A Look Into The Talent Acquisition Scenario Today: Important Factors, Challenges and The Road Ahead

Asoke K Laha, President & CEO of Interra Information Technologies

“Very often, the best time to recruit people is before you need them,” says Doug Conant, the founder of ConantLeadership. Long before leaving Nabisco to undertake the massive feat of turning around troubled Campbell’s Soup, Conant had adopted a practice of taking time to set up meetings with people he thought he might want to work with in the future.

“I’d been doing that for over a decade when I went into Campbell’s so I was able to hit the ground running,” he explains. “I believe a CEO has to be the chief talent officer and the chief employee officer, as well as a chief executive officer.”

Conant advises business leaders to look beyond the typical resume-bolstering accomplishments for deeper measures of an individual’s work and performance ethic, what he calls the three Cs:

Competence: A high degree of competence in their field or area of interest. 

Character: Evidence that, time and again, they delivered on what they said they were going to do.

Chemistry: Great chemistry between them and the teams they lead.

“With every high potential individual who I spoke with, I was constantly poking at the three C’s and looking for evidence of their ability to contribute to a high-performance culture,” he says. “That’s how you set the standard on talent.”

The companies all over the world are facing  a lot many challenges such as social & technological changes, cultural diversity, aging populations and political instability and the latest, pandemic. This impacts talent hunting seriously, this is no longer an exclusive domain of a pack of recruiters but finally a call to be taken by the CEO or business leadership as the example of Doug Conant shows.  

While Talent acquisition has to be led by the CEOs and business owners across the world,  the recruitment landscape is changing fast from what it was  twenty, even ten years ago. We need different tools and much higher level of proactivity to hunt talents effectively now compared to the past.  Let’s discuss a few core challenges in this area today.

1. Digital help in employer branding
The market today is driven by candidates, with demand to fill open positions far exceeding  supply in many verticals. This makes recruiters face an increasingly demanding and competitive talent market with many recruiters going for the same candidates.

Firstly, we need to focus on our employer brand. The employer branding is the sum-total of what potential employees think of you as an employer and the goal is to create differentiation and preference in the minds of these people. Therefore, investing in a strong employer brand will give you a major advantage in attracting top talents. But how do you go about doing this? The answer is through content and social network. Renowned marketer and keynote speaker Jay Baer famously once said that “content is fire, social media is gasoline.” In other words, your content exists independent of what you’re doing on social but you use social to drive awareness of your fantastic recruitment-related content (employee spotlight videos, behind-the-scenes, hot topics in the industry, recent team awards etc.). According to a survey by Employer Brand International, 76% of companies said that Social Media was their main channel when it came to communicating their employer brand.

2. Conversion of uncertain candidate

If the demand is  far greater than supply in the talent market,  then the candidates have an opportunity to select from a big basket of possible employers and chose from multiple employment offers. A further challenge is that the candidates the recruiter has declined previously have potentially moved on elsewhere, leaving the recruiter to research the talent pool again.

3. Recruiters Vs Hiring Manager: bridging the gap

This can make or break an effective hiring process.  A number of issues can arise between recruiters and their hiring managers which are very much multilateral. To give you an insight into the potentially tenuous relationship that can arise, iCIMS conducted a special study and arrived at the following findings:

80% of recruiters think they have a ‘high’ to ‘very high’ understanding of the jobs for which they recruit.

77% of hiring managers say that recruiters’ candidate screening is ‘inadequate’. 51% of recruiters said hiring managers ‘should do a better job communicating what they are looking for in a candidate’ and ‘provide relatable examples’.

54% of recruiters complain that hiring managers expect recruiters to place candidates into hard-to-fill positions more quickly than is feasible.

I have in my own company tried to solve this problem by making the hiring process a more collaborative one between the recruiters and the hiring managers. I have launched a “war room”  which is attended by all  recruiters and the concerned hiring managers across the table daily for one hour and discuss and resolve issues upfront.  Communication and development of  relationship is the key in these meetings making insightful discussions on data around best channels for sourcing, number of applications, application/interview ratios etc.

4. Attracting and Retaining the Millennials

Millennials, the new stars of talent landscape, constitute more than 75% of an IT employment scenario today and possesses significantly different characteristics from previous generations – they have close affinity with the latest technology, they tend to favour their personal needs more than that of the organisation they work for, they want open communication & regular feedback and are more comfortable with a volatile, dynamic, fluid career. The last point is a particular challenge for recruiters as hiring a candidate who leaves their post quickly reflects badly on the recruiter (and hiring manager). This also increases the workload for the recruiter who now has to find another suitable candidate pool to fill the new vacancy. Retaining this new generation therefore may prove to be a stressful job.  Anne Donovan, Managing Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, says: 

5. Developing Skills in Analytics

In my own experience I have seen many of our recruiters today have the ability to use technological tools to their advantage but lack the skill to effectively crunch the data. This is a very key area in which an employer should develop solid skills. Empowering our recruiters with skills of Data Analytics which will help them acquire talents in the new emerging complex employment market more effectively.

We should align all our key stakeholders in the company and select the key metrics to review very carefully and comprehensively. The Glassdoor recommends the following metrics we can measure around quality of hires, influence over hires and retention, which should serve as a good starting point:

Cost-Per-Hire
Time-to-Hire
Candidate Demographics
Cost-Per-Applicant
Source of Applicants
Candidate Engagements (e.g., social likes, shares, follows)
Competitor Intelligence
Company Reputation and Ratings