A ‘Weatherproof' Talent function: Myth or Reality?

The world economy has gone through a fair few troughs since 2020. The UK alone has seen over half a million redundancies since 2020 until today. (this is a conservative figure). In the three months to December 2023, there were 116,000 redundancies made in the United Kingdom, compared with 94,000 in the previous month. November 2020 was at the absolute peak with over 400,000 in that month alone. While this has impacted most disciplines, one of the most severely hit discipline has been the Talent acquisition function. There are probably a bunch of articles out there talking about how to ‘repurpose’ the Talent function when hiring numbers are low. I’m here to shed light on the key responsibilities of a good talent function, irrespective of the size of the company.? My goal is to change the narrative and identity of the talent function from role producing machines to a function that covers the following

• Developing an employer brand that attracts the the right candidate profiles/personas?
• Designing hiring processes that ensure the quality of hires remains consistent
• Building an insights driven function that continuously feeds into the dynamic hiring strategy to product the best results
• Stay up to date to the inner workings of every department, in order to truly partner with your stakeholders

Building a strong Employer Brand

A key responsibility of the Talent function is to develop a strong employer brand to go one step closer to becoming the preferred employer by the target candidate pool. A key element while building the marketing strategy, is to create consumer personas when we’re working on our marketing strategy, so why do we not do the same while building out the Employer Brand strategy? Candidates after all are potential employees and maybe even potential users/consumers. When we know and understand the kind of candidates we want, it helps us develop and communicate our attraction strategy with clarity and authenticity. What is a persona? It’s an imaginary person that embodies the most important characteristics found within your broad candidate pool. Operationally and tactically speaking,this would also include building out assets that align with the strategy, ensuring the careers page is updated, automation and communication with the ATS is in line with the strategy to name a few things.

Secondly, it’s important to build out the Employer Value Proposition? (EVP). Depending on the size of the company, this will involve multiple formal/informal discussions with the employees to understand how they define the culture, the people and ways of working.?

When I’ve done this in the past, this exercise took a quarter in a 150 people organisation. Conducting the sessions, gathering and processing the information and building the EVP is a long drawn out process. The EVP will be the foundational pillars of talent attraction strategy therefore needs to be built with care. In the case of a startup and scaleup, the culture of the company goes through a few transformations while they move from a 5 people company to a 100+ organisation, when they move from founder led to SME lead, therefore the talent function must consider conducting EVP audits and pivoting when required.

Scalable Hiring Process with a focus on quality of hire

In the early stages of a company, the focus tends to be on hiring as of yesterday and the processes and strategy are often built around that principle (if I can even call it that). Some may argue that's the need of the hour and it just works for the business at that point in time, however in order to build a strong hiring culture, it’s crucial to develop the right processes across all roles from the get go. This often is not the case, where the talent team needs to look at building robust processes in order to ensure the quality of hires is not compromised. This is an elaborate piece of work as it involves understanding what’s broken in the current process, how can we make it better in a way that works for the company and candidates, this may also include adapting the process for each discipline, building tighter assessments, evaluation methodologies. To give you an example, right at the peak of hiring for Senior Software Engineers at my most recent company, we realised during our weekly hiring catch ups that the evaluation process wasn’t quite fit for purpose anymore, this led us to define what good looks like in the technology team, as some of the recent new joiners had a bit of a misalignment both from a values perspective as well as the goals setting expectations. We brainstormed with the team and redefined the behavioural traits that we are looking for in every new joiner and rebuilt our questions for each stage based on that. Additionally, while we were at it, we built a rubrics for each stage, which gave the interviewers a clear idea on what a good answer looks like. This took over 2 months to complete and was done only for 1 function. The same can be done for other functions. something to consider working on even when hiring numbers are low.

Build an Insight driven function?

As a Talent function, we have access to a ton of candidate and hiring data through the ATS and any other tools we use for hiring for assessments, interview transcribing etc. It’s important to derive insights from the rich data that has been gathered over a period of time. Inculcating an insights driven culture within the function, will help devise a more informed sourcing strategy, selection of interview panels, understanding what’s working well and what is broken in the interview process. To share a few examples, while trying to understand our sourcing strategy for a niche role for the first time, we thought of the usual suspects like Linkedin sponsored ads and active sourcing on the platform would give us good results as it had the largest database of relevant candidates. However, 4 weeks into our sourcing for this role, we realised the conversions were less than 10% on the sourcing and clickthrough rates for sponsored rates were negligible. On the other hand, a source like Otta or Cord, sources specifically built for sourcing candidates for tech roles gave us a response rate of over 40% and conversions from first stage to final stage was nearly at 85%. Similarly, we assessed the quality of the interview panels by assessing the conversions through to the next stage combined with qualitative feedback from the candidate, we realised having a diverse interview panel, in terms of gender and experience led to a higher conversion and a better candidate experience while conducting a Values Interview. There are many other data points which could be delved into deeper when hiring numbers are low giving the Talent team a chance to really leverage the data they have access to.

Build on the Business & Market Knowledge

A key responsibility, often lower down the to do list due to competing priorities, is business and market research. Every solid talent function should be synonymous with research and this is something which needs to be inculcated from day 1 in order to build a research driven function. Market mapping, competitor analysis, benchmarking is integral in order to craft a more tailored hiring strategy and helps the Talent function to truly be partners to the business.

On the other hand, the talent function represents the organisation, the product and its people to potential candidates and user/consumers, in order to create a credible relationship with both active and passive candidates, it’s integral to understand the product in depth, the business model, and future plans. This definitely needs to be done at the onboarding stage when a new team member joins the Talent team, however I think it’s an ongoing journey to absorb and imbibe the plethora of information. This can include having regular sessions with each department to understand what they’re working on etc. Shadowing them in their standups, making detailed notes of the latest projects, what went well, what could have been done better. Interviewing people from each department every 4-6 weeks and writing a short blog spotlighting them and what they’re working on. Lastly, having regular sessions with the leadership teams and learning more about the inner workings and sharing notes on what’s going well and what could be done better. One such example which was led by the CEO of the most recent company I worked with was a book club session with the leadership team and the talent lead. We were asked to read a book on hiring best practices and how we could implement this within our company to make our process tighter and more efficient. Similar things need to be done on a regular basis to ensure the leadership team is connected to the hiring strategy just as much as they’re involved in the sales and marketing strategy of the company.

The above list is not an exhaustive one. These are some of the key elements of a solid Talent function over and above the day to day hiring. There is enough to keep the talent function busy when hiring has to slow down or when there is a hiring freeze. We don’t consider eliminating the entire Finance or a Product? team when the things are looking bleak then why do this for the Talent function. It’s time we change our perspective to this multifaceted function as it has a lot more to offer.

Keen to hear your thoughts on the above and if you have suggestions on what topics if you’d like to read more about in my future articles.