Talent Acquisition Strategy: How to Acquire Top Talent

[Music] pick up any news feed anywhere in the world right now and the top story is talent is nowhere to be found if you're at a loss for how to acquire talent in today's crazy job market have we got some insights for you talent acquisition is the art of developing not just a hiring process but an actual strategy for having the right people build your organization for the future and today we're going to break down what is the difference between recruitment and talent acquisition the seven top tips for talent acquisition and how a management consulted

we can help you with talent acquisition before we dive in make sure you subscribe to this channel so you get first access to all of our incredible content now let's talk a little bit about recruitment and talent strategy again talent recruitment is one of the most critical parts of growing an organization for the future if you have too many customers and not enough talent to serve those customers big problem if you have two fewer customers well that's a totally different situation that we won't address in this video today but talent acquisition is really a key

and critical part of organization strategies and the focus on people management has been exploding in the last 10 years first let's break down the difference between recruitment and talent acquisition this is something that i never really thought about but once i understood it it helped to illuminate the major difference recruitment is to identify an open position and fill it you put a job posting up you identify who someone is that fits the skills and you hire them a talent acquisition strategy is thinking about the short medium and long-term goals of your organization thinking about putting

the right people in positions or just hiring the right people into the firm regardless of position so that you have an amazing staff to deploy on the problems and solutions that you're interested in addressing because of this a talent acquisition strategy is longer ranging more holistic and often more difficult to define because instead of saying i have a 40 hour a week position to fill you're looking for something special inside your talent this defines a lot of organizations today so let's walk through the seven tips that we have to build a top talent acquisition strategy

number one understand your recruiting goals and expand the timeline of those recruiting goals if your recruiting goals are to staff certain revenue functions think about everything that you're going to need to do that and don't just think about serving revenue that you have today think about how you're going to build for the revenue that you're interested in tomorrow maybe there are new products or services that you want to develop hire the talent that can do both today and tomorrow's jobs also identify what you're willing to pay and how many people you're able to budget for

looking at specific budget numbers and recruiting kpis can be incredibly helpful because for example if you know that you have to talk to 20 people to hire one you'll have different expectations of your pipeline and different evaluation of new processes second you need a way to engage with your potential talent what does this mean it's like standard marketing you have to understand where your talent hangs out are they in school are they in industry coalitions do they come from certain firms and now they're moving over to yours do you want to hire people that are

high potential but high risk or do you want to hire people that are high potential and low risk identifying what the categories are and again what you're willing to pay for them is helpful as you're sourcing your recruitment strategy when you figure out where you've been successful before that can be incredibly helpful in fact one of the organizations that we worked with found that if they tried to hire from the ivy league they were not successful they spent a lot of money and gained very few employees but when they moved over to hire from the

small ivs from schools like williams they were able to convert a higher percentage of their potential recruits to actual employees so they started to double down on schools that had those similar characteristics even though of course people that were in the ivy league were interesting to them if they weren't successful there then it wasn't a recruiting match the third tip for developing a talent acquisition strategy is to build your brand this is building your brand not for customers but for talent explaining to people why you're a remarkable place to work giving case studies of the

incredible people who work with you explaining what your culture is like and giving differentiating factors this part of your talent acquisition strategy pays dividends both now and in the long term because you'll acquire talent this year but you'll also begin to seed for people who may not be ready to work with you now that you're an amazing place to work in the future as you're thinking about building your brand it's really important to remember that one negative review from an employee can have a drastic impact on hiring outcomes in the future in fact 55 of

job seekers in 2020 said that if they read a negative review about an employer workplace they would not even apply that creates real uphill challenges for you so you need to strategically think about how to market your culture using social using traditional means using partners and amplifying email lists and podcasts number four having an internal employee referral program programs one of the most missed opportunities by many organizations this was something shocking that i discovered when i was at maine bain would pay me a worker at the firm money so that they could hire people that

i referred into the process it was something i fundamentally did not understand when i joined maine but after i was there for even just a couple of months i understood that the people that i hung out with were likely targets for vain because they were up and hard workers had a similar pedigree and so they were interested in sourcing talent from the networks of the people that were already at the firm they were also interested in this for another reason it was very low cost they could get me to share the stories of why somebody

would want to work at bain with the candidate and that person would be more likely to be both successful in the interview and also interested in ultimately joining bain which changed their kpis for the better so an employee referral program is a process where you compensate your employees with something that they really want it could be vacation time it could be a boondoggle for the top employee referrals or it could just be cold hard cash but giving employees the ability to refer other people to not just jobs where they're going to work with them but

to any job inside the organization can really lower your costs and amplify your brand cost effectively number five hiring from within many companies don't create an early pipeline using internships and externships for something like this but hiring from within can be one of the most important ways that you can build your organization it's important to understand the skill acquisition needed for each level inside the organization and if the skill acquisition gap is much higher in your senior positions you might want to look for and source people who are at the lower levels i'll give you

a fun example of this i met someone who worked in california for bcg he had originally started as a temp worker helping bcg unpack their offices and bcd liked him found him enjoyable to talk to and asked him to come in for an interview when he came in for the interview he had absolutely no experience in anything talent acquisition related or human resources related but there he was he was a box unpacker who had come from another job he had a temp contract and they just really liked his personality bcg has an amazing internal training

program and so they were able to identify talent well now he's a senior director in that department he's grown up through the ranks he's hired other people he's brought them on and he tells them all that story that there are unusual ways that you can find jobs that are really remarkable and so not only is it an amazing brand ambassador but he was sourced in the same creative ways that bcg will look to source their employees today number six it's critical that you understand what the employees of today are looking for and here's the challenge

it's not usually one-dimensional sure they're looking for a great compensation package but they're also looking for work aspects like flexibility like professional development like cohesion like off-sites they're looking for things that matter to them that are additional portions of the work but interestingly one of the things that we find is that they actually really want to understand what they're going to do all day having a massage in the office for a terrible job doesn't do anything for employees and so having a really clear sense of what it's like to work with a client to work

in the professional development process to be mentored and challenged and reviewed they want to understand what their experience is going to be like as a staff member of your organization so this is one thing that we help with tremendously a lot of people give marketing schmaltz and language that just doesn't resonate with today's generation of job seekers and we're able to convert your insights into their language when you're sharing what matters inside your organization to them the seventh and final issue for developing a talent acquisition strategy is to develop content that resonates you figured out

what message matters you figured out who these people are you figured out where to find them you figured out that your employees can go get some of them for you but ultimately you really need to identify the tangible specific content i'm talking about the words the messages the videos and the interactions that are meaningful for people let me give you a couple of examples we offer the ability for you to come onto our web portals using zoom we invite thousands of people to join in and they can watch you present about your organization we can

do that as a guided conversation we can do that as a one-on-one we can do that as a q a but we help facilitate the kind of fun peppy interesting meaningful interaction that really drives other people to see who you really are we do the same thing through video through written content through social posting and through emails to our email list you need to think about your content in exactly the same way and if you have found that any of these issues one through seven are a challenge for you we would absolutely love to help

whether you work with us to do the content and to deliver it to our audience or whether you just want advice about how better to address the talent of today we would love to help you at management consulted we come from mckinsey bain and bcg they found us we were needles in a haystack they trained us they developed us and they made us evangelists for their brands and their organizations and we can help you do the same for your brand your organization and your talent acquisition strategy reach out to us team management consulted you can

send us a message you can leave us a comment on any of our social channels or you can find more information on our website managementconsulted.com thanks so much for listening [Music] you