Talent acquisition occupies a big chunk of a company’s time and focus. Whether your company is the size of Apple or a local trucking company, hiring qualified employees demands a certain amount of attention and organization. Consider these 5 reasons why perfecting your talent acquisition process can lead to long-term benefits for your company.
1. Talent Acquisition Efforts = A Valuable Business Partner
For a rapidly growing small business, tasks like posting jobs, receiving applications and resumes, and setting up interviews can be spread across personnel in all departments. Sometimes the urgency of the task means employees are forced to take on additional roles and responsibilities. While input from various departments is valuable, a scattershot approach to hiring can lead to missed opportunities, tardy communication, and soured relationships with potential hires.
A dedicated talent acquisition team will have a tight focus on helping the business thrive. Team members will see a holistic view of all departments and staff. They will act as liaison between upper management and departments to identify hiring gaps and do the administrative legwork to find applicants to fill those roles. A tool like ApplicantStack can further reduce the time required for posting available positions, organizing the applicants’ information, and keeping a detailed log of communication.
2. Talent Acquisition Team Analyzes Pay Equity
According to the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls, unequal pay can be a result of direct or indirect biases based on gender, race, incorrect perceptions about employees’ career ambitions, or simply on past experience. In the hustle and bustle of everyday operations, management likely doesn’t have the time available to analyze each employee’s pay status and interrogate its fairness.
From job posting to onboarding, your talent acquisition department can apply some of the following suggestions from the Commission:
- Remove bias from hiring process by making sure all genders are represented at each stage of the hiring process.
- Encourage a company culture where employees can discuss their salaries without any fear of recrimination.
- Allow employees to be heard by management on concerns of compensation.
- Review and establish fair and equitable compensation packages for every position so pay is reflective of the job requirements rather than subjective criteria.
Competent talent acquisition professionals can create a comfortable atmosphere around compensation from a candidate’s first interaction with your company. Transparency during the hiring process helps weed out any employee who turns out to be unwilling to commit to an undisclosed salary.
According to Aptitude Research, a whopping 44 percent of candidates drop out of the process if pay isn’t disclosed from the beginning and it doesn’t meet their criteria once revealed. Transparency and open dialogue help weed those candidates out from the beginning.
3. Talent Acquisition Teams Facilitate Succession Planning
In addition to hiring outside talent, your TA team can identify action plans for employees within the company to fill roles now or in the future. Promoting from within the company takes a great deal of the unknown from the process and can be an encouraging experience for a valued employee.
The University of Washington created a toolkit for assessing how succession planning could benefit your business. Aside from immediate positions that need to be filled, the tool helps company leaders identify a holistic view of current and future goals. It then helps identify which employees can be trained or mentored into filling positions that support those goals. They’re tasked with working with upper management to quantify the value and urgency of those roles to create a long-term strategic plan.
4. Talent Acquisition Teams Identify Successes and Failures in the Hiring Process
Whether your company is consistently hiring to meet growth or hires in bursts such as seasonal work, there is always room for improvement in the process. A dedicated TA department will review and evaluate each hire. A tool like ApplicantStack produces detailed reports that give your company valuable data.
- “Source Performance” helps you know where your applicants came from.
- “Time in Stage for Active Candidates” shows how long applicants sit in any section of the workflow.
- “Hire Metrics” gives percentage hired, among other metrics.
- “Stage Conversion” reveals where each candidate sits in the hiring process.
These reports are not only useful for the active hiring process but provide a window into the overall efficacy of the team’s efforts. It can help identify repeated breakdowns in the process and point to places with needed improvement.
5. Talent Acquisition Teams Contribute to Employee Retention
A report published by Madeline Laurano at Aptitude Research revealed that 49 percent of companies surveyed set employee retention as a top priority. Companies that link talent acquisition with employee retention see vast improvements in metrics like employee turnover (60 percent vs 32 percent) and employee production (62 percent vs 20 percent).
The report also found that many companies still see hiring and retention as a job for separate organizations. In fact, a quality TA department can recognize strategic initiatives that ensure retention of those employees your company worked so hard to hire. It takes many worker hours to recruit, gather resumes, interview, negotiate, hire, and onboard new employees.
Retention has a direct impact on an organization’s stability, long-term success, and productivity. High turnover rates are disruptive to operations and impact growth. Using the metrics reports from ApplicantStack along with personal interactions between employees, hiring managers, and management, employee retention becomes a collaborative effort that benefits worker and company alike.
Businesses of all sizes can benefit from a thoughtful look at their hiring processes. Even if your staff and budget feel small, an investment in dedicated talent acquisition professionals may make all the difference to company culture, productivity, and retention.
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