The War for Talent is Really Proactive vs. Reactive Recuiting

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Yesterday, I received three emails from hiring managers and recruiter friends who were looking for the perfect candidate. They were stressed from the pressure the vacancy was causing for themselves and their team.

Since the recession, teams have been forced to downsize. No doubt this causes morale issues and added stress to your department as employees are already overworked and pushed to the max. When a new position opens up, it can cause mayhem to the current stressful conditions. Suddenly the recruitment process is tainted with a sense of urgency more than the search for the ideal candidate.

Has this happened to you? Did you know that this can be avoided? The secret is not about filling the vacant position today, it’s about anticipating the job opening six months from now with proactive recruiting. It is important for recruiters to not only be one step ahead of the actual need they also need to have their arsenal of talent accessible and ready.

As the skill gap enlarges and the rate of change increases rapidly, the recruiters who practice proactive strategies will win the war for talent. The first step in avoiding reckless reactive recruiting is to know the difference between proactive and reactive recruiting. Successful recruitment is 100% proactive.

Here are some best practices you can implement to help you have a proactive recruitment strategy.

Develop a positive reputation online.
Be sure to have a career page and exposure to the online communities like Glassdoor and LinkedIn. The more positive opinions that are available from existing employees about their experience working at your company, the better your organization is positioned for recruiting opportunities.

Engage with candidates and drive them to your talent community.
Use social media tools to share valuable resources and network with the possible candidates. Have a mission to drive talent to your community. This can be done easily by adding a Join Our TalentCircle call button to your career page and use the URL to your career page on all of your recruiter’s social profile bios.

Grow a sourcing program.
Develop your own talent pool through actively networking in-person and online combined with job postings and referrals are all critical components to proactive recruiting. TalentCircles is an excellent tool to manage the candidate profiles and grow your own sourcing program so that you are ready to hire when the right time comes.

Survey internal teams frequently.
Ask about hiring needs so you can forecast more accurately. Did you know that TalentCircles has an excellent survey tool that allows you to reach out internally to get information? This is a great way to track data and forecast the hiring needs ahead of time.

Follow competitors on LinkedIn and other social communities.
Social media provides recruiters the opportunities to find talent. One way to find talent that your competition is attracted to is to follow the competitor’s networking activities. Join their communities and get exposure and engage with candidates.

By implementing a proactive recruiting approach over reactive hiring will reduce stress and costs for you and your organization. Get happier, healthier and more productive employees and hiring managers as you anticipate your openings and building candidate pipelines for future openings today.

Do you have any additional strategies that help you with your proactive recruiting strategies? Please let me know.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell. 

The War for Talent is Local

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

A lot of discussion has emerged concerned the skills gaps and impending labor shortage, but nothing resonated with me until now.  A couple weeks ago, I was sitting at a local HR and recruiting board meeting for the OKC Metro Employer Council when the idea hit me like a brick wall.   I had the equivalent of a recruiting epiphany as I listened in on other board members conversations and challenges.  I realized the war for talent is local. 

OKC vs. Yuma:  A Tale of Two Different Candidate Marketplaces  

Listed as the third strongest metro economy in the US by Bloomberg in 2012, Oklahoma City has been insulated from most of the country’s economic downturn.  This city and community is currently the place I call home.  The local economy is going strong, and our metro area’s unemployment rate is ridiculously low at 4.9%.   It’s hard as heck to recruit here which is something I heard over and over again at our board meeting.  Quality job seekers have their pick often from multiple offers making your job as a recruiter extremely competitive.  That’s in stark contrast to Yuma, Arizona’s, unemployment rate, which stands at 29.8%. 

The markets are completely different; yet I can almost guarantee your company’s recruitment strategy in these two different cities is exactly the same.  Imagine courting a candidate in Oklahoma City versus Yuma and presenting them with what is your best offer.  In Yuma, that candidate accepts your offer immediately while the Oklahoma City candidate stalls not even returning your call. That’s because recruiting and the war for talent is local. 

Recruiting Gets Specific.  The War for Talent is Local

As recruiters, business leaders, and HR professionals we are faced with a challenge especially when managing multiple position requisitions and competing for talent in Oklahoma City versus Yuma.  Our hiring and recruitment strategies should differ because the local market and the candidates in which you pull from are very, very unique.  As a recruiter you have an obligation to research your local candidate marketplace to get a sense of what recruitment strategy would work for you. You are spending your precious time in Oklahoma City posting and praying to a candidate ecosystem and economy that dictates a different recruitment strategy altogether.

In these uber competitive local marketplaces like Oklahoma City, Omaha, and the Dallas Metroplex, building a talent pipeline is the best way to help elevate the stresses of a competitive candidate marketplace due to a robust economy. 

How to Build a Talent Pipeline

Recruiting is local and building a relationship matters.  When it comes to building a recruitment strategy even to fill a single position in a metropolitan area like Oklahoma City, the devil is in the details. And those details in extremely competitive markets in Oklahoma City require you to build and develop a talent pipeline 6 months, 12 months, and 3 months before you even begin looking to fill an open position there. 

This starts with creating a conversation and an opportunity starting with a talent network of eligible, qualified, and interested candidates before the need for a specific position arises.  Because a relationship is built on time, reputation, and trust and a talent network affords you these things.     

