Talent Acquisition

Many organizations struggle to find candidates to fill their roles. Often, that’s because they lack a long-term hiring plan given the disruptions in their business and the market. But sometimes it’s because they aren’t approaching the right candidates in the right ways. They may be approaching hiring as a transactional process rather than as a full-blown organizational strategy.

A talent acquisition strategy can make the difference. A robust strategy will ensure that the candidate journey is designed to meet candidates’ needs and is engaging, intuitive, fair and fast. But it goes beyond just hiring. It involves setting the strategies, processes and tactics that enable your company to identify, recruit and then retain your human resources.

For example, adding technology to your talent acquisition processes can bring the right talent to your doorstep faster and with higher engagement. For instance, sourcing and selecting tools, including chatbots, are available to candidates 24/7/365 and can shorten the time it takes to move candidates to the interview stage by nearly 80%. Automation can help your team identify top talent, schedule interviews and rank candidates based on skills.

You might also set a talent acquisition goal to eliminate bias, including unconscious bias, in your candidate assessment processes. Technology can play a role here, ensuring that recruiters focus on the best talent with the necessary skills and don’t consider any demographic factors.

The Korn Ferry talent acquisition process follows our “CARE” model, which ensures that every candidate experience is fair, consistent and engaging. This model consists of four steps:

1. Configure your talent acquisition machine. Caring for candidates means you need the right people, processes and technology on your talent acquisition team. You need to make sure that you have the right members on your team with the right skills, that those team members are doing the right work and that you’ve given your team the tools and technology they need to make their job less manual and more efficient.

2. Adapt your hiring process to each candidate. No two candidates are alike: they’ll have different needs, preferences and expectations, depending on the role they’re applying for and the stage of life they’re in. That’s why it’s important to tailor the hiring experience to each candidate’s journey, specifically what you want them to think, know and feel at each stage. Candidate personas can inform how you design the candidate experience, including which channels you select, what messages you include in job postings, how you assess candidates and what technology you use. A persona should include the person’s age, personal circumstances, family commitments; current role and career background; motivations and aspirations at work; job search status and preferred channels; and expectations of the recruitment process.

3. Refine your candidate hiring technology: Talent acquisition technology, such as always-on chatbots and digital assessment solutions, can help you provide a best-in-class candidate experience. But you can’t rely 100% on technology; it has to complement your people and the way they work. The right technology solutions will depend on your persona and the role. For example, high-volume roles may be appropriate for an auto-responder email, but executive roles will require a more personal approach.

4. Elevate candidates to employees. Treat candidates as if they’re already working for you and you’ll improve their hiring and onboarding experience. Look for ways to engage them throughout their journey. Embed your brand and values in every step of the hiring process. Share information about your company culture and values and ensure they feel included at every stage. This way, even unsuccessful candidates will leave with a positive impression of your company that they can share with potential employees and customers.

A talent acquisition company can transform a transactional hiring process into a comprehensive strategy that fuels and fills your talent pipeline. And it can also show you new approaches to hiring that will help you figure out new ways to secure potential candidates.

Here are just some of the talent configuration and retention strategies that a talent acquisition company can help you create:

• Balance: Stabilize your organization through operational transformation, performance improvement and technology.
• Build: Make more of the talent you have through reskilling, upskilling, succession planning and diversity planning.
• Borrow: Help you draw on the skills of contingent labor, contractors, seasonal staff and gig workers.
• Bot: Accelerate and scale your hiring processes using technology such as robotic process automation and machine learning.
• Bind and bounce: Reduce employee turnover and increase engagement and productivity through pay and reward, retention schemes and performance management.

Talent acquisition is a strategy that helps your organization fill current roles as well as build a long-term talent pipeline. It’s a proactive, continuous process that encompasses recruiting, onboarding and training. Talent acquisition requires companies to study their workforce in tandem with business strategies to make sure that they have the people, competencies and experience necessary to move the business forward.

Human resources is much broader than talent acquisition. It covers the entire lifecycle of an employee, from onboarding to training, setting compensation and benefits, developing policies to govern employees and building retention strategies.

A talent acquisition specialist helps organizations source, attract, interview, assess, hire and onboard employees. They are more than just recruiters who simply try to find talent for a role. Talent acquisition specialists take a longer-term view of the organization’s hiring processes and talent pipeline to make sure that recruits and new hires are engaged, are aware of the organization’s brand and are in the best position to hit the ground running if they join your company.

Talent acquisition teams are responsible for helping organizations find talent with potential to fit not only in a role but with the organization as a whole, including its culture and values. They create a forward-looking talent acquisition strategy that enables them to understand people’s potential, recruit a diverse and inclusive workforce and engage top talent with the drive to help the organization move forward.

Talent acquisition teams can also help organizations make sense of their HR-related data so they can build more informed talent acquisition strategies and choose the right talent at every level of the organization, so they have the talent they need today plus a hiring blueprint to help them prepare for tomorrow.

At Korn Ferry, talent acquisition teams engage in four key functions:

• Executive search: We identify the best candidates to lead your organization who mesh with your values and culture. We then help you build the right compensation and benefits package to keep them engaged and motivated.
• Professional search: We look for qualified, talented candidates for your middle and upper-management roles who will be invested in helping your organization for the long term.
• Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO): We offer RPO partnerships that can help you accelerate your recruitment processes, build high-performing teams, and lower your hiring costs.
• Project recruitment: We help you scale your hiring processes to fill large numbers of roles quickly and efficiently.

Talent is in short supply, and employee retention is more challenging than ever. It means the hiring situation for many organizations is dire. And it means human resources teams are struggling to find new candidates as well as replacements for the people who have left.

Talent acquisition teams can help organizations solve talent sourcing challenges. They might suggest ways to find new pools of talent in different locations, especially if the work can be done remotely. They may look for ways to upskill and reskill existing talent to fill talent gaps. They might look to alternative talent sources, such as contingent labor, contractors or gig workers. They might apply technological solutions to automate and streamline hiring processes, especially if an organization needs to find talent for many roles at once. And they might suggest ways that the organization can retain talent by setting new pay and reward strategies and performance management plans to increase engagement and productivity.