This includes senior talent-focused roles including Heads of Talent, Employer Brand leaders and CHROs — we’ve seen them turning down roles at tier-one global companies because they are being offered more money and better benefits elsewhere — faster!

Many are also moving on because their teams are quitting, and they don’t feel they have the support they need.

The talent acquisition retention problem is real: if you can’t retain the people who source your talent, how can your business continue to recruit?

1. Make Time for Talent Mapping

Planning for future hires so that talent acquisition teams do not become overwhelmed is key. Let’s face it: it’s easy for talent acquisition teams to become overwhelmed. Advertising vacancies, sourcing candidates, taking the time out to screen or interview and even negotiating salaries — recruitment (done right) can be incredibly time-consuming.

Not to mention the ongoing issue of candidates ghosting recruiters or not even showing up after they have accepted an offer.

This is where talent mapping may help.

Many businesses use talent mapping to plan for short, medium and long-term hiring goals. In advance of live vacancies, by talent mapping, recruiters scour the market to identify the top talent in a given field.

Talent mapping helps to ensure that emergency hiring situations don’t leave companies powerless, waiting and hoping for the right candidates to apply. Chances are, when a company utilizes talent mapping, it has already identified a pool of candidates ready to go straight to interview.

The process also creates a reference for the internal talent you have, and the talent you are likely to need. By mapping the company structure, you can then identify the talent gaps you will eventually need to fill.

Talent mapping can also help support internal mobility with the current workforce. This research can highlight the areas companies can invest in training the team members who could eventually fill open roles and help support your TA team and drive retention. Identifying potential in the workplace and investing in career development, in turn, promotes employee engagement and positive company culture.

2. Reputation is Everything: Employer Brands Must Reflect a Good Candidate and Employee Experience

A good employer brand will attract the right candidates, but gaining a reputation for providing a poor candidate experience is likely to make life extremely difficult for your talent team.

When it comes to their experiences of applying for roles, people are likely to share freely, and this also includes online reviews. If talent finds your application process too long, complex or you don’t communicate well with candidates, then your employer brand reputation could be on the line. The same goes for your employees: they will also share their experiences, especially when the reality of working for a company is entirely different to the employer brand it presents to the outside world.

All of this together can impact the day-to-day success of your talent team, and over time could contribute to talent team career fatigue and retention problems.

A last note on employer planning and your talent team: all too often, employer branding doesn’t take into account all roles, including HR and talent acquisition functions. It’s important to look at what is important to these roles and to segment your messaging in favor of this. For example, in a fast-moving technology startup, talent acquisition specialists may get a unique opportunity to set up a one-of-a-kind tech team that disrupts the industry quickly.

If you want to build a business growth machine, you need to ensure the employer brand also appeals to the talent team. In the past, marketing teams have had the bandwidth to support EVP work, but they are stretched to the brink as well right now.

3. Consider Alternative Sourcing Models

When I speak to talent acquisition leaders, one of the top issues that come up is the lack of clarity surrounding resources. Overpromising resources only to have them never materialize is unfortunately quite commonplace, and all too soon talent leaders can feel isolated and overworked because they’re being spread too thin. Even the best-intended organizations are struggling with hiring recruiters and keeping the teams to support TA leaders.

There are tech leaders who’ve been told they can’t use agencies but need to get hundreds of people hired in complex roles before their Employer Value Proposition even exists. There are talent managers trying to source highly technical roles without enough information surrounding the skill set, all the while fighting for budget to meet their targets. There are HR teams that simply don’t have the time and expertise to get into sourcing, but often feel they don’t have the choice. There are also HR teams that want to build a relevant EVP, but don’t have marketing partner bandwidth.

Resources are often lacking, and outsourcing may be a big help.

Some organizations have been nervous about outsourcing and have been sitting on budget, waiting for the new year to spend it. It’s safe to say that the time is here to spend that budget to address attrition and compete in today’s truly complex hiring landscape.

An experienced Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) provider can offer expertise in recruiting highly sought-after roles, giving your in-house team assistance and support when they most need it. Today, RPO providers work in strategic, flexible partnerships with companies, becoming a seamless and flexible extension of your hiring team which can ebb and flow with demand.

Taking on a little support is not admitting defeat: it’s simply recognizing that today, talent acquisition has become much more difficult and much more time-consuming than ever before. In the race to become more strategic and more efficient with your resources, a bit of RPO may be just what is needed to make in-house teams feel supported and to master talent team retention.

Your leaders will appreciate your business acumen and your in-house teams will welcome the help.

The post 3 Ways to Master Talent Team Retention appeared first on RecruitingDaily.

It was a pleasure to celebrate Global Talent Acquisition Day speaking to such an engaging panel of talent acquisition leaders. Among Moderna’s April Eldred, Kathy Erickson of Financial Force, Shelley Jeffcoat of LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group and Tom Hopcroft, president and CEO of Mass Technology Leadership Council, we discussed the uncertainty the past 18 months have brought for talent acquisition functions. 

