Article: Companies focus on higher quality hire

Talent Acquisition

Companies focus on higher quality hire

LinkedIn's Hiring Trends 2012 survey reveals the social hiring outlook for the coming months
Companies focus on higher quality hire
 

Hiring quality talent in a shortperiod of time is the greatesthiring challenge

 

Six key trends will shape the hiring strategy for organizations in the coming months.

The strong focus on social hiring seen across 2012 is likely to continue in 2013, compelling organizations to factor in some key trends in the recruiting space to stay competitive. In a joint roundtable by People Matters and LinkedIn, Irfan Abdulla, Director of Talent Solutions at LinkedIn, reveals that in the face of an acute demand-supply mismatch, some key trends will drive the hiring outlook for organizations in the coming months. LinkedIn recently conducted a survey among 255recruiting professionals in India to understand the recruiting outlook for 2013. The survey revealed the following key hiring trends that will drive the focus for recruiting organizations:

1. Organizations will continue to see a strong hiring outlook-The last few months saw organizations opening up more positions to fill through social channels. These positions across roles and levels have seen, and will continue to see, an increase in volume. The poll revealed that over 50 percent of hiring organizations will continue to see an increase in hiring budget and volume.

2. The competition for talent will increase - Competition and compensation came across as the biggest hindrances for organizations in attracting talent. This reflects a highly competitive landscape led by social media as one of the most important channels for hiring in the coming times. According to the survey, recruiting leaders are most concerned about their competitors will invest more in areas of employer branding, employer referral programs, and new recruiting technology and tools.

3. Recruiting organizations will focus on passive talent and pipelining - 65 percent of the surveyed organizations are focusing their recruiting efforts toward passive talent and over 87 percent are actively engaged in pipelining talent. Organizations realize that opening up the passive talent pool allows targeted access to more aligned candidates for positions. While training schedules and on-boarding time continue to shrink, there is a greater need for organizations to target talent with the right set of skills and experiences to take on the more complex jobs that modern day organizations require. Another key development that is fueling the focus on passive candidates and talent pipelining is the transition from an industrialized ecosystem to a knowledge ecosystem. As the skills required in knowledge economy are difficult to build and take more time, more and more organizations are looking for more targeted candidate sourcing and talent pipelining.

4. Quality of hire will be the name of the game - As Irfan mentions, “The focus on passive talent is because hiring for quality has become very critical.” Organizations across all industries witness that there are various aspects of quality that act as constraints and make hiring more challenging. One of the most common challenges is ‘time to hire’. Most organizations grapple with the dilemma of hiring the best talent within a limited span of time. 41% of organizations in India consider ‘quality of hire’ as the single most important recruiting metric. Some of the key complicating factors of the ‘quality of hire’ challenge involve how to provide competitive compensation where industry boundaries have ceased to exist, when and how to assess quality, and what metrics to measure.

5. There will be heightened focus on employer branding - Employer branding will constitute one of the core priorities for organizations in the coming months. Organizations, however, face a number of key challenges in employer branding. Many are confused whether employer branding is an HR responsibility or a marketing responsibility. There is a lack of standard mechanisms to track and monitor an employer brand, thereby making it difficult to demonstrate RoI to senior management. In addition, many organizations struggle to formulate the right employer branding metric. Social media has become an important channel for organizations to promote the employer brand. Organizations, however, are unsure about how to measure the reach and engagement with an employer brand through social media. LinkedIn has an interesting metric to track the effectiveness of the employer brand–called the Talent Brand Index that captures ‘the number of follows on the company’s page’.


6. Hiring is mostly a data-driven decision - Confirming that employers in India are serious about their employer branding, the survey reveals that Indian corporations are ahead of the curve when it comes to regularly measuring the employer brand. Against a global average of 33 percent, 50 percent of Indian organizations regularly measure the health of the employer brand in a quantifiable way. Again, 45 percent of Indian organizations regularly survey candidates to understand employer brand position against a global average of 32 percent. Organizations that are poor at leveraging data for making hiring decisions will fall behind in the race for acquiring the best talent.

With the talent landscape becoming increasingly competitive, the need for HR organizations is to understand the best mechanisms by which they can reach a larger talent pool more effectively. Data analytics and employer branding will be the primary avenue where organizations are likely to invest their social hiring time and efforts in the coming months.
 

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, Technology, #Social Media

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