|
Would you lose sleep if you lost a mission-critical employee or if your CEO announced a major expansion strategy in a new playing field? How quickly could you react and adapt to these situations and do your part to help your organization win in an intensely competitive environment?
Finding quality talent on a whim is difficult and the competition is becoming increasingly resourceful in attracting people with appropriate skills and attributes. Proactively building your talent pipeline is good business and will help you shine in times of change.
According to research by the Aberdeen Group, proactively building your candidate pipeline significantly reduces time and cost to hire, and increases the likelihood of landing your choice candidates. According to Lou Manzi, the former Vice President, Global Talent Solutions, at GlaxoSmithKlein, "hiring may slow or stop, but talent acquisition never does." This statement rings as true today as it ever has and, indeed, Best-in-Class organizations are 32% more likely than all other companies to indicate that their hiring practices are continuous, as opposed to reactive.
This continuous focus is highly aligned with two additional strategies, which are also the most differentiated - improving the candidate experience and creating a talent acquisition culture. When it comes to improving candidate experience, candidate relationship management is critical.
But how are the Best-in-Class engaging candidates early-on? According to Aberdeen, the top candidate relationship management activities show how these companies value a combination of technology and proactive outreach from key stakeholders:
- Maintaining an engaging and informative company career portal
- Recruiters and hiring managers actively communicating with candidates via phone calls or personal emails
- Utilizing software (such as candidate relationship management or an applicant tracking system) to regularly track all candidate communications
But the most differentiated strategy is around creating a talent acquisition culture as a foundation for all of these strategies. Best-in-Class companies are 55% more likely than all others to indicate that building a corporate culture where everyone views talent acquisition as part of their job is critical to success. This also lays the groundwork for an effective onboarding process, one which involves all relevant stakeholders to ensure a new hire gets off to a strong start. Visibility into the process, along with a common language with which to describe and evaluate talent, are both key to enabling this culture.
Where to Start?
Organizations today are continually looking for ways to proactively build talent pipelines and make better decisions about talent. According to Aberdeen, top performing organizations were found to be using assessments more broadly across employee populations and job roles, as well as more frequently and consistently than other organizations. Assessments help minimize the risk of a bad hire or promotion and ensure that individual efforts are aligned with organizational goals.
Does your organization's talent acquisition framework include proactively and continuously preparing for new talent?
"You hit home runs not by chance, but by preparation."
Roger Maris | 
