Articles 
As CHRO or CEO, a talent shortage is a direct constraint on your ability to execute your strategy. Maintaining relevance requires a different set of skills than those of the past. These new skills are in demand not only by traditional competitors, but also by new talent competitors, such as big tech firms. The employer-employee relationship has changed, as highly-skilled professionals now have the power to decide who they want to work for and on what terms.
Becoming a Magnet for Top Talent
With many organizations going after the same high-potential candidates, it has become critical for companies to adopt a more proactive approach to recruiting instead of relying on outdated techniques such as “post and pray”. Employer brand is one of the strongest recruiting weapons an organization can have in its arsenal: today’s candidates are spending much more time investigating potential employers: they want to know what working for them is really like and what others are saying about them. Having a mobile-optimized career site that showcases your company’s brand and culture, as well as career opportunities, is a good start, but leading organizations across all sectors are taking it one step further and leveraging technology to activate high-impact recruitment marketing campaigns that help cut through the noise and remain front-of-mind for top talent.
With this goal in mind, Philips leveraged Avature to drive improvements across its recruitment strategy, from branding to talent pool conversion rates. Today, Philip’s email performance metrics (such as open and click-through) are almost twice as high as the industry average. The organization sourced over 2300 candidates for their top pipelines in the last year, with the Healthcare (Quality & Regulation) talent pool growing by 225% thanks to a holistic recruitment marketing campaign. You can read more about their success here.
Faced with low brand recognition in the US market, ABB chose Avature CRM to support their multi-pronged strategy to become an employer of choice for engineers. They leveraged Avature’s email functionality, scheduled actions and automatic customization to create a personalized experience for each email recipient. They also created a branded talent portal with Avature to encourage interested candidates to join their talent pool. Less than two years after launching the campaign, ABB’s LinkedIn Talent Brand Index nearly doubled, giving the company an advantage when reaching out to new candidates. You can get more details on their strategy in the full customer story.
Adapting to the New Normal
Adopting a more flexible, fluid and agile mindset that aligns your propositions with your candidates’ expectations will help you stand out from your competitors. It’s worth taking the time to identify what top talent looks for in an organization, as well as in the workplace. You might have historically focused on creating full-time positions and attracting someone with the specific skills you’re looking for to work long-term. However, offering short-term, project-based positions might help attract dynamic talent that prioritizes flexibility over the stability of a permanent role.
Tapping Into the Power of People Analytics
As most of you know, people analytics is a complex business. The majority of organizations have disparate systems, making it difficult to collect and review data, and to acquire the necessary insight to inform these companies’ people strategy. Resolving this issue is business-critical, as TA teams in outperforming companies are leveraging single platform solutions to identify the talent and skills gaps within their workforce.
For those that can take advantage of it, there’s another huge opportunity: internal mobility. In addition to lowering attrition and increasing engagement, there are numerous benefits to promoting and re-engaging top performers in new business areas. Developing your workforce and equipping them with news skills and capabilities minimizes risk by making them more agile, knowledgeable and invested in your organization. Having clear talent visibility and oversight allows you to start building powerful talent pools and pipelines that consist of both internal and external candidates.
Achieving Total Talent Management
Those that are truly leading the field are the ones that have taken their internal analysis to the next level by starting to consider the more sophisticated concept of total talent management: how to develop a strategy that supports their business with the right people, whether they’re full-time employees or external, contingent workers.
Getting to that point requires overcoming specific hurdles. Firstly, how do you ensure that your organization has the visibility of external employees? Currently, for cost-, risk- and compliance-related reasons, procurement teams, rather than talent acquisition teams, tend to own the contingent piece. This divide creates silos and limits the flow of information and visibility that TA functions have. Reorganizing responsibilities and aligning contingent practices with permanent employees’ practices is the first step towards succesful total talent management.
Next comes the issue of how to curate the talent you’re leveraging on a contingent basis. Rather than relying on vendors to meet short-term talent needs, leading companies worldwide are adopting a direct-sourcing strategy by cultivating an engaged talent pool of temporary workers. Download our free Leveraging a Total Talent Strategy e-book for useful best practices, such as how to get strong candidates to join your community, use your company culture to keep them engaged, and encourage hiring managers to evaluate contingent workers on a project-by-project basis so you can easily identify your top workers for the future.
As we’re faced with the uncertainty of what the future might hold, it’s easy to look to technology for a quick fix that will help you navigate the unknown. But it’s not just about installing a shiny new system. You must take the time to truly understand your business so you’re in the best position to develop a solution that will output exactly what you need. Prioritizing agile technology that can flex to meet your specific needs as they change over time is the most assured way you’ll be able to activate the strategy you want to execute.
