Why Your Talent Management Strategy is Doomed to Fail & What You Can Do About It

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

A recent study from Harvard Business discusses how a company’s own board of directors, seen as the business lighthouses guiding the organizations to business success, demonstrates how these business leaders view the success of their company’s own talent management strategies.

In short, these companies are awarded a big fat F by those brilliant business minds that are guiding the organizations. Something has to change because the current model isn’t working. Without an effective talent management strategy recruiters are sourcing and spending time on candidates that won’t make it past the qualification stage of your process. This is a waste of crucial resources that your company can spend on building a better company culture or newer HR technologies.

A talent management strategy isn’t just HR or the recruiting team’s responsibility. It’s an entire company initiative focused on the entire employee life cycle from engaging to sourcing to recruiting to hiring to onboarding to developing to promotion to exiting and every point in between. Without focusing on the overall employee life cycle companies will be doomed from the start. The process in today’s recruiting world goes far beyond the simplicities of hiring and firing employees, but it extends outward towards the entire cycle from pre-screening to retirement.

According to these leaders, the areas of opportunity include diversity, firing, and rewarding talent-assessing talent which actions commonly associated with management and business leaders not just hiring and recruiting. Without overall strategies your company can never take a holistic approach to talent management and will be doomed from the beginning. How do you fix these problems? Here are just a few suggestions on how to start turning your entire strategy around:

Build a talent pipeline. Building a talent pipeline is one of the most effective ways to start recruiting from a pre-selected group of already qualified candidates. Start working with applicable candidates in building a secure pipeline.

Invest in a community. Talent Networks like Talent Circles allow recruiters to be a part of the conversation instead of applicants filling like a data set in company’s CRM. Building a community allows each candidate to feel special and will more likely want to stay as a candidate whether they’re actively or passively seeking employment.

Hire based on skill not only work experience. When candidates apply for your company and have a skill set that is what you want, don’t look past them if they don’t have necessary experience. Take it as a way to mold the candidate into an employee you want them to be instead of retaining bad practices from previous employers.

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. 

Photo Credit. 

C#4 of Social Recruiting: Courtesy and Candidate Centricity

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

We have already discussed "C#1" Continuity, C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding, and C#3 Culture — your core values and credibility.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Even if social networks allow you to broadcast information to a lot of people, one of the key assumptions of all social networks is that you are not simply addressing an "audience." You address individuals who voluntarily start a connection with you by becoming "friends" and "followers". Your attitude counts — and we all know that disgruntled friends and followers un-follow in a click.

However, today, when candidates respond to your call, they are treated like an anonymous bunch of people. Recruiting isn’t “personal” anymore. Worse, at the very moment when a candidate is considering a personal and professional commitment to your company because you’ve convinced her to try to work for you, your traditional ATS solutions bury them in unnecessary paperwork. The functional purpose of finding the right candidate destroys the humanity of your brand. TalentCircles helps you to pace yourself and offer a positive face to your company.

Welcome candidates

Give a face to your company: When candidates join your talent network, welcome them. A video is the best tool - this is when your brand must show its human dimension. As a recruiter, you are the bridge between your brand and the people: you represent your company and its personality.

Acknowledge your guests

Acknowledge your new candidates by sending them a customized email.

Let candidate access information at all times

You can send branded personal email notifications and digests (when you post jobs on your network, create blog posts or organize a video event or a webinar) to your talent community.

You have lots of opportunities to invite candidates to visit your network regularly. They have their own dashboard, providing them with the latest news and opportunities. They can also join the circles that are of interest to them, as well as invite friends.

The benefits of a candidate-centric process are obvious:

• In a business environment where close to 80% of employed people are open to considering another position, it's key to offer both active and passive candidates a friendly entry point into your company’s talent pipeline, and give them reasons to regularly frequent your network.
• Instead of being discouraged by a process imposed by a company, candidates are happy to opt into your company network. This is critical: Realize that, just as customers, if candidates do not feel welcome, they may knock at your competitor's door!
• The more active you are on your talent network, the more likely they are to be interested in your brand and share your content (jobs, information, events or blog posts). 

