Quadrant II

Module 4: Talent Acquisition

1. Learning Outcome
2. Introduction
3. Recruitment vs. Acquisition
4. Levels of talent acquisition
5. Stages of talent acquisition
6. Recent trends in talent acquisition (India)
7. Organisational examples
8. Summary

Module 11: Talent Acquisition

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1. LEARNING OUTCOME
After completing this module the students will be able to:
• Understand the importance of talent acquisition.
• Understand the difference between recruitment and talent acquisition
• Learn about the stages of talent acquisition.
• Understand the recent trends in talent acquisition in India

2. Introduction
Over the year there has been a massive growth in the number of organization
across the world. This is partly due to increasing number of start-ups and the pace
at which they are growing for example Facebook, Flipkart etc.

This has led to a strain between demand and supply side of Talent. Therefore, every
organization be it a well-established one like Unilever or a recent start-up like
CabsGuru has started applying new and innovative methods for acquiring talents.

Talent Acquisition is a newer concept when compared with recruitment, which is

actually a subset of earlier. Hence many of us still confuse Talent Acquisition and
recruitment as one or less the same thing. But before understanding the difference
between the two we need to understand what actually talent is.

In War of Talent McKinsey defined talent as “bright young people”. Now this is a
very vague definition which does not tell what actually talent is. To understand talent,
we need to first answer the following questions, is talent something that you are born
with or is it something like skill that you can acquire over time?

“A talent is a person who has certain skillsets or competencies which are rare and
hard to imitate and the lack of which would lead to strategic disadvantage to an
organisation”

Now once we have answered what talent is we need to understand what talent
acquisition is and why it is important. Deloitte in its Global Human Capital Trends
2014 report found that Talent Acquisition and Access was the number four most urgent
trend for the more than 2,500 global business and human resources leaders who were
surveyed to identify the top 12 global talent challenges faced by organizations today.
Talent Acquisition leaders continue to struggle to demonstrate their value and develop
contemporary sourcing strategies. According to the Global Human Capital Trends 2014
Report, “60% of respondents to their global survey have updated or are currently
updating and revamping their talent sourcing strategy, and another 27% are considering
changes”.

Deloitte defines Talent Acquisition as “a strategic approach to identifying,

attracting and onboarding top talent to efficiently and effectively meet dynamic
business needs.”
From the late 2000s, there was lot of research proceedings which spoke on the
challenges of Talent Acquisition. Dramatic shifts in the distribution, availability and
nature of talent are taking place around the world. In the Western democracies,
workforce skills and skilled workers are in increasingly short in supply. Conversely, in
India, China, Korea and other Asian countries, there is an enormous and growing
supply of workforce-ready people, despite these gains in Asia, however, jobs across all
industries are becoming more complex, demanding ever-higher skill levels and
pushing up the demand for skilled workers. Five- and 10-year strategic plans have to
take into account not only where the talent is now, but where it will be in the future.
“Which countries have the strongest pipeline of talent? What will change? And what
impact will it have on strategic planning for the medium term?” was the questions
raised by Financial Executive article written by Michele C Heid.

“Innovative ideas, strong execution, and a foundation of clear metrics can enable many
more talent management professionals to create a talent mind-set that will prepare their
organizations to face the challenges ahead” This was the conclusion of the team of
researchers from Hewitt Associates in association with Human Capital Institute who
conducted Talent Practices Impact Survey in 2008. Indian researchers also started
working on Talent Acquisition and its trends. According to DK Ribfia Jain, attracting
qualified talent is the critical first step in the talent management cycle. Jobs are plenty,
finding the right candidate is the challenge. The need is to "sell a job". Having sold the
job well, retaining good employees is the next challenge that arises. And the company's
brand image makes these tasks easier. Hence the marriage of compulsion arises
between HR and marketing principles-employer branding. Use of e-recruiting and web
functionalities had become collaborative approach in acquiring and managing talent.
The online experience of web browser access, interactive interfaces, social networking,
collaboration and community are now commonplace with candidates.

Ms.Pramila Rao, in her paper titled ―A resource based analysis of recruitment and
selection practices of Indian Software companies conducted a qualitative study of 5
leading software firms of India and concluded that Indian corporate houses need to be
aware of management practices in the changing economies and need to identify how to
make their transitions smoother. Marcom HRsay 7-Second Survey on Talent
Acquisition Challenges for 2011 highlighted that Assessing Leadership skill, Accurate
Candidate to Job matching skills, Assessing job skills are the 3 top most challenges of
Talent acquisition in 2011. Negotiating competitive offers was not seen that much
challenging as most of the companies were ready to offer an attractive package for the
right talent.

