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The Mindset Shift That Is Transforming Enterprise Recruiting

Forbes Human Resources Council

Anil Dharni is cofounder and CEO of Sense, an AI-powered talent engagement and communication platform.

The old recruiting mindset of “we have a seat and we’ll make you want it” is dead. Organizations that not only recognize this but embrace it are thriving and are poised to survive whatever the economy brings us in the days ahead.

But what is the new mindset? What does it mean for organizations? And what does it take to bring all of this to reality? I have some good news: It’s not as complicated as you might think. And taking quick action on that shift is within your grasp.

The Role Of Your Recruiters Has Evolved

Your organization has job openings. Your recruiters take the steps necessary to fill those job openings. It’s a simple formula, right?

It was a simple formula. But like nearly everything about business today, it has evolved. More recently (particularly since the days directly preceding the Covid-19 pandemic), it became more of a “woo talent and convince them our jobs are the best” strategy. In other words, your recruiters essentially became an extension of your sales team.

Yes, even that has now shifted. The tide is just starting to turn, but our team here at Sense is closely monitoring both industry trends and data sets for our customers, and we see a palpable shift happening again in the role of recruiters and a mindset shift when it comes to the expectations of talent.

Now, recruiting serves as marketing (writing persuasive job postings, sharing jobs in the right places, adding candidates to your funnel, etc.), sales (leveraging text, email and phone calls to “sell” talent on your jobs) and the new twist: matchmaker.

Talent wants you to help them find the right opportunity in your organization—an opportunity where they'll thrive. When that happens, everyone wins.

So, how does that happen exactly?

How Enterprise Recruiting Should Respond To This Mindset Shift

Acknowledging the mindset shift is critical not only to surviving that shift but to taking advantage of it to improve your organization and its results. Here are three ways your team should respond to be best positioned for success:

1. Reduce the burden on your recruiting team.

Talent is now looking for recruiters to act almost as career counselors. They expect them to go the extra mile and show them how they would best fit—and grow—within your organization.

But recruiting teams are already overworked, according to a survey by human resources analytics firm Veris Insights. Their research found that "77% of high-ranking recruiters are open to changing jobs, along with 65% of HR professionals—a figure that rose 17 percentage points from September to November last year." Expecting them to build the deeper relationships necessary to deliver on these expectations can be daunting. We hear from customers every day who want to provide talent with this type of experience, but they simply cannot within their current constraints.

Leveraging automation and AI effectively has dramatically increased their recruiting teams’ ability to meet this expectation. We find that customers of our talent engagement platform, for example, see a 30% to 50% increase in recruiter productivity.

2. Define your talent engagement strategy.

In my conversations, I find it increasingly common that companies or recruiting teams talk about the tactics or steps they want to take for talent engagement, but they lack an overarching strategy to guide them.

Now’s the time to take a step back and define a clear strategy. What do you hope to achieve? What tangible outcomes will move the needle for your organization and contribute to your recruiting and organizational goals? And then, what tactics will help you meet the evolved mindset while helping your organization meet its goals?

While specifics may change as the quarter and year progress, having that “master plan” for your recruiting team can eliminate uncertainty and ensure everyone is working on the same elements and toward the same goals. It also puts pen to paper on defining your company’s stance on talent engagement and how you expect your recruiters to deliver experiences that align with your company message.

3. Assess and carefully vet potential technology partners.

My team frequently meets with prospective customers who scrambled to acquire a one-off point solution when they realized they “needed” something. Suddenly, one, three, five years later you have found yourself with a mishmash of point solutions and nothing is working together.

Rather than putting time back on your calendars and creating better experiences, point solutions working independently require more hand-holding and multiple customer service teams and often create fragmented talent experiences that don’t align with your company message.

Oh, and they tend to make your recruiters miserable.

Although it’s always a good time to assess the performance and value of your recruitment tech stack and properly vet new potential partners, when you’re defining or refining your talent engagement strategy, that is a great time to ensure your tech stack will help you deliver results on that strategy.

Prioritizing these three things now will provide a solid foundation for your organization to move forward in alignment with the mindset shift in enterprise recruiting. And by prioritizing it now, you’ll gain the upper hand on the competition.


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