CHANGES IN TALENT SOURCING

Talent Acquisition is a “strategic approach” to identify, attract and on-board top talent
to efficiently and effectively meet dynamic business needs. Businesses are gradually lining up
talent acquisition as one element of a wider talent management strategy, attached from other
basic HR disciplines. Organizations are being regularly faced with challenges with recruiting
good talent quickly that too in a market which lacks talent. Proper recruitment activities and
system will need to be followed by managers in order to attract the right talent at the right time.

Talent Acquisition is the besieged recruitment/acquisition of high performing groups.

Organizations are now hiring “talent acquisition” specialists whose work is to approach and
recruit high performing groups from competitors. This role although similar to a traditional
recruiter carries greater prominence and significance to a business. An organization has to
develop talent acquisition strategies which appeal to top candidates in order to employ them.
They also have to sourcing plans that includes social media and employer branding.
Recruitment technology that not only reaches candidates but also that evaluates analytics of
those candidates has to be developed. It is important to identify the right individuals who will
change the company, and build widespread talent recruitment plans that join business goals
and talent objectives.

In the present difficult recruitment market, Organizations face quick changes and
unknown changing aspects. There is a big gap between the skill sets required and the skill sets
received.
Organizations receive a huge number of applications for some positions in the
organization and an absence of skilled candidates for others. The influence of employing the
incorrect candidate cannot be overstated. At the same time, Organizations are under
tremendous pressure to increase their productivity and reduce costs. At this point it is valuable
to determine how talent acquisition is seen as different from recruitment.

Recruitment is the sub set of Talent Acquisition and includes the activities of sourcing,
screening, interviewing, assessing, selecting and hiring. Recruitment is essentially filling an
available position when a person leaves or is shifted to another function. Recruitment process
ends when a suitable candidate is found who is skilled for the job in question and is involved
in the job. Talent Acquisition is a far more difficult and complex process. It is considered as a
more practical approach and complete way to search for talent that will provide to the whole
business success of the organization.

Talent Acquisition requires good networking ability to be able to go after the right
talent, who are top performers who are not dynamically looking for a change in their job.
Therefore, talent acquisition is the corporate employing chant for high level hires today.

Objective

 To understand the changing dynamics of talent acquisition.

 To understand the talent acquisition process and its effectiveness
 To understand whether the new procedures are successful or not
 To check whether candidates are happy with the newer techniques of talent acquisition.
 To understand the gaps that exists between existing skills and required skills.
Talent is the ancient power that facilitates the success of any organization. Lacking
extraordinary talent, businesses cannot,

 Compete with competitors

 Increase productivity
 Increase capital/profits
 Make iconic products

Present shortage of talent is affecting all businesses of all sizes, at all locations of any
financial position. In the present scenario businesses want to hire, develop and maintain
extraordinary talent to endure competitive advantage.

Other than recruitment Talent Acquisition is inclusive of different strategic elements:

 Talent Acquisition Planning and Strategy – ensure the alignment of business,
examines workforce plans, labour market understanding required, and global
considerations to be looked at.
 Workforce Segmentation – requires knowledge of different workforce segments and
the various positions within these segments, as well as skills, competencies, and
experience required for success.
 Employment Branding – includes activities which would help uncover, articulate and
define an organizations
image, culture, key differentiators, reputation and the various products and services. This
helps advance the market position of organizations, and helps attract quality candidates
and depict what it is to truly to work for that organization.
 Candidate Audiences – it is important to understand and define the audiences in which
an organization needs to source for specific roles. Based on the understanding of the
jobs and where the audiences will come from to fill them, different sourcing strategies
should be applied.
 Candidate Relationship Management – It is important to be able to build a positive
candidate experience, manage candidate communities, and maintain relationship with
candidates not selected.
 Merits and Analytics – is the continuous tracking and use of key metrics to improve
continuously and to ultimately improve the quality of hire.

