This year I have spoken to over 20 groups on the topic of talent acquisition with a presentation I call “Stop Wandering: Recruit with a Map and Plan”. This topic hits close to home for me as a human resources executive and consultant to individuals seeking new opportunities.
At gatherings of HR people, I hear the same stories about how important it is to find the right talent or develop existing talent so the right people are in the right place at the right time to accomplish business goals. Yet the quantitative and qualitative evidence indicates we are either deluded or wrong about how well this effort is going.
In my talk I point to evidence that all is not what it seems. Consider this statistic for a moment from the 2012 Bersin by Deloitte Talent Acquisition Factbook. Time to fill (a very common measurement of recruiting success) has reduced from 60 days in 2011 to 55 days in 2013 indicating companies are filling jobs faster than ever. In the same time period first year turnover (people who resign or are terminated in the first year) has gone up from 12.6% in 2011 to 14.5% in 2013. First year turnover is a complete waste. It means the wrong person was hired. All that time and money spent recruiting and training all down the tube.
That is some of the quantitative evidence. On the non-statistic side, candidates bitterly complain about how impersonal and cold it is to find a job. No one answers the phone or responds to inquiries. It takes ages to fill jobs. Any candidate will tell you that it takes longer than 55 days; candidates wonder where that statistic comes from. Candidates refer to the process of contacting some companies as the “black hole”. In fact they call the HR Department the “black hole” sometimes.
We have a talent problem not recognized or acknowledged in HR journals. HR people think they do a good job recruiting and retaining talent. I wonder.
I attended a Cleveland SHRM Staffing Management Association meeting recently that demonstrated this situation very well. It was a panel discussion exploring talent acquisition. Since the crowd was large, the external recruiters went into one room and the internal HR people who handle recruiting directly for companies stayed in another room. I went with the external recruiters since I was unaffiliated.
The external recruiters had a lively conversation about where to find candidates, how to court and tend candidates to have them ready for an opportunity in the future. The external recruiters used LinkedIn and networking to find people who might be interesting to a client in the future.
We rejoined the internal recruiters to debrief. The external recruiters shared the lively discussion about finding talent. The moderator for the internal recruiters was very quiet for a while. Then he said, “Boy, we didn’t talk about any of that”. The internal recruiters talked about on-boarding, dealing with recalcitrant hiring managers, paperwork, and the general process. They did not talk at all about finding candidates, courting talent, or building relationships with people that could be useful in the future. They did not even talk about LinkedIn. Not at all.
As the Captain said in Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” Business people, including HR people, talk extensively about the need to acquire the right talent but they are not building relationships required to actually do it. Maybe the largest companies are doing it but not the companies I work with or the people attending the meetings where I speak. Maybe they don’t know how.
Until companies begin realistically addressing talent by acting like they really value people, we will continue to have this failure to communicate.