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

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Looking Back & Moving Forward: The History of Talent

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

The History of Talent 

Talent for human resources and organizational leaders refers to human capital.  It’s the people that make the business and drive the organization through what we call talent.  Talent can be stolen.  It is coveted and much debate is how, why, and in which way talent can be measured. 

Measuring & Defining Talent

The word "talent” is derived from the Greek word “talanton,” which means "balance, sum, weight," was an unit of weight, in gold and silver, which was used as a form of legal tender for purchase or trade during that era. Talent' entered into the Hebrew language and translated meant the word Kikar' (loaf or cake) suggests that the shape of the talent was circular like the bread of those times.  In the modern day area the process of hiring, recruiting, and retaining talent remains circular.  It is ongoing, never-ending, and has increasingly become a focus for human resource professionals who specialize in human capital as well as senior business executives who understand how valuable talent is to the success of their organization.  A 2012 study conducted by IBM titled, “Leading with Connections” found that 75% CEO’s identifying and cultivating talent as critical to the success of their organization. 

Interestingly enough that same study identified four critical traits were key for successful employees: collaborative, communicative, creative, and flexible.  These talent qualities are considered soft and thus, hard to be measured. It’s ironic given that talent was originally considered a unit of measure. 

Understanding the War for Talent

The concept of talent for human capital often referred to as talent management occurred in the 1997 with the book, The War for Talent. It first discussed the battle of recruiting, hiring, and retention when it comes to employees.  McKinsey and Company, the organization who authored the aforementioned book has continued their focus on talent in a white paper published in 2001 summing up the continued importance of talent as a unit of measurement but in a different way than the Greek’s had intended.

“In today’s competitive knowledge-based world, the caliber of a company’s

talent increasingly determines success in the marketplace. At the same time, attracting and retaining great talent is becoming more difficult, as demand for highly skilled people outstrips supply.”

So maybe the Greeks weren’t wrong after all.  Talent is a unit of measure driving the success of an organization where profit margins and quarterly earnings indicate how valuable talent truly is to an organization who embraces a company’s most intangible asset.  And while the history of talent is rooted in HR Metrics and measurement, how you measure talent is up to you. 

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter  @blogging4jobs . 

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Passive is the New Active Candidate

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

One of my least favorite buzzwords in the recruitment industry at the moment is the passive candidate.  Studies have been conducted and the secrets revealed on how to best source, search and snag the hidden job seeker and passive candidate.  I myself have written about the passive job seeker, and after all the research and contrary to the hype, I’ve come to a conclusion that the passive job seeker simply does not exist.  As brown is the new black in the fashion world, passive is the new active candidate in ours. 

All Employees Are Candidates in the War for Talent

The passive candidate was defined as that candidate who wasn’t actively looking, searching or interviewing for a job.  And, somewhere in this conceptual world, a candidate transitions from passive to active status.  But, when that happens is unclear. It’s very fluid and very, very grey.   

And as recruiters, hiring managers, and HR professionals, we foolishly we buy into this mumbo jumbo in the war for top talent at our organization.  The passive candidate is just like Valentine’s Day.  It’s a commercialized concept created to sell tools, techniques, and systems to locate and search out that passive job seeker.  The term "passive candidate" seems to have surfaced in the early 1990's before recruiters had access to online talent communities and social media when cold calling and phone sourcing was king.  The line to cross from active to passive was much more clear.  Passive job seekers simply didn't apply.  The simple act of applying wasn't so simple as it involved either mailing in your paper application or resume not applying online.  Maybe technology and accessibility not loyalty is reason for the end of passive candidate.  

Social Media & Technology Drives Accessibility & a Fluid Job Seeker Marketplace

The reality is that every employee is active in some form or another with a combination of social media, lifestyle changes and the economy.  Professionals no longer stay loyal to one company and are always on the lookout for new, bigger and better things.  Changing employers is the human equivalent of upgrading your cell phone plan to the newest version of smartphone, which most people do every two years once their contract expires.  The job search is just like. 

A study by LinkedIn supports this new upgrade in a job seeker and candidate lifestyle.  An estimated 47% of job seekers are tiptoeing their way in the job search; four out of every 10 workers are applying for jobs, interviewing and engaged in a job search in a covert and secret manner in twelve months.  If this study holds true, 94% of your workforce is passive at least once every two years.  And two years happens to also be the average tenure of the Generation Y job seeker and your new majority workforce. 

The Passive Candidate is the New Active Candidate 

A candidate is just like someone who works out at a gym.  Right now I’m there most days two times a day (that’s right, twice a day thank you #operationskinnybum).  Suffice it to say, I’m an engaged customer who is focused on weight loss and healthy living.  There are others at my gym who work out as often as me, and others I see only once or twice a week.  The act of going to the gym and working out means you are actively engaged.  You don’t come to the gym to sit at the smoothie bar or take a nap.  No one at the gym is “passively” exercising – they have to physically walk through the door and scan their membership to get in.  Similar is the so-called passive job seeker who clicked to apply for an opening or responded to a recruiter’s message.  The very act of their engagement makes that candidate an active candidate.   You either workout or you do not; you are either looking for a new job or you do are not.  The passive job seeker simply doesn’t exist because if the majority of your workforce is tiptoeing their way through the job search – they are your new active, formerly passive, candidate.  

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media.  She’s an author who writes at Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @blogging4jobs. 

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