Before we get started today, season’s greetings everyone!
At this time of year, we are reminded of many things – one of which is that traditions are everywhere… culturally, personally, in-business and life-at-large. Even though traditions are tremendously important to us and for our families, we sometimes need to break the old, and create new!
Which is what I suggest with the way you might have been measuring, tracking and managing your recruitment and talent acquisition activities.
My perspective is that recruitment and talent acquisition are quite different, yet they likely co-exist within an organization.
And in the same way a successful company knows what make its products, services and solutions unique in the competitive market space (aka – its value proposition), talent acquisition must understand, identify and strategically source the people-side of that competitive advantage.
To many, recruitment connotes a traditional process-view of attracting and sourcing a candidate to fill an open seat. Talent Acquisition, on the other hand, speaks to a much more holistic and strategic view of your workforce plan, talent pipeline or people supply chain. Talent acquisition should be focused on critical and vulnerable roles, addressing succession plans and ensuring the replacement (or addition) of key value creators is not too far away.
What many organizations struggle with, once they start to strategically acquire talent, is managing and measuring this new capability with a traditional recruitment mindset.
Aberdeen Group, in their September 2013 Study of Talent Acquisition – Adapt Your Strategy or Fail, base their definition of Best-in-Class Performance for Talent Acquisition upon a number of factors including key performance indicators and metrics related to First Year Turnover and First Year Performance.
Let’s start with First Year Turnover – which is a crucial to understand as it drives significant cost, wasted effort within an organization and disruption.
Think about the knock-on effects of making the wrong hire (for your company, the team, the hiring manager, the open position, the new employee who might have left another organization for this new opportunity).
Armed with information about your First Year Turnover, you might, amongst other things:
- Identify weaknesses in your onboarding activities;
- Identify inconsistencies between the Talent Acquisition team and hiring managers;
- Realise that you are overselling and/or not delivering employment brand;
- Identify a crucial inability to help talent achieve their potential and build value for your organization.
Now add the First Year Performance dimension to this turnover, whether it be in the form of talent segmentation, performance feedback, or hard-and-fast business outcomes like attributed sales, utilization or other relevant business outcomes for that individual – and you have something incredibly powerful.
Powerful to the point that by segmenting your First Year Turnover by Performance, you get a whole new picture on the impact of that First Year Turnover.
- Are the First Year Top Performers leaving? What did that cost us? What is the opportunity cost from lost revenue? Was this churn in key value-creator roles and are we still going to make this year’s business plan?
- Are we rapidly dealing with individuals who we might have made a legitimate hiring mistake or simply don’t fit?
- And what are the reasons and rationale for these issues, and strategies to move forward?
So, take the next few weeks and enjoy your seasonal traditions and think about launching the new year with a new focus – like shifting from the traditional recruitment metrics of attract and source, to workforce analytics around first year outcomes yielded from your next crop of talent.
Be well, pay forward somebody’s coffee when you are at the Tim Horton’s drive-thru (like that Good Samaritan did for me last year!), and all the very best for the holidays from your friends at PeopleInsight.
It’s your workforce data. You should use it.
John Pensom, CEO
QuIRC, a Canadian company delivering cloud-based workforce and business analytics through their insight-as-a-service offering called PeopleInsight