Further in 2014 Deloitte’s just published Global Human Capital Trends 2014 report
found that Talent Acquisition and Access was the number four most urgent trend for
the more than 2,500 global business and human resources leaders who were surveyed
to identify the top 12 global talent challenges faced by organizations today. Post that
many papers have been published regarding best practices in Talent Acquisition seeing
shifting focus of organization to talent acquisition from recruitment.
3. Recruitment vs. Acquisition
 Recruitment is a linear process, where employers source candidates for the
existing vacancies currently available. This approach is reactive in its nature,
thus leads to increased time-to-hire and cost-to-hire. At times organizations
compromise even on quality in order to manage cost and time.
 Talent Acquisition is on-going cycle of process that start by building Employer
Brand, communication of Employee Value Proposition and on-going
relationship with targeted Talent segments. This approach leads to the
development of talent pools and talent pipelines eventually creating sustainable
talent supply chain. Talent Acquisition is geared towards anticipated demand
and typical hiring needs rather than the current talent demand. This leads to
more strategic nature of the approach and significant improvements across all
Recruitment KPIs.

4. Levels of talent acquisition

Deloitte in its maturity model framework has classified talent acquisition strategies
into 4 categories as follow:
 Reactive Tactical Recruiting
 Standardized Operational Recruiting
  Integrated Talent Acquisition
 Optimized Talent Acquisition

Source: http://www.bersin.com/Lexicon/Details.aspx?id=14762
5. Stages of talent acquisition
The process of acquiring talent efficiently and effectively involves 5 stages as given
below
I. Branding
Branding is the phase that connects candidates to employers and people to
connect with and follow. Sourcing is the phase that converts candidates to
applicants for specific roles. The objective of the branding phase is twofold:
 Candidate attraction
 Company culture visibility

Demonstrating a company’s values helps candidates determine whether to opt

in or opt out of the application process. Smart companies are fostering this by
thinking of job descriptions as content rather than advertisements, with content
and connections being provided by existing employees.

The branding phase is about providing enough content and connection points to
enable people to connect and discover what life at the company is like. Some
organizations have set up a recruitment marketing function within talent
acquisition by hiring specialists or by hiring external consultants, while others
have placed the responsibility with the recruiters. This approach is flawed with
recruiter workloads, skill level and other priorities as barriers for generating
content.

The solution to this is to take a “brand advocate” approach by creating social

destinations such as LinkedIn company pages, Facebook career pages, in
addition to their career sites. On these social networks, employees can share
their stories, updates and images.

II. Sourcing and Applying

Sourcing is the process of converting candidates into applicants, and is the
entry point of the hiring funnel. Sourcing can be both inbound and outbound.
Inbound sourcing is the generation of applicants who have responded to a job
advertisement and expressed interest in specific roles. This may be as a result
of advertising, job sharing, referrals, mailing and similar approaches. The
objective is to attract applicants or to convert candidates into applicants.

According to 2014 research conducted by CareerXroads, the top source of hire

was via internal means (41%), which highlights the importance of internal
mobility as a sourcing strategy. The question is: who takes responsibility for
internal mobility and who has responsibility for communicating opportunity
throughout the organization? This is typically seen as a task for HR, with
communication being executed via a company’s intranet. It can also be via a
similar posting or may rely on employees checking or requesting opportunities
with the exception of intra-department promotions or company redeployment.
In terms of the hierarchy, all new opportunities should be first matched against
internal employees, followed by ex-employees (good exits), candidates found
via external sourcing methods and finally, job distribution coming as a last step.
One organization making great inroads in this area is Sodexo USA, which
includes internal mobility in the responsibilities of the talent acquisition team.
 Sodexo achieves this goal by viewing all employees as candidates of the
organization and allowing recruiters to directly approach employees.

Additionally, the company enables employees to benchmark themselves against

colleagues and provides mentoring, support and development resources to
enhance employees’ skills and knowledge. Interestingly, internal applicants and
hires increased significantly when Sodexo introduced their mobile application.
Internal applicants outnumber external applicants and hires by 4 to 1 and an
internal referral program also enables employees to refer colleagues for internal
opportunities. Sodexo is in the facilities industry and many of its employees are
based away from a desk and a computer. By giving the talent acquisition team
responsibility for internal mobility and by retaining employee data within the
candidate relationship management (CRM) system, Sodexo was able to be
successful. Other popular methods according to the survey were Employee
referrals (20%).

