2018: The Year We Demand Reinvention in Sourcing & Recruitment

Change is an exciting beacon of hope! Hope that newer and brighter futures will change the way businesses are run and make recruiting and sourcing processes more efficient. Yet, how many business leaders actually implement change? The Harvard Business Review asked over 1,000 employees across several industries nationwide if senior leaders were asking them to challenge the status quo, the result:

• Never or almost never (42%)
• Sometimes (32%)
• Fairly often (26%)
• Always (3%)

In the sourcing and recruiting industry alone, we’re constantly reporting on common roadblocks like time-to-fill, the talent drought, candidate experience, engagement tactics that work and how to increase sourcing efficiency. But what are we doing to implement change? This is the year we do something: demo that AI technology, build that employer branding strategy, hire that executive sourcing agency. Take a look at how we as business and talent acquisition leaders must demand reinvention in sourcing and recruitment.

The Importance of Renewal in Business

Let’s open our doors of perception quickly. Workplace satisfaction is surprisingly at an all-time high in the U.S. with 89% of U.S. employees reporting being somewhat or very satisfied with their current job. Yet 3 million Americans quit their jobs each month. Workplaces have also been seeing large overhauls in how we approach employees in the modern workplace, how we foster a culture of inclusivity, how we engage employees, etc. So why are employees still leaving?

Evaluate what makes a happy employee...

Job Satisfaction Contributors:

• Leaders treat employees of all levels with respect
• Opportunities to use skills and abilities in your direct line of work
• Safe work environment
• Overall workplace benefits
• Employee to management trust

Making a case for recruitment:

We understand employees have the ability to be happy and we know what makes them happy, yet many are still not quite sticking. As sourcers, we blame the sourcing and recruitment strategies. It’s all about the selection process: attract, engage and hire employees who are actually interested in you as an employer and company. Starting to sound like a sappy love story?

There are a few steps we can take to make this work:

1. Building diversity through technology
2. Build a solid talent pool for fast business scalability
3. Integrate unique approaches in your sourcing & relationship building

Building Diversity Through Technology

Testing new technology as a best practice isn’t new, but the technology itself that we encourage companies to test is and always will be new. Take a look at the suite of technologies you currently use in your sourcing and recruiting functions. How do they work, and more importantly, how do they fall short? When we’re thinking about reinvention in the workplace and building from the ground up, we look up to technologies that will approach sourcing new talent who, too, will build a workplace of change.

Did you know 85% of large global enterprises say a diverse workforce is crucial for innovation? Attracting, engaging, and recruiting diverse talent begins with showing candidates your company is serious about diverse hiring and creating a workplace of inclusion. Intel started this initiative in 2014 by requiring interview panels for all new hires include at least two women and/or two members of underrepresented communities. The results? New hires including women or people of color increased by 45.1% in just two years.

Talent analytics and diversity tools like Atipica are leading platforms for organizations looking to scale diverse business teams. When you work with IQTalent Partners, you work with our partners, too. Atipica is our leading brand in diverse hiring analytics, starting in the early stages by helping recruiters predict gender and race from aggregate resume and ATS information.

Filling the Talent Pool to the Brim

In an Aberdeen study, over 80% of organizations reported having trouble filling high-potential talent and 79% of those organizations don’t know what to do to resolve this issue. Especially for teams who may not have a talent pool already built, let alone an in-house recruitment model to help build those talent pools, time to fill is likely a huge hurdle. 60% of organizations handle recruitment internally, and 40% partner with a recruitment process outsourcing provider. Aberdeen also reported “when companies fully internalize their recruitment efforts, they limit the scope of understanding for what candidates want from them as employers.”

Where we step in.

While IQTalent Partners works somewhat similarly to the basic function of an RPO, we’re far different. IQTalent Partners works as an extension to your in-house recruitment team, and if one isn’t already built, we work with you to build that too. We work to best understand your hiring needs, specific shifting job role functions and ideal candidates, so your talent pool is packed to the brim. We understand the landscape of your business has frequent changes, which is why it’s important to partner with a team that is fully integrated in the industry’s latest shifts and knows how to best attract and engage with candidates that fit your mold.

So what about the talent pool part? Not only are we fast and efficient at what we do to help you scale at the quickest rate possible, we hand over all the sourced candidate data we worked to collect during our tenure, unlike many RPOs who take candidate data with them upon departure.

Integrating Unique Approaches in Your Sourcing & Relationship Building

When you’ve considered what ideal changes need to be made in your company’s perfect candidate and solidified that in each of your candidate personas, it’s time to think of unique approaches to each of those candidate “types.” We talked about transparency in the employer branding and interview stages, but how can we translate this to the sourcing and engagement conversations? Essentially, you need to identify where your candidates are “hanging out.” This isn’t a one size fits all strategy either.

Read some of our favorite stories on how we got some of our top talent’s attention through trial and error.

Ultimately, it comes down to going back to the basics: be human and re-learn how to connect with others. We’re remapping the way we approach talent, what candidates we want and what technologies we’re looking to bolster our efforts, but when it comes to actually connecting with people, we need to strip down and simplify. What works for one candidate pool, won’t work for the other. (This is where the importance of hiring vetted industry experts comes in handy).

As recruiters and sourcers, we’re working to rebuild our reputation as untouchable. For decades we’ve done all the cold calling, all the sourcing, all the outreach and all the resume reviewing, until the role became so sophisticated, we had to call in technology to help take some of the work.

“Blake Thiess PHR, SHRM-CP, couldn’t have said it better, 'Why is it so hard to find us, and consequently, get ahold of us as recruiters? Let us be better. Let us be easy to reach. Let us harness the power of visibility to drive our results.' "

Candidate attraction and engagement isn’t going to go very far if recruiters, the conversation starter between a candidate and a brand, aren’t fully representing how we value employees and candidates.

Employee retention starts with employer branding transparency. Creating an employer brand that shows your company’s true colors gives quality candidates the confidence to carry forward with your company through the recruiting process because they can trust you’re going to treat them well and offer a workplace they can agree with.

How are you growing relationships in your sourcing and recruitment processes to reinvent the hiring process? See how IQTalent Partners works to augment your in-house recruitment teams to build those valuable relationships with talent that matters.