Today (April 9, 2017) I completed reading the “Talent Acquisition (TA) Enter the Cognitive Recruiter” section in the Deloitte 2017 Human Capital Trends Report. I found it interesting as Talent Acquisition is ranked 3rd as a priority in HR (a total surprise!) and secondly it made me revisit my memories of beyond recruitment experience.
The terms Recruitment andTalent Acquisition are considered to be equivalent by many individuals and organizations. However, a difference does exist. Bersin by Deloitte aptly defines TA as a strategic approach comprising of recruitment components (sourcing channels, screening and interviewing, assessing, and selecting) as well as other strategic and process components (workforce planning and segmentation, employment branding, candidate experience management, process expertise and compliance, integration with talent management framework, and analytics/metrics). In other words, TA is more of a gestalt approach that is proactive and dynamic.
Today’s VUCA world mandates companies (irrespective of their size) to think beyond recruitment. The intention should not be limited to just opening and closing a position, but it should be more proactive and holistic in nature. Companies and their leadership teams need to understand the importance of TA as it helps align business needs and strategic expertise with the available cross-generational workforce skills, abilities, sourcing strategies available to tap the talent, branding, and campaigns to attract talent and technology as a key differentiator. By so doing so, it strengthens the candidate-company relationship to enhance the overall value proposition.
It’s important to note that TA components don’t operate in a vacuum. Planning and working through the components becomes challenging due to the volatile flux of different environmental (internal and external) factors like rapid technological advancements, demands to shorten hiring cycles, candidates’ needs, and expectations, lack of adequate talent within an organization to streamline the hiring process, use of traditional sourcing channels, unstructured interviews, screening and interview processes guided by the interplay of different biases, the inability of a company to invest in technological-driven applicant tracking systems (ATS), …. and the list continues.
Implementing TA requires a company to think beyond recruitment, understand, tweak and tune TA components when needed. The said company needs to consider the various operating forces within and outside of itself, and plan on how to integrate all the TA components seamlessly to facilitate efficient execution. Read more about Key Success Factors (KSFs) in Talent Acquisition
Feel free to share your thoughts and insights on the importance of Talent Acquisition.
