Getting ready for the Next Wave of Talent

It’s time to rethink how we work in TA and HR.?

On a recent Recruiting Future podcast about the End of TA, Joe Mullings defined the clear differences between TA and HR functions within a business.

Talent Acquisition is a long-term HR strategy used to attract highly-qualified candidates into Executive and leadership positions within the business.? Mullings described TA as an ‘invasive, aggressive’, ‘jump out in the market and build a message, a hiring brand, a hiring narrative and explain to people why they should follow my company’s hiring brand and explain to me who I might become once I lean in and potentially want to work at your organisation.”??

Mullings also explained that HR is responsible once you are in the organisation or ‘who takes care of the family.’? HR is buried in the environmental issues of the business. Right now it’s about teams coming back into the office, creating a safe environment and managing the processes around remote working. There is an entire change in the structure of our work place. This is where HR shines.?

Having started my career in HR with the requisite degree, I can safely say that the expertise for each role is different. Hiring for talent and taking care of employees are two distinctive skill sets.?

‘I fell into recruitment’ is something that is a running joke in the TA community. Listen to TAPod and their first question to all their recruitment guests is “tell us about how you came to be in recruitment?”? Almost all, apart from a few guests (one was me), came into recruitment through being convinced by a recruitment agency to give it a try and then switching from agency to in-house. This is a sell and hunt environment and while there is not a ‘degree’ for this role, we are looking more and more about how the credentials and skills required for it, being such an integral part of a HR Talent strategy.?

There are huge challenges in our current market. Check out the blogs from our Tribe members Neil Gunning and Rich Lewis-Jones who look at the current situation and give their insights into TA strategy.?

We are hearing of job offers being made in 48 hours and with our borders closed, talent is facing a shortage in many areas. 30-40% pay increases to retain quality talent are also discussed.?

Talent Acquisition requires a different skillset to HR.? Increasingly, business needs to understand the difference between the two functions and ensure the teams are provided the budget and resources they require to succeed.

So what do we need to do in order to manage this next wave we are seeing?

Get your EVP right??

Many of us think Employer Value Propositions are an easy thing to define.? A survey, some discussions and focus groups with a bit of creative input from marketing and we are good to go, right? But how solid is your data if you collect it yourself - how open and transparent will your people be, will you get the real truth? Or the version they think you want to hear?

?Ben Da Costa from Noble Agency says that the first thing you need to do when thinking about your proposition is identify the business needs: Why are we doing this? How do we interpret our corporate brand to shape our employer brand and reputation? What will get us to where we need to be - the people, the skills, the personalities and then build on that.?

?He goes on to explain that for many businesses the needs may have changed post-pandemic. There may be different pressures on the business, the overall strategy may have shifted. You need to think about where the business needs to be and what employer communications are required to get you there. Do we need tactical campaigns to fill urgent gaps in the business? Or are we moving forward with a new approach? Have we settled on a new balance of flexible working and need to show the world our progressive environment? Or has flexible working affected our culture and we need our EVP and Employer Brand communications to help protect and nurture our culture?

?If you are a business going through change and transformation, you may need a proposition for right now and then look at it again when you enter the next stage. The comms then follow from that and can provide a great foundation for your messaging and brand to the external market as well as inspiring and retaining your internal talent.??

?Self-made EVP’s are a lot less effective than bringing in the experts. Creating an EVP is not an out-of-the-box, off-the-shelf exercise. You need to engage your leadership team, look for challenges they’re facing and ways that your Employer Brand can help them. The case grows for bringing in experts to help you develop your EVP and Employer Brand to the needs of your leadership team and the future business direction to drive stakeholder support.? If you involve your people – create something your current employees truly believe in, you’ll create a brand that is a magnet to future talent.?

Get your arms around contingent hiring

Too often I have heard HR say that contingent hiring is too hard and it has steadily fallen to procurement to bring them onboard. This is problematic.?

We are not buying a photocopier. We are buying a person and that has implications for the organisation. Too often I have worked with contractors who have created more harm than good with their behaviour and skill sets.??

Contingent has become an easy ‘out’ for managers who want to circumvent a hiring process. And we know there are many people working in an organisation who have contracted for years. Again this has consequences for the business.?

Imagine understanding where all these people are, what they do and then creating a way for your internal people to fill some of those roles.?

