DNA Trait 6: Talent Acquisition

In our latest 'HR and Talent Management Benchmarking Report 2019', we found that the practice to recruit talent to support growth is the most important area of focus for HR departments in 2019, tied with employee learning and development. In short, 2019 is expected to be all about talent recruitment and development.

In our 'How Organizations Identify and Develop Great Talent' research, we asked HR professionals about their most difficult hiring challenges. Number one was "finding candidates with the skills we need" (selected by 68%), but it was followed by a variety of other related challenges, including:

• Wages and salaries not competitive enough
• Losing promising candidates during the hiring process
• Poor ability to track and attract candidates who are not actively seeking new jobs

So, finding skilled candidates is just part of the job. Offering them enough to get them to sign up is another major challenge, as is being able to locate and woo passive job candidates.

How good are organizations at maintaining a high quality of hire? On one hand, over half (55%) report doing a good or excellent job in the area of quality of hire. On the other hand, HR professionals regret an average of 31% of new hires, suggesting that there's immense room for improvement in this area. Organizations typically fare even worse in other areas, especially cost of hire and time to fill a position.

Recruitment marketing (RM) consists of the various activities an organization uses to find, attract, engage and nurture talented prospects before and during the application process. The use of the term "marketing" is apt because of the parallels between the practices we use to engage both consumers and candidates. The four broad areas of RM include job marketing, employment branding, candidate engagement and use of a technology platform. Fully 91% of HR professionals cited in our State of Recruitment Marketing report feel that RM will become more or much more important in the future.

There are multiple drivers behind RM. Three of the top five are directly related to technological changes: social media, technology improvements and the need to integrate online recruitment tools.

Almost all organizations use background checks, interviews, and reference checks as part of the hiring process. However, while essential, they are often insufficient. As we mentioned above, HR professionals regret an average of 31% of new hires.

To help with hiring quality, some companies have turned to the use of pre- hire assessments, indicates 'The State of Pre-Hire Assessments' report. Such assessments can take many forms, from psychometric tests to in-depth behavioral simulations. Organizations that use pre-hire assessments report multiple benefits, as shown in the figure on the next page. For example, 90% said it helps them recruit higher quality candidates, and another 67% said they are able to do a better job at screening large volumes of candidates. Yet, most organizations rely on these assessments very selectively, depending on the position.

For example, only 44% of organizations are using pre-hire assessments for professional positions. Similarly, only 39% use them for technical hires and just one in three for executive positions. The question that companies need to answer is whether a higher usage of assessment tools could help them reduce the number of regrettable hires they make each year.

Imagine a job opens in your organization. You inform your applicant tracking system that the position is open and a few minutes later you receive an ideal list of candidates. Imagine that along with each recommended candidate comes a profile matching their experiences and skills with those required for the position. Imagine your system could give you a score on the likelihood the candidate will succeed in the position as well as their retention risk.

This represents some capabilities that recruitment experts would like to see from the application of AI to talent acquisition. HR.com's How Organizations Identify and Hire Great Talent found that HR professionals want a range of outcomes to emerge from AI usage:

• Fill open positions faster
• Improve match between candidates and jobs
• Spend less time sifting through resumes
• Improve candidate experience during the hiring process
• Identify the best internal candidate
• Reduce hiring regrets
• Increase diversity of new hires
• Reduce recruiting advertising spend

Nothing in HR stands still for long these days, particularly in areas where technology plays a significant role. Let's take the topic of recruitment marketing. The figure below shows the ways HR professionals expect it to evolve over the next several years, with greater automation and predictive analytics being at the top of the list.