RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

ROI – Return on intelligence – a sure fire thing in recruitment…

Planning, forecasting, workforce analysis, headcount prediction, manpower planning and plenty more. Even the plethora of expressions illustrates the uncertainty around whether people needs can be forecast and how accurate this can be – never mind whether that can be used to make recruitment more effective.

A lot is about expectations. Forecasting is most effective when it looks at trends and patterns – not precise numbers. The intelligence gained from a continuing dialogue with the business helps target your attraction budgets, your own use of headcount and transforms the seemingly mythical talent pipeline into reality. Or put another way – think of the last five times a piece of recruitment hit you unawares. How many of those could you have known about if you’d asked the right people the right questions? The answer will not be “none”.

In one business I was once told that forecasting was impossible at a time of change – heads could be cut, stay the same or increase. A few basic questions later it was clear the decision points were around a specific time period and the scale of possible change easy to analyse – albeit there were three options. As a result the recruitment team was ready to scale up or down at that particular time.

Investing resource in intelligence gathering relationships seems a tough call. It’s usually expensive resource with apparently no juicy metrics like direct hiring. But in our experience it’s a sure fire thing – it inevitably means actual recruitment can be done with fewer people, with lower cost of acquisition, better candidate experience and more effective metrics.

Of course after linking recruitment and planning there’s the connection with internal talent… But’s that’s another story…

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