8 Reasons You Need a Talent Acquisition Strategy

Executive recruiting today can be a minefield or a motherlode

Let’s start with the minefield.

Worldwide reports tell us that 70% of business leaders believe the existing talent pool is shrinking (2018 Talent Acquisition 360).

Many key employment niches (lawyers, physicians, business executives, tech leaders, financial managers) are at 45-year low levels.  And more companies than ever are competing for your best employees.

Does your business have the tools and tactics needed to compete successfully in these “Candidate Attraction” games?

The rules are new.  Baby Boomers are retiring, leaving a huge gap in knowledge and leadership. Traditional recruiting methods are not effective quickly enough to address the rapid expansion of new technology.  Meanwhile, the number of FTEs (full time employees) continues to decline globally, due to attrition and the increasing participation of contingent labor (project-specific employees, independent contractors, consultants, and freelancers).

If your company hasn’t already encountered these challenges…it will.  Ninety percent of the 1,100 responses to Cielo’s 2018 global survey saw Recruiting and Retention as a top priority.  The pressure can only grow.

So how can this doom and gloom be construed as a Motherlode? Think Silver Linings.

Opportunities are there

Underneath all the negative pressure, opportunities to excel exist when you are the business best able to locate and lure the increasingly scarce asset of highly skilled talent.

For that, you need a Talent Acquisition Strategy.

It is important to differentiate a Talent Acquisition Strategy from traditional recruiting.  What we are talking about are “strategic, long range plans to make recruiting and hiring more efficient, effective and productive by using a continuous, forward thinking process.”

Having a recruiting strategy recognizes that discovering the best and brightest talent for your business is not a one-time-only event.  It is a series of both long- and short-term actions that identify, attract, present, evaluate and connect individual candidates to a particular business where a close fit of skills, values and cultures results in superior performance and work relationships.

Developing and managing a robust strategy for recruiting provides significant benefits for companies of all sizes and geographic locations.  Here are eight critical things you want your strategy to do:

1. Build stronger companies and foster teamwork where everyone understands the goals and embraces the priorities
2. Better attract top talent with skills, values and culture that most exactly fit the business’ short- and long-range environment
3. Anticipate recruiting and growth staffing needs (as well as wants) in advance of an actual job opening
4. Refine and clarify the company’s Employer Brand as a key basis of communication with potential employees
5. Target and locate the best talent pools relative to your specific needs over time
6. Enable the recruiting process to move more quickly and efficiently to fill vacancies and minimize disruption in the work process
7. Challenge employees to continually look for the best talent available
8. Foster sharing of company values, pride in performance and personal satisfaction.

There is hard work involved in the process of developing and implementing the strategy that is best for you.  To succeed, strategy development should start at the highest executive levels and incorporate the organization’s needs, vision, goals and operational realities.

Talent Acquisition Strategy development guidelines should be shared with a committee of employees organized to reflect the company culture and determine how the company will think, act, present, communicate and express its Employer Brand in the talent marketplace.

(NEXT:  Two key deliverables that transform the recruiting process)