Time and again, great leaders have underlined the importance of having the right talent on board to succeed in a mission.
Businesses are faced with unprecedented levels of uncertainties and ambiguities. They are moving fast and adapting on the go. Thus, they need talent that aligns well with the organisation’s core values, believes in its purpose and is excited about its vision. Leaders have to find the right talent for them first; then comes the challenge of nurturing and growing the talent to the heights of success!
Know what we are good at!
Many organisations are so busy that they go through the motions of the recruitment process at a rapid pace without a periodic review of their value proposition. The business environment keeps evolving and hence, one must keep evaluating the relevance and attractiveness of one’s story for a potential employee.
This exercise can sometimes be quite an exhaustive affair, for example, a business might be diversifying and thus, needs to dip into a new cohort of the talent pool to recruit from. Sometimes, there could be a competitor aggressively recruiting and thus, impacting our ability to attract talent from the market. There could be external developments due to which our value proposition may no longer be attractive enough.
Communicate the right way!
Experts have to be at work in listing down the cohorts of talent we are trying to recruit and thus, defining the pools one has to cast the net on. Then, they have to evolve the media one would use to reach those pools and craft the communication for each media accordingly. Since first impressions last long, we have to ensure that our communication is effective and we are able to spread the awareness we targeted. Even simple tasks such as writing an email to a potential candidate, posting a job on social media or the company’s career page or publishing it on the company’s intranet to generate internal referrals have to be done with care and focus.
Messages have to be customised keeping in mind the pool being targeted and the medium in use. For example, a company has to change the language and the content of the communication when they recruit blue-collar or grey-collar employees in different states. This customisation may not be required when they recruit talent at managerial levels.
Our communication has to be simple, contemporary, relevant, and comprehensive; and at the same time, it must reflect the unique characters or purpose we stand for. Done consistently over some time, we establish an identity that the talent pool takes notice of and speaks about. The power of word-of-mouth communication starts yielding positive results for us.
Empathy and pace are essential!
Consistently crafty communication falls flat if the candidates participating in our recruiting process do not experience warmth and care from us. The recruiting process in any organisation involves several people and thus, has many moments of truth that a candidate experiences our brand as an employer. Any dissonance between our claims or promises and their experience does not go well in the talent market for us. Hence, we must align our people involved in the recruiting process so that the candidates get a realistic preview of the job and our culture.
Secondly, candidates expect speed of action and care from their future employers. Hence, we need to tune our systems and processes to deliver an experience matching the expectation of the supply side of the talent equation.
We have to keep a continuous watch on our process to keep it fit for the purpose all the time.