Employee referral is considered to be inbound sourcing because applicants

respond to an invitation to become an applicant from an internal employee. The
report notes that 10 percent of referrals result in a hire, which demonstrates the
reason that many hiring organizations place referrals as a top priority for their
talent acquisition strategy. Employee referral networks are expected to
significantly increase their return on investment given that their reach is
significantly increased as a result of social media. Successful companies
incorporate social referrals. This differs from the traditional referral, which was
in essence a recommendation. Employers are also combining brand advocacy
with referral networks as a single initiative rather than a series of short lived
projects, where the focus switches from month to month. The person
coordinating recruitment marketing should also take responsibility for the
referral network, and success should be measured by employee participation,
candidates and applicants generated and ultimately the number of hires.

III. Candidate Screening

Organizations are expanding their screening process to include interview as
well as assessments, profiling and testing as a means of gauging applicant fit
and suitability, and technology providers are now offering solutions that help
remove subjectivity to the interview process through greater collaboration,
standardization and results measurement. This provides a data-based argument
for selection based on evidence. As a result, the role of the recruiter is evolving.
Employers tend to organize data in the CRM by: Employees, Ex-employees,
Candidates and Leads. By tracking the level of relationship between the
individual and the organization, sources can provide hiring managers with a
realistic time-to-fill following consultation with the hiring manager.
IV. Assessments and Interviews
In the past, tests and assessments for talent acquisition were expensive to
deploy, and required training to interpret and administer. As a result of this,
tests and assessments and background checks were applied at the end of the
interview process to validate hiring. Advances in technology and data
analytics have really changed the game in this area.

Combining assessment and tests with video, for example one on one interview
which takes quite a lot of time and hence consumes a lot of resources were
replaced by Video Interviews by Deloitte in 2016 for shortlisting candidates.
The significantly reduced cost and ease of application has seen the assessments
move from the end of the hiring process as a validation, to the start of the
application process as a qualifier. When applicants are qualified, progressed or
declined by assessment at the start of the process, it streamlines and automates
the qualification stage.

Another approach is to include simple and quick assessments as a part of the

sign up process like in the case of Aditya Birla Young Leader Programme
which used personality test as a prerequisite to signing-up. Qualifying
candidates at this stage pays real dividends when it comes to identifying who to
move from candidate to applicant against a specific opportunity. Assessment
 results also provide the data to validate talent attraction and branding activities
against capabilities and cultural fit, making adjustments to strategy where
necessary. Where all shortlists are pre-assessed, hiring managers can interview
with confidence to make the best hires.

Modernization of the interview process is also changing the way that recruiters
and hiring managers interact. Previously, recruiters would complete a
preliminary screening interview, take notes as possible and shortlist from there,
oftentimes sharing incomplete feedback with hiring managers. From there,
hiring managers interview candidates, taking (sometimes wasted) time from
their day jobs to evaluate the same individuals. As more organizations adopt
interview management technologies, recruiters and hiring managers can
evaluate candidates based on the same criteria and questions. They can also
view or listen to the same interviews, providing feedback in a more
collaborative manner. As a result, they can improve quality of hire and advance
the right candidates for further evaluation or hiring.

V. Onboarding
When it comes to onboarding, what works best will vary from organization to
organization. The key is that someone takes responsibility for the applicant
post offer and guides their transition to new employee.

The traditional approach to onboarding was to receive some form of

structured or unstructured training during the first week of employment, but
this is shifting to sharing content, connections and other initiatives from the
day the offer is accepted. Including onboarding with the hiring funnel
means that onboarding tasks can be automated, but the relationship between
recruiter and applicant/ new employee is retained.

