Recruiting has undergone significant changes over the past twenty years.
The executive job market has been under strong pressure for several years and the advent of recruitment 2.0 with the democratization of social networks has redrawn the contours of a sector that has had to adapt.
But since 2020, the economic events caused by the Covid health crisis and the arrival of Millenials in the workforce have started a revolution. The Great Resignation movement is reaching beyond U.S. borders. The new generation is sensitive to new values when choosing an employer: diversity, mobility, telecommuting,
congruence of its employer brand, etc.
Recruitment, long the poor relation of Human Resources, has become a business issue.
The Talent Acquisition Manager has gained a voice in some Codir. He has become a key success factor. In a talent shortage market, recruiting the best candidates means taking them away from your closest competitors.
The technological environment has been transformed with the hegemony of social networks in our use of the Internet. Mobile access anywhere, anytime, has created an unlimited reservoir of data that is disrupting digital marketing. Talent Acquisition has quickly understood its interest and HR marketing
explodes.
In this rapidly changing environment, how do you build the Talent Acquisition teams of tomorrow?
Choose the right Talent Acquisition Manager
The differences between Talent Acquisition Manager and Recruitment Manager
The difference between a Recruitment Manager and a Talent Acquisition Manager goes far beyond the job title. We've seen this new name come up in startups, which are always fond of Anglo-Saxon sounding job names.
Recruiting talent is a strategic issue for a future scale up. Future unicorns are risking their survival if they do not manage to recruit the right skills quickly enough. They are great laboratories to observe the future of recruitment because they have the organizational flexibility to design new functions, with the sole objective of operational efficiency.
The recruitment manager is often a manager of a team of recruiters serving hiring managers. The strategic dimension of his or her position is reduced and he or she focuses on the operational side.
The Talent Acquisition Manager has a more strategic approach.
The 10 missions of the Talent Acquisition Manager
Here are the missions of the Talent Acquisition Manager in 2022:
- The employer brand
- Monitoring & Consulting
- Recruiting
- Strategy
- Outsourcing
- Segmentation of the pool
- KPI & Analytics
- Technology watch
- Compliance
- Process optimization
Employer branding has become a powerful recruitment lever. All the key elements used to make a candidate's decision are now in one place: The Internet. Reputation is made and broken with a few clicks and viral content. Talents read reviews (Google, Glassdoor) and consult social networks (LinkedIn) before applying to your company.
Monitoring and consulting are the benefits of a C-Level specialized in recruitment. The Talent Acquisition Manager brings to a company's management team the information that Human Resources Managers used to ask for from their recruitment providers:
- What are the market trends?
- What are the salaries for such a position?
He also offers his expertise on the entire recruitment process.
Operational recruiting is his area of focus. But that is only a small part of his job.
He/she decides on the strategy to be adopted to best meet the company's objectives. He must have the power to build his Talent Acquisition team.
It selects and manages partners. Outsourcing is often necessary to cope with the shortage of skills.
Segmenting the talent pool allows you to identify the skills present in the company. Having visibility on the people you can develop internally saves time and money. It is also a way to reduce turnover and increase the attractiveness of the company.
KPIs and data analysis are crucial to optimize recruitment processes.
HR tools provide data on all aspects of talent acquisition and management: sourcing, number of interviews, number of profiles contacted, number of requirements, number of employees hired, career management, candidate experience, etc.
The Talent Acquisition Manager is constantly on the lookout for new technologies.
The great versatility of the TAM will be a challenge for the constitution of tomorrow's Talent Acquisition teams. How can we successfully respond to all the changes?
The 6 pillars of tomorrow's Talent Acquisition team
Building the employer brand of the future
For a long time the preserve of marketing, employer branding has joined the ranks of Talent Acquisition with the advent of HR marketing.
Employer brand is an evolving concept as it depends on socio-demographic (Millennials, Gen Z, Boomers, etc.), technological (social networks), and sociological (telecommuting) factors.
Here are some figures that show the importance of employer branding in the recruitment process:
- 79% of candidates use social networks when looking for a job.
- 88% of millennials believe that being aligned with company culture is important.
- 84% of employees might leave their company for one with a better reputation.
- A company with a strong employer brand reduces its recruitment costs by 43%.
As you can see, employer branding is important and it is made or broken online.
Tomorrow's Talent Acquisition team will have one or more employees dedicated to employer brand maintenance.
Employer branding is based on many pillars:
- Community Management
- Diversity & Inclusion Management
- Press Relations
- Onboarding & Offboarding
- Employee Experience
- CSR
The employer brand manager will have to synthesize all these issues.
Inbound recruiting: the future of talent acquisition
Inbound recruiting is the adaptation of digital marketing techniques to recruitment: SEO, SEA, Content.
Developing an employer brand requires a presence on the Internet. Companies seek to be visible via their commercial, corporate and career sites. But they also develop blogs to use Google referencing as an acquisition channel.
Inbound recruiting is the application of digital marketing tactics to talent acquisition.
And content creation is multiplying with the rise of social networks. For a long time, social networks were reserved for lead acquisition and were underused by companies. We could see company pages with institutional content without flavor.
