Article: Companies to focus on sourcing right talent

Talent Acquisition

Companies to focus on sourcing right talent

Assessment tools can help companies source the right talent by being niche and focused
Companies to focus on sourcing right talent
 

By using talent assessment tools, companies can reduce the cost of reading a resume by as much as 96 per cent and have a time saving of almost 58 per cent

 

Looking at the talent acquisition space, we believe that sourcing the right talent is of prime importance this year. With more and more companies looking to hire, this will be a humongous task. There are people downloading resumes on a daily basis, but there is an almost 60 per cent inaccuracy in query generation itself. This means when people humanly write queries and job descriptions, 60 per cent of the times they are wrong. This can be fixed by assessment tools, which can read resumes and job descriptions and draw inferences that can then be used to measure candidates.

By using talent assessment tools, companies can reduce the cost of reading a resume by as much as 96 per cent and have a time saving of almost 58 per cent.

Being niche and focused

The model of assessing people has shifted to assessments being more niche and focused on jobs and particular skill areas that people are being hired for. Earlier, people were assessed on generic parameters like attitude, aptitude, communication and technical fronts;  today they focus more on skills. The skills you possess will help you move to the next stage.

Technical assessments have started looking a lot more radical in terms of gamification. A combined initiative of marketing and talent assessment, gamification has become a mass medium for assessing people and the excitement in this space is only growing. Statistically, the assessment market is about $3 billion in size and a quarter of that is just on talent acquisition in the pre-hire stage. About $1.75 billion is talent management post the hiring process to ensure that the candidates are on-boarded and skilled for their particular roles with the right training. This is touted to increase 15-20 per cent by 2020 to $5 billion.

Facing the challenges

A lot of people have complained about talent transformation and assessment being ineffective in an organization prima facie because the data that comes in to manage the lifecycle of an employee is very rudimentary. However, this problem lies at the pre-hire stage and that is where it needs to be addressed. People have understood that and have started focusing on pre-hiring problems. A lot of companies are looking to outsource this to specialized vendors for assessment and are considering models that take both talent transformation and assessment and integrate them together-models which look at social aspects in terms of data collection so that we can understand individuals before assessing them. Analytics here plays a huge role in analyzing this data and making inferences. 

There is a lot of push to ensure that the learnings from the internal workforce are transferred to acquiring talent. And the demand to get the right person for the right job is becoming a reality due to the technology and the focus on niche solutions.

Experiential insights

Looking at our own experiences while working with some of the big IT companies, there is a 27 per cent decrease in skill mismatch due to the analytics and assessments that we drive. This has led to an increase in the productivity of the companies in servicing its consumers. Hence, the radical nature of promoting an integrated workforce optimization and talent acquisition solution is becoming a reality with the large ITeS companies, which are looking to minimize their revenue losses because of missing out on the right candidates and hence improved productivity.

The global value proposition of these solutions is also a reduction in attrition, which is a problem worth billions of dollars. It is not just attrition but the whole process that an employee goes through in quitting a company in the first six months. In addition to the monthly compensation that is wasted, the cost of onboarding and training the individual comes out to be 1.5 times the salary. That in total is a huge cost and a big loss for organizations across industries across the world.

It is time to leverage this talent assessment and transformation to ensure that the right fit candidates are matched with the right industries and roles. This will not only help in increasing workforce efficiency, but also save organizations billions of dollars.

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Topics: Talent Acquisition, #TalentAssessment

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