RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

Making resourcing stand for something

Last month we ran our first Ochre House think tank event in Hong Kong. With speakers and participants attending from many global organisations, the event generated a lot of stimulating debate around resourcing and talent management.

Of particular interest was the discussion surrounding how the internal resourcing or talent acquisition function can brand itself for success. The idea of internal branding is not new and was previously touched on by Shilpa Unalkat, however it remains an important debate.

From the discussions at our event and subsequent meetings with HR and business leaders, successful branding of the resourcing function appears to boil down to four critical success factors.

1)      You need to be clear about the value proposition internal resourcing offers, beyond just filling jobs. This typically entails a more lofty ambition such as improving the capability of the business through the hiring of better people or enabling the organisation to recruit and retain world class talent. Of course to avoid such aspirational statements becoming rhetoric, evidence of delivery (through metrics, case studies and leadership endorsement) is essential.

2)      Build a talent pipeline and make the organisation aware of the super stars in the market. This, argued a number of business leaders, was the single most important action talent acquisition professionals could take. To be taken seriously, finding ‘game changing’ people who were engaged and wanting to have a conversation with your organisation earned high kudos.

3)      Align with the business rather than the HR function. A little contentious maybe but we all know effective resourcing requires very different skills sets from HR, so aligning to the business rather than HR (whilst maintaining the critical integrations for internal mobility, succession planning and high potential mapping) appeared to earn respect. Those organisations whose Talent Acquisition functions were more aligned to the business also noted that workforce planning was generally easier. Getting the ‘inside track’ enabled a better insight on forthcoming demand.

4)      Behave like a sales and marketing team. When we remove the jargon, recruiting is essentially a sales and marketing process. Organisations need to segment, target and position their offering amongst candidates. Identifying and approaching candidates (prospects in  sales speak) is what recruiters spend all day doing. In many ways, it’s no wonder that, generally, the most successful internal Talent Acquisition teams have a good smattering of ex-agency recruiters amongst them; those who see recruiting as nothing more than a sales and marketing activity.

So there it is; four critical success factors. Agree disagree or others you’d like to add? Please share below.

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