I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but Talent Acquisition isn’t about hiring people…
Hands up if you have uttered any of the following phrases in a fit of despair and frustration:
- “We’re looking for a unicorn”
- “The salary on offer here is way too low”
- “This job description is terrible”
- “That’s a great question, let me take that away and speak to the hiring manager and get back to you”
If you have, welcome to the world of traditional recruiting. I, too, was guilty of all of these (and more) during my 7 years in both agency and in-house roles until I became frustrated by the challenges of the modern Talent function.
So I asked myself — what if it could be different?
Joining Opencare a year ago afforded me the opportunity to build a Talent function that focuses on business problems first, and hiring second. It may seem counterintuitive but it has made the team more effective, the business stronger, and allowed us to more than double in size within a year without compromising on quality.
Here are the fundamentals of how to re-shape your Talent function:
Talent is not a service function
In most organisations, Talent / Recruiting / HR are treated as a service. They are only to be consulted once decisions are made and you need someone to execute on them. Right?
Wrong!
The Talent team is a huge driver of business success and has a direct line to both revenue generation and revenue loss based on the calibre, fit, and balance of the people that you bring into the company.
It is time to change the status quo.
Struggling to convince your leadership team that Talent is more than a service? Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, once estimated that bad hires have cost them “well over $100 million”.
That might be an extreme example, but I think we can all agree that no CEO wants to waste money onboarding employees who don’t work out, or spend 9 months searching for a candidate that doesn’t exist.
To be effective an organisation needs to view each department as subject matter experts who are all looking at the same core set of business problems but each from a different lens. That way, each team can focus on their strengths and bring a unique point of view to the table… Talent is no different.
If Talent continues to be viewed as the team that simply executes searches by typing a few keywords into Linkedin and posting a job description, you will miss out on the Talent team being active participants in their own success.
If you judge the Talent team on their ability to find a person that matches a wishlist of requirements pulled out of thin air, then Talent will always fall short of expectations. Everyone will waste time chasing a purple squirrel, then after a few weeks / months there will be a redefining of the role, and the Talent team is back to the start.
This loop continues endlessly until the hiring manager either hires the best they can find (who usually has none of the skills or experiences they initially asked for), or gives up on the search completely.
So how do you implement this change in mindset? I’ll outline a few key steps that will start this journey.
Key takeaway: Talent is not a service, it’s a business unit that drives revenue.
Start with the business problem first
The first significant mindset shift is to accept that hiring someone full time should be your last resort.
Let that sink in.
It’s the most costly, and intellectually laziest, way to solve a business problem.
Talent doesn’t need to be exclusively focused on hiring, you can:
- be the connector of teams to industry leaders to provide coaching and training
- find contractors to solve short-term needs
- look for offshoring partners who can help to reduce costs
- go to market and find the best full time talent when needed.
Example: if your sales manager comes to you and demands 5 more Account Executives, their fundamental challenge could be that they need to increase revenue by 40%.
Hiring 5 more Account Executives might allow them to do that, but as their Talent Partner you really need to dive deeper with them and figure out what’s holding back the team today.
A: Are your current Account Executives spending 20% of their time doing expenses and booking flights?
B: Is prospecting new meetings taking up too much of their time due to ineffective tooling or processes?
C: Do the Account Executives have the necessary skills to close a high enough % of deals?
Each of the answers to the above questions can fundamentally change the Talent strategy that is needed to help the team hit their revenue goals. Let’s examine each scenario and the other ways in which they could be solved:
A: We can hire lower cost Operations or Admin talent who have skills to more effectively complete these tasks, and thereby recapture 20% productivity across our current Account Executives. This could mean we can hire a few Admins for the team, and just one more Account Executive.
B: Let’s push our sales manager to look at the cost of investing in Salesforce and trialling a contract BDR to test out if that helps the team increase revenue.
C: Use your recruiting skills to connect the team with a strong sales consultant who can help address the skill gaps on the team and increase their closing %. We may not need to hire any more team members if we can bump their close rate by 15 points each.
Here you can see that any Talent professional can step in, use their innate skills for interviewing and cross-examining to help the hiring manager truly understand their challenges and develop the lowest complexity talent solution possible.
