The 2020/21 pandemic made it paramount for organizations to reevaluate their talent acquisition strategies. The most profound change has been technological. As per a survey, more than 20% of the global workforce mainly worked remotely and was just as effective. A change in the way they work means that there will be a change in how we acquire talent.
Talent acquisition involves investing in the growth of your human capital, motivating them, developing and retaining them. Talent acquisition additionally involves a multi-pronged approach as mentioned below:
Boomerang strategy – It identifies and brings back former employees. The company can recognize ex-employees with excellent performance records and generate an influential RoI if brought back. Case-in-point, after trying to revive their product roadmap and finding no success, Meta resolved differences with its CPO, Chris Cox, and restored their product roadmap.
Early career talent strategy – It is a process of making a database of universities and colleges to understand talent to refer later. For example, Miami Dade College partnered with SoftBank and Correlation One to expand access to data science and in-demand careers such as cybersecurity, cloud computing, and more.
Less momentum startups strategy – As per Draup’s analysis, 75% of the startups fail to gain the right momentum. Companies can track these startups with little momentum to track the available talent in analytics, AI, and big data skills. This database can help in designing a proper talent acquisition messaging.
Talent for easy-to-learn digital skills strategy – Several skills will become easier to learn with the emergence of digital services & solutions. Returning mothers and other population segments can learn these skills quickly. There had been programs to target such talent segments with a broader range of skills, but we must be specific on the skills to train.
Alternative industry strategy – There is a refresh of jobs everywhere. Many people have quit their jobs, but we can target talent differently. We can target people with specific skills and provide them with digital literacy to reskill them. For instance, we can bring former nurses to manage the employee advocacy aspect within health plan management in large companies.
Job role reimagining strategy – We must relook at jobs to hire differently. Rather than finding an actuary with a data science background, we can employ one data scientist who works with a team of actuaries. We can have a Robotics COE that works with multiple warehouses instead of scaling talent across all locations with the emergence of the cloud.
Improving Talent Acquisition Processes
Acquiring the right talent by leveraging artificial intelligence will be the top priority for competitive and forward-looking organizations. Let us understand:
The continued rise of data-driven talent acquisition
Today’s talent acquisition teams have data-driven mindsets and the requisite technology to enable their organizations to execute data-driven talent acquisition strategies.
Talent acquisition teams use real-time analytics and insights from pipeline growth metrics and offer acceptance rates (by team, department, and location) to the quality, hiring cost, and candidate feedback scores. It helps them in the short term to reduce/eliminate manual work and improve critical areas and in the long term attract, hire, and engage the best talent.
The increasing importance of automated nurturing
Candidate nurturing is a key facet to data-driven talent acquisition due to the dated, ineffectual, and unsustainable approach to building relationships when companies manually email leads and move them through the recruitment funnel.
In 2022 and beyond, automated nurturing will eliminate the needless complexity and inefficiency of manual communications and ensure you provide a personalized touch with your team’s candidate outreach.
A heightened focus on employee engagement
With The Great Resignation continuing into the end of 2021, in 2022 and beyond, distributed workforces will remain commonplace, making it vital for companies with a hybrid workforce to modify their employee engagement efforts.
Companies will ensure that employees, regardless of location, feel seen and heard by colleagues and managers, understand the value they bring and set up for success – a potential competitive differentiator.
A renewed focus on improving workers’ wellbeing
As mental health and employee wellbeing will focus on business leaders and talent acquisition teams, there is a focus on mental health and wellness. They must be flexible to employees’ needs as it is crucial to workers’ wellbeing, which is essential for companies to thrive today.
The growing need to prioritize internal mobility
With 9 in 10 talent acquisition leaders saying that 10% of their companies’ open roles can be filled internally, they must prioritize internal mobility. It is harder to hire well-qualified candidates in a highly competitive job market, and they must retain existing employees.
This means they must entice their workforce to stick around with reskilling and upskilling to avoid turnover and alleviate the ‘churn.’
Along with this, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion will also be a focal point in 2022 and beyond. Talent acquisition must offer stipends for certifications (analytics/graphic design/management) or conduct in-house training (like mentorship programs). Business leaders must offer plentiful opportunities for employees to grow their skillsets to enhance their ability to move up within the organization.
Talent acquisition seems like an imperfect journey, so talent acquisition must leverage AI-based talent intelligence to deep dive into candidate persona. Talent intelligence platforms like Draup analyses and evaluate the underlying talent attributes across firms, industries, individuals, and regions to make talent acquisition decisions.
Draup provides accurate data sets, expertly analyzed data points with tailor-made reports and insights to make talent acquisition a seamless experience.
