Companies Seen Boosting Talent Acquisition Strategies
Recruiting and onboarding are two of the top three technologies being used in 2015 to enable talent strategies, according to recent data released by Peoplefluent, a social human capital management technology company.
The findings stem from recent webinar polls with Brandon Hall Group and Bersin by Deloitte of more than 200 human resource executives at Fortune 500 companies. Results illustrate that nearly 40 percent of companies will be implementing talent acquisition strategies in 2015.
More than 50 percent of survey respondents indicated that what keeps them up at night is recruiting hard to find skills in both leaders and employees, retaining premier talent and sustaining employee engagement. Seventy-three percent said that developing a talent pipeline was a struggle and more than a third of respondents had worries about onboarding effectiveness. The survey found that 77 percent of professionals do not currently link their recruitment and talent management systems.
Seventy-five percent of CEOs view talent acquisition as “urgent” or “important.” CEOs responded similarly on the correlating topic of retention with 78 percent citing it as a major issue.
The top five actions facilitated by technology for successful talent acquisition strategies in the coming year were: referrals (89 percent), applicant tracking (83 percent), background screening (70 percent), social recruiting (69 percent) and onboarding (63 percent).
"These poll results highlight the importance of a robust recruiting solution for today's talent management landscape," said Jack Hill, director of talent acquisition solutions at PeopleFluent. "The PeopleFluent Recruiting Mirror addresses a majority of the pain points referenced in the survey, including applicant tracking, social recruiting, onboarding and integration to name a few. We look forward to working with our global customers to elevate the candidate, recruiter and hiring manager experience to meet the needs of the 2015 workforce."
A couple thoughts come to mind here. One is, as Bob Korzeniowski, already pointed out, that ATSs are a simplistic and inefficient approach to a complex problem. If a manufacturing company had equipment with a failure rate half as bad as a typical ATS, they'd replace it in a flash. But I suppose they view their existing ATSs as somewhere between a commitment more sacred than marriage and a sunk cost they hate to discard. The other is that if more employers would successfully get and keep their employees engaged, those employees would be recruiters.
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8yOne solution is: Get rid of the Applicant Tracking System (ATS). So much talent gets rejected by the ATS that the company doesn't know how many people they could have hired that would have rocked. Yes, you're getting 100+ applications per job. View each application and process them manually. This means actually hire people to talk to the applicants and see how they would rock at your company. Cheaping out in the HR department means you're losing out in talent. You need more fishermen to catch fish! Another solution: Evaluate candidates using relevant criteria. For example: Don't reject great talent because they're not going to be your drinking buddy after work. Virtually all of the "talent woes" are self-inflicted. There is no talent shortage, there are plenty of fish in the sea.