Key takeaway: Explore every option before committing to adding full time headcount to your teams
Be the champion of your craft
At the top of the article I mentioned one of the most common complaints I hear from recruiters — “we’re looking for a unicorn”.
My reaction is always the same — you didn’t do your job.
Don’t blame hiring managers; defining roles and knowing what is available in the market isn’t what they were hired to do. It’s your job.
The business doesn’t expect you to be able to teach the engineering manager how to do effective code reviews, so why have we therefore normalised that hiring managers should be great at finding and hiring talent?
The solution is simple: take that labour off the hiring manager and do it yourself.
Hiring managers can tell you in a heartbeat about the business challenges and roadblocks they are facing (see the point above) so ask them to start there. Work with them to really understand how their team and department contributes to the company’s overall success, and what the strengths and weaknesses of their team are.
From there, you can build out a clear profile of who or what’s needed to unblock the challenges that are stopping the team meeting productivity or revenue targets. This can be an iterative process where the hiring manager provides feedback, but you are the expert who has seen how other companies are structured and knows different skills that are available.
You may encounter some push back (luckily I didn’t at Opencare) but fundamentally you are taking work off their plate and helping them make the best possible decision.
Example:
You have an engineering manager whose team is missing deadlines for shipping their product. They are requesting 3 senior engineers with 8 years of experience working with React and Node.js experience for $90k.
You can either get frustrated and yell about how the market is very competitive and the salary is too low, and that React has only been around for 6 years, or you can put your know how and skills into practice.
Unpack what is actually stopping them from shipping the product. In our scenario, let’s say the QA team is overwhelmed with the volume of code and needs a leader to put a better structure and system in place. Additionally, the team is bad at estimating the time it takes to complete projects so every piece of work is overrunning.
In this case, it’s clear we need a QA Team Lead who has built processes before, and an Agile Coach to come in on a short-contract and up-skill the team on their estimating skills. You can use half the budget you previously had allocated but get a higher quality outcome that alleviates the core issues of the team.
By taking ownership of the role definition process you can craft positions that are realistic and available in the market and also create compelling selling points to the candidates you do engage with. Your job descriptions will improve dramatically because you have more context and can write something that really speaks to the right individual.
This is where taking pride in the craft of Talent is vital because you will become a key revenue driver for the business by building balanced teams who can take on many challenges instead of one-dimensional groups that reflect the hiring managers preferences or lived experiences.
Key takeaway: You need to own the role definition process and collaborate with your hiring managers to build balanced teams that are set up for success.
Deepen your wider business knowledge
The ability to sell an opportunity to a candidate is entirely dependent on your ability to craft a narrative that resonates with them, and the only way to do that is by being deeply integrated with your business.
Without exception, everybody wants to do meaningful work every day and feel good about their contribution, so if you can illustrate how your junior customer service hire is going to contribute to achieving your company mission and goals they will be excited and invigorated to take on those challenges.
To deepen your business understanding you need to invest time in sitting with your partner teams and attending their meetings, having informal coffees, celebrating their wins, and helping solve their business problems.
The more you integrate with the teams you are supporting, the easier it is to sell them to candidates.
I saw huge improvements in performance in every role I’ve worked in when I spent time with both leaders and individual contributors on the teams that I was hiring for. Whether it was having daily stand ups with Executives at Flipp, grabbing beers with Network Engineers at Google, or working with Opencare teams to set OKR’s, the increased level of understanding came across to candidates.
Most recruiters are highly skilled in quickly building relationships with people, so use those skills to get more integrated with your business.
Key takeaway: Your business is really interesting and exciting, spend time getting to know it really well.
In conclusion
I’m not saying it’s easy to build a Talent function like this, but it is incredibly rewarding for the members of the team, and it drives strong results for the business.
Of course, there are days when I think about how much easier it would be to run Talent as a service. To allow hiring managers to fire off requests and set deadlines for me again. On those days I think back to the glowing reviews the team has received for providing a white-glove, end-to-end service for our hiring managers that allows many first time managers to hire really effectively and it reminds me that this approach is how you scale an organisation quickly.
Believe in the skills that you bring to the company as a Talent professional and make your case for changing the status quo.
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