The complexities surrounding establishing achievable DEI goals, attrition, communicating values and culture and moving on from traditional but increasingly ineffective ways of recruiting were all debated. In a corresponding poll we conducted, it was found that 44 percent of talent leaders felt that their biggest challenge was sourcing talent fast enough, and the panel agreed. 

However, it’s fair to say that among such a great panel of talent acquisition leaders, the solutions and innovation discussed were by far the highlights. Here are five key takeaways that really stood out.

April Eldred

Vice President of Talent Acquisition, Moderna

“We know as a business that traditional ways of recruiting just aren’t going to get us where we need to go. The past year and a half has been a time of extraordinary growth. We ended 2019 with more than 800 employees, and today we have more than 1,800, having gone from one country to more than a dozen countries in that time. 

“To manage talent acquisition during this time, my team and I have used a data-led approach, looking at the market and at talent data. When you need to make a billion doses of a vaccine, and there are only so many people with a skill set that you need, it’s essential to find out where the skill sets live. We’ve leveraged data in order to differentiate and get in front of the right talent. It’s been extremely effective. We’ve been able to bring the business along on our journey, showing them the data, how we’re going to pivot and the results of our data-driven approach.

“Data is also fed into our online digital virtual event platform, which we’ve been using since the pandemic began to conduct interviews remotely. We can do pre-interview, Artificial Intelligence-driven candidate assessments so that we have the data we need in order to inform hiring decisions faster. 

“The digital virtual event platform itself has been a real differentiator. When you have hiring managers who need to hire dozens, if not hundreds, of people, and they have limited bandwidth for interviewing, the ability to host virtual interview rounds featuring branding and information for candidates is invaluable. It has allowed us to personally connect with a large volume of candidates whom we would not have been able to accommodate in-person via a seamless platform.”

Shelley Jeffcoat

Director of Employer Brand, LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group

“With the market saturated with more jobs than talent, we saw an opportunity to adjust how we’re looking at our internal talent pools. So often, the focus is on external candidates. We can prioritize internal mobility as another key focus of our recruitment strategy. Before you can do that, you need to be clear and authentic about who you are as an employer and then use your corporate differentiators (i.e., values, culture and employee offerings) to retain and grow the talent you have.

“In looking at the partnership between Talent Acquisition and DEI teams, it’s also essential to consider whether your DEI goals and initiatives are achievable when trying to hire the talent you need. If your goal is to hire 10 percent more diverse sales professionals, there needs to be a clearly articulated strategy to go along with that. For hiring managers, this may involve looking at expanding your recruiting channels to access diverse or niche talent pools, reviewing your interviewing practices and making sure employees have some level of transparency to these roles so that they can help drive an employee referral program.”

Kathy Erickson

Global Head of Talent Acquisition, FinancialForce

“It’s important to us to prove to our existing talent pool how much we value them within the company. We are dedicated to nurturing our existing workforce, as well as external candidates in this competitive environment, and if the internal candidate doesn’t get the job, it’s important to have the conversation with them even if it’s a difficult one so that they continue to feel valued. People are not expendable. 

“It’s this sort of transparency that is needed, and it applies to DEI as well. Companies need to measure their candidate slate to determine whether it is diverse, and if it’s not, they need to understand whether this is justified and if problems of bias need to be addressed. We’ve certainly got that transparency that allows me to get on a call with a hiring manager when I am alerted to any potential bias. We’re empowering our teams to make that call and to have these conversations to open up these challenges and address them intentionally.”

Tom Hopcroft

President and CEO of Mass Technology Leadership Council

“It may seem that there are a lot of structural barriers to having a diverse workforce, but DEI starts at the top. What do you as an organization stand for, starting with those in the C-suite and the boardroom all the way down through the organization? It can’t just be about signing a pledge for social justice; it’s about really making commitments and getting CEO or executive buy-in at the top. 

“Over the last few years, we’ve seen companies take DEI more seriously, and we’ve seen a real sea of change. But a good analogy is this: when the tide goes out, the rocks are all more visible. And we need to address those rocks, which go all the way back to our investment in education and addressing structural issues in the community. 

“Tech is not a very diverse sector, but the one thing about change is the opportunity it creates for innovation. There’s a big opportunity here to refresh tech organizations with a more diverse workforce and to do that, we need to initiate discussion.” 

A Final Word

Last, but not least, here are some final thoughts from me. The last year has brought significant uncertainty for talent acquisition functions. Employers have had to adapt quickly as budgets have been scaled back, only to have to get back up to speed faster than ever before.

Many businesses, especially tech businesses are looking to scale at unprecedented rates. Understandably, talent acquisition leaders are often unsure as to what hiring resource model to take in such an uncertain market. 

Building a flexible and resilient talent acquisition strategy that can weather uncertainty and scale up and down is paramount. In some businesses, there are so many open positions that hiring managers simply cannot handle the volume. Many of these companies are looking to Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) to help their internal talent teams focus on what they do best.

This type of flexible, future-proof model allows for the ebb and flow that companies truly need right now, lending agility when needed and scaling down if needed.

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