What is wrong with Talent Acquisition?

My heart lies in recruitment, I have done nothing else in my professional career than work in recruitment. And I've ended up in this beautiful profession in a way many of us probably recognize. When I was younger I was in the middle of my studies and one day I woke up and I just knew; 'Later when I grow up I want to become a recruiter!' ... Said probably no one ever, including me. But hey, here we all are!

For the last 4 years, I've worked with countless TA teams around the world in all different forms and sizes. I've also engaged in many speaking opportunities from the United States to Europe, Africa, and Australia. I feel there is a trend in the type of questions I receive about what is going on in the world of TA and how their individual performance is stacking up. (spoiler; You are probably doing not so bad as you think)

So I've decided I am going to try to address some of these recurring questions through a series of LinkedIn articles. For mainly two reasons;

1. It allows for a fully open discussion on every topic, there are so many inspiring people in our industry and I hope they will contribute and share their vision and experience on some of the topics.
2. I hope I can inspire some of you to address the things you are struggling with or pick up that project you always wanted to do and help push our beautiful industry forward as a whole.

Starting off, I would like to say a few things about our profession that, I think, contribute to some of the core things we as an industry are struggling with to move forward on and that are within our own circle of influence to change.

So what is wrong with Talent Acquistion?

For me, there are 3 main points 'wrong' with Talent Acquistion that actually hold us back instead of helping us pioneer and move forward.

1. Recruitment is a young profession, and we have not been educated for it

In 2005, roughly 70% of the Fortune 500 organisations did not have a dedicated recruitment department. Recruitment was spread throughout the organisation often falling on to the Hiring Manager or HRBP as one of the many tasks they are responsible for.

That it is perceived 'normal' that organisations have a dedicated recruitment department is not as 'old' as it has been found normal that an organisation has a dedicated finance or marketing department.

The fact that we are a quite young profession is one of the key things that get me very excited about working in recruitment. Take marketing for example, for the series lovers out there, Madman is something I refer to on a regular basis to explain the times we are living in in recruitment. Madman is a series about a marketing agency in the 50s and 60s, it are exciting times to work in this industry as a lot of the rules and knowledge about consumers and influencing their behavior were simply not there yet. It was an exciting time to work in marketing and there was a lot of pioneering (or trying and failing) in those times.

Recruitment today is a lot like the 50s and 60s of marketing. Our profession is relatively young, and we are pioneering a lot, while at the same time, the amount of books and knowledge that is written down about our profession is exploding.

And the truth is, almost non of us is formally educated in the direction of Talent. The closest we can get is a study in Marketing or anything commercial. Even studying in the direction of Human Resources is not setting you up with the right tools to be able to attract those resources to the organisation.

So we all fell into this profession of whatever reason, and we are expected to have all the answers and know-how on how to actually build a strong strategic Talent Acquistion function that consistently delivers and solves all the talent challenges of our organisation. Though the truth is, in comparison studying and building a career in finance, sales, business, marketing, or IT, we kind of don't know how to go about it. At least from a formal educational background perspective.

And that is ok, though this for me is one of the three main reasons we sometimes struggle to make progress. We should apply a more structured and methodological approach to how we build strong TA functions. And today we lack widely spread formal frameworks and models that help us do that.

There are good pieces of content out there like the Hiring Success Methodology. Which offers a structured way to assess your current state, set priorities, translate this into a roadmap, execute through a continuous improvement model, and measure your impact. As we find this topic so important, we are sharing all of our knowledge 100% for free.

Become a Certified Hiring Success Change Leader today.

2. Talent Acquisition is a 'Sales & Marketing' function, not a 'Cost Center'

Despite the fact I 'ended up' in recruitment, I fell in love from day one. This seemingly easy job of finding candidates, proposing them to matching jobs and just waiting until the placements came rolling in, was more complex than I could imagine. I loved it! And this is why;

I truly believe recruitment at its core is among the most complex sales jobs out there. And to be clear, for me this is exactly the same whether you are in-house, RPO, or on the agency side. While selling a car or a piece of software you never end up being very close to signing the deal and that car or software decides it doesn't like the person or company you are selling to and it all falls apart. And boy, do we as recruiters have scars from situations like that, I sometimes still cringe thinking about some of these situations from years ago.

No matter how complex the 'thing' you are selling is, in recruitment this 'thing' is human. This means there is only a match (or sale) if both the buying party (Hiring Manager) fully agree to all terms and conditions as well as the person.

This leads me to point 2. Talent Acquisition sits as a department under the HR or People function and the problem with that is, is that HR is a cost center and is managed as such. Though Recruitment is a sales & marketing function and should be approached as such. We advertise openings and the organisation we represent, and we sell the position to the candidate, and to a degree we sell the candidate to the hiring manager.

Approaching TA as a cost center is in my eyes a deadly mistake. Optimizing a cost center revolves around making the processes cheaper and faster. Trying to build a TA function with a focus to become endlessly cheaper and faster, has absolutely nothing to do with becoming better at hiring the right person, exactly at the right moment.

TA doesn't 'cost money'. No, you invest money into attracting talent. Like you would invest money into Sales or Marketing efforts. And this has a clear ROI (Return on Investment), a certain ability to 'hire on time' against a certain 'quality'.

3. We need to better understand the impact we have on our organisations with the hires we make

If we are a sales and marketing function we also need to learn to define 'what we do' in a different way. When asking TA people around the world what their job is, too often I get an answer along the lines of; 'I fill jobs'. Well, you might technically be right, but I do fundamentally disagree with this as a definition of what we do.

The problem with saying you are responsible for filling jobs is that you distance yourself from whatever the organisation is doing, and to some degree, this is actually causing the gap between business and recruitment if we feel we are not being taken seriously or as equal talent advisory partners.

Words matter and the way we define what we do has a tremendous impact on how we are perceived. So we need to understand how what we do contributes to what the organisation working towards. Connecting our jobs to the business outcome.

If I get asked the question 'What do you do', my answer would be something like;

'We are the Talent Acquistion team and we are here to enable the business strategy by identifying and solving the talent needs of the organisation, through deep collaboration with the business to ensure we can hire exactly the right person, exactly on time when the business needs it.'

The value we bring to the table as a Talent Acquistion function is not just filling the open jobs, it is the impact we have on the business if we are successfully doing so with exactly the right person at the right time.

This directly implies it is a deep collaboration with the businesses we serve, not us vs them. Each hiring manager has a goal to achieve, and they need to right set of people in place to do so. And we help our hiring managers build great teams. Obviously, there is a huge connection to the role of the HRBP and talent management here, but I'll leave that for a later article.

In summary

We are living in exciting times in the Talent Acquistion industry. Though it may not be as exciting that every meeting starts with a cigarette and whiskey as it does in Madman, but exciting times nevertheless :)

There are three things that I see that are holding us back that we can address ourselves, that are in our own circle of influence if you will:

1. We need to adopt a more structured and methodological approach to building and improving TA functions.
2. Approach Talent Acquisition as a Sales & Marketing function instead of a cost center.
3. We need to stop talking about 'filling jobs' and talk about the impact we have on our business if we successfully fill those jobs.