Imagine a conversation with a manager with a need where you can point them to a provider that can find the right contractor and manage the process for you, from identification, through acquisition, procurement and employment contract. If you think that targeted offshoring for a period of time might help with constrained access to talent, look at Consortio. If you’re wanting access to high quality temp talent, look at Weploy. Imagine having a ready made pool of vetted and assessed people that you can work with the hiring manager to bring on. An exciting start-up in this space to look into further this Werkling.?

But first you need to get your arms around contingent hiring and fully understand it. One way to do this is to make a TA person responsible for contingent hiring who can work closely with procurement on the contracts and assessing providers. That is the only role procurement should have in this.?

Point your TA team internally:?

Imagine taking the narrative-based recruitment team who are having talent discussions with hiring managers and letting them lose on your internal market.?

We need to understand who and what we have in our organisations. Internal mobility and using our internal people for project work to improve their skills and to continually engage them will be a major way to overcome challenges in the market.?

There is some cool tech that can help with this. Check out Reejig and Flow of Work (two fabulous Australian start ups).

TA sit with Hiring Managers with their expertise in the outside market and take a job brief to go look.? Imagine if TA were sitting with the whole picture of your organisation, the contractors and the external market?

Questions to the HM become: ’Can this role be done as a project? Do you need a full time person in the role?’ Then looking at our internal people, can we move our people in and train them up? Should we get a contractor in for some of this and use our people for the rest? Does the resource need to be located here? Can we use an outsourced option??

TA take that information, make recommendations or ‘go hunting’ for the best way to fill that role.?

HR needs to open up their ‘confidential’ information on employees to the TA team. I have sat in roles where I was not privy to wider salary or people information. The most successful role I ever had was where I was integrated and integral to the success of building? a team alongside the work that HR were doing. I knew who was not performing, what each person’s potential career path was and where the shortfall in skills were in the team. I sat in on their strategy days. I was a true partner.?

Data is your frenemy!?

HR & TA are often accused of not being business oriented enough, that we need to speak the language of business. We don’t naturally move towards the facts and figures!?

Understanding HR analytics will give you information to identify talent and evaluate your processes, successes and challenges. This will help you to understand who is ready for promotion or at risk of moving on. It's useful for tracking employee interactions, who are the ‘go-to’ people in your organisation, retention and team dynamics and what are the current skills available in your organisation. Ensure your people have positive experiences joining your organisation and are going to stay. We all love Enboarder for this!?

Getting a decent strategic workforce plan and having your hiring managers understand that is pivotal. We are planning a Workforce Planning for TA workshop with Tess Walton to help TA/HR understand how to approach it.?

Imagine presenting dashboards to the C-suite on the impact of all these things, how HR/TA can help the organisation succeed in its market by having the right recruitment and people practices in place.????

Give TA the resources and a budget with control on how they spend it, including engaging recruitment agencies and job boards.?

Does your organisation have a separate TA budget? Can you track what you are spending on agency recruitment and job board advertising and do you know how successful those channels are? Agency management including your PSA can all be managed on TalentVine in a cost effective and transparent way.??

Understand your sources and where your best people are coming from.? Set up great programmatic recruitment campaigns with Indeed or get access to all job boards for those tricky or national roles via Adzuna and get good data!?

If your team is busy, look at outsourcing to new ways of building your team resources. Look at PeopleScout for project RPO or engaging hourly resources through Recstra.

And back them up for a best of breed, fit for purpose system. We are brilliantly sponsored and supported by SmartRecruiters and PageUp

Acknowledge your brilliant team - have fun!?

We go a long way on motivation and appreciation. We know TA and HR are overwhelmed with work at the moment but take the time to celebrate all you have and are achieving!?

And do it in style...

The ITA’s are approaching.? This is a truly independent awards night.? Send them along to celebrate. Check out the details here.?

Or bring your team to Talentpalooza in October! We celebrate all things Talent with a fun 1970’s theme - Peace, Love and Talent!?

About Us

Talent Table is a community and event business. All the topics discussed here are covered in our events and on our Talent Table Tribe community group.?

Our next events Next Wave Talent and Talentpalooza will be covering these and many more topics using our community and experts to explore these themes.?

Check out all our events and our Tribe here.?

We love to see our talent community getting together and learning, sharing and having fun!?

*Image from LinkedIn Business