Talent sourcing in 2022 has evolved into a completely different exercise, and is commonly viewed as both a challenge and opportunity. You see, if you’re on the path of ‘we need new talent’… as a means of reactionary backfilling of roles or undertaking the ‘same old’ style of recruitment, there’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong.
Today, I’m taking on a topic that is raised frequently by our clients: where can I find the talent my business needs now, and as a means of building a reliable, quality pool of workers and skills for the future of my business?
But first, let me set things straight: there’s no silver bullet. There’s no single portal, or social media site, or platform, or recruiter that’s going to solve this – sometimes ubiquitous – issue.
What’s required is more strategic, more considered, and an approach that is truly custom fit to the needs of your business. Make no mistake.
And so, I’ve decided to address this issue by providing you with my top 6 talent sourcing ‘secrets’. You’re right, they’re not secrets – but they may as well be. Remarkably, most organisations are failing to adopt these 2022 strategies for finding the skills their business needs. Which doesn’t bode well for their future success.
But you, on the other hand, will have the edge if you take these secrets onboard. Okay, here goes with the first 3 of the top 6 talent sourcing secrets…
Talent Sourcing Secret #1 – It’s a Candidate’s Market
Sure, this statement doesn’t, of itself, provide you with a guide as to how you’re going to land the skills you need now or into the future.
However, it does suggest that you need to change gears or recalibrate your approach to reach the people and skills your business needs.
You see, with a small number of workers holding key skills in Australia, there’s real competition out there. The effort to find this talent is costly – both in your time and your financial outlay.
As a result, the focus is now on the talent. Not on your needs. It’s on treating candidates like customers, on giving candidates a great experience of your brand, so they want to work with you. Quality talent now pick your organisation to work with, as opposed to you simply choosing them. It’s a candidate-driven market. The power has shifted.
This applies to all categories of talent: contract, SOW, contingent, part-time, FTE.
Just on the point of the candidate experience, there’s a multitude of knock-on effects when you create a positive experience for candidates. Check out these numbers from Kelly Services:
Benefits of a Positive Candidate Experience
My advice? Take stock of your approach to the candidate market and adjust accordingly.
Talent Sourcing Secret #2 – Build a Talent Pool
Again, building a talent pool is no magic solution. Once established and nurtured, however, it will prove a windfall for your hiring success.
A talent pool is a central repository of candidates an organisation grows over time, to tap into as needed. These candidates come from a variety of sources: they previously applied for roles with your organisation; they were silver medallists in a job application with your organisation; they’re a referral; they’re an inbound candidate through your website, your careers page, your social media channels or similar.
As communications and HR processes are increasingly digitised, it makes logistical and strategic sense to establish a pool of talent for your business. If you miss out on a quality hire (FTE or contractor), keeping them in your sphere of engagement over time pays dividends.
The other obvious benefit is this: the time-saving simplicity of being able to tap into a trusted, quality database of skills when your business needs it is hard to put a value on. It’s not only the cost savings you’ll enjoy, it’s a lack of stress, a speedier time-to-hire and time-to-productivity, and zero recruitment marketing costs.
Of all my secrets on this topic, I’d say this one is potentially the most lucrative.
The important issue with building a talent pool is this: it’s a long-game, so don’t rush it. Have a specific criteria for candidates to qualify. Undertake a quality check on the candidates before adding them. Keep them engaged in your external HR marketing comms, and categorise them by skills or department, so your comms are relevant and engaging. And never take them for granted.
How do we do it? Through Workforce Exchange. CXC engages with 10,000 contractors every year across over 300 corporate organisations. What happens when a contractor finishes their assignment? They have the option of being put into a constantly growing pool of qualified, proven workers. When one of our clients has a talent need, CXC simply looks through our 15,000 contractor profiles to find an appropriate resource.
As these contractors are ‘known talent’, they have already the proof that they can do the job, are quicker to onboard and have already gone through our extensive background checking process.
Talent Sourcing Secret #3 – HR Analytics
Data-driven decision making is prevalent across almost all departments in forward-thinking organisations today. And no industry is immune.
The ability to tap into fact-based evidence for decision making, rather than based on opinion, intuition or observation, is powerful in a HR and talent context. It’s a growing trend, with data coming from all corners of the organisation. HR teams are now gathering and analysing data across the full spectrum of HR and people functions, including employee and non-employee engagement, performance, recruitment, management, retention, rehiring and more. Powerful stuff.
But where does the data come from? HR analytics data comes from any one or all of your HRIS systems: your Applicant Tracking System, your Performance Management System, your Managed Supplier Program, your Recruitment Marketing Platform. In addition, as long as you’re tracking your web, careers site, and social media activity, the analytics from these sources, in relation to your HR marketing activity, are also very powerful.
In respect of talent sourcing, HR analytics is a reasonably recent trend. But as HR technology continues to evolve, the opportunity to capitalise on HR data is game-changing.
Think about when your organisation hasn’t found the people it needs. Your hiring efforts are reaping very little, and yet you have no insight as to why. It’s impossible to improve or fix your approach without factual insights. It’s for this reason that data-driven recruiting is on the rise.
As the labour market is increasingly competitive, if you can start to gather, analyse and lean on the data that is readily available to you, your ability to find the talent and skills your business needs will be vastly improved.
Finally on this secret, there’s a host of valuable side-benefits from analysing your HR data. Here are just a few:
- You can create programs to improve employee retention or contractor reengagement.
- You can improve the efficiency of your recruitment efforts, by identifying vacancies borne from succession planning, and from forecasting the future needs of your business. This is especially so for high-demand skills where contractors are the best option for plugging skills gaps.
- Analyse contractor performance, consistency of pay scales, ROI and more.
- Build criteria for all categories of workers to be eligible for inclusion in your talent pool.
- Get a better handle on your talent and HR supply chain margins, supplier KPIs and ROI.
- Improve your ability hire the skills your business needs now, and looking forward.
Once again this applies to all categories of talent: FTE, contingent, SOW, contract, the works.
Next week, we’ll cover the next 3 talent sourcing secrets for 2022. And we’ll show you how contingent workers play a role in the skills shortage and acquisition paradigm. Look out for it! And finally, if you’ve got any feedback on your approach or experience with talent sourcing in today’s market, you can contact me here, or leave a message for me here.
