Flexibility, RPO and Talent Fusion

Posted on October 25, 2011 by tfus

Over the course of the last 10 years, I have worked at 3 RPO firms, 2 large market providers and TalentFusion. All of the operating or delivery models have similarities and many differences.  One of the many things that attracted me to TalentFusion was the fact that our operating model was born out of the professional services industry.   TalentFusion deploys functional and dedicated recruiters with extensive experience recruiting and sourcing mid/senior level exempt talent, with specific industry knowledge. Prior to working at TalentFusion the only operating model I was familiar with was either the “high volume” recruiting model or the contingency/retained search model. Each model services a need, but what I liked most about TalentFusion’s recruiting model is the fact that it can bend and flex to accommodate both hiring demands.

Today’s current recruiting environment is complicated, some organizations know they need help recruiting and leverage one or more RPO firms to help them with their hiring challenges. Some organizations are just starting to realize the many benefits associated with RPO and are exploring the benefits of via RFI’s or RFP’s. Either way, in order to adjust quickly and strategically to the many recruiting scenarios a client or prospect may present to you, it is imperative that you have a flexible delivery model that can be customized to meet the exact demands of our clients.

-Renick Morris

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Recruiting = Talent Acquisition, is this an accurate equation?

Posted on August 15, 2011 by tfus

Perhaps this question would not have been on the table during the 2008 recession. During that time frame, people were focused on economic indicators; the housing market, unemployment rates, budgets, and companies adopting the mentality of “doing more with less.”   It was more about survival with an often reactive approach since companies had little time to plan.  Frequently, after an economic or financial crisis hits, businesses take a look at how to do things differently and have time to take a proactive approach to conducting business.

In the past recruiting often had a shortsighted goal in order to generate revenue for the customer.  The longer the seat was vacant the greater loss of revenue.  Recruiters were given a job description, salary ranges and asked to fill the vacancy often having limited dialogue to discuss the requirements, or understand the business prevue. Recruiting was viewed as a transactional, commodity based business function to fill job openings with qualified people.   In contrast, Talent Acquisition is distinct elements of the Talent Management continuum, a proactive, strategic function, procuring talent for the organization’s value add. Talent Acquisition is no longer a silo in the human resource function, but collaboration with specialists from other functional areas within Talent Management to posture a company for talent who will evolve and become strategic partners within the organization. Talent Management/Acquisition asks: do we have a strategy in place to attract and retain qualified employees;  do we know what business is in the pipeline, what the staffing needs are for the next six-twelve months, bill rates that determine potential candidate salaries, etc.   Recruiting is involved on the front end of the process now we have a seat at the table as a collaborative business partner.

Talent Acquisition strategies are not static, initially job boards, employee referrals, etc. were the way to find and acquire talent; now Social Media has become a go to strategy due to the speed and cost savings associated with it.  In order to compete in the global marketplace, companies ask themselves; how we go about talent acquisition, do we have technologies in place to attract, engage and retain qualified workers?   Are we prepared for and do we have contingency plans for a retirement surge of baby boomers leaving the workforce?  Below are a few Talent Acquisition strategies:

  • Social Media –social media networks has an amazing impact on talent management. LinkedIn has over 100 Million users; a sixty-three percent from last year.  Facebook has grown to more than 750 million users worldwide all contributing members of the workforce. In addition to LinkedIn and Facebook, among countless social networks like Twitter, Xing you have a powerful talent acquisition tools. Google+ has joined the game as well.

Social networks allow recruiters to maintain long term dynamic relationships with an extensive pipeline of passive candidates.

  • Search Engine Optimization – Job boards will continue to play an important role in sourcing, search engine optimization will become a key component in strategic recruiting. Talent hubs will gain popularity, allowing candidates to filter jobs by class, location, and company. Organic search engine optimization is viewed as one of the most cost effective and under-utilized ways to generate applicant traffic to a company’s listed job openings.

