The Complexity of Recruiting

21st Century Recruiting - From Transaction to Transformation

Recruitment today is finally moving away from transactional thinking and beginning to understand how to better connect and engage with relevant talent prospects. My perspective in this article delves into the fast changing world of recruitment and throws light on some key trends & emerging practices that will continue to shape the future character and complexion of this discipline.

Talent Spotting

As the business environment becomes more volatile and ambiguous, and the market for top drawer talent gets tighter, the business of recruiting and sourcing is probably undergoing a paradigm shift. The biggest challenge for today’s recruiter is that the job of finding talent has become more complex. In his ground breaking book It’s Not the How or the What but the Who, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz succinctly traces the shifting paradigms of Talent spotting, from the era of focus on physical attributes, moving on to IQ – verbal, analytical, mathematical, and logical cleverness – to the ‘competency & skills’ movement we see today.

He further argues that in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment of today, competency-based appraisals and appointments are increasingly insufficient and organizations must navigate to a new era of Talent spotting – one in which our evaluations of one another are based not on brawn, brains, experience or competencies, but on potential. Geopolitics, business, industries, and jobs are changing so rapidly that we can’t predict the competencies needed to succeed even a few years out.

The lesson: Recruitment models of today must factor this new imperative & identify and on-board people by moving into the deeper waters of understanding a potential hire(s) psychology and motivation

Data Driven Recruitment

Big Data in recent times has been increasingly gaining a foothold in the lexicon of Talent decision makers. For much of 2012 there was talk of just what Big Data is, how it would affect talent acquisition and talent management, and how to work with the constant and much larger flow of data slated to have an impact on the Industry. Big Data, according to most major analysts, is all set to change everything about what we do and why we do it in the near future. Nobody knows for certain what the future holds, but as Neil Griffiths, wrote in his introductory note in a seminal White paper by Dave Mendoza; ‘it seems the coming years will see the rise of what we call Futurecasting: the ability to interrogate ‘big data’ generated by the increasingly ‘social’ digital world, and to begin basing hiring strategies and tactics on the new insights that are created.’ The business world today is grappling with a deluge of data points from myriad sources. However, data is the lowest level of abstraction from which information is derived and its ability to enable informed decision making can only be brought to fruition if data aka ‘meaningful data’ is analysed and interpreted in the right business context. This innovation presents Talent Acquisition with a unique opportunity to raise its profile as a strategic business partner. Strategic sourcing, improved workforce planning, building critical talent pipelines, are just few of the yet many unresearched possibilities presented by applying Big Data principles to the talent acquisition process. The Industry is in a consensus that the Data interplay will change the nuances of recruiting as we understand now, but many are not sure how. The scenario brings to mind the Chinese curse: “May you (talent acquisition) live in interesting times.”

The Digitization of Recruitment

There was a time, not so long ago, when recruiting was very much simpler. You had an approved opening and you filled it. The technology tools at our disposal included a phone, a rolodex, and a notebook. Quality candidates were plentiful and sourcing meant calling people on that rolodex, searching through one’s privately maintained databases and maybe getting the word out about open positions through print publications. The recruiters ‘world of data’ largely revolved around the holy grail metric – Cost per Hire and a company’s ‘recruitment strategy’ meant knowing when to step down on its in-house efforts and call in the third-party brigade. Hireology, a leading Talent Assessment firm in the US, recently released an [INFOGRAPHIC] titled “The Evolution of Finding Candidates”, which provides an interesting account of how recruitment and selection has evolved over time. Starting with employee referrals dating back to ancient Rome, the infographic includes statistics and facts about how the industry has changed and where it is headed. Back in those ‘dark ages’, candidates snail-mailed typewritten resumes in response to these print ads. An early innovation here was the ‘fax machine’ which allowed candidates to digitally send resumes to employers. But the real game-changers were the desktop computers and the advent of the internet which completely democratized recruiting. Flash Forward to Circa 2014… Times have certainly changed. Today, there are multiple layers of technologies, tools, partners and services embedded in the recruiting processes, that are unmatched in complexity and sophistication from the days of yore. This interplay of social media tools, video, big data, analytics, cloud based products and mobile recruiting platforms is creating an interesting potpourri of resources geared to enhance the recruiters’ ability to more efficiently match job seekers with the right opportunities. However, digital convenience comes at the expense of meaningful engagement as digital transactions substitute physical interactions - and the trust and relationship capital they build, which is centric to the logic of the recruiting function. The challenge for the recruiting function here is to face the implications of digital change: in particular the loss of control over the candidate relationship, increased competition and threat of commoditization, and the need to engage digitally with all key stakeholders in the recruiting value chain. This rapid pace of digitization and the rise of the millennial generation is re-defining established workforce paradigms and will require the recruitment function to enable innovative efficiencies in its business/operating model, while creating seamless and consistent engagement with all stakeholders.

Recruiting Revisited: The New Recruitment Models

For all the flak the recruitment function receives from Industry experts and business stakeholders, there are a lot of very talented, intelligent, and skilled individuals in the recruiting field. Second, there are some definite, emerging trends in terms of how progressive companies are re-orienting their recruiting teams. And third, there are lessons to be learned from the innovative best practices and operating models of some world-class recruiting organizations. A sneak peek at the new recruiting models of today point to the following trends displayed in a graphical format:

The seismic shifts we are seeing in global business has significantly altered the recruiting landscape. The real challenge - and indeed the real opportunity - for the profession will lie in learning how to unlock the huge potential presented by the emerging tools, techniques and approaches. Recruitment is, and will remain a people centric function but its future promise to provide competitive advantage would lie more at the intersection of people with business, process, technology and organization strategy.

______________________________________________ Photo Credits: Zooco ; Nucleartist ; wlablack ; Fotoscool ; Maisei Raman/shuttersock Please click here for a link to the resources cited in this article

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Staffing Strategy for a Recruitment Firm.