How To Prepare For a Tighter Talent Market

The good news is that the economy is improving.  The bad news for business leaders is that finding good talent is getting harder, particularly for positions focused on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).  The pool of active candidates is shrinking.  What does this mean?

This is a critical time to shore up your talent acquisition practices, specifically your sourcing/recruiting system as well as your screening process.  This article discusses how the connection with talent is once again shown to be the #1 influencer of time-to-fill.  A strong process is also essential for identifying the candidate who is the best fit, and for creating a positive experience for candidates.

Don’t wait until the talent competition is even more intense to improve your hiring practices.  Stay ahead of your competition.  Be proactive and make improvements now with these five activities.

1. Establish your talent pipeline – Invest time building connections with people who are the kind of people you want to hire.  Use your Applicant Tracking System or other means to catalog who top talent prospects are and stay connected with them.  Make sure that potential candidates who are intrigued by your company have the means to express general interest (even if there’s not a job for them to apply for) and to be notified of openings.
2. Build your employer brand – What’s great about working at your company?  Why is the same position better at your company than at your competitor?  Figure out specific, authentic answers to these questions and others that define who you are as an employer and why someone would want to work for you.  Get this information out there on your Career page, your company profile on LinkedIn, your Twitter feed, etc.  Use a mix of writing and video to tell the story.
3. Streamline your screening process – Great candidates get scooped up quickly and may lose interest in your company through drawn-out application processes.  Review your entire process and look for ways to make it more efficient.  Does HR need to have more control?  Is your application process onerous?  This saves you money as well as optimizes your ability to secure the best talent.
4. Train your hiring managers –  Make sure they have the skills to effectively identify if a candidate fits.  Also, give them experience doing hiring in any kind of revised system that you establish (see #3 above).  If you modify your screening process, your people need time to work within the new system.  Give them that experience now before the stakes are even higher because talent shortages are intensified.
5. Examine the candidate experience – The points above touch on this, but it merits highlighting.  Top talent can afford to be picky.  If your company has a cumbersome process for candidates, if the people they meet at your company don’t convey confidence and competence for hiring, if they go long periods of time without hearing from you during the screening process, all of this can lead to a great candidate being turned off at some level and potentially dropping out.  Additionally, the entire application and screening process is a way for you to make a certain impression on candidates, even ones who aren’t finalists.  What kind of impression does your process make?  Can you afford to make a bad impression?

Start this work now.   Talk to outside resources like Synergy Consulting Services to see what value and efficiencies they can bring to your efforts to strenthen your talent acquisition system.  If necessary, set aside dollars in your next budget.  Time and dollars spent now will pay off many times over because you will be able to fill positions sooner and with the best fitting talent who is fired up about joining your company.