Best Practices for Achieving Talent Success Maturity
Recruiting: The First Step Toward Getting More A-Players on the Roster
In today’s highly competitive environment with a less-engaged, more mobile, and multigenerational workforce, it’s become more challenging than ever — and more important — to recruit smarter and with an eye toward hiring, developing, and retaining more A-players.
By definition, recruiting is the processes by which companies source, screen, interview, and hire candidates to fill openings in the organization.
That means recruiting is the first step in the employee life cycle — the first chance you have to engage future employees, and very likely, the first functional area you might want to focus on as you move your organization toward full Talent Success Maturity.
Depending on your organization’s recruiting maturity, the outcomes you might want to focus on can range from the early stages of maturity (e.g., making sure you have accurate job descriptions and templates for consistent correspondence with candidates) to full maturity (e.g., having processes in place and being able to draw top talent from competitors and other industries).
Looking at recruiting in terms of ClearCompany’s defined maturity levels, you move from a totally ad hoc system to:
Automating
Some of your recruiting practices may be moving from being manually performed, or maybe conducted by individuals and with no shared process, to processes that are automated, standardized, and repeatable. For example, maybe you’re ready to start evaluating trends among hiring managers or departments (e.g., which have higher rejection rates; which take longer to hire). Or maybe you’d like simply to have accessible templates for consistent, effective, and on-brand correspondence with every candidate, through each step of the recruiting process.
Improving
Other recruiting practices in your company may be at a stage where you’re applying knowledge and data to how you recruit, and you’re quantitatively managing those processes in alignment with business-driven metrics and desired outcomes. For example, you’re able to access performance assessments of top performers, apply competencies to job descriptions (building a “roles” library), or using an automated, consistent process for filling requisitions and posting jobs.
Optimizing
Finally, you may have some parts of your recruiting functionality in which process management includes deliberate, strategic, and measurable optimization and improvement. For example, you’re trying to make sure that all of your job openings are aligned with the company’s mission, vision, and goals through clear and measurable metrics, and that you have a clear and repeatable process for identifying qualified internal candidates for new and potential openings before seeking external candidates.
You obviously don’t need to — and you can’t — tackle every aspect of recruiting for Talent Success right off the bat. But with a framework to benchmark against and a set of best practices to guide you, you can gradually and confidently move the needle toward hiring, developing, and retaining a greater share of A-players than your competition.