Byrne Mulrooney, CEO, Futurestep shares with People Matters the future of attracting, recruiting and engaging talent beyond hiring and the value of measuring impact of new employees beyond the appraisal process

What are the biggest talent challenges you see companies facing today in the talent acquisition function?

Assessment and selection continue to be the biggest challenge facing companies today. The question is how does one benchmark what good talent looks like? The second one is aligning the candidate’s preferences, desires, experiences and background with the DNA of an organization. The entire process of candidate attraction, selection and on-boarding is a critical component that a lot of companies are looking to improve in order to enhance the experience and make it consistent and globally relevant without diminishing the local flavor.

What are the trends in talent acquisition going forward?

The entire notion of ‘candidate communities’ is becoming really strong and powerful. In the past, the pre-joining stage was a pressure point and it used to be difficult to engage the new employee-to-be and start getting him/her ready for the new role.

Today, candidate communities are a way to engage and connect people of similar backgrounds, skills and experiences into groups where they can share, grow and interact. These pools then become attractive when identifying talent, and once the candidate is interested in working with a brand, it is a way to engage that person until the date of joining and beyond.
Investing in talent communities helps employers to be seen and be influential in the talent pools they are targeting. We can then create a stimulated and engaged candidate pool that hopefully, at a point in time, when they potentially decide to look at different opportunities, will consider your firm as top of mind.

What changes do you see in the candidates themselves?

Candidates today want a wealth of experiences. They are not thinking of a job for 15 or 20 years. They think about an opportunity as a project, an experience, a way to get exposure to different skill-sets and increase their own professional growth and personal development. Companies have a better chance to retain people when they are able to identify this development and readiness and provide the avenues for growth.

Tell us more about the talent communities, where has the need for them emerged from?

We believe in ‘talent with impact’ and we see that as having three different dimensions to it: firstly, the immediate impact, which is when you have an opening and find the person with the right skills and then the job gets done. Secondly, the consequential impact, which is when you find the person that is such a great fit that all of a sudden, the complete energy levels of the team rises and hence the productivity of everybody around him/her also rises. Thirdly, the potential impact, which happens when the person you find is somebody who has the potential to be promoted and can take additional responsibilities and can grow within the company. What we are seeing today is that companies are looking at quantifying and identifying these three levels of impact. Talent communities are a great way to do it because it looks at the individual in a holistic way.

We are working with our clients to look at 10-12 different measures to track these three levels of impact. Each organization will need to identify the measures that will be relevant, based on the culture of the organization. One is able to measure these different levels of impact when tracking an organization for even as short a period as 2 or 3 years.

Please share some examples on how talent impact is measured.

There are different approaches. It starts with how the candidate fits the role and how well he/she performed in that role to what happened in his/her career and how soon did he/she get promoted? Besides the traditional metrics, we look at how fast the person got on board and learnt the ways of the new team. Communities can also help you track the impact looking at the visibility the person is building and how he/she is contributing.

On a separate note, can you share your views on how do you see RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) evolving specifically in India?

RPO is amongst the fastest growing markets. We have seen two trends: one is a trend towards geographical expansion, where companies that have had success in a single country or in a single discipline, are now looking at how they can replicate the success, either by broadening the skill-sets that they are recruiting in or by extending the geographies that they are participating in. These two trends are the most pronounced.

Secondly, companies are looking beyond the Phase 1 of outsourcing and trying to figure out how they can measure the ROI of RPO and how they can move it to a strategic component of their business model.
Companies are reflecting on what functions bring them the deepest impact and hence which profiles, roles and kind of people will bring that level of impact.