The talent pipeline
By Belinda White | thebigchair.com.au | 04 March
If you haven’t heard the term ‘passive candidate’ before, there’s a good chance you will this year. With the labour market continuing to tighten, recruiters and employers are no longer waiting for job seekers to come to them: they are going out and finding people who may not be actively looking to move.
“Good people aren’t unemployed, they’re with your competitors,” says human capital expert Brett Minchington, who is set to tell recruiters this inconvenient truth at the Australasian Talent Conference (ATC) in Sydney this April.
As the managing director of Collective Learning Australia and co-founding Partner of the Employer Brand Institute, Mr Minchington says that companies are increasingly finding it’s not enough to rely on traditional sources of recruitment anymore.
Founder of the ATC, Mr Trevor Vas, agrees that a lot of talented people won’t be found calling recruiters.
“They will, however, have a profile on a social networking website, be involved with their professional association, or be attending industry events. And just as you might use these channels to find potential clients, you should be using them to find potential employees,” Mr Vas said.
He adds that these ‘prospects’ may not have heard about your organisation and are currently happily employed.
“Initially, you may have a straightforward business relationship, but over time, they will become a passive candidate, to be approached when a role arises in the future,” Mr Vas said.
Finding and attracting these ‘passive candidates’ is high on the leadership agenda in 2008 and will be a central theme of this year’s ATC, which is targeted at corporate recruiters.
The issue is not just relevant to recruitment professionals however: the skills shortage will affect managers across the board.
“Of course, the pluses include more job opportunities, greater bargaining power at salary review time, and employers who provide a range of perks to attract and retain talent.
“But it will also create significant challenges. If you think it’s hard to find talented people for your team, you are not alone. Virtually every manager in the country has had difficulty finding the people they need,” Mr Vas said.
There are several factors driving the squeeze. A booming economy has led to an extremely low unemployment rate of 4.1 per cent. In fact, research by the RCSA (Recruitment and Consulting Services Association) found that two thirds of the recruitment industry believe Australia has hit, for all practical purposes, full employment.
This is coupled with demographic changes that have seen the first wave of baby boomers retreat into retirement, while there are fewer young people to step up and replace them.
According to a recent study by the Academy of Social Sciences called Population and Australia’s Future Labour Force, labour force growth has dipped from an annual rate of two per cent between 1980 and 2005 to the current rate of 1.2 per cent, and could go as low as 0.7 per cent by 2021.
Against this background, professional recruiters have started to feel the pinch. The RCSA’s latest research found that 91 per cent of recruitment managers and owners have spent more time and resources on finding candidates than a year ago, while 85 per cent are changing the methods by which they source them.
And managers, according to Mr Vas, will inevitably find themselves accountable for recruitment outcomes
“Being under-staffed, unable to replace departing employees, or settling for a new hire that didn’t quite meet your standards, will eventually impact your business results. Any sales or service delivery leaders are especially vulnerable, because having the right type and number of skilled people is critical to achieving budgets. Yet talent shortages are certainly not an acceptable excuse for under-performance,” he said.
Accordingly, those managers with a talent pipeline to draw on will have a competitive advantage.
“Every manager who wants to future-proof their team should have a pool of ‘passive candidates’ who aren’t actively looking for a new role, but are open to creating a relationship and then possibly moving if the right opportunity comes along,” Mr Vas said.
Creating such a pipeline takes time, dedication and most of all persistence. It’s not just about finding people either, but building a relationship and engaging their attention.
“Simply getting a business card and filing it away is not the point. The key is to build a relationship based on future opportunities, so that when the role does come up, the person knows you, your company and its values,” Mr Vas said.
According to ATC conference speaker, and Head of Sourcing for Deloitte in the US, Rob McIntosh: “In the next five to 10 years, finding people will no longer be the challenge - the challenge will lie in who has relationships with these people.”
He also argues that recruitment shouldn’t just be a responsibility for the hiring team or the recruitment consultants.
“The biggest challenge in reaching passive candidates is that there is about a 30 per cent response rate when it’s done by a recruiter. One way to increase the response rate is to get senior managers to make the first call and sell the opportunity, before handing over to your recruiters. And the more senior the person, the greater the response rate,” he said.
