By Craig McGrory, Presto's Executive Director, Talent Supply Solutions
Throughout the New Zealand market, HR professionals face a considerable number of drains on their resources on a daily basis, with time needing to be spent on everything from managing the needs of existing staff, through to helping in the onboarding of new employees and dealing with those busy periods when hiring spikes strike, some planned for but often not.
It means there is limited time available for the essential and critical role of talent acquisition, yet this is increasingly seen as the most integral aspect of delivering lasting benefits for your organisation.
When it comes to their level of aggressiveness, risk-taking, and competitiveness, these two functions have also slowly moved apart.
why companies are separating the Talent Acquisition function from HR
As a standalone business function, Recruiting (or Talent Acquisition) will go through a transition from an overhead role into a unit with direct accountability and can create a strategic competitive advantage.
Ensuring you are able to acquire the best, brightest and most suitable employees is essential for long-term prosperity and success. Its primary goal will move beyond simple job fulfilment and into a heavily proactive state of sustainable, long term recruitment.
In today’s world of extremes, finding the right talent needed to deliver to promises made, goals and budgets set, and expected delivery timelines is such a crucial, yet often the most challenging, piece of the puzzle. To make things even more complex the multitude of ways to find this crucial talent is evolving at such a dramatic pace through the improvement of innovative sourcing tools and techniques.
the 6 key requirements for an effective TA function
1. Successful TA strategies take risks and require speed of
Increasing innovation and technology in recruiting involves accepting a much higher degree of risk and the speed needed in today’s market is hard to meet under HR’s pace. Moving fast and deciding quickly is a non-negotiable for today’s talent community, and is essential in an optimal hiring strategy.
2. The best strategies build competitive advantage
As an overhead function, HR often has an internal focus on its own processes and rarely has alignment and visibility into the company’s core tools, processes and strategy.
3. Workforce planning and TA require a proactive and blended approach
HR’s culture and processes are designed primarily to react to events, while a successful recruiting strategy will work to ensure hiring strategies are embedded into the company’s future talent pipeline.
4. A data-driven model
Most of HR’s decision-making is based on intuitive decisions and a disruptive shift brings data-driven decision-makers to be more efficient. This allows recruiting to become more digital, and data-focused.
5. To demonstrate TA business impacts effectiveness (new metrics)
It is almost impossible to demonstrate effective TA business impacts under HR’s exclusive use of transactional metrics. Being separated from HR would allow TA to develop teams that understand the importance of demonstrating immediate business impacts. An independent function would emphasize the ROI of great hires in key positions, rather than the costs of hiring (which are insignificant compared to the business impacts).
6. Modern TA and recruiting requires an agile, technology-dominated approach
Its focus on consistency allows HR to be cost-effective. However, TA operates in a constantly changing external environment. Being independent would allow this function to increase its emphasis on adaptability, scalability, and having agile processes. TA and recruiting technology is also advancing at a much faster pace than the rest of HR and regular industry data shows that recruiting has the highest revenue and profit impacts of all HR functions. This high impact alone makes recruiting worthy of the special focus that independence brings.
The advantages of working alongside a provider like Presto lie in the fact that, should your recruitment accuracy dictate your success, or lack thereof, then we can take over or guide you through part of your current TA function.
The use of market intelligence by our domain experts helps us to identify the best candidates, while comprehensive reporting and analytics help drive the process and improve behaviours to drive outstanding results.
At the same time, our models bring economies of scale up or down during times of changing need, to allow clients to benefit from improved cost reduction. Our clients also gain an advantage through increased speed of hire and lower fees compared to more traditional third-party recruitment models currently in play.
This article was published on our quarterly issue, "Market Insights". Read the full newsletter here, issue 02 - July 2019, Climb Higher Heights.
Source: Dr John Sullivan, professor, author, corporate speaker, and advisor's article for ERE.net