The morphing face of Talent Acquisition

Talent Management solution sources have developed to meet the growing and changing
needs of HR organizations. This makes the technological assessment and selection procedure
a little more challenging; increase of talent acquisition systems allows organizations to
execute a comprehensive solution to meet their unique needs. Some basic dynamics related
with present talent acquisition procedure by some vendors includes:
 Paper resume replacement: Most of the organizations today have moved from paper to
an electronic or online applicant tracking system, solution sources are integrating job-
matching kits to increase quality of candidates hired. Technology is also helping to analyze
and clarify best matched candidates.
 Social media applications: All organizations want to utilize popular applications and
sites such as: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter- to locate and hire potential job
candidates.
 Human resource management systems and third-party service integration: In the past
few years a lot of money and time has been spent by organizations in order to evaluate
 HRMSs and other matching software services. In order to reserve that investment, any
new talent acquisition solution should be capable to communicate data and be able to
compete with remaining technology.
 Contact management capabilities: Now days most of the applications can come from
various sources, they do not have to be known to the company or employees of the
company previously. It is important to make way for all applications in spite of their
origin.

Talent Acquisition and its Performance

In spite of changing Talent Acquisition aspects, the loyalty of the following steps cannot
be ignored:

 An Agile Talent Acquisition function: Agility is “how efficiently and effectively an

organization can respond to changes in the marketplace, how efficiently they can identify
recruiting spaces, and how accurately the right people can be lined up in the right places.
Companies should appear for diversity in their approach and procedures.
Employer Branding: Determine a clear employer product and coordinate that strategy
both internally and externally. This will increase an organizations capability to get to know
talent and appeal to them. A well-known brand with clear vision and goals appeals to
candidates.
 Strategic adoption of social media: Social media endures to shock how candidates are
sourced, involved, and hired. The whole scenario is now shifting from how jobs are
vaunted to how candidates apply.
 Mapping talent acquisition with performance management: In today’s scenario talent
hired has to not only increase its own performance but also overall business performance.
Organizations must give more
visibility about the positions and the candidate’s performance to hiring managers.
 Data/Metrics driven function : By using analytics organizations can highly increase
workforce management strategy by enclosures and provide knowledge to leaders
for increased business planning and association. A metrics driven culture in important for
any organization

On Premise and Outsourced Options

Although recruitment planning is best approached in the context of a broader talent
management strategy, it is generally often executed as a standalone activity. It is looked at as
a discreet process. At the beginning of the recruitment cycle data is fed in, output data is
passed to HR management system and other business systems, once a candidate has been
selected.
Because of its discreet nature recruitment lends itself well to a hosted services or software as
a service (SaaS) outsourcing model. In a SaaS setup, the vendors own IT structure is used to
run and manage the software, and users assess it over the internet, in a similar manner as they
would work with an in-house server. Because of its standalone nature, recruitment can be
shifted to the SaaS model without any significant disruption to the other HR operations. This
has a number of advantages. From the perspective of technology, it removes the need for
organizations to install, manage and upgrade the recruitment software- as the vendor manages
directly.
On the financial perspective front, customers may be able to bypass capital expenditure
restrictions, and avoid heavy costs, since SaaS fees are usually charged on a subscription
basis.

Web Based Recruitment

In today’s era web-based recruitment is becoming a standard business requirement, as most

organizations realize that they need to provide some level of applicant interface on the
company’s website. This also includes the ability to accept applications online.

Web based recruitment is divided into 2 categories:

 Information and promotional, where vacancies are displayed on customers websites or

third-party sites and where the organization is marketed.
 Transactional, where candidates are able to submit their applications online. From the
perspective of the employer transactional capability may include screening and filtering
of initial applications.

The Broader Talent Management Picture

Talent acquisition is being looked at as one component of a broader talent management
strategy, which cannot be separated from other key HR disciplines. Ideally these goals will be
cascaded down the corporate hierarchy to subsidiaries, divisions, departments and individuals
as part of a corporate-wide performance management strategy. In turn there will be
adjustments to departmental and individual performance metrics, which will in turn set the
context for all decisions in regards to employee development, performance appraisals,
compensation and requirement.
The talent management cycle kicks off once the business objectives have been set, with a
workforce planning initiative, typically incorporating 3 principle steps:
 Existing skills and competencies are analysed.
 Identify areas of need by carrying out a gap analysis.
 Assessing workforce needs by analysing skills and competencies required for each
part of the business, which includes business development, employee development,
recruitment and succession planning as well.