Statistics indicate that quality candidates are on the market for only ten days. On the other hand, the average time to hire is close to 24 days and rising. These two statistics are surprising given the rising attrition rates and the number of candidates entering the tech talent market each year, thus implying a disconnect among talent stakeholders in reading the market and existing talent sourcing strategies.
Our research indicates that a key aspect most recruitment teams fail to master – and one which forms the basis of any talent sourcing strategy – is the optimization of the applicant inflow pipeline.
A solid Applicant Inflow Pipeline helps HR teams fill specialized roles, boost enterprise productivity, reduce talent acquisition costs and time to hire for a role. As a recruiter, you always need to work upon several recruitment stages carefully designed to engage the candidate but also provide you with every bit of information needed.
Employee retention rates are plummeting while the talent demand-supply gap increases every month, making it difficult for HR to arrive at an efficient process that drives in quality talent. At a crucial time like this, it is important for HR to look beyond traditional applicant inflow pipelines and optimize them to suit the hyper-digital world of 2022.
The process of optimizing the applicant inflow pipeline goes through three distinct steps.
Each of these steps contributes to reducing employee attrition, increasing internal mobility, and ensuring the skills relevancy of employed talent. This would ultimately lead to lower demand for applicants in the future.
Increase Applicant Inflow
One of the early mistakes recruiters make while increasing the Applicant Inflow is diving into the same-old talent pool they’ve used for years. They usually avoid feeder industries and talent hotspots that are specifically associated with the talent pool they want. They also tend to overlook adjacent talent that has the potential to fill the role with some reskilling efforts.
Let us take the example of a sample role in this case.
Relevance of Feeder Industries & Talent Hotspots:
If an enterprise wants to hire a software engineer from the IT Industry in USA, they will be limited by 44% of talent that comes from this specific industry. However, if they are to look beyond IT and access feeder industries such as BFSI, Telecommunications, Media, and more, the pool grows by another 66%, thus significantly widening the talent pool..
With remote/hybrid models of work increasingly penetrating industries, hiring local talent might not always be fruitful. For example, a company in San Antonio, USA cannot hire quality software engineer talent in their region due to the lower availability of this group. Hence, it becomes a necessity to look beyond and pick up talent from hotspots such as Austin, Dallas, San Francisco, and more.
Relevance of Adjacent Talent:
It has been consistently proven that adjacent talent is the key to winning the talent war in 2022. The relevance of adjacent talent is established the moment we realize there’s a shortage of talent for specific roles in Applicant Inflow Pipelines globally. To beat this shortage, it becomes crucial to hire talent that can be reskilled to the role of your choice.
For example, an Applications developer or Java developer can easily be reskilled into a Software Engineer in a timeframe of 6 months with specific courses and pathways designed. Hence, it is not a necessity to hire software engineers if they can be created in-house through adjacent talent, as explained in this case study.
Optimize Candidate screening
Apart from the traditional recruitment checklists, employers need to understand what skills the candidate consists of and how those will help the organization. This is where skills-based hiring and use of talent intelligence come into the Applicant Inflow Pipelines. Replacing the “degree-based approach to recruitment” is the need of the hour as skills-based hiring can help fill jobs quickly, retain talent, and diversify an organization’s talent pipeline.
However, skills-based hiring needs to be executed with a strict process that includes:
- Identifying Skills Requirements for present and future.
- Improving Job Descriptions with a focus on skillsets.
- Leveraging websites/portals for maximum reach.
- Screening candidates & conducting assessments.
- Interviewing and hiring the chosen candidates
A faster way to enable skills-based hiring is through the use of talent intelligence tools. TA tools of 2022 are transforming the way we looked at recruitment five years ago.
From Job aggregators to Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and CRM tools, talent intelligence is reinventing traditional recruitment by infusing the power of AI and ML with data.
Talent Intelligence Platforms such as Draup excel at identifying skilled talent and ways to integrate them with the organization keeping D&I in the picture, thus offering a complete talent check.
Develop Internal Mobility Pipelines
Internal mobility is a critical element of an organization’s talent strategy. Internal mobility arms HR execs with tools to identify their employees’ skill sets and deploy this talent pool to where they are needed the most.
Encouraging a culture of internal mobility not only elevates your employees to greater levels of work, but it also supports their career growth and development. With a strong internal mobility program, companies can shift resources to where they’re most needed. They can do so without the costs and delays associated with a traditional external recruiting process.
Mobility programs are crucial to retaining talent. 81% of talent professionals agree that internal mobility improves retention as most organizations lose over USD 400,000 annually in recruiting.
Some of the major benefits of fostering internal mobility in Applicant Inflow Pipelines include:
- Lower talent acquisition costs
- IP protection due to fewer talent leaving
- Stronger leadership teams comprising of people who’ve risen through the ranks.
- Greater employee engagement & retention
To explore more on this topic, join Vijay Swaminathan, CEO & Co-Founder of Draup, for a breakfast event on April 21st 2022 as we collaborate with HR leaders to discuss the challenges, best practices, and data-backed strategies for refining your talent inflow pipeline.
Draup is an AI-powered talent intelligence platform that delivers HR leaders with data-backed insights into the global talent pool, cost modeling, and reskilling pathways suitable to manage talent faster and drive company-wide reskilling initiatives or hire quality talent.
