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Taleo Research Article
Hire Before You PostRecently, I heard the story of a woman who was rejected for an auditor’s job in the office of the comptroller at a company. Later, a financial analyst position opened up in the company. Thanks to the automatic matching function within the company’s staffing management solution, this woman’s profile popped up against the requisition and she was hired immediately, before the company even advertised the job. When you hire someone before you even post the job, you reduce cycle time and sourcing costs immensely. Matching Supply and Demand Robust staffing management solutions systems can identify matching candidates in the corporate candidate pool to a newly created requisition and immediately invite them to apply to the vacancy. At the core of this automated capability is the definition of talent supply and demand in a common vocabulary. First, the requisition is created based upon standardized skills and competencies drawn from a centralized database. Candidates then match themselves against these skills and competencies, storing the information in a structured candidate profile database. The automated matching of supply and demand enables a significantly better paradigm, as opposed to merely automating an old process. Old Paradigm In the conventional hiring cycle, the process begins with identification of a hiring need, summarized in the requisition. Sourcing is triggered by and flows from the requisition. The marketing message is generated out of the requisition document, and this message gets posted to a mix of traditional and interactive media, determined by a sourcing strategy.
The list of potential candidates consists of those who respond to the sourcing stimulus. Delays inherent in waiting for the candidate population to react to the marketing stimulus contribute significantly to prolonging the overall cycle-time of the conventional recruiting process. If the exposure in the media is not sufficient, then as a last resort company may turn to: 4. External agency search The company may receive hundreds of resumes via postal mail and e-mail, some of which may explicitly cite the requisition number. Those that do not must be manually matched up with the requisition, or else they join the thousands of other, largely ignored, unsolicited resumes the company has on file. Typically, once the hiring need has been filled, resumes of unsuccessful candidates are stored for a period. Storage of paper resumes presents a tremendous barrier to retrieval. In some ways, it is cheaper for the company to re-source for each new requisition rather than taking weeks to sift manually through filed resumes looking for candidates with the right skills. Hence, the full cost to attract a candidate must be incurred again for every new hiring need. Many large corporations have adopted resume management systems to handle the volume. However, this merely automates an older process, since it relies on non-scalable keyword searches. Matching keywords is an imprecise activity requiring human intervention to ensure accuracy. New paradigm A structured candidate relationship database opens up new sourcing options. Hiring before you post means making use of developed pools of talent, within the corporation and without. With candidate relationship databases, sourcing is really transitioning to the following step-wise strategy:
This escalation strategy moves from the lowest cost to the highest cost source, with the opportunity to fill the vacancy at each stage. As each source is exhausted, the strategy advances to the next source. Of course, this is not meant to say that the steps follow each other chronologically, rather that there is this order of business priority. Talent Inventory |
