What to Do When Your Competition is Beating You in Talent Recruitment

Unlike the talent war of the 1990s and 2000s, which was driven by shortages in all areas, today’s crusade is about a lack of supply of the right talent. The need has never been greater to generate sustainable growth and compete in an environment that changes at the speed of light.

If you want the best and the brightest to continue to knock at your door, the key is to create shared value between company and candidates.

It’s All About Leadership

At the core of the talent competition issue is the question of leadership potential at all levels of an organization. You need to cultivate leaders who collectively demonstrate insight, courage and inventiveness to deliver ongoing growth.

After years of global economic turmoil, we’re in a post-crisis era. Growth may be slow, but change is fast. In order to adapt, companies must implement the right strategies and technologies to find and engage top talent.

Key insights include:

• Candidate engagement. Gain access to new, unmatched data for enhanced decision making on talent. Ask candidates to show you what they can do for your company based on what they know. Then, they’ll be empowered to demonstrate their value beyond the laundry list of talking points that is their resume.
• Optimization of social media for sourcing. Company culture plays a key role in talent acquisition, but candidates can’t influence it. However, they will decide what’s right for them based on their own conclusions and what others tell them. Social media offer creative opportunities to educate and engage candidates about your culture. New systems of engagement are beneficial to both hiring managers, as invaluable data is provided, and job seekers, as an information source.

How to Create Shared Value

Increasingly, businesses suffer from a lack of public trust and credibility. They are perceived as pursuing short-term gains at growing social and environmental cost. This happens to the detriment of their HR goals; namely attracting today’s millennial talent, which is the future of our global business world.

Pay attention to millennial candidates because:

• They have tremendous skills to offer. Mobile technology is second nature to them. They think email is old school! They have big demands and high expectations – and they naturally embrace the latest change, as long as it gives them work/life balance and fulfillment.
• They are taking the job market by storm. They are driven, connected and often, highly educated. They are a force of nature: the children, grandchildren and largest generation since the baby boomers.

Attracting millennial talent is not always easy, but it’s exciting and has unlimited potential. Millennial candidates show unprecedented concern for creating positive social impact. Among 2010 college graduates, 84 percent noted that they would seek employment that is socially responsible during their careers.

The creation of shared value is an evolution of capitalism to helps solve society’s greatest unmet needs. It’s about enhancing the competitiveness of your company while simultaneously advancing the economic and social conditions of the community – and world – in which it operates.

• Move beyond profit maximization. Integrate social impact into your core operations. If you recreate business models to internalize issues that have traditionally been left to the public sector to solve, you can promote significant economic success.
• Align your corporate goals with candidates’ goals. Embrace opportunities to thrive as a business while tackling some of the major challenges facing our global society. This will help improve your company’s bottom line and make it a more attractive place for tomorrow’s leaders to work.

The expert workforce consulting team at BrainWorks can partner with you to win the competitive war and build your talent management strategy for today – and tomorrow. Read our related posts or contact us today!