We all know the higher your website or job description appears on the list of search results for a given set of terms, the more web traffic you can expect to receive. Quality content that is search engine optimized will get picked up for a wider range of relevant searches, resulting in a higher number of quality candidates and a more effective recruiting campaign.

 

Workforce Planning -Workforce planning will play a critical role in talent acquisition seventy-seven percent of employers have not analyzed projected employee retirement rates or assessed current employees’ capabilities. Employers are becoming more aware of the impact the baby boomer exodus thirty-seven to forty-five percent of the workforce representing a shortage of 10-15 million workers.  There will be positions that need to be backfilled.  Talk about a war on talent?

Going forward a Holistic Talent Acquisition will encourage organizations to maximize their talent pool by aligning it with short and long term business objectives; it encourages an organizational culture of engagement and innovation, requiring organizations to view talent acquisition, development, retention, and employee management as an entity rather than distinct parts.  Human Capital Management and HR professionals will become catalysts for strategic change when they understand the relationship and interconnectedness of the different components of the end-to-end talent lifecycle. From attracting and selecting talent wisely, retaining and developing tomorrow’s leaders, helping former employees transition out of the company, talent management will streamline the entire talent lifecycle.

In closing, recruiting and talent acquisition are unique, we as consultants are increasingly becoming more aligned with talent acquisition.  We can all recruit, yet are we aware of the strategy behind hiring qualified people to augment the clients  whom we are supporting?  We are TalentFusion’s value add to the client, and are an integral part of the “big picture” as consultants who work strategically to exceed client expectations.

We are all change agents…Happy Talent Acquisition!

-Sandy

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Direct Sourcing of Passive Candidates

Posted on June 14, 2011 by tfus

For as long as I have been recruiting, there has always been a lot of debate around direct sourcing of candidates by recruiters.  When I first started recruiting over 15 years ago, we were taught how to identify and track down passive candidates, using traditional methods of picking up the phone and calling into companies.  Admittedly for me, calling people who weren’t looking for new job opportunities and asking them if they were open to thinking about a new job was just plain terrifying. It wasn’t until I reframed the task in my mind that I realized that is really wasn’t so scary.  If I was called by someone who thought I might be interested in a new job, I would be flattered.  In today’s virtually connected world, making those connections is easier than in years past, but it is important that recruiters do so with tact and consideration.

One of the primary sources I use to reach out to passive candidates is LinkedIn.  It really is a great tool to reach out to individuals who either appear to match a role you are recruiting for or may know of someone who is possibly interested in a job change.  Often the question is asked, what is the best way to appeal to the receiver of your message to read your email and then return your message?  After a recent LinkedIn training, I learned a few techniques that I believe make a lot of sense whenever you reach out to someone you think may be a great fit for a job:

  • Address the person by his/her name. Often recruiters race to send out emails via LinkedIn (these are called InMails), and they don’t think to include the name of the receiver.  Would you read an email that didn’t have your name in the salutation? I know I would be hesitant thinking it was a bulk or spam email even via my LinkedIn account.
  • Explain to the receiver why you are emailing them.  This doesn’t have to be too specific, rather just detailed enough for the receiver to know you actually looked at their profile and saw aspects of their background that matched with the job you are contacting them about.
  • Refrain from sharing too much information in the email.  One of the biggest mistakes a recruiter makes is including the FULL job description in the email.  Who has time to read that? You want to entice that person to email you back so you can connect with them on the phone sooner rather than later.
  • Pick up the phone and call the candidate. In this high tech world, it is easy to get lazy and not pick up the phone to talk directly to the candidate.  Recruiters are most successful when they speak with the candidate.  There is a lot to be said about having the opportunity to analyze the candidate’s voice to determine his/her interest. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, recruiters are sales people.  I know that I have, many times, applied persuasive sales tactics to get a candidate excited about a role I am recruiting for.
  • Ask the candidate if he/she has any referrals. Most of us know colleagues/friends/family that might be looking for new jobs.  This is one of the best ways to get leads – ask for them.
  • Include your contact information.  For instance, some candidates don’t fully understand how InMail works on LinkedIn. If you include your work phone and email, you likely will get a higher response.

