Why recruiting team health is important from the perspective of a CHRO
I recently came across an article published by The Josh Bersin Company, titled “The Definitive Guide to Recruiting: Human-Centric Talent Acquisition.” While there are a number of insights in the article, one key aspect in strategic talent acquisition that caught my attention was the importance of investing in recruiters.
As a prior Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO), I always wanted to understand both the employee experience and the experience of our candidates. Surveys, metrics, and data research told me what I need to pay attention to and where interventions were needed to enhance these experiences. The health of the organization (including candidates that did not join and employees that left) was my responsibility.
As I read this article, and thought about the metrics that my leadership team and I focused on in the Talent Acquisition (TA) space (e.g., time to fill, rate of offer declines, talent funnel activity), I realized we did not spend enough time on the engine that was critical to our business success, our TA team. One reason might be that HR often suffers from the “cobblers’ children have no shoes” phenomenon. We are so busy taking care of the organization that we neglect providing the same focus to our teams.
I suspect, however, that the main reason for the lack of focus on the health of our TA teams has been the absence of technology solutions to accurately understand and advance the work of our recruiting teams. Questions such as, “What is the optimal requisition load?”, “How should I reallocate requisitions?”, “How much will it really take to fill the job?” were either not answered or inefficiently addressed using manual reports and time-consuming meetings to discuss resourcing and requisition rebalancing. We had not begun to use technology to answer strategic questions like; “What type of requisition should a recruiter be assigned to aid in their development?” and “Are my recruiting teams optimally staffed to handle future hiring initiatives?” Using technologies developed by Taltrics to provide data-driven insights to answer these questions will allow us to have a truly human-centric TA process, that starts with the TA team!
