What’s Wrong with Talent Acquisition — and How to Make It Right

Confessions from Wouter Vermeulen, Chief Talent Officer at V/G

Talent acquisition is broken. How broken?

“Only 25 percent of hiring managers currently say that recruiters influence their hiring decisions, and only 35 percent are satisfied with recruiting’s impact on their business results,” according to The Corporate Executive Board/Gartner.

Tech leads all other industries in employee churn, with 13.2 percent of tech workers having left their jobs last year, according to a Linkedin studypublished in 2018. Almost half of those who left their jobs moved to another position in the tech sector.

Solving the talent acquisition problem gives you a huge leg up when tackling the next problem: talent retention and management. V/G’s CEO, Wouter Vermeulen, has a few ideas on how to revolutionize the crucial process of talent acquisition.

“I’ve seen the success stories and things gone bad,” Vermeulen says. “I was part of that — where I was put in management or leadership roles that went terribly wrong. And I knew I could do something to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

What’s broken on the business side of talent acquisition?

Wouter: Companies have siloed talent acquisition from everything else — employee relationships, comp, etc., and so many rely on transactional recruiters to fill positions. The problem is that 80 percent of the recruiters today are people that just want to move bodies into openings. They’re there to collect on their placement check and make a quick buck. After that, there’s no continued relationship with the talent.

Another issue I see is particular to early-stage companies. With these companies, culture is shaped by the first employees that join the company. A lot of these companies don’t really take a step back to think about their culture, and then one morning they wake up a year and a half later and realize these people have created the culture. It’s passive, rather than active.

They don’t do that intentionally. They say we need a phenomenal mobile dev lead, etc. They look at people functionally, or the people they like and worked with before and try to fit them in the mold. All of a sudden they wake up to a company with a culture that wasn’t really intentionally managed. And that causes problems with both acquisition and management.

How are you reimagining talent acquisition?

Wouter: I want to embrace accountability on the recruiting side. We aren’t here to just collect a placement check. Talent acquisition needs to be thought of as an integral part of talent management. Companies need to think of the process much more holistically, and we want to play a vital role in that process, from talent discovery to career management. We don’t just disappear the moment the offer is signed.

As for finding that talent, first, you have to think of your own mission as a company: What is your purpose? What is your definition of success?

Then you can focus on building a team that includes people who are not just a list of boxes to check but are in fact craftspeople. Craftsmanship is not just innate talent, it is a mindset. It’s about the relentless dedication to tackling challenges and finding answers.

I’ve been in the tech space a long time, and I’ve seen what the high-growth nature of these businesses has done to the market. I came to realize that people are really the essence of product and services. Technology is technology, but true innovation comes from people.

V/G is a strategic talent search & development consultancy partnering with the world’s most renowned technology companies to help them find, retain and cultivate top talent in tech.