Australia’s leading companies are taking a strategic and proactive approach to sourcing top talent. Follow these five steps in building an effective multi-sourcing and proactive recruitment model for your organization.
Developing a winning talent acquisition strategy is critical to the success of top companies around the globe. The challenge, of course, is to integrate and implement integrated plans for everything from employer branding to candidate assessment and selection to attract best-in-class, mid-level professionals.
In Australia, HR practitioners are beginning to move away from a reactive approach to filling their most critical management hires and towards more proactive and strategic programs. Specifically, a “preemptive-strike” mentality allows a company to be on the forefront in addressing tomorrow’s workforce needs today.
To achieve this, the practice of partnering with recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) specialists is becoming more common. Evaluating the flight risk of the current management team, calculating the cost associated with their departure, managing the external talent pool, identifying and educating potential candidates for an employer even before key roles becomes vacant are some of the ways that RPO providers are helping businesses develop the insight necessary to make swift decisions on internal versus external hiring and reducing the time and cost to fill.
When CGU Insurance Australia sought assistance in hiring 380 roles per year across multiple geographies, a dedicated, branded Futurestep recruitment team worked with the client to develop new career initiatives including the “CGU Careers” employer branding campaign as well as conducting talent mapping within key competitors. As Rita Agati, head of strategy and HR at CGU Insurance Australia Group (IAG), pointed out:
“Partnering has allowed us to proactively build a sustainable workforce for the future by understanding the market, knowledge, skills, trends, and remuneration, while providing a high-touch recruitment model that streamlines our recruitment process and is cost-effective.”
Here are some insights into how a multi-sourcing and proactive recruitment model is taking hold across Australia and worldwide:
- Step 1: Develop a workforce plan. Forecast the anticipated hires by role, placing emphasis on key strategic positions. Look at current attrition rates and estimate expected hiring needs over a set timeframe; for example, forecast sales recruitment during the next
12 months. - Step 2: Conduct a risk audit across roles. Rather than wait for your star performers to resign, identify the highest-impact or highest-risk roles in your organization now, looking at business unit by business unit, and role by role. Figure out the true cost impact of their departure, including the value of their intellectual property, specific skill sets, as well as the hard dollar numbers of the recruitment fees and induction or training costs associated with replacing them.
- Step 3: Devise a proactive talent strategy. The above steps will provide some focus on the number and type of roles that warrant a proactive approach to sourcing. This planning should allow you to develop a business case based on expected hiring and the cost/risk of losing key people.
- Step 4: Power up multiple sourcing channels. There are now a wide range of methods for identifying and attracting prospective hires, and these include internal alumni and referral programs, research- and network-based sourcing, competitor- and brand-based sourcing (e.g., corporate web sites, etc.)
- Step 5: Continuously manage relationships with candidates. The external talent market continues to change as people reassess their careers and move to new roles internally and externally. Organizations need to not only capture this updated information but also develop and maintain relationships with prospective hires. All information needs to be stored, managed and regularly updated.
Clearly, Australian employers are not the only ones choosing to outsource all or part of the recruitment function to a proven, capable RPO provider. Given the competitive edge that this strategic decision offers clients of all shapes and sizes, we’re not surprised to see it happening in every major market around the world.
