Earlier this month over 500 talent acquisition professionals attended Talent Connect Australia (scroll down to see the highlights from Twitter).
The day was packed with speakers sharing their stories and tips for overcoming your most pressing recruiting challenges. In no particular order, here are seven challenges and their corresponding solutions:
1. Your hiring managers doubt your in-house direct sourcing skills.
Challenge your team to find more and better-qualified candidates than anyone else.
“Leverage the internal knowledge your recruiters have of the business to identify key success factors for a role and only assess against these.” – Susan Bor, SVP Talent Acquisition, SAP
Start in a select geography or function and prove success.
“Buy-in came from proving results. We started with select markets: Singapore, China and Germany. At the same time, we built out our internal recruiting team in the U.S.” - Amy McKee, Senior Director, Global Talent Acquisition, Autodesk
2. Your recruiters resist change because it requires more work.
Incentivize: make it a game, e.g., an employee referral competition. Recognize success publicly on a leader board.
Educate: updated profiles engage candidates and promote your talent brand - the result is less work overall.
Be transparent and realistic: LinkedIn may not be the answer for everything all of the time, and not every employee will value it the same way.
“You can zero in on the right candidates much more quickly with LinkedIn, and that saves a ton of time.” - Amy McKee, Senior Director, Global Talent Acquisition, Autodesk
3. You’re not sure if your efforts are producing better-quality hires.
Identify key success factors for a role and only measure against those factors. For example:
- Did the new hire ramp up faster/same/slower?
- Did the new hire hit his sales quota?
- Is the new hire still with the company after x months/years?
“Be relentless and intentional on the quality of candidate.” - Susan Bor, SVP Talent Acquisition, SAP
4. You have a distant relationship with Marketing.
Know why recruiting should matter to marketers. Candidates are potential clients, customers, competitors, and joint venture partners.
Focus on where you can combine efforts. For instance, you can identify top performers to help Marketing draft a story. You can map the employee lifecycle to help Marketing engage at key touch points.
“Joint execution is critical – Marketing and HR teams must go to market together.” - Danielle Bond, Aurecon’s Head of Marketing and Communications, elaborating on her company's successful Marketing-HR dynamic.
5. Your recruiters don’t use data enough.
Show what’s in it for them. They’ll be more efficient because of better-informed strategies, and they’ll be happier because hiring managers will respect them more.
Demonstrate how simple it can be. LinkedIn Recruiter delivers talent pools and Talent Brand Index measures employer brands – in seconds.
“Only 15% of talent acquisition leaders believe they do data-driven recruiting well.”- Will Hamlin and Josh Coulson, LinkedIn.
6. You have a tiny budget but need big results quickly.
Recruitment functions are being asked to do more with less: 41 percent of surveyed companies in Australia expect their hiring volumes to increase but only 26 percent of companies expect their budgets to increase.
Try the “Follow” button to increase engagement.
“We went from zero followers to over 3,600 in just a few months. The ROI was about 400%.” - Duncan MacKay, National Manager, Recruitment & Sourcing, Superpartners
“We realized our ROI more quickly going from 15,000 followers to 50,000 in a short time.”- Charlie Milne, Head of Recruitment and Sourcing, Westpac Group
Use “Update Me” to get notified of candidates’ profile changes.
“We’ve set up alerts based on the specific skills we’re looking for.” – Adam Buxton, Head of Recruitment, AMP
7. Your employees first look for new roles outside the company rather than within.
Make internal options more visible and accessible.
Celebrate success stories to combat the “fear of poaching” mindset.
Ensure the internal experience is easier and better than the external experience.
“You need to foster a culture in which internal movement is more important than external recruitment.” - Susan Bor, SVP Talent Acquisition, SAP
And in case you missed it, we unveiled CheckIn, a simple way to collect and manage candidate information at live events.
Missed our Australian conference? Talent Connect Las Vegas (Oct 15-17) and Talent Connect London (Oct 23-24) will be here before you know it. Hope to see you there!
Topics: Quality of hire Talent Connect
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