By Gary Berney
More than 90% of C-suite, HR, procurement and business leaders now want to be part of the total talent acquisition strategy for their companies. This is a big change in 3 years since the last Cielo talent acquisition 360.
Talent acquisition is now a strategic business priority and the emphasis in the report is on quality of hires. Achieving the best ‘quality of hire’ for a company was the near-unanimous metric for measuring success. How you define quality of hire should include retention rates, ROI, time to productivity plus any specific business needs which are individual to a company.
With this in mind, the report says HR should be looking for technology that can improve quality of candidates. Technology is vitally important but HR feel inundated with new tech providers. The report suggests they need to focus on the tech that helps them deliver their main priority – quality hires. This requires HR to look at technology that provides great communication tools to help drive the best candidate experience.
HR have to date relied on their ATS to help with this priority, but an ATS is designed to help HR with candidate workflow. It was not designed as a candidate comms tool. Companies should look beyond their ATS to improve communication and quality of hire.
The report also indicates that HR should also be looking beyond their reliance on email to communicate with candidates or employees, using Social Media, video or text for more fruitful conversations. HR need to think more deeply about the candidate experience with, for instance, a third of candidates looking to apply for roles via mobile nowadays.
The report concludes with talk of a total talent acquisition strategy which requires identification of all forms of Talent Acquisition – your website, referrals, social media, job sites etc and to ensure HR have mapped out the most successful and productive ways to deliver business goals.
Leaders in all of the business functions surveyed now agree that retaining talent is a core business driver and that they want to play a more active role in talent acquisition decisions, a clear indication of the increasing pressure to align talent acquisition and retention with business goals.
Those in HR who identify the best of talent acquisition technology will certainly find themselves at an advantage in the market when is comes to finding talent and hitting their company’s business goals.
