What’s Your TA Nirvana?

While the concept of ‘Talent Acquisition Nirvana’ may sound audacious, it’s fair to say that I’ve met many exceptional Recruiters and Leaders who’ve honestly said: “based on where we are now, any improvement would be heaven!”

Whether you’re setting the pace for the market, or just establishing baseline practices with your Talent Acquisition function, our Improve > Accelerate > Modernize series promises to meet you at your current state, and showcase a few simple ideas to stimulate the step-change you’re looking for.

Yes, a certain level of time, resource, and capital investment is required to realise true benefit from your talent initiatives, and as with any critical business function, the first step before making that investment starts when you pinpoint your highest pay-off activities.

Last week’s article, ‘Building a case for talent acquisition investment’, focused on why talent acquisition maturity is important and outlined a few commercial pitfalls for non-adopters. There, I gave some suggestions on where to start building your business case and identifying those high pay-offs for your business.

This week’s baseline of practical recommendations will help you to create an initial ‘how’ framework – especially if your organisation has a newly created or developing talent function.

I know What I need to do. The question is: How?‍

I often get asked for advice around how an organisation can make that leap in its talent acquisition maturity. The answer is different from organisation to organisation, however there’s some ‘universal truths’ as well.

As a keen follower of the thought leadership brought to our industry by Josh Bersin, I’ve been among those practitioners who have benefitted from the beauty of a good Bersin model. Bersin’s ‘High Impact Talent Acquisition’ (HITA) research quantifiably connects functional performance to better business outcomes (and is a good reference point when you’re making your aforementioned business case!).

Often these models are accompanied by high-level ‘how’ recommendations that Consultants like myself salivate over, however I do hear from my clients that they still need more guidance to operationalise and contextualise these great insights. Of course!

Although there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to getting your how right, I’ve included below my first 8 steps to improvement … with my top 3 recommendations to help get you on your way …

With your ‘how’ map in place, there’s still a considerable amount of magic that needs to happen in iterating, executing, reviewing, communicating, integrating and extending. I welcome the opportunity to discuss this with you in person.

Final considerations;

• To help prioritise the ‘how’, keep focused on those initial design principles – consider broader collaboration; TA, HR & Business stakeholders.
• Design thinking also helps to map experiences – bring in recent hires and or representatives from your target market to really personalise.

Next week’s post; ideas that will help ‘Accelerate’ talent acquisition for strategic impact. Email me if you would like to explore the ‘art of the possible’ for your organisation.