How Technology Supports Total Resourcing Excellence
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Jamie Davies
“The ‘War for Talent’ is over – the candidates have won” was an opening remark from a speaker at a recent HR Conference that I attended. This stark comment made people sit up and think about their own talent Acquisition strategy. The shortage of talent on a national, international and global scale means it is vital for organisations to have a highly effective and efficient resourcing function. Deploying an effective solution goes far beyond simply placing your vacancies on to a job board or website.
It is about:
- Ensuring you have visibility and transparency off all vacancies at all levels. This will help promote your brand internally as well as externally
- Maintaining consistency, control and compliance across all departments, divisions, regions and countries
- Building a collaborative solution where all stakeholders (hiring/line managers, recruiters, HR, contractors, candidates and agencies) are accessing one system.
Technology can support organisations’ resourcing strategy with the aim of creating total resourcing excellence. In other words, it’s the ability to deliver the very best candidates consistently, on-demand and at low cost. Looking at number of specific areas where technology aids and supports TRE it starts with ensuring the candidate experience is a positive one with your website having clear navigation, be multi-lingual and culturally specific for both the local and international market with comprehensive search capabilities.
It needs to be interactive and allow candidates to complete an on-line application, create a personal career page, receive jobs by email, and for candidates to apply speculatively and yet receive a professional and personal response Technology will streamline the recruitment process by having structured job specific application process with scoring, weighting and matching functions make pre-screening easier, faster and accurate. This ensures greater consistency and compliance.
Clearly technology will cut the administration workload by having standardised processes, workflows and group actions to allow resourcing managers to spend less time on administration and more time with hiring managers and candidates. This in turn will reduce error and improve quality within HR.
Technology does allow organisations to build a collaborative environment with real time access to all stakeholders (managers, suppliers and candidates) from one flexible system. This gives transparency, control and consistency across every step of the process. The objective is to reduce the time to hire, reduce the cost to hire and most importantly in these days of talent shortages increase the quality of hires. In this war for talent, technology will enable organisations to leverage web-based sourcing and talent relationship management programs to attract the best people in a cost effective and proactive manner. This can be achieved by ensuring all resumes [paper, email, agencies, online] are consolidated in one single system for easier tracking and response management, and for these systems to have smart auto-match capabilities as well as the ability to have smart sourcing options such referral programs, tempto-perm programs, intern-to-perm programs, and hire back.
Equally it is also about building relationships with the market and being proactive. Technology allows organisations to maintain and nurture close relationships not just with people on the market but also those who in the market. Finally, technology is there to support your business decision making.
Technology will provide you with information – quality information – across every facet of your resourcing strategy. For example how effective is your sourcing? who are your best suppliers? are your internal mobility strategies working and helping to reduce turnover and external recruitment by making internal deployment more effective? In today’s highly competitive and global marketplace, organisations need to ensure they have the best resources strategy in place to ensure they stay ahead of their rivals.
This resourcing strategy needs must be under pinned by robust and flexible technology that operates globally to ensure companies attract and acquire the most valuable and highly prized resource – namely talent. Jamie Davies, managing director at MrTed Limited, considers how organisations can utilise technology to support and manage talent acquisition effectively on a global scale.