New Year corporate-speak is entering conversations faster than your summer suntan is leaving, and the phrase “Do more with less” is waiting to ambush you like some kind of discount Gotham-City villain on a dark night.
With absolutely zero ado left in stock, let’s speed to the point: if you have a Talent Sourcing department, you’re most likely walking past an unholy amount of value in what they do. If you don’t have an internal team dedicated to this space, your competitors are reading this and taking notes, so you’d best be faster than the Flash after eating a day-old egg sandwich to get to where you need to be.
In APAC, Talent Sourcing falls in five main user categories – Agency, Internal Recruiting, Executive Search, Consulting & Intelligence and Freelancers. A key consideration is that not every user makes use of the function in the same way, and the purpose of this piece is to discuss applying Talent Sourcing principles to Internal Recruitment. A working distinction of the difference between Talent Sourcing and Recruitment functions is that recruitment is primarily concerned with advising the client and filling a role – success is outcome based. Sourcing is at its best when its strategic – data is found and communicated, decisions are shaped.
Classically, sourcing was the province of “passive candidate attraction”
Aka identifying and engaging candidates for jobs that weren’t applying to job boards. This, coupled with a perception from those in agency that sourcing is simply a “junior recruiter” function, has led to an unfortunately myopic perception that sourcing has four core functions:
- Sourcing passive talent for active opportunities
- Developing talent pipelines and talent pools
- Competitive intelligence
- ATS organisation – information assessment and classification
With technical advancements in modern Talent Sourcing – each week brings us a new app or plugin that can find a billion profiles, candidate contact details and file your taxes – the capability is in more danger of blending completely into recruiting as a whole, reduced to just the basics. The good news is that there are six areas to point your internal sourcing capabilities to make an immediate impact, finding and communicating data to instantly add value to strategic conversations and cementing internal TA as a leader in strategic planning.
Areas to expand Sourcing influence are:
- ESG in talent attraction
- EVP messaging
- Competency-based recruiting
- DE&I strategy
- Salary benchmarking
- Counter-intelligence
Practical ways to expand the remit of sourcing are:
- Consider the conversations you’re having with passive candidates, and how they can flow both ways – when your business has a clearly articulated ESG (Environment, Sustainability and Governance) platform, you can engage with both candidates who are passionate about these issues and senior candidate who may shape the organisation’s response to them. Being able to both discuss ESG with candidates and understand what matters to them allows passive and active candidates to become more informed and gives greater purpose: it’s a commitment in action.
- EVP messaging is often overlooked – from the days of the “company mission statement” and the famous “Don’t be evil” to a more clinical examination of underlying factors of attraction that pull candidates to the business, there can be a shyness about it. In Australia, our robust application of tall poppy syndrome can lead to a certain difficulty in articulating why candidates should join your organisation. EVP is also often simplified into a paragraph on company values, when it should be formed with the market in mind – what draws candidates to your company? What do you employees love about working with you? What is it about your company is “cool” or makes new joiners go “Wow”? In large multinationals (think Australia’s banking sector, telecommunications, professional services) there is often a sense of “sameness” – blue is the same as yellow is the same as red etc. The reality is that this is often poorly communicated, and candidates often feel they inherently know what one company offers because they’ve worked at a direct competitor.
- Competency-based recruiting can be challenging to accept, given a hiring manager often prefers the comfort of matching title to title or known industry competitor to brief. The stark reality is that with talent pools shrinking, and overlap occurring (hands up those readers who – regardless of industry – are looking for Business Analysts or DevOps Engineers?) – hiring managers can find comfort in retreating into hiring for a title, not a competency. The key in a sourcing context is to provide insight into candidate relevance – certain competencies (curiousity, desire to grow, the capability to self-teach) can pay highe dividends than sticking dogmatically to what is comfortable.
- DE&I Strategy: passive candidate attraction is often an untapped source of data for DE&I conversations. Talent Sourcing can provide nuance and context to discussions, as well as identify candidates who are underrepresented by specifically searching for them. Many companies seem to think DE&I conversations can be comfortably left to their senior leadership issuing a statement about how attracting and celebrating diverse candidates are key to their success. It’s often a shame that they are represented by Senior Male Leader in a Suit. Sourcing can successfully highlight candidates who may feel uncomfortable with applying for roles, as well as develop key pools of talent.
- Salary benchmarking: your TA team should have access to internal salary data, but they’re also speaking to passive candidates and understanding what the market is paying. Is your company taking note of these salaries at a macro level? These insights increase the applicability of a well-defined EVP: the company may not see themselves as desirable compared to others in terms of salary, but many benefits
- Counter-Intelligence can be generated by one phrase: “Is CLIENT somewhere you’d be interested in? Why/Why not?” and then listening. Counter-intelligence aims to understand what the market is saying about your client – working to understand how it is perceived and how to communicate & rectify any erroneous information. It can also be generated by analysing exit interview feedback to understand key reasons for employees leaving, leading to both internal and external feedback that creates and shapes market perceptions.
The days of considering Talent Sourcing as solely a direct answer to a situational problem have passed, and the advent of AI in Talent Sourcing continues to highlight this – AI can already provide comparable results faster. The competitive advantage is in digging deeper to address strategic challenges that may not be readily identifiable – allowing AI to assist in the transactional elements (candidate identification, interview scheduling, note summaries) and using Sourcing as a function to drive strategic conversations – why would people join our client? Why are they leaving? How does the market see us as representing their needs?
Talent Sourcing is primed to compliment the evolution from a more traditional recruiting approach into an advisory function, and the winners will be those companies who understand and utilise the hidden value, beyond the barriers of “find names and fill jobs”.
