Ugi Talent Acquisition Team
Eleanora Parrot
Talent Acquisition provides consultation on hiring, talent acquisition, and talent movement for university staff, classified staff research and faculty positions. We work collaboratively with hiring leaders to post positions, screen candidates, and help leaders to select the best talent to meet their needs.
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Begin with an intake meeting to learn about the role, ideal candidate profile, and required skills and qualifications. Source a few candidates together to demonstrate what the talent pool looks like and get detailed feedback on candidates.
Stay in lockstep with your hiring manager throughout the recruitment process to both solicit feedback and guide them toward a desirable hiring outcome. For example, help hiring managers draft social media posts to promote their open role and interview questions to effectively evaluate candidates.
Effective candidate sourcing channels include job boards, online sourcing platforms, an employee referral program, internal talent, and company alumni. You can also uncover candidates who are expanding their skill sets by partnering with bootcamps and networking at conferences.
Begin employee onboarding once the offer letter is signed by welcoming your new hire to the team and sharing next steps. A strong onboarding process can make or break a new employee relationship, so prepare for and streamline this process as much as possible before your new employee starts.
You should also prepare for fluctuations in the economy. Look beyond hiring full-time workers to also include contractors, gig workers, part time employees, and flex workers. Changing up your employee mix can help you better address dynamic staffing needs.
A more effective approach is skills-based hiring, which focuses on evaluating candidates based on their skills, rather than on their pedigree. For example, you could remove degree requirements from your job descriptions and focus on responsibilities and competencies instead.
Internal mobility starts with identifying top performers within the company and taking the time to train and prepare them to take on more responsibility and leadership. An organization can work toward this months or even years ahead by offering career pathing, regular and detailed feedback, internal mentorship programs, high-quality employee training, and stretch assignments.
Modern talent acquisition software makes it easier than ever to take a data-driven approach to decision-making. Talent analytics play a crucial role in optimizing your recruitment processes for the best hiring outcomes and return on investment.
For example, you can understand which candidate sources yield quality applicants and which are a waste of your limited resources. These metrics will help you determine where your recruitment marketing budget is best spent.
LinkedIn Recruiter 2024 includes an AI search experience to help you find qualified candidates faster, plus AI-assisted messages to personalize LinkedIn InMails and garner more responses. These features can save you time so you can focus on other talent acquisition strategies, like boosting your employer brand and providing a stellar candidate experience.
LinkedIn Talent Insights enables data-driven recruiting so you can make more informed workforce and hiring decisions. For example, talent pool insights enable more efficient talent pipelining, more effective candidate sourcing, and more targeted employer branding.
I wrote an article not too long ago called What does an advanced talent acquisition function look like?, and received a fair few calls about it. A lot of the questions were related to building (or redesigning) a talent acquisition team, so I thought it made sense to follow up that piece with a three-part series on how would I build an advanced talent acquisition team based on conversations and lessons learned in the last 20 years.
Having a high percentage of hires coming from employee referrals is what I have found high-performing companies and talent acquisition functions aim for as part of their optimal strategy. After employee referrals, I have found that the next highest source of candidates is all over the map. There are many reasons why this could be the case, from industry type to different job families and where you might be physically recruiting different candidates.
What advanced talent acquisition functions do first and foremost is recognize the value of mining the heck out of their own databases. But even with these advanced talent acquisition functions, a much smaller percentage have actually put a robust talent relationship management methodology in place that continues to nurture the relationships with talent that is a better-quality fit.
Most ATSs will allow you to build some type of either requisition structure, or folder structure, or even #tagging structures where you can move your candidate persona types off that open req into this talent relationship management design structure.
The simple premise is that these persona types are a higher-quality candidate, because you have spoken with them previously, generally understand what motivates them, and have been through some form or interview to validate that they are a quality candidate.
Future Fit = You have interviewed them, they have the right skills, good culture fit, but they need a little more experience related to some of your must-have criteria for those ongoing req types in your organization.
The Warm = Interested in your organization but the timing might not be right (waiting for annual bonus, finishing up a company-paid MBA, etc). You know they are a high-potential match based of previous conversations, but you need to connect them to the right open opportunity when the timing is better.
The Withdrawn = They meet the key requirements of the role but withdrew from the process before making it to the offer stage. If the business gave them a thumbs-up prior to withdrawing from the process, if the circumstances are right in the future, they might be a future fit.
The Unknown = This is the only persona that is the exception to the rule and a little different. You have not spoken to them, but given your market and competitive intelligence, they work for certain types of companies that your own company would be interested in by default. Example: If you work for Accenture, then by default, pretty much any candidate identified who works for Deloitte, KMPG, or PwC is of interest to your business. Finding a way to build relationships with these non-candidates is strategically in your best interest.
The Offer Decliner = Made it all the way to the offer but withdrew from the process (could have accepted another competing offer, etc). If the circumstances make sense, you want to keep in touch. History has shown me that this is one of the highest-quality candidates in the persona set. I have lost count of the number of times my teams have gone back to people who turned down our offer six months later to hear from the candidate that they made a mistake and would like to re-engage. If you made an offer once before, then if/when the right opportunity arises, you will offer them again.
Back in my early Microsoft career we decided to identify all the college/campus candidates in the last five years who turned down our offers. We ended up with a list of about 600 names. We could only connect with half of them (this was before LinkedIn became what it is and the research tools we have today). Out of the ones we did connect with, the majority of them were blown away that we were even following up all these years later. The following month we generated 16 hires from this one activity.
There is nothing wrong with a TA structure where all your recruiters are doing full lifecycle. Less hand offs means fewer things can go wrong or get lost in translation. We had been doing it this way for years before corporate sourcing came along as a way to split the specialization. There is no one perfect way to structure your TA function. Sometimes decentralization works where the recruiters are imbedded into the business units. Other times leveraging a CoE model where sourcing/branding/marketing/ops/recruiting coordinators are sitting in a virtual centralized model works as well. My only advice on the full life-cycle recruiter model is there are only so many hours in a day. You must be operationally strong and diligent to make sure your recruiters are:
I have been doing this long enough to know that when/how/why you hire a contractor really falls into a couple of buckets. There might be some other scenarios beyond what my observations are, but I think they are more one-offs. Here is why:
Scale = If the business comes at me with an increase in hiring demand above what is possible to slightly increase the req loads of my current team, then I have some choices to make. Is this demand short term (now) and is the need long term (sustained increase for the next few years)? If I need to ramp up quickly but the need is not a sustained need, then obviously this is where you would use contractors (or staff augmentation).
Short-term Specialization = There are times where I needed to engage a contractor because of requiring specialization in hiring a group of candidates we had no historical expertise in. We were also not sure if the business thought this was more of a short-term play, vs. a more sustained effort where the volume of hiring would be consistent enough to support a full-time person.
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