Do you have the right talent acquisition strategy?

Talent acquisition – current scenario

Talent acquisition is a long term strategic initiative to look for talented people, gain new relationships and convince them to offer their expertise to your company. In this digital age with blurring geographical boundaries, it has become a challenge for HR managers and recruiters to get the best minds on board. Hence, it has become imperative for HR managers to devise unique and attractive talent acquisition strategies to help attract the best talent and also retain them for a longer duration.

Generally, the HR department of a company looks for candidates only when they want to fill up a specific position, whenever an employee leaves the organization. In this context, your talent acquisition strategy should focus more on the bigger picture of macroscopic hiring and set higher expectations from a long term perspective. In fact, it is a great challenge for HR and functional managers to find and hire the right candidates, particularly in certain key specialist and management functions.

In order to ensure long term success, you need to have a strategic approach for talent acquisition to ensure that the right candidates join and stick to your organization for a longer period of time. For this, you need to probe into your present talent acquisition data, analyze what your current goals are and zero on a forward-thinking talent acquisition strategy that you can implement to attract the best talent with the desired skill sets. Hence, this type of strategic plan that helps to prioritize retention is quite worthy, since it goes a long way in saving your employee turnover costs.

Now, let’s look into the greater details about devising the right talent acquisition policy and the key pointers that could ensure greater success.

Probe your talent acquisition data

The first step towards creating an effective talent acquisition strategy is to gather the data by calculating how much you would spend on employee retention and turnover. This will help you to clearly assess the changes that are required. In this regard, you can do thorough research about how many employees are actually leaving your organization and analyze if your present talent acquisition plan is really yielding any results or is it just a futile exercise, wasting your time and money.

Role of retention rate in devising the right talent acquisition plan

You can easily calculate the retention rate by dividing the number of individual associates hired at a specific point of time; say a year or a quarter by the number of associates hired at the start of the year or the quarter. Next, multiply this figure by 100 to get the exact retention rate. Unfortunately, if you find that the retention rate is very less, you need to analyze what went wrong, for which you need to look into the data of your exit interviews including your employees’ feedback. This will help draw a conclusion about why your current talent acquisition is not foolproof and why it has failed miserably.

For instance, assume a scenario where an associate leaves your organization just a few months after being employed. The pertinent reason could be either the employee might not be the right fit or he/she might not be properly on board. Another reason could be that the candidate couldn’t have been given adequate time to get adjusted in the new environment or worse, he/she might find the work environment sickening and uncongenial.

Let’s take another scenario, where an associate had left after working for a couple of years without being promoted. The primary reason could be either he/she wasn’t provided sufficient opportunity to grow in your organization or showcase his/her skills to let managers take note and offer a long term career path. This is also one instance of failed talent acquisition strategy, wherein proper learning and development are also equally vital, just as important as recruiting a new candidate. 

Revisit your onboarding and training processes

After you know where you stand with respect to your talent acquisition strategy, you can make certain amendments to your onboarding mechanism. This implies you need to create a learning environment, where new associates get personalized training, based on their job expectations. As part of this process, managers need to define key goals, including establishing a continuous communication eco-system between line managers, mentors, and co-workers. Apart from that, they need to handhold the new hires, so they could meet those goals within the defined time period.

In fact, when you onboard a new hire, you need to ensure that they get incessant learning opportunities, so they get positive vibes that they are growing in line with the company’s growth. This will, in turn, develop immense confidence in them that their work is being valued, thereby anticipating good growth prospects in your organization including promotions and pay hikes.

Talent acquisition goes hand-in-hand with training and retention programs when it comes to minimizing the turnover and increasing employee engagement. Hence, it's critical to emphasize your company's commitment to growth and training during the talent acquisition process.

Now you are set to devise an innovative talent acquisition strategy

When you have the key pointers, you are all set to devise a great talent acquisition strategy. To get started, you need to modify your onboarding process and devise a plan that includes all your learning experiences, right talent acquisition strategies, best onboarding practices, and retention models. If you have done your exercise well and put this exercise into practice, we are sure your organization would be on the right track to offer stupendous onboarding, training and learning experiences. This translates into employee loyalty, thereby helping in saving your precious time and money.