5 Reasons Recruitment Will Move into Talent Management

The Internal Recruitment function is changing and evolving at an ever increasing speed. I am sure you have heard 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 is only about 15 years old. 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 in these 15 years 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.
 

 
Talent Management defined according to 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/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 this talent into highly productive workers.

 Recruitment as a standalone one-dimensional function is still living but I believe its longevity is very short.

[bctt tweet=”Recruitment as a standalone one-dimensional function is still living but I believe its longevity…”]
 

When I am talking to Internal Recruitment Directors about making the transition from recruitment to talent management I offer five reasons, these are:

1. A talent management-based approach will directly contribute to the improvement of your business performance of your organisation;

2. True business partnering with your Line Managers becomes of much greater value;

3. Talent management tends to increase the simplicity of HR service delivery which reduces the cost of service;

4. 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

5. 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:
 
The paradox of recruiting jobs while making other jobs redundant will not be acceptable in the future. The cost is impacting many organisations and employees. A high performing talent management function will be to minimise redundancies. It is soft skills that determine high performing organisations. If you have high performing staff that lack some technical skills, these will be able to be gained from the learning and development function.
 
Lastly, the social recruitment process has brought transparency to candidates, line managers and organisations. The ability to understand the micro and macro demand and supply 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.
 
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 for the way forward, or we all risk being obliterated like the dinosaurs.