Innovate or lose the Talent War

IN MY 20 YEARS IN TALENT MANAGEMENT AND RECRUITMENT CONSULTING, I AM STILL TO DISCOVER a true corporate HR recruitment business unit that actually operates or even thinks like a strategic business function. Where every other aspect of business has undergone a transformation, (Change Management, CRM, Six Sigma), HR functions in general and recruitment specifically, have remained stagnant.

A recent global leadership study, showed a resounding 75% of executives identifying “improving or leveraging talent” as a top priority. They know, and HR needs to understand, how important a world class staffing capability is to a company’s success, their growth and competitive standing.

South Africa must have some of the most ineffective recruiters and antiquated recruitment practices on the planet that are adding significantly to the shortage of quality talent. Little effort is being made to either develop the best recruiters, or to research, build, redevelop and focus on developing new innovative talent management practices.

HR recruitment functions are inundated with administrative types who do not have the right skills for the new generation of global business. Having trained thousands of specialist recruiters, it is evident that a large number of HR generalists cannot actually recruit or don’t have the skills to be great recruiters.
Most of what they do is the administration of HR systems and processes, usually an automation of existing ineffective recruitment practices. They truly believe that screening volumes of CVs is actually recruiting.
Their lack of skill in innovative talent acquisition practices can be seen by their reliance on old media as their main labour source supply. This includes a heavy reliance on job boards and newspaper advertising, ignoring the fact that top performers or passive candidates (top performers not actively pursuing jobs) are not found on job boards or reading recruitment adverts. Rather than attracting the best in industry candidates using innovative sources, they are limiting their search to active candidates from the job board or newspaper population.
They also rely heavily on recruitment agencies that use the same sources as their in-house capabilities, namely job boards, adverts, social networks, to find candidates.

Some of the most successful recruitment functions, with innovative recruitment practices that will leave you breathless, deliberately avoid these active candidate sourcing methods, and instead focus largely on the passive candidate market.
Recruitment functions have got away with too much for way too long. Many organisations are without a written recruiting strategy or plan. The few strategies that do exist, are usually quite basic, and talk of “talented bums on seats” with cost reduction as the single most important focus. The problem with that strategy is that as fast as new people are hired, just as soon do the average performers obtained cheaply, leave the organisation.

Where hiring managers are focused on whether the staff hired are innovators, in the top 20%, able to increase sales or improve customer satisfaction ratings, traditional recruitment function output is measured by number of openings handled, cost savings, people hired and time to fill. Find me an executive who will honestly be impressed by an average candidate, hired within a record two days at a 12% fee.

Traditional HR recruiting practices are also characterised by limited staff planning, poor or non-existent competitive analysis (sorely needed to remain ahead in the war on talent), poor planning to develop labour supply chains, leadership bench strength or talent pools, ineffective referral programmes, poor employment brand strategies and incredibly boring career websites.

Enter the new era of Talent Management and Chief Talent Officers.

CHIEF TALENT OFFICERS:

Aspiring to be the premium talent acquisition department in industry, and producing outputs worthy of the annual executive summary, these leaders in talent management are driving new innovation in the field of HR.

Their purpose is to maximise both the capability and capacity of the organization by directing the acquisition, development, deployment and retention of talented people.
Whereas in the past, recruitment, retention, training and development, performance management, employment branding, internal redeployment, staff planning and diversity were independent HR functions, they have integrated them into one managed function called “Talent Management” to increase business impact.

They see technology (mobile phones, blogs, podcasts), employment branding (best company to work for), metrics (quality of hire measures) and innovation (in employee referral programmes, recruiting tools, career websites) as the primary drivers of recruitment going forward.

Chief Talent Officers’ greatest innovation is the management of their recruitment and talent pipeline process like a true business supply chain. They’ve long discarded the traditional fixed HR model and traditional HR practices and adopted a more scientific, data-based approach to recruiting.

Not surprisingly, they utilise a wide variety of business and management tools in recruiting such as gap analysis, continuous improvement, re-engineering, root cause analysis, statistical trend analysis, supply/demand forecasting models, process mapping, ROI, productivity analysis and internal and external benchmark comparisons.

They are innovators in sourcing, have a fierce passive candidate focus and use new media sourcing methodologies, for example social networks, blogs, career websites, and referrals (which incidentally is rated consistently as the most effective tool for sourcing new hires - I’m surprised so few companies make this a priority). They produce comprehensive sourcing reports to identify candidate sources that are having a major impact on their recruiting success, and the percentage of the recruitment budget consumed by each source.

They’re bent on hiring recruiting professionals, as opposed to generalists, who have a pure business focus, understand costs, ROI, efficiency, productivity and strategic business objectives. Professional recruiters adept at sales and selling the employee value proposition and who can inspire prospective candidates to join their organization. They hire recruiters who know and understand that CVs and interviews are least effective in determining true capability.

With the war for talent exploding in most industries, it’s time for organizations to engage in profound self-reflection. As painful and shameful as it might be, it will also be enlightening and exhilarating.

Artemis Elias is a consultant in recruitment and talent management.