Today, more than ever, it is easier to track down individuals who are not actively looking for jobs.  To be successful in attracting passive candidates, remember the basics, and you will likely experience a much better response to your inquires.

Best of luck in your passive candidate searches!

- Wendy Muller

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Recruitment Leadership

Posted on June 1, 2011 by tfus

So much has been written over the years about leadership that it is virtually impossible to break new ground.  The topic of recruitment leadership, however, appears to be still somewhat untapped.

I suspect the reason for the limited content on recruitment leadership is that so much energy goes into either the actual practice of recruitment, which is very helpful, or upon what industry pundits view as leadership, such as their limited take on who the so-called stars in our profession are, or how big their company is or who they know as opposed to any real support for their abilities to provide real business recruitment leadership.

In 1996, I was very lucky to join a great company called Keane.  I inherited a terrific group of Recruiters and Managers.  Some of the best I have ever had the pleasure of working with.  Prior to joining Keane, I was more of a Sales and Business guy with a smattering of recruitment.  Maybe that is what helped me, with the help of my great team, re-frame recruitment as a business function.  I did not know any other way and that ignorance and naïveté may have played an important role in both elevating the function and holding it accountable in the same manor of a sales operation.

So, we started with measurement and I think this is a critical element of providing leadership.  Metrics were a relatively new concept, particularly in the area of recruitment.  So, we began publishing monthly reports on key metrics down to the individual level to provide organizational visibility on the recruitment function and a certain level of uncomfortable scrutiny on each Recruiters performance.

New at that time, I think measurement remains critical today in providing recruitment leadership.  It is critical to set clear goals, per management 101, and then measure performance towards those goals.  It is also critical to establish reward systems that recognize outstanding performance publicly and in a meaningful way.  We did that at Keane by creating a President’s Club-like program called the Leadership Circle that recognized the top Recruiters each year with awards and a nice trip to a warm climate.

Next, and in support of the now very measured and aggressive recruitment goals, we provided tools, technology and best practices.  It is critical to provide the material needed by Recruiters to achieve the goals that have been laid out.  This remains true today.  At Keane, and at TalentFusion, we took some of our best practitioners into a think tank environment to contemplate and then provide the “best practices” as they relate to all facets of the recruiting function.  This led to a stream of innovations and published tips and techniques that enabled continuous learning and systemic improvements to the process.  This enabled further improvement in the performance and elevation of the recruiting function.

From a leadership perspective it is critical to align all this activity with senior management.  That is a very important job for executive recruitment leadership.  It also takes a lot of time, energy and even some personal risk.  If we are going to treat recruiting as a business function then it needs to take on a share of the risk that the business feels.  That needs to be communicated and committed to at the highest possible levels of the organization.

For TalentFusion and other RPO providers, that business alignment is somewhat natural.  Recruiting is our business and therefore, the function is already aligned with business by definition.  By the way, this is one driving force behind outsourcing as it allows organizations to outsource a business process that may be important but is not core to a firm for whom it is both.

In the corporate world it may prove a little more difficult but still very necessary and do-able.  If you are in a position of recruitment leadership, I would encourage you to spend energy here.  Alignment with the business is key.  Are you meeting with your business leaders?  Do you or your boss report to one?  Are you communicating to the business what your recruiting strategy is and seeking their input?  Are you demonstrating to those leaders that you are driving recruitment the same way they drive their business function?

There is a lot to leadership.  It is complex.  There are all the intangibles like motivation, presentation, speaking skills, negotiations, strategic thinking and maneuver just name a few.

Having said that, if you are in a position of recruitment leadership you will make huge strides forward if you measure, enable and align the function with the business.  Just those three things, which are no easy task, will elevate the function to a business level and separate you from much of the pack.

More to come in later discussions on other areas of recruitment leadership.

Good Luck!

- David Pollard

 

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