Recipe for Long-Term Hiring Success: Talent Acquisition and Collaboration
Collaboration is the key to success in any activity and therefore talent acquisition is no exception. A HR team working on any aspect, be it compensation and benefits, performance management or career planning will need inputs from various stakeholders. These could be managers, finance or even employees. All stakeholders must work together effectively to make workforce planning successful.
What is talent acquisition?
The process of finding and retaining highly qualified employees is talent acquisition. Talent acquisition teams in companies consist of a group of human resources and talent acquisition specialists who are focused on hiring employees and increasing employee retention. Ensuring that the right staff are employed at the right time and at the right cost is what workforce planning is all about.
Creating an effective workforce plan is however a challenge for HR because of the number of inputs that they must depend on from various sources. The finance department must give the budgetary inputs. While finance provides the headcount limits for each department, HR must work with other departments like sales, product, or marketing to understand the talent needs for each department and then work on plan.
Once HR and finance have approved the plan and ensured that it meets needs of the stakeholders, the output of the plan is passed on to the talent acquisition team. Talent acquisition is responsible for delivering the headcount outlined by the plan. They must deliver appropriately as over-hiring can create a cost burden while under-hiring will reduce productivity. A realistic plan that meets the company’s targets will require that workforce planners in HR align with the talent acquisition teams. They can do this in three ways, let us explore how this is possible.
- Account for a flux in talent
It is no secret that in some companies, certain departments provide new hires a gateway into the company. For instance, new hires join this department but soon move on to positions that are more desirable within the company in other departments. A software company may have new hires who join the quality and assurance department but have their sights set on a role in software development. It is possible for companies to lose about 25% to 30% of their talent to other positions within the company. Of course, there is a possibility for these employees to leave the company itself either voluntarily or involuntarily. Such sudden flux in talent within the company can significantly change the hiring requirements.
Workforce planners need to collaborate with departments to account for these internal movements and predictable company exits to estimate the hiring capacity that is required. It is easy to severely underestimate this if there is no collaboration.
- Account for teams that act as magnets
In some companies, there are specific departments that act as magnets for talent. New hires in gateway jobs eventually move to these departments. For example, it is possible that the sales team in a company staffs their positions for account executives not just through external hires but also through internal hiring from their sales or telemarketing teams. It is a great way to achieve hiring targets by people moving in from within the company. However, if the department is unsure how many positions, they can fill in this way, it may become difficult to estimate how many external hires need to be made. A department that can fulfil its recruitment needs this way may need not ramp up the recruiting team to do much of external hiring. To create a robust hiring plan, workforce planners need to be able to tell the recruiting team precisely how many internal hires are expected to move into that department.
- Monitor hiring, movement and exits
Workforce planners must account for how many people will move within departments and exactly how many will leave the company. Based on this knowledge, they can create a forecast. However, that forecast may not be very accurate. Therefore, they need to track internal movement, exits and hiring continuously.
Large companies invest in workforce planning technology to handle the complex, overall company-wide workforce plan. Despite that, the recruitment team risks over or under-hiring, putting either profits or productivity to risk. Workforce planners must maintain communication with the recruitment team to get a grip on exactly how many external hires need to be made based on internal movements.
Conclusion
A good talent acquisition process involves collaboration between talent acquisition specialists, employers, hiring managers, human resources professionals and other departments. Workforce planners and recruiters need to collaborate with each other and departments within the company in a simple, intuitive way. Collaboration can decrease the risk in workforce planning and make the workforce plan more accurate.
