In previous Part-1, I mentioned about thew need to talent acquisition, how it is different from recruitment and ways to evolve effective talent acquisition strategy.

Talent Acquisition Strategies

Basic Strategies

If we were really serious about looking for talent, here are some of the things we would be doing as Staffing, Recruiting, talent Management and as human resources professionals:

1. We would work harder than we do at identifying high performers: Together with high performers themselves, we could establish some indicators of success or of high performance for each position we recruit for. These could be the number of sales they have made in a month, the number of reports they have written that resulted in consulting assignments, the amount of revenue their group has generated, and so forth. This is hard work though. There aren't a lot of benchmarks to go by, but we all know more or less who contributes the most to our organizations. Our task is to quantify those contributions.

2. We would work with managers to develop profiles of the high performers in each group: We would try to find commonalities and things we could identify during the screening process that might predict success. These could be competencies, activities high performers engage in, work methods, or processes. There are many firms that can help you determine what these "critical success factors" are and even help you develop tests to identify them in candidates.

3. We would find out where potential high performers like to go and what they like to do: This step allows you to target your advertising toward high performers and decide which events are worth attending so that you can get at the kinds of people you seek. Doing this well requires a focus on competitive intelligence, or "CI." CI is well known in the industrial world; many companies employ CI experts to ferret our information about production capacities and equipment installations at their competitors. The same principles apply to recruiting. You can gather information from competitors and from vendors and suppliers about where good people may be located. You can certainly use your employee referral program for the same purpose.

4. We would do a better job of collecting and capturing critical information about candidates: The knowledge you gradually accumulate is valuable and should be put into some sort of database where it can be shared with other recruiters. A BLOG can form the basis on an internal or external community of recruiters where this kind of information can be exchanged. This is a form of knowledge sharing and transfers that, when properly done, can save thousands of hours of work and bunches of money. After all, headhunters rely on their own human knowledge management systems (i.e. their brains) to do this all the time. Our challenge is to make this more broadly accessible and to keep it current.

5. Finally, we would recognize the importance of developing people so that they can become high performers: The recruiting function has to move toward becoming more like a talent agency