Blurring the Lines Between Talent Management and Internal Recruitment

The Internal Recruitment function is evolving at an amazing rate. I’m sure you know the platitude that if your internal rate of change is slower than the external rate of change then you will be left behind and eventually become a dinosaur.
Internal Recruitment as a profession isn’t even 20 yet – if it were a person, it wouldn’t be able to drink! When it started it had no dedicated software, no websites or job boards, no LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, only agency software converted for internal or master/managed vendor functions. It had few dedicated Internal Recruitment Professionals. Most of the work included managing agencies and placing reactive print based advertisements.
There have been many changes over Internal Recruitment’s eventful adolescence and the rate of change is ever increasing. The main focus of the change is turning one-dimensional recruitment into a multi-dimensional Talent Management function. Providing a one dimensional recruitment only service may meet your current needs but will not meet your organisations future needs.
[Tweet “Recruitment as a standalone one-dimensional function is still living but I believe its longevity is very short.”]
Talent Management, as defined by my colleague Dr John Sullivan is “the integrated process of ensuring that an organisation has a continuous supply of highly productive individuals in the right job, at the right time”. It involves the cohesive consolidation of Recruitment, Redeployment, Internal Mobility, Learning and Development and Performance Management.
Thinking about this, it makes sense. Consider that when you are sourcing high quality talent for lateral positions you must assess and predict who will make your most productive workers. Having analytics from your performance management system will significantly increase the accuracy of this prediction. When you are hiring talent at an entry level you must be certain your learning and development processes and systems will transform new talent into highly productive workers.

When I am talking to Internal Recruitment Directors about making the transition from recruitment to talent management I offer five reasons, these are:
 A talent management-based approach will directly contribute to the improvement of your business performance of your organisation;
 True business partnering with your Line Managers becomes of much greater value;
 Talent management tends to increase the simplicity of HR service delivery which reduces the cost of service;
 Internal recruitment functions are automating, outsourcing and/or offshoring many recruitment activities in the selection process allowing time for recruiters to add greater value; and
 Consolidated Talent Management technology is freely available and big data is able to fill in gaps where technology is not integrated.

Another two important considerations are

Firstly, how to manage the paradox of recruiting jobs while making other jobs redundant – even in the face of automation, this is a dangerous and costly path to tread. A high performing talent management function will be to minimise redundancies. Part of how to approach this in a world where technical skills are becoming increasingly automated is to focus on the soft skills that determine high performing organisations. If you have high performing staff that lack some technical skills, you have options from learning and development functions to AI and automation.
[Tweet “#Softskills should be a #recruiter’s priority – hard skills can be taught, or #automated”]
Secondly, how to capitalise on the transparency the social recruitment process has brought to candidates, line managers and organisations. The ability to understand the micro and macro supply and demand of internal and external skills and match these to business needs is now possible and expected. Products such as LinkedIn have created transparency and reduced the demand for agency services for this reason. New products that enable organisations to get an understanding of the market for skills are increasingly available. This will change and reduce the need for many of the current internal recruitment services.
[Tweet “The new #transparency in #recruiting means you have no excuse for not understanding the #market “]
The continued progress in Internal Recruitment is inevitable. For those recruiters who see this as a threat, now is the time to confront these issues and come up with a path forward, or we all risk going the way of the dinosaurs.
Image: Shutterstock

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