Strategy:
Brand, Strategy, Structure and Technology: a Framework for Improving Talent Operations
Over the last decade, companies have constantly wrestled with a changing set of talent issues. It seems that once an organization has addressed one challenge—whether it involves breaking down silos, aligning processes or putting the right systems in place—there is never a sense of completeness…of finally getting it right.
If you find yourself feeling this way, it may be of some comfort to know that your competitors probably also feel the same way too. That’s the nature of competing for talent. It is a constant race and a continuous push for improvement. As a result, the practice of talent acquisition and talent management has evolved significantly.
Today, companies have more tools, strategies and expertise than ever before for identifying, attracting and retaining the people they need to drive business success. At the same time, the pressure for continuous improvement in talent acquisition and talent management is intense. If you don’t reach the right people in time, your competitors will.
A Big-Picture Perspective
Given the sheer complexity of today’s talent operations, how do you identify and prioritize your options for improving performance and staying competitive? Should you be adopting the latest technology? Is your company reaching for the type of talent it truly needs?
The good news is that there is a framework for making sense of your talent landscape—one that goes beyond tactical issues to address the broader challenge of understanding your complete talent picture. That framework consists of the common drivers that determine the success of talent operations for nearly every company in every industry, and it encompasses four key ingredients.
Those ingredients include the employment brand, the overall talent strategy, the organizational structure to support that strategy, and, finally, the technology to support effective talent operations. By assessing your talent operations through the framework of brand, strategy, structure and technology, you can gain insight into where they work well together, as well as gaps where improvement is needed.
Brand: More than a Slogan
Your brand is not a logo or tagline, but instead it is a perception of your company among candidates and employees. For example, a company may be perceived as an “old guard” conservative organization in a market where it needs to compete for young technical talent that values risk-taking and flexibility. In such a case, the perception (the employment brand) may be costing the company valuable hires.
The brand can help you attract and retain talent, or it can drive talent to competitors. Recognizing the value of the employment brand, many companies are taking a disciplined approach of defining the Employer Value Proposition (EVP). An effective branding effort involves measuring the perceptions of the labor market against key EVP attributes and using this information to prioritize HR initiatives, screen candidates for cultural fit, and develop targeted marketing campaigns to specific talent pools.
Strategy: the Push for Next Practices
Continuous improvement lies at the heart of effective talent strategy. Typically, companies emphasize the importance of best practices and strategies to attract and retain talent. There is a natural desire to find out what is already being done and to copy it. To be truly competitive, however, organizations must be willing to look ahead and, when appropriate, create talent strategies that define "next" practices.
If the competition or the talent industry can’t reveal the next practices that will give you a competitive edge, where do you look for inspiration? One answer is to get back to the basics: building relationships and productive networks. A strategy that can help you do these things better will always be a key to competing for talent.
Finally, it is important when delving into the nuances that drive strategy to remember that the quality of candidates has to do with how well you know them. That means knowing their goals, objectives, and passions, and understanding how well they will fit in your organization and succeed. Getting to know someone that well takes time, and the more time you invest, the better the candidate knows you and your culture. An effective strategy gives your recruiting organization the time and resources to know the candidate.
Structure: The Ability to Bring Strategy to Life
Every talent strategy is only as good as the organizational structure that supports it. If the structure isn’t aligned with the strategy, execution will be difficult if not impossible. For example, if your strategy is focusing on difficult-to-reach passive candidates or candidates from competitors, an organizational structure that relies on an HR generalist recruiting model won’t deliver the right results. Dedicated recruiting resources are needed, including recruiters with specialized skills, and the structure needs to account for that.
Another issue companies constantly address is the question of whether they need a centralized or decentralized structure for their recruiting organization? There are strengths and weaknesses to each approach, and over the years companies have wandered from one approach to the other and back again. Today, more companies are borrowing from both approaches. Some aspects of the recruiting organization can be decentralized to improve regional focus and control. Other aspects are centralized to leverage economies of scale and to present a consistent face to the candidate market.
Technology: Enabler of Processes
Technology cannot solve core talent problems. It is simply the enabler of the processes that can. However, the right solution is essential and the wrong one can prove very costly. There are four success factors that will make or break your technology platform. First, the technical infrastructure needs to be sound. If the system does not perform, it will not be used. If any click takes more than five seconds to display the page, it’s too long. The second factor is an alignment with the people and the process. In other words, as people use the tool to get their job done, the by-product is that all necessary data is captured. No extra steps.
The third factor is the ability to get data out of the system for reports and metrics. This includes utility reports such as open requisitions and candidate pipelines, as well as measures of performance such as recruiter efficiency or cycle-time metrics. If the system cannot produce this information, the recruiters will maintain it in a spreadsheet—and that signals the approaching demise of your current system.
Finally, a continuous change management process is essential. Communications and user training are always important, but more fundamental than that is the need for a deep understanding of each stakeholder. It means establishing a process that will continuously identify changes that may interfere with or create opportunity for the stakeholder—and it means applying creativity to solve problems as they emerge. It is an ongoing process that requires dedicated resources. Typically, change management is a recruiting operations management function, or sometimes it is left to the HR administrator.
Applying the Framework to Your Talent Operations
Brand, strategy, structure and technology represent an effective framework for assessing your talent operations at a high level. For example, what often appear to be technology shortcomings are actually caused by inadequate organizational structure. Likewise, the inability to attract candidates as effectively as you’d like may seem to indicate a weakness in your strategy or your overall structure—when, in fact, the employment brand may be the root of the problem.
The issues that challenge our talent operations present us with opportunities for improvement, and continuous improvement is essential when competing for talent. The reality is, no single strength, problem or opportunity falls exclusively into one area or another. An organization’s brand, strategy, structure and technology work together to create a complete talent picture, and so their workings are highly interconnected. Applying a holistic perspective won’t solve the challenge, but it can help you make sure that you are asking questions that consider the complete workings of your talent operations.
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