We’ve seen cases where rapidly-growing companies, rather than attract young talent and nurture them upwards, engage in a reactive attempt to fill executive positions by offering attractive, secure packages with equity. This is because two years earlier they didn’t have a plan in place, which would have given them the foresight to know that if key business objectives were met, these positions would be created. Not long after this incident, some of these companies did have the talent pipeline in place to produce internal candidates for executive positions, but their route was blocked by the entrenched people recruited previously.
As part of our consultancy work and training, we’ve ceased to be surprised by the number of in-house recruiters or HR directors who either admit their company has no strategy or, if they do claim to have one, reveal that it’s only in name and that it doesn’t inform their day-to-day decisions.
We see that people don’t prioritise a recruitment strategy, but in reality it’s pretty simple to put one in place. Rather than having recruitment efforts targeted and focused, standard practice seems to be to bat away vacancies as they appear. We believe that it makes far more sense to have a plan in place, but despite this being relatively easy to do, it is consistently overlooked. Why?
The main reason, it seems, is that people simply don’t know where to start.
In order to generate some discussion on this matter, and raise awareness of the key importance of a strategy, we’ll be actively engaging with the HR and recruitment community, kick starting a wide-ranging discussion about strategic recruitment.
We’ll be starting off with a blog series covering everything from why you should have a strategy, to the detailed components of the very best plans. At its conclusion, we plan to host a strategic recruitment forum, where a selection of top-level HR directors, COOs and executives will discuss the various challenges of formulating and implementing a strategy.
We’d love to hear what your thoughts are. You can join the debate on our dedicated LinkedIn group and we have put together a short survey so that we can better understand the recruitment strategy of your business. Remember to be honest, if you don’t have one, you’re certainly not alone….
