integrating your talent acquisition function

hr professional

Mar 28

Get a head start

One of my biggest challenges when I led an internal talent acquisition (TA) team was getting the recruiters to think about talent needs beyond their current requisitions. Look, there was no question that the recruiters had a full workload and were doing their best. But, we also had a lot of jobs to fill during the year. This included hard-to-find talent that our organization needed to advance our purpose, as well as specific talent a hiring manager needed to achieve her goals. Our job was to ensure the organization had all of the talent it needed to be successful. We couldn’t get this done when every recruiter did her own thing; we had to work as an integrated team.

But, how do you integrate a team when they are spread out and working on so many things? The bottom line is the TA team is the organization’s front line in the talent market. Every team member needs to be on the lookout for high quality, hard-to-find talent and strategic hires that can advance an organization’s purpose. We needed to leverage the strength of the collective team to keep an eye out for key talent. This was a tall order, especially at a large and complex organization, and we definitely felt overwhelmed when we first took this on. But, in the end, we realized it was a few simple steps that helped the team focus more broadly on talent needs and ensure the organization had the talent it required for success.

Here’s a story

The first time I asked what the key talent needs were across the organization, I got a lot of blank stares. Not surprising – we were a large multi-national organization hiring 20,000 people per year in 150 different countries. If you worked in San Francisco, it would be difficult to know the key needs in Dubai. Also, even if we said what the needs were, what was the likelihood the team could remember when there were so many other things going on?

To keep the needs front-and-center, we needed to communicate them in a simple and engaging way. So we started quarterly all-hands calls with every TA team member at the organization (we held two calls to accommodate the different time zones). In addition to giving an overall update on the TA function, we used these meetings to talk about talent needs in the context of the business. Through this “storytelling,” the team was able to understand what the organization was trying to accomplish and why this was important. This also provided the recruiters with a great story to use with the candidates they identified. But, that was just the start. Since these calls were quarterly, we had to find a way to continue the conversation in between the meetings. We created a TA user group on our internal social media platform. It took some time but soon recruiters used this to exchange ideas and get advice from each other. This platform helped us keep a strong focus on our needs and it became a great virtual community that helped us fill jobs faster and identify top talent around the world.

Do you know what you don’t know?

Staying on the lookout for the organization’s overall talent needs was a great start, but it was not enough. It was also important to know what is top of mind for hiring managers so we could ensure they had what they needed to achieve their goals. This meant that we had to get our recruiters to understand a hiring manager’s overall talent needs—not just the current job opening. Most of the time a hiring manager’s needs have some common elements and the recruiter is likely going to come across similar talent when searching for the target role. If a recruiter has the full picture of the requirements, she can work to attract talent when she finds it.

We made sure every recruiter asked about the hiring managers goals and talent needs for the year during the search kick-off meeting. The hiring manager usually engaged immediately and gave a lot of great detail on all of her goals, how she was going to achieve them, and her talent needs. This broader conversation not only helped to develop an overall understanding of the hiring manager’s needs, but also provided the recruiters with a compelling pitch when talking to potential candidates. This improved the time it took to fill job openings with high-quality candidates. We also were able to identify strategic hires, which we may have missed if we did not have the conversation.

How about an assist?

OK – so now we were down the path to keeping an eye out for strategic talent needs and starting to fill jobs faster. But, we still found that as things got busy, the team went back to their old ways of just focusing on the work in front of them. We had to do something else to make sure the recruiters kept focused on the key talent needs.

So, we introduced a metric for recruiter “assists”. We defined assists are referrals from other recruiters for key talent needs across the organization. When a recruiter finds and refers a candidate for an opening she does not own, she was credited with an assist. The recruiter used her knowledge of key needs to fill a job that is critical to the organization. If we wanted recruiters to think beyond their current workloads, we had to recognize and acknowledge them when they do.

But it was not enough to track this metric. For this to really work well, we had to set a goal for each recruiter to work towards each year. This was one of the best ways to ensure that everyone was on the lookout for great talent. Not to mention: this continued to advance the TA community. As I mentioned before—we could not help the organization get the talent it needed with each recruiter doing her own thing. We had to leverage the strength of the overall team to find the best talent for the organization.

Parting gifts

What do you think? Do you agree with these practices to create a more integrated talent acquisition function? What are some other things your teams have done to stay ahead of your competition when it comes to talent?