Strategic talent management includes pay for performance activities that help bring out the best in people and identify where top leaders are emerging or where performance challenges or pay imbalances may exist. All of these initiatives presume organizations to be proficient in first finding and recruiting the talent that's right for the organization and thereby worth developing in the first place. However, companies often take months to find and recruit talent for key vacancies, or worse, hire individuals who poorly fit the positions for which they are hired, thereby squandering valuable resources. The problem is that hiring errors rarely become apparent for months.a gap which can have severe effects on the performance of the organization. By increasing their proficiency in sourcing and recruiting talent, companies not only save time and financial resources, but hone their competitive edge.
Hiring errors rarely become apparent for months a gap which can have severe effects on the performance of the organization.
To understand why some organizations are less efficient than others in finding and recruiting talent, we observed how these processes typically work. We learned that, as with other functional areas, talent sourcing and recruiting tend to be isolated functions within the HR domain. Companies effectively treat each function as a distinct operational silo with minimal levels of interconnectivity with each other and with other functions, such as compensation planning or succession management efforts. In most mid-size and larger organizations, for instance, when a vacancy occurs, the manager completes and submits a job requisition that in-house or external recruiters use as the basis for a candidate search. After hiring, HR generally stores the detailed information it has gathered about candidates in departmental archives rarely seen by non-HR staff.
This traditional approach, which many companies once considered efficient, has several challenges. Here are a few examples:
- Recruiting criteria entered on job requisitions are often inconsistent with the criteria to be used subsequently in performance reviews.
- Systems and processes are designed to target external candidates with no parallel structures for conducting internal searches.
- Companies archive pre-hire employee information, making it difficult to access and consider during performance evaluations, compensation and succession planning, and internal hiring searches.
- Because staffing initiatives are difficult or prohibitively expensive to track and analyze, companies rarely attempt either and thereby lose the substantial value of process feedback.
These challenges make it difficult for organizations to gain full value from the data collect during the recruitment process, add additional costs, and compromise through sheer scale of effort the overall outcome. With more and more organizations looking to shift recruiting responsibilities internally to control agency costs, a new method of addressing these challenges adds significant value.
