“As the economy improves, the war for talent is heating up.”
Posted by Mitch on 24th October 2014
That title is an amalgam of loads of articles I see posted online.
The obvious conclusion being that as confidence grows and companies try to increase their staff numbers, recruitment agencies will become busy again.
But, busy doing what?
For the majority of agencies this means being busy only filling 1 in 5 of the jobs they work on.
Or to put it another way, disappointing 80% of the companies they engage with.
And with more companies trying to recruit, that 80% will represent a larger number of companies. Now there’s a business plan just waiting to come back and do some arse biting.
Then there’s the ridiculous expression “war for talent”.
Let’s examine what that really means out there in the real world.
“The act of a company asking several specialist agencies to source candidates whose suitability for their job is assumed, purely on the fact they currently work for a similar type of business.”
Jobs by the way, that many will be filled with a candidate that bears little relationship with the person-spec given to the agencies.
You’ve all occasionally checked-out the LinkedIn profile of the person who got that job that you’d been working on the past couple of weeks, right?
You know, that job where the client insisted the candidate had to have 10 years experience doing the same job for a competitor.
The same client that ended-up hiring a friend of an employee or someone who sent in their CV spontaneously who only had 2 years experience that wasn’t with a competitor.
The point being that often, hiring managers will hire people for their potential to do the job rather than those candidates prepared to make a sideways move. The reality is that the first type of candidate tend to outperform the latter type of candidate because they’ve got something to prove. And they tend to stay in the job longer too.
This type of candidate tends to be out of the reach of most agency recruiters because they allow themselves to be bullied by the client who insists they only want to hire the mythical “perfect candidate”.
When you stop and think about this whole “war” thing, who are recruitment agencies actually warring against?
Their clients?
Candidates?
Or themselves?
Comments
By Sandy W on Monday, 05 January 2015Thanks for a really good article.
Maybe it’s time to do things differently. It’s clear that in some industries, there is a definite shortage and a “war for talent”. However, there are now companies that look at optimizing “talent” in a different way.
It is now possible to take advantage of the latest advances in software for workforce analytics and planning. This means finding the best talent and keeping that talent.
It also allows a company to make the most of their current “talent” through understanding and maintaining quality HR data.
This can result in higher employee retention which is vital in industries where “talent” is in short supply.
You might be interested in this article about strategic workforce planning: http://www.qhr.com.au/strategic-workforce-analytics/
Commenting is not available in this section entry.