Agile Recruitment or Talent Acquisition is a part of Agile HR and companies like IBM, General Electric, and a few more have started practicing it in real-time. War for high potentials (HiPos); rapidly changing needs of today’s talent (aka candidates), technology disruption, failure of traditional recruitment practices to hire the right talent within the cycle time, hybrid multi-generational workforce, and other internal and external factors mandate organization leaders and HR professionals to adopt a ‘from-to’ shift mindset to unlearn the traditional practices and embrace & learn contemporary practices (like lean agile methodology, growth hacking, and new interview techniques) that harness recruitment or talent acquisition agility.
Transforming the talent acquisition function is not just limited to: articulating a high-level strategy, breaking it down into quarterly/monthly goals to achieve desired outcomes, redefining team roles, implementing new ways to attract talent, practicing lean-agile principles & values, and adopting new metrics to evaluate the process.
Meaningful and successful transformation begins with assessing the current state of talent acquisition function, defining the challenges and opportunities for improvement, mapping the future state, and building a case for change. Then, the leadership team needs to explicitly communicate the reason for talent acquisition transformation to the entire team and provide assurance that they together with the team will embark on this journey. Business leaders, talent acquisition leaders, and other key stakeholders on the top level need to be role models and coach their team toward achieving value-driven outcomes (hiring the right talent, positive relationship and engagement with candidates, reduced cycle time, etc).
Infusing agility and transforming talent acquisition function mandates organizations to focus on their people’s (leaders and teams) mindsets, as it is the mindset that drives thoughts, learning, behaviors, and actions. The four mindsets that are imperative for talent acquisition team agility are –Growth Mindset (one of the Agile PeopleOps Framework (APF) manifesto)
Business leaders and HR/talent acquisition leaders need to realize the value of these mindsets, ensure that they practice them, and coach their teams to models these mindsets. It’s important to note that the case for change (including the current and future state) can serve as a reference point to identify leaders and their teams’ current mindsets and the mindsets they need to develop to foster agility.
Part 2 of this article will cover the what and why of the first two mindsets and part 3 will be about the last two mindsets. Stay tuned!
Interested to conduct recruitment or talent acquisition learning & development sessions at your premises for your team? Book your schedule at https://culturelligence.com/contact-us/. Thank you.
