2018 Talent Acquisition Strategy: The 4 Things You Can’t Miss

With 2017 in the rearview mirror and 2018 here, the state of talent acquisition technology has never been more fragmented and diluted than ever. With Google for Jobs entering the arena in June, and the impact of AI & Machine Learning becoming better understood, 2018 will surely be another transformative year. As the talent acquisition technology market evolves, so has the increased emphasis on vendors to provide clear differentiation and value.  With transparency comes a more informed understanding of how talent acquisition professionals can evolve their traditional efforts to embrace a digital-first strategy.

According to Josh Bersin, Principal & Founder of Bersin Research, companies spend around 3x more on recruiting compared to employee training (making it approximately a $420 billion market) for the simple fact that more than 20 percent of all workers change jobs every year.  Because of high employee turnover rates, employers must constantly advertise, source, recruit, interview, assess, and onboard new people all year round.

Despite the complexity that is the recruitment process, many organizations continue to think of recruiting on an “as needed” basis (which employs posting jobs, capturing resumes, etc) in a very linear fashion. With a Millenial and Gen Z dominated workforce, as supported by the chart below, the ATS-centric and liner models of variablized recruiting are where the most mistakes are currently being made in attracting talent from those generations.

To avoid linear recruiting, there is an order of operations that can be followed and isolated for optimization in a progressive TA process. At WayUp, the leading digital platform to reach, recruit and engage college students and recent grads, the first three disciplines in the figure below (Brand Building, Job Posting, and Sourcing & Recruiting) really hit home. There is a clear understanding amongst forward-thinking professionals that technology is the catalyst to transforming the way quality talent is sourced, hired, and on-boarded into respective organizations, most especially in the pursuit of this ‘integrated’ approach.

With an integrated approach in mind, here are the four can’t miss trends for talent acquisition professionals in 2018:

1. Invest in AI…But Do So Cautiously

Artificial intelligence has continued to be the most discussed topic at technology led HR conferences, regardless of industry or audience.  From a consumer’s perspective, it’s often a mechanism to garner opens, clicks, and responses and not an accurate representation of their product or service offering. To that very point, AI and Machine learning seem to be used interchangeably to describe functionality, which only bolsters the argument of widespread inaccuracy since they are, by definition, not the same.

John Sumser, principal author and editor-in-chief of the HRExaminer, set out to discover AI’s impact to HR with his most recent research and session titled, “Artificial Intelligence: Making Sense Out of All the Claims.”  The report sought to set realistic expectations about emerging predictive technologies and get us thinking about the true costs of ownership. For TA professionals, AI offers the opportunity to shorten hiring windows, predictively determine a potential candidates performance, and surface stronger candidates intuitively.   

Regardless of your stance on the matter, AI vendors must deliver on a challenging promise:

• The creation of a cognitive system that augments an individual’s expertise.
• Allows for smarter, quicker, and more informed analysis.
• Seamlessly delivered insights to the stakeholder to make it digestible and actionable.

2. Digital Talent Acquisition Is Becoming More and More Like Marketing

Talent acquisition and marketing share many of the same principles in that each discipline employs an art and science to attract a targeted audience in order influence a specific action(s). At a more fundamental level, it’s all about the funnel. The days of ‘shooting from the hip’ and investing in the traditional channels/strategies to attract and engage the right candidates are over.  A prime example of this is Unilever, who in 2017, pivoted entirely from a costly, intensive, and suboptimal on-campus TA strategy to a digital-only approach. Challenging the ways of old, the Unilever team was able to optimize their entire TA funnel and created tremendous ROI.  Check out this webinar to see the full story.

With the right combination of timing, channels, content, and integrated technologies at each part of the talent acquisition funnel, employing a cutting-edge strategy will become a reality.  Specifically, creating an environment that optimizes a recruitment marketing mix that’s informed by data to:

• Create a year-long campaign calendarized approach for existing and forward-looking roles
• Do more with less, maximizing every budgeted dollar you have to drive awareness to target audiences
• Predicatively understand what channels drive the highest quality candidates through attribution reporting efforts
• Create transparency for internal business leaders to demonstrate TA value
• A digital candidate experience/journey that has intuitive UI/UX with timely communications that can be read and received on all devices and browsers

When done properly, this can result in a predictive model for TA.  Understanding what you can predictivity deliver with certain levels of investment, in which channels and when is a position of strength for HR professionals alike.

3. Hiring the Right Recruiters is Even More Important Than Ever Before

Your credentials and years of experience are one thing, but the difference between good and great are the underlying attributes that create consistency for top-tier performers.  According to a senior talent acquisition leader, “Of all the factors I’ve studied in the success of hiring great people, by far the number one driver is having the right recruiter. Recruiters who really know our jobs, our culture, and our hiring managers can find and bring in the best people.”  The very best in breed talent acquisition pros embody the following:

• Great Communication: whether it be internal or candidate facing, clear and direct communication skills are the primary prerequisites to being great.
• Honesty: defaulting to transparency in any process is the cornerstone to establishing trust and authenticity to create a meaningful candidate experience.
• Be a Market Expert: in order to effectively attract top talent ‘you must do as the Romans do.’ Learning to speak the vernacular of the roles you’re responsible for recruiting for and immerse yourself in their discipline.
• A Sense of Urgency: timing and metrics matter, so why do TA professionals generally not act with ‘urgency’? Applying a sales like mentality/culture to TA has been a strategic way to solve for this at scale.
• Student of your Craft: continued education is a paramount part of anyone’s development.  Being in tune with the latest trends, technologies, and strategies guarantee a culture that strives for greatness and momentum for improvement.
• Embracing your Inner Marketer: The synergistic principles that exist between marketing and talent acquisition pros are palpable in a digital world. Accessibility to data, people, and channels that create hyper-focused reach to the desired audiences with the goal of creating interest are one in the same for both disciplines.  The very best of TA pros create multi-channel marketing mixes to drive applicants to view and apply to their postings as opposed to the spray and pray strategies of the past.

4. Create an Authentic Employment Brand

Simply put, study after study proves that creating an employer brand that evokes both authenticity and human-like experiences attracts and converts the best talent. So the question is how do we create moments that reflect the aforementioned principles? What data do we need to acquire to inform that strategy? Are there standardized attributes that can be referenced to get started?  These are all important questions to answer in understanding and prioritizing your employment brand efforts in 2018.  However, it starts in understanding the correlation between your EVP (employer value proposition) and the perception of your potential employee base.  In measuring ‘perception’ credibility, attractiveness, and differentiation are areas to at the focal point of discovery via the following approaches:

• Brand Sentiment Surveys
• Campaign Testing
• Focus Groups & Panels

When conducted properly, the data acquired via those approaches will inform your employment brand strategy with an emphasis on delivering authentically and consistency in all mediums.

—

For more info, please contact us email engage@wayup.com!

WayUp is the leading talent acquisition platform to reach, recruit, and engage college student and recent graduates.  With an ever-growing marketplace of 4M+ candidates, employers can post entry-level jobs, go direct-to-talent via sourcing tools, and leverage employer branding solutions to transform their early career TA strategies.