6. Recent trends in talent acquisition (India)

 Focus on passive talent engagement: Passive Talents are high performing
individual who are not looking for a change in their job. Due to increasing
competition organisations are now looking towards them as a potential talent
pool. Organizations want to adopt targeted strategies to engage with ‘passive
talent’ as 45% employers report that the lack of this is a competitive threat.
Sourcing moves from requisition filling to maintaining an on-going relationship
and recall with key talent.
 Focus on pre-candidate engagement: Speed to fill is so important in this market.
Business leaders know these kind of economic conditions don’t last forever, and
they want to squeeze in every last revenue they can. While the use of sourcing
increase CRMs and talent networks to grow their candidate pools, talent
acquisition leaders are focused on pre-candidate communication and resources.
On building a relationship before they have an authorized headcount in their
 organization making the hiring cycle shorter. This extends beyond employment
branding to looking at pre-candidate communications and marketing strategies.
 Rise of ‘Quality of Hire’: Speed of hiring and cost remain critical however
organizations increasingly consider ‘Quality of Hire’ as the most critical
effectiveness metric. ‘Early Attrition’ is the most encountered measure for
Quality of Hire, tracked by 30% employers across
 Use of Mobiles as an advertising medium: Because of the increased competition
for highly qualified candidates, talent acquisition leaders are looking at not just
a mobile optimized or rendered career site but they are adding new mobile tools,
techniques and strategies to their current candidate engagement cycle including
SMS, mobile apps, and social media. Delhi based Start-up Little Black Book has
been using their social media page and their mobile app as a recruiting source
since long.
 Use of better technology for recruiting: Organisations are opening their
budgets, adding and expanding on recruiting technologies. The best talent
acquisition leaders have been through bull markets and recessions and are
making technology selections with this in mind. As we become more familiar
with different types of HR and recruiting technology, there is an increasing
need to better leverage the tech, personalizing it to our needs. Recruiters are
diving in deeper into their current analytics and reporting dashboards to help
improve and enhance their current processes and strategies.
 Increasing budget for recruitment: In line with the positive hiring sentiment,
67% organizations are increasing their recruiting budgets over last year.
Components that improve candidate experience and enable efficiency
(technology, branding, referrals, and assessments) have higher wallet share.
 Emphasis on Talent Analytics and Assessments: Pre hiring assessments
remain more important than ever before. 65% of organizations have dedicated
capability for assessments, technology and data analytics. However,
leveraging big data for effective hiring decisions is still at a nascent stage.
7. Organisational examples

 Unilever
Unilever wanted to double the company’s size while reducing its overall environmental
footprint and increasing its positive social impact. To contribute toward achieving this
vision, Unilever sought to create and deploy a new talent acquisition model to attract
suitable talent available in the market. Accenture was approached to help the company
develop and implement a recruitment model for non-managerial talent, focusing on four
key pillars attract, hunt, cultivate and hire.

Accenture was able to devise a new talent acquisition model using reach of social
media and power of analytics and were able to average cost to source by 51% and
average time to fill the position by 40%. They were also able to improve hiring
manager satisfaction scores and candidate satisfaction scores to 4 out of 5 and 4.2 out
of 5 respectively. Accenture model focused on key four aspects:
o Attract: Leverage social, digital and offline channels to educate passive
and active candidates on the benefits of a career at Unilever. Key
activities included advertising on careers site, job boards, LinkedIn and
other social media platforms.
o Hunt: Proactively network with both passive and active candidates in the
job market to build targeted pipelines of talent across demand segments.
Key activities included competitor talent mapping and labour market
analytics.
o Cultivate: Create a talent pipeline strategy, take an existing talent pool
and provide engagement in a two-way approach to form a true
‘community’ candidate experience. Key activities included engaging the
talent pipeline through online virtual events and newsletters, leveraging
social media.
 o Hire: Take a candidate from application to joining work on day one with
all the administrative requirements involved. Key activities included
reviewing applications received through careers website, mobile site and
offline channels, interviewing, extending offers and onboarding.

 Emerson
Emerson, which is a manufacturing and technology company that offers a wide range
of products and services in the industrial, commercial, and consumer markets, hired
Tim Potten in 2010 in their Process Management division as Talent Acquisition and
Human Resource System Manager. There were many openings across the globe
ranging from roles like hourly manufacturing workers to global marketing managers.
To tackle this situation Tim used LinkedIn as a recruiting source. Happy with results he
further decided to use Sourcing Accelerator, a bundle of software designed to engage
brands with Emerson’s brand. By leveraging the technology at hand and their process
management they were able to achieve following results:

o Reduced time-to-hire by nearly 20 percent, from 68 days

to 55 days Increased LinkedIn-generated salaried hires
by 200 percent
o Increased traffic to Emerson Process Management
Career Page by 6x Increased application per job by 2.5x

8. Summary:
Talent Acquisition is a newer concept when compared with recruitment, which is
actually a subset of earlier. Hence many of us still confuse Talent Acquisition and
recruitment as one or less the same thing. “A talent is a person who has certain skillsets
or competencies which are rare and hard to imitate and the lack of which would lead to
strategic disadvantage to an organisation”. Talent Acquisition is “a strategic approach
to identifying, attracting and on boarding top talent to efficiently and effectively meet
dynamic business needs.” We learnt the stages in talent management viz. Branding,
Sourcing and Applying, Candidate Screening, Assessments and Interviews,
Onboarding.