Is now the right time to upgrade and improve your Talent Acquisition function?

Yes it is. Circumstances and business cycles aren’t static nor are they completely predictable, candidate and hiring markets continually evolve, and talent acquisition tools/tech get better every year. Like everything else, your TA team’s tools, capabilities, workflows, approaches need to be revisited to ensure they’re keeping pace. If you haven't examined how you hire in a while - why not now?

If there’s a window of time while hiring may be quieter,?and you have the opportunity and ability to harness the collective intellectual-horsepower of your TA team before things get busy again – it’s a good decision. It doesn’t have to be a 10x transformation, or a cause an allergic reaction from your CFO, but it should at least follow some cadence of continuous improvement to increase or build on the strategic value, efficacy and standing with the business, and your future candidates

I’m occasionally asked about what approach(es) to take – and there are always variations to levels of complexities etc , so I’ve tried to visualize a simplified model with the accompanying image for anyone who wants it as a guide, that might help when it comes to applying a cascading method of performance-tuning to your Talent Acquisition function.

Research First. What is your market doing and where is it going??What are your competitors for the same talent doing? What do their career sites and job profiles look like compared to yours??Try applying to one of their jobs, and then one of your own to see what the candidate experience is like.?If you find yourself getting a case of FOMO, maybe it’s time.

Step 1. Start with taking a good look at your foundational assets – your jobs.?The requirements, the accountabilities, personas, deliverables & outcomes and performance metrics etc. If they need a good scrubbing and realignment to how your business operates now – do it. Review them all, or your highest volume jobs, or whatever - start somewhere.

Step 2. Take those renewed inputs and generate improved outputs. Better job descriptions will cascade to improved sourcing effectiveness and candidate attraction/identification, improved assessments (pre-screens and interview questions), improved speed by reduced ambiguity in what the business is looking for. And finally, something that will allow a candidate to prep for a better interview experience by focusing on what matters most.?(nothing worse than a candidate studying an old job profile only to be surprised by questions about something different).

Step 3 and 4. Incorporate the “How”.?Process Efficiency.?Improve your assessment guidance/process on how to achieve unbiased stack-ranking and enabling more evidence-based decision making based on the new outputs you created earlier. Underpin that by revisiting your process workflow (this is the important part…you’ll see why below). Do you have a RACI for your process and is it still relevant??Are there any intersections of the hiring process that exhibit friction or redundancy that needs to be addressed? Is your current process dependable/repeatable/scalable/measurable??

Step 5. Up until now, time and knowledge have been your only costs.?The next thing to consider requires budget – either reallocated or new – and most likely a business case to obtain it.?Whether it’s implementing some new tech, or squeezing out every last drop of capability from what you have, or bolting on a couple of extensions that will be a force-multiplier to how you want to work – this is the big one. It allows you to focus on high-value work and lets the bots manage the lower-value/time consuming work. You could spend $50k or $500k depending on your size, so make sure you are being as pragmatic yet as forward-looking as you can.

Here’s the book-end to the earlier statement above about ‘the important part’.??Repeat after me – No New Tech Will Improve A Bad Process.?May help a little, but it’s not going to be significant – especially if you’re going the route of a new ATS. If you’re going to look at upgrading your recruiting technology – use that as an opportunity to improve your process beforehand.?Combine Steps 1-4 with some good tech – and your talent acquisition process, programs and strategies will operate at a significantly elevated level.

Step 6. Use your Data. Taking advantage of that new tech isn’t just automating your refreshed processes or improving job/candidate/hiring team management, engagement and experience. Measuring everything you can will help diagnose and respond faster to what works best or what isn’t working at all. Make data-driven decisions instead of opinions to influence continued improvement – and demonstrate greater value to the business. Use your data to examine trends, explore predictive analytics to help your business plan and forecast hiring outcomes, report back to your leadership on how your team and the business is performing.

Step 7. You’re at the final stage, yet emphatically the one that ties it all together - Training. No benefit to all that work if you don’t get it out there and get everyone aboard. Document everything into a playbook and make it simple to read/follow. Share it. Then train (or in some cases, re-train) your stakeholders. Show them the light. Teach. Explain. Influence. And not just the business – train yourselves. Dig deeper into the science of recruiting so that the art of recruiting is the outcome.?

Before you know it, you’ll have come through a slower hiring cycle with a decidedly higher-functioning TA model. You’ll be better prepared and perhaps even ahead of the game of those who don’t evolve. And when you tie your strategy into the strategy of your business

Skip a step, add a step, do what you need. But do it. Everyone will thank you.?