C#3 of Social Recruiting: Culture — your Core Values and Credibility

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

This week, we have discussed "C#1" Continuity and C#2 Consistency or the art of following-through your branding

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

As most social media gurus like to say, social media is about speaking with, not "at" people. It's not about pushing generic and bland statements that would define just any company. It's about telling people what's unique and exciting about you.

The primary purpose of your home page in your talent network is to offer a personal connection with your core values, to create the desire of being part of your world and or interacting with you.

The flexibility of TalentCircles allows you to upload videos or create new content about your company as often as you want. If it is compelling, your creativity may be a reason for your candidates to follow you more closely inside your talent network and invite their friends to show them how awesome you are.

You probably do not have a team of artists creating a new Google doodle every day, but you may have great employees who would love to share their story and speak about your company’s core values. The credibility of your talent network is dependent on the trust you instill. If your company really is a great place to work, your best spokespeople will be your employees!

Storytelling videos showcasing real people are an essential dimension of HR marketing. This is also what will entice the candidates in your network to share your jobs, speak about your events, or re-post your blog entries on their personal social networks.

Quit Snooping on Your Employees on LinkedIn

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

LinkedIn, the recruiter’s social recruiting go to tool of choice is now over 225 million users strong. Social media and the Internet is a great way to stay up to date on professional information and news related to your job and career, but it is also a way to spy on your employees.

Having had resuming mining access to job boards for many years, I always cringed when hiring managers were allowed access to source using these systems for employees or worse I’ve had hiring managers' request to receive updates regarding employees who update their resume on a job board as well as LinkedIn. These databases and resources are not meant for spying they are for searching for qualified potential employees.

As the use of social recruiting and online tools grow, I become increasingly concerned about employee privacy and data not only for individuals but when employers use access for big data analytics and information as a way to predict an employee’s resignation or the beginning of their job search activity.

I speak out of experience I was nearly fired for recruiting on LinkedIn. And I plead. Quit snooping on your employees. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Four Square, access to employee information shouldn’t be used as a productivity-monitoring tool. Employers, particularly managers should focus on measurable results like meeting assigned expectations, deadlines and production metrics than social media activity.

Ever since social media came an important workplace topic the idea of privacy has been thrown out the windows. From employers wanting to gain access to employees' social media accounts to recruiters now trying to predict an employee’s next move. We’ve become so focused on the possibility of employees leaving that we forget to implement programs that focus on overall retention.

To me, the importance should be put on the actual culture of the company instead of all the moving parts that are being scrutinized in this technology age. The use of obtaining employee social media passwords and recruiters snooping on employees on LinkedIn would cease to be an issue if the culture was one that encouraged employee growth and opportunity.

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. 

Photo Credit. 

C#2 of social recruiting: Consistency — Follow-through your branding strategy

This post is part of a series describing the nine "Cs" that drive a successful social recruiting strategy and started with You do social sourcing. Now start your social recruiting strategy!

On Monday we discussed the first "C," Continuity.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Following-through your branding strategy is critical.

Your social pages express your brand and your message. They are consistent across the various social sites: Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, or Twitter. They are your social image. Still, when candidates respond to your call of action, your employer branding magic ends: you transport candidates into the bland environment of a standard ATS. Just like customers, candidates immediately feel when they are treated impersonally.

Consistency across your social media accounts is key to quality social recruiting. You brand is not just a show to be seen from afar. Your brand must be present, inspiring and immersive at all times — especially when people get closer to you.

You must pursue your employment branding initiative inside your network, and again, bridge your public persona and your internal corporate identity.

Here is an example of great brand continuity created by The Home Depot.

On Twitter

On their talent network powered by TalentCircles

Using TalentCircles, you can customize the look and feel of your entire talent network.

• Most capabilities are point-and-click features.
• A free customization toolkit allows full custom branding of the header and the footer of the platform — plus custom CSS and JavaScript. This toolkit allows for complex and deep customization of any page of the network.

The image that you have developed for your company on the Web at large must be continued inside your private network. The candidates who "like" you on Facebook must be immersed in the same type of experience if they happen to want to work for your company, now, or later down the road.

In short, if you want customers and candidates to take your brand seriously, take it seriously yourself!