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Recruitment & Retention

Published October 2009

Recruiting for Hard-to-Fill Positions

 

  Jeremy Barnaby

Finding the right people to fill certain roles can be challenging. But it may be even more challenging when organizations don't identify the required skills, knowledge and abilities upfront and ensure recruiting processes are sophisticated enough to handle today's market.

What makes a position hard to fill? How do talent leaders find the right people to take these positions? Difficulty filling a position may stem from a variety of reasons, but consider a slightly different definition of this business problem. The most difficult jobs to fill are those the organization has not sculpted to match strategic business goals, and there is no consensus on the skills, knowledge and abilities required to achieve them.

Today we are experiencing record high unemployment rates. Yet, highly skilled people who match a company's vision are still difficult to come by. A recent talent synchronicity workshop at Intel revealed 80 percent of talent management professionals still had jobs to fill. Of that group, roughly 75 percent said they were being challenged to hit their time-to-hire metrics. Given the capabilities provided by a Web-connected world, what is the challenge? There are many pieces to the recruiting puzzle, and although many of the moving parts of the search are the same, the success of certain talent management instruments could be maximized if given equal or greater focus from business leaders.

Businesses must conduct robust and timely environmental scans of the marketplace to find where highly sought-after talent reside. Search strategies should be filled with the latest Web-mining tools, target company lists and social media approaches. In an ideal world, organizations would routinely deploy recruiting CRM, ATS, knowledge management and employment branding best practices. Employment branding ensures talent managers are in contact with those they already know well and the right message is getting to the professionals who they want to know better.

According to the 2009 Generator Group Talent Acquisition Trends Survey, an annual analysis of talent acquisition and management trends with a focus on economic impact, hiring priorities and recruitment, 47 percent of companies believe the current economic climate has made it easier to find and attract top talent. This is much higher than in 2008 when only 27 percent reported the economic climate helped in their search and acquisition. The use of social networking sites for hiring is a hot topic, but 38 percent of respondents cited Twitter and 29 percent cited Facebook as one of their least effective recruiting tools. LinkedIn, however, continues to grow in effectiveness, with 11 percent citing LinkedIn as one of their most effective recruiting tools; this is an increase from 8 percent in 2008.

Looking at the big picture, the act of finding someone could potentially become highly commoditized. Social and professional networks will increasingly morph into tools that make recruiting less of a value proposition. Assuming the act of finding people is less intensive or dramatically cheaper, it will benefit talent leaders to expend more intellectual power before turning hard-to-fill talent searches over to recruiting researchers.