To engage millennials, you have to be authentic. You have to share your company culture, values, etc. Social networks are the perfect channel for this kind of content that values the exchange with real people.
Tomorrow's recruiting will be all about content. A complete content strategy can be created with candidates in mind.
Let's say you are a company that regularly hires IT developers.
The skills shortage is well known. If you're waiting for a job opening, you'll certainly have a hard time finding one and that can affect your business. But if you already have a community of developers interested in the content you regularly publish, you may have candidates. In any case, you will surely have a network ready to recommend you.
To properly target your content, you will need to create personas, which requires marketing skills.
The steps to create your candidate community can be very simple:
- Blog / Social networks
- Subscribe to a newsletter via a lead magnet
- Email sequence
The skills needed to develop an inbound recruiting strategy are numerous:
- SEO
- SEA
- Content creation
- Marketing
This strategy will be increasingly developed in the future.
Outbound recruiting: boosting talent acquisition with AI and RPA
Outbound recruiting is "classic" recruiting, i.e. actively seeking out talent.
The multiplication of candidate sources creates a problem that could hardly have been foreseen in the 90s: recruiters have too many candidates to contact. In 30 years, we have gone from a market where we could easily find active candidates but not passive ones to a job market where we have access to a majority of passive candidates who are not interested.
The shortage of candidates is mainly due to the reluctance of existing employees to change rather than a real lack of potential candidates.
Indeed, we can actively approach thousands of people on LinkedIn or contact hundreds of people who have left their CV on a CV library.
This paradox multiplies the time needed for sourcing where talent acquisition teams spend a lot of time approaching and qualifying.
The future is already AI.
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing candidate pre-qualification. In the United States, Eightfold is developing AI-based solutions to automate sourcing for its clients.
The company has a contract with the U.S. State Department to match veterans' skills with job openings.
Its AI is capable of boosting TTY and the company boasts that it has saved hours for AirAsia, one of its customers.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates repetitive tasks. They are perfect to help your recruitment:
- Multiposting of ads
- Search for candidates
- Sorting of applications
- Validation of supporting documents (diplomas, pay slips, etc.)
- Feedback on the progress of the recruitment process
The talent acquisition team of tomorrow will be able to intelligently implement recruitment automation. Even if they use external service providers, they will need to master the entire process to make it work.
Candidate assessment of the future, or predictive talent acquisition
Candidate assessment is also about to be revolutionized. Personality tests will soon be overtaken by the predictive capacity of Big Data. Until now, we lacked the means to tap the potential of these huge amounts of data collected. But today we have Artificial Intelligences that can do it for us.
The company Crystal Knows offers its clients the possibility to give the DISC profile of potential candidates by analyzing their online behavior.
Artificial intelligence allows you to perform predictive analysis on your own employees.
Talent assessment will be transformed when companies can assess the fit of candidates' personalities with their culture.
Candidate experience 2.0, talent retention
In the context of a real war for talent, candidate retention has become a crucial issue. But the candidate experience has changed with the evolution of the Internet.
While the web of the 2000's confined speech to a few forums, social networks have created an environment where we are all closer to each other. Everyone can send a private message or comment directly on the publication of a CEO or a public figure.
Our online experience is becoming increasingly personalized. Algorithms are getting users used to viewing content that is supposed to appeal to them. This is the concept of the information bubble first thought up by Eli Pariser in 2011.
Internet users' expectations are no longer the same and companies have started to adapt.
Career sites are starting to offer a personalized path for candidates.
This is the direction that the candidate experience will take in the future: chatbots that adapt their messages according to the person, job ads that will be different according to the candidates' profiles, email sequences adapted throughout the onboarding process, etc.
A simple example is the ability of an organization to share the right business information and values with the right candidates.
Imagine a computer developer and a salesman. The first is a vegetarian and an environmentalist. The second loves sports and competition. The arguments to interest one or the other will be different. Ideally, the company presentation should be written differently.
- The developer could have information about IT projects, the technical stack, and events in which the company has taken part (trade shows, for example). He would have an insert about the company's commitment to its "0 waste policy", and why not information that the company restaurant offers vegetarian menus.
- The salesperson would have information about the company's business strategy. He would have an insert with pictures of the last trip the top salespeople won last year. And another about the basketball team the company sponsors.
We already have all the data, we just need the solutions to use it. The candidate evolution
is just beginning its revolution.
Optimization of Talent Acquisition processes
The final pillar of the Talent Acquisition team of tomorrow is process optimization.
The use of robots and AI will free up time.
By using the data, KPIs and metrics at its disposal, the TAM will be able to generate substantial savings.
This time will be used to spend more time on what will always make the difference in recruitment: the meeting of two people.
If today's recruiters are all overworked, we can hope that current technological developments will allow them to focus on meeting candidates.
Tomorrow's Talent Acquisition teams will be composed of specialists (inbound recruiting, HR marketing, analytics, Big Data, etc.). Depending on the company's objectives, the Talent Acquisition Manager will have to choose to internalize resources (permanent employees), or to use service providers (firms, ESN, Freelancers, RPO, etc.).
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