Matthew Parker, group managing director of StepStone Solutions, examines how HR can win the war for talent and enhance employer brand, through making the most of new technology to attract candidates cost-effectively, and by bringing them on-board quickly and smoothly.

Traditional recruitment methods – print advertisements in newspapers and trade press, printed CVs and paper-based processes – are showing their age. Not only is the associated administrative burden becoming unmanageable, ‘traditional’ advertising’s effectiveness is being undermined by the rapid growth of online channels such as job boards and ‘social networking’ sites.

These media are far better and more cost-effective at reaching specialist pools of talent. Indeed, a poll earlier this year of HR professionals carried out by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that online advertising is now widely perceived to be as effective as local newspapers, whilst identifying people with the right skills is the most pressing recruitment challenge, cited by 65 per cent of respondents.

Streamlining the recruitment process

The battle for talent requires HR managers to be one step ahead of their competition. Driving down the time to recruit (as well as the associated costs) can give organisations this advantage. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) do away with the filing cabinets stuffed with paper CVs of yore, which could easily be mislaid or ignored altogether, allowing organisations to computerise much of the recruitment process, slashing the paper trail and significantly reducing average time-to-hire.

More recent advances in e-recruitment technology have extended the ATS concept to the outside world, enabling organisations to publish advertisements directly to their corporate sites and job boards. These next generation e-recruitment systems screen CVs and automatically generate interview requests for potential candidates via email, immediately kick-starting the recruitment process and saving a small fortune in postage.

E-recruitment allows recruiters to build and manage a robust pipeline of motivated, talented people. Features like applicant tracking, requisition tracking, automated CV ranking, customised input forms, pre-screening questions, response tracking, and multilingual capabilities enable organisations to ensure they are talking to the highest quality staff, even expand the scope of their search internationally, and quickly ‘regret’ unsuitable applicants.

At the same time, it can help create a ‘talent pool’ of good candidates who, for all their strengths, are not quite suited for the vacancy in question. The system ensures they are contacted automatically the moment a suitable vacancy arises.

Integrating job posting and recruitment in this way enables recruiters to provide tangible evidence that their campaigns are getting results. Gathering statistics on time to hire and where the best applicants are coming from is critical – it enables HR managers to focus their efforts on these areas, demonstrate ROI, and save time wasting on unproductive activities.

Channel hopping

Experience shows that the more channels recruiters have at their disposal to reach certain audiences, the more successful they are likely to be. Recruitment is no longer dependent on press advertisements and employment agencies. Thanks to the internet, job boards and career portals have flourished, providing a cost-effective way to attract applicants. They are the number one method of looking for a job with 72 per cent of the UK workforce having used them.

However, increased use of web channels – and the greater volume of responses they can deliver – requires organisations to be able to efficiently process the increased volumes of applicant traffic.

It is here that e-recruitment technology can play a key role. By enabling the candidate’s progress to be recorded automatically, organisations can identify the channels most effective at attracting the best candidates – rather than delivering the highest volumes.

An online recruitment portal also helps HR teams ensure a consistent employer brand experience, since every applicant could be a potential customer. With this in mind, it is vital that from the first click on the jobs page on your corporate website, the experience for applicants is as professional and inclusive as possible.

Talent – your organisation’s most precious asset

Once your successful applicants have been on-boarded, you need to retain them and develop their skills at all costs. Understanding employees’ motivations, strengths and qualities is vital to developing the talent in your organisation – yet this vital process is often carried infrequently, or overlooked altogether.

Talent management brings together a number of important human resources and management initiatives – and goes far further than organising training sessions. It’s about identifying the key skills the organisation needs to develop, and ensuring that they are exploited as far as possible. This is important – since organisations can no longer expect to find the best people externally, they need to be able to work far better with the talent they already have at their disposal.

Most large multinationals have such procedures in place to monitor the development of their top 20-50 employees: talent management technology allows organisations of every size to be just as thorough – with every employee they hire.

StepStone customer National Express, for example, has used our software to extend a talent management scheme to around 700 managers across the company. The programme – called Leadership DNA – uses scorecards held within the system to track progress against objectives and leadership potential, as well as ‘softer’ measures, like the likelihood of them moving elsewhere. After two years, National Express has identified exactly who could move into each of the business’s top 150 jobs within 12 months.

Given the cost of recruiting a middle manager is between 33 and 65 per cent of annual salary, taking such a proactive approach to talent management can unlock significant cost savings.

In considering this, it is essential to realise that to put your organisation ahead in attracting talent, it is no longer enough to consider the different elements of the recruitment and retention process separately. A more joined up approach is required to move towards what StepStone has termed ‘Total Talent’.

In doing this, every stage of the process – from pre-hire attraction through on-boarding to managing employees post-hire – is supported. Any organisation, from small businesses to multinational corporations, can take a more strategic approach to managing their human capital.

The technology era

‘Total Talent’ not only improves the candidate’s experience, it also widens the pool of talent, the time and reduces costs per hire – through more effective use of advertising, lower administrative overheads, and improved pre-qualification of applicants.

At the same time, it can help organisations protect themselves from the risks of staff defecting elsewhere. In the increasingly competitive war for talent, it’s not hard to see why more and more organisations are adopting this approach.

For more information, please visit www.stepstone.com