Finding the right talent for your organization has become almost as difficult as saving private Ryan, luckily we know some TA Generals.

Coined by McKinsey’s Steven Hankin in 1997, the term ‘war for talent’ has become synonymous with the market conditions that have led to fierce competition between companies to attract and retain talented employees. This phenomenon will only increase at a time when too few workers are available to replace the baby boomers now departing the workforce in advanced economies.

A whopping 82 percent of companies don’t believe they recruit highly talented people. For companies that do, only seven percent think they can keep them.

For tech companies like Devoteam, a French IT service company, they are the ones storming the beaches in search of top talent to bring into their organizations. Spread out over 18 countries across Europe, they have developed specific strategies to gain ground in the cutthroat world of Talent Acquisition (TA) where 73 percent of candidates are passive and top candidates only stay available on the market for 10 days.

One of the people spearheading these endeavors is Matthieu Rivière the TA director for Devoteam. He has seen first-hand the fight to recruit talented individuals for his international teams and the importance of having the right firepower like candidate engagement and experience.

We caught up with Matthieu Rivière at  Hiring Success 19, where this TA general shared with us some of his experiences in the trenches of TA and how he thinks his company can win the War for Talent.

If you want to learn more about Hiring Success EU – Amsterdam, September 10-11, 2019, check out our agenda here!

What is it like on the frontlines of the War for Talent?

As a tech company, we understand that it is a war and that means competing for highly skilled technical people with all other types of companies. 

The struggle to attract people becomes even more difficult because we specialize in consulting, so most people would rather work in a startup or one of the well-known tech brands. Therefore our main challenges boil down to being able to engage with passive candidates, start conversations with them, and then create a preference in their minds to choose us as an employer. 

Then, on top of all that, our recruitment volume requires more than 2000 people a year and our average employee turnover is two to four years. In general, it is a very difficult environment to succeed in.

How does your team confront these challenges?

As a service company, providing the best customer experience is our main priority. This idea translates to recruitment in the form of candidate experience. And, at the end of the day, creating a top of the line candidate experience is good for us as well as it allows us to be more selective and acquire the best talent.

As far as the specifics of our recruiting function, each country is specialized in a particular type of candidate profile. Half of our IT specialists are in France so the team there will be made up solely of IT recruiters. In other locations, we have TA  teams focused on finding project managers or Java developers.

In general, everybody is involved – even the sales teams are committed to sourcing candidates and engaging them in the recruitment process – working closely with the recruitment team for sourcing and employer branding.

How do you expect to win the War for Talent?

The strategies to ‘win’ are becoming more and more based on marketing. We have to engage as many people as we can and convert them into candidates – much the same way you would convert a lead into a client. 

Candidate experience will continue to be paramount, and for that, we will continue to use a mix of digital and physical components. From our point of view, everyone who works here is an ambassador of our employee brand, and having everyone involved really makes a difference.

The tools we use and our Applicant Tracking System (ATS) are crucial to our success. Without the system capabilities such as candidate feedback on the hiring process, texting options, and easy integration to social media platforms like LinkedIn, I don’t know where we would be. 

We are lucky to have a tool with such a great user experience that anyone can pick up because, as I mentioned before, even the sales team may source some candidates or hire them for a job. This aspect and a truly flexible solution made it easy to implement the SmartRecruiters technology in each country despite the different offices or recruiting team structures. 

In the end, we are positioning ourselves to succeed with our candidate marketing techniques and having technology that’s adaptable to any situation.

See more from leaders like Matthieu in the next part of the blog series – 10 Things I learned at Hiring Success – where we find out what it is like maintaining a brick and mortar store against the waves of digitalization.

Sometimes it’s hard to discern which benefits are trendy and which will actually improve employee quality of life. We talk with PayScale to learn the difference.

This year Seattle Business Magazine named PayScale the top place to work in Seattle. No easy feat in the Emerald city with competition from tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon, and the siren call of San Francisco and Silicon Valley constantly ringing up the coast. Tech talent is scarce and flighty, but also most crucial to a company’s success, according to a recent report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. So how do you not only attract, but keep, this sought-after talent?

The answer for PayScale is work-life balance. “We see our employees as whole people,” says Caitlin Williams, the company’s senior talent acquisition partner. “All our benefits are designed to benefit people as people, not people as workers.”

“Yes!” agrees Chris Stiemert, director of talent acquisition. “Most of what we do is listen to our employees and learn what they need and want.”

For PayScale, employee empowerment is the north star, and they are relentlessly experimenting to see what works. Almost more interesting than the benefits they keep are the ones they leave out – and why!

How do you make sure your programs are meaningful, and not just trendy?

Chris

I’ve worked at companies that had free soda, food, you name it, but you start to realize that the underlying purpose of these perks is to keep people in the office, working. We try to focus on what will actually move the needle in terms of retention and quality of life.

Caitlin

I totally agree. I think a lot of companies focus on things that are really fun to hear about at the outset but, in the end, aren’t about genuine care for employees, or long-term productivity and wellbeing. “We Hire Whole People” isn’t just a tagline for us, and we try to carve out benefits that speak to “a person” rather than an “employee”.

Caitlin, what makes PayScale the top place to work in Seattle?

I’ve worked in several different areas of the tech industry – biotech, ecommerce, software as a service, etc. What stands out to me after three years at PayScale is how it invests in its employees in two essential ways: career/professional development, and overall health/well-being.

• Professional/Career Development: We offer an array of development courses, and we also employ leadership and career coaches that help our employees uplevel both hard and soft skills.
• Health and Wellness: This last year we opened a gym on the basement level of our building for PayScale employees. We host free weekly yoga classes and stock the office with fresh fruits and sparkling waters. The other piece of this health and wellness initiative is “Independence week”, where this year we experimented with shutting down the office for the entire week of July 4th to give folks a great mid-year reset that most workers only get during the winter holidays.  

Chris, why does PayScale take employee happiness so seriously?

We start from a place of believing that happy employees ultimately means better business. All these things—happy hours, decorating the office for Halloween, providing snacks, and offering workout facilities follow naturally from this idea and create an environment where employees feel safe and happy so we can have transparent conversations around all aspects of work.

There’s always going to be a new opportunity in this tech market. We’re competing with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Dropbox, and Snapchat, and many others. So, of course, we need something unique, but it’s more than that – we really feel that treating employees well is the right way to run a business. Our ability to source and retain talent just proves that point further.