not necessarily there to make the recruiter’s role easier, efficient, or more effective.
Rather, it’s built for hiring managers to lean in to the process, to pull reports and enable a productive online experience for candidates.
Candidates still offer feedback that their resume is uploaded to a “black hole” and when they receive an electronic message to acknowledge or decline their application, the mass communication lacks a personal connection and trust in the organization they seek employment with. This much sought after two-way human interaction is missing from the “enabled, candidate focused” system. The reports are often riddled with the potential risk of poor data integrity. For the recruiter, the task of reading every resume received and determining yes to screen or decline or maybe is not unlike the previous method of A-B-C piles.
Job boards once dominated the market, offering the candidate access to job listings from multiple industries in one easy place. Over time, they offered employers the opportunity to market not only their hiring needs, but also their employment brand.
Today, organizations rely on their corporate website and sites such as LinkedIn to achieve the same goal. Job search engines such as Careerbuilder and Indeed allow candidates to search many employer websites in hopes to find a new job.
RPO hit the market and many industries have tried and some continue to employ this outsourcing model. BEWARE – it takes most controls away and you face the risk of losing any type of culture or brand transfer in the process. Then there is the Vendor management system that bridges the relationship between agencies or headhunters and their corporate clients. Again, be careful here, as you can lose something that is called BUILDING A RELATIONSHIP with your candidates and your vendors.
Human analytics is important – but remember it is a data point ONLY – not the gospel according to Wonderlic or whichever instrument you use – this has become much more than a ” cottage ” industry as everyone and their brother seems to be in this business. Testing and assessment centers were once heavily relied upon. Today online psychometric testing is used to assess a candidate’s fit. “Which-animal-are-you?” interview types of questions were once popular, but lately we’re accustomed to the series of behavioral interview questions.
Currently social media, social networking, and online and video interviewing help to create a positive and interactive communication with candidates, hire top talent, and enhance one’s employment brand. Mobile technology offers better means to enhance the two-way communication with candidates.
Sourcing became (and still is) a critical skill for recruiters. With the presence of Google and access to the Internet, Boolean search strings became a hot commodity. Today, innovative ways to source top talent is an art form. Professional networking groups open doors for one to attend events as a recruiter and network to uncover the next best candidate.
LinkedIn took this notion to the next level tenfold, and today many recruiters use this professional social media website as their main hunting ground.
LinkedIn Recruiter provides a solution to managing talent pools. CRM is the latest buzz for recruitment, leveraging a system that marketing professionals have used for years. Regardless of which system is employed, technology has no doubt contributed by proactively creating talent pipelines to meet critical hiring needs.
Recently, there is debate on whether recruitment, which is currently in some organizations a function under human resources, should fall under marketing. Another option is that it moves higher up the food chain – I report to our CEO, which works well in my case.
But many agree that recruitment should function as its own entity. Although there is merit in partnering with HR and marketing among other key stakeholders, as Talent Acquisition professionals we provide a unique and invaluable service to our hiring managers, senior leaders, and CEOs.
I question as to why are we not listed as our own function. And why can we not have our own listing in the drop down menus of job boards? We are lumped under Human Resources. HR has an important place in a corporation, and some of their governance can apply to hiring. However, acquiring talent is a skill of its own, and most HR generalists are clueless here (apologies to my HR colleagues and friends). Many organizations understand this and have a separate leader and team structure to support the attraction and acquiring of new talent into and within their organization. We are labeled as TALENT, not HR specialists, and rightly so. It’s time for the next stage in our evolution. It’s time for us to showcase our function as a key contributor, noteworthy of distinction…because we already are.
The way in which we interact with hiring managers and senior leaders has also evolved. We were once an order-taker and now are partnering with managers to understand their hiring needs, conduct panel interviews, evaluate candidates, and close the deal, i.e. hire the chosen candidate. Today, in many cases, the recruiter is a right-hand partner, providing advice and guidance not only on the hiring process but also the job market, strength of internal and external candidate pools, and industry trends. With data come analytics and potential solutions to key challenges. As an industry of professional Talent Acquisition experts, we are getting better at this every day. The emergence of “big data” and metrics helps to identify critical talent, enables us to source more strategically, and provide intelligence on how the competition is performing in efforts to hire talent.
It’s time to be visible, on our own; relevant, strategic, and to be separate and not a division of someone or something else, not a separate department reporting to an Staff Executive who really has no clue about what it costs to hire the very best people.
It’s this simple: Talent Acquisition leadership needs a seat at the table